The Charlotte News
Monday, October 8, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from the U.N. in New York that Egypt this date had rejected the British-French Suez Canal proposal, but suggested in response the creation of a negotiating body to seek a settlement of the dispute. Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Fawzi had told the U.N. Security Council that the British and French had merely reintroduced the proposal of the first London conference, which had already been rejected by Egypt. The plan which had been presented to the Council the previous Friday by Britain and France had called on the Council to endorse the London recommendations for international control of the waterway, urging Egypt to use those recommendations as a basis for negotiation. British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau, Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitri Shepilov and Secretary of State Dulles listened intently as Mr. Fawzi spoke, outlining the major objectives, to establish a system of cooperation between the Egyptian authority operating the canal and the users of it, taking into consideration the sovereignty and rights of Egypt and the interests of the users, establishing a system for tolls and charges which guaranteed for the users fair treatment, free from exploitation, and providing for a reasonable percentage of the revenues to be allotted, especially for improvements. There was no specific reference in the Egyptian counter-proposal to international control but there was recognition of international cooperation in operation of the canal. The Council was considering a British-French resolution proposing that it criticize Egypt's July 26 nationalization of the canal, endorse the 18-nation London proposals for international operation of it and recommend that Egypt negotiate on the basis of those proposals, while in the meantime cooperating with the new Suez Canal Users' Association. Both Egypt and the Soviet Union had already rejected the 18-nation plan. A Cairo newspaper had quoted Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser the previous day as telling an interviewer that if the U.N. gave into demands of "big imperialist countries", it would collapse like the League of Nations. Tass, official Soviet news agency, in a comment broadcast from Moscow, declared that Britain and France, in their resolution, wanted the Council "to condemn Egypt" and thereby justify their own actions against Egypt.
Former Ambassador to India and former Governor of Connecticut Chester Bowles, in a speech prepared for the Women's National Democratic Club in Washington, said this date that the Eisenhower Administration had failed to trust the American people with the facts about relationships between the U.S. and the rest of the world. He urged Democrats to "cut through the present political haze—whether knowingly concocted or the result of ignorance," which surrounded Republican claims of being the party of peace, claiming that the U.S. position abroad was "steadily weakening" and that either the Administration's leaders genuinely failed to grasp the significance of the situation or they had developed a campaign approach "with the single intent of concealing the truth from the American people." He went on to say that in either case, it appeared that the Republican Administration had forfeited its right to leadership in foreign policy. He did not directly attack the President, but said that a Republican president was hampered in providing foreign policy leadership by "the profound and continuing struggle within the party between its isolationist and internationalist wings." He described Adlai Stevenson as "the best qualified man in foreign affairs ever to run for the presidency in the history of our country." He said that the country was faced with the loss of many military bases abroad and with what he called Soviet gains in the Far East, the Middle East and elsewhere. He stated that the Democratic Party believed that there was more to "real peace than the absence of shooting alone."
In Chicago, Mr. Stevenson told Democratic Party fund-raisers around the country, via a long distance telephone conference call this date, that they were winning but that they could not be allowed to "run out of gas". He spoke from his farm near Libertyville, Ill., to all 48 state leaders, speaking with the 24 in the East at noon and the other 24 a half-hour later. The message said that the overall campaign had been progressing well and that they sensed a rising tide of optimism, which was completely justified, that the money which would be raised on October 16 in doorbell ringing would be used to purchase television time for Mr. Stevenson and Senator Estes Kefauver, his vice-presidential running mate. He said in the pep talk that he intended to keep talking sense to the voters but was worried about lack of money to pay for television time, insisted that the leaders impress on voters in their areas that it was an urgent mission, second only to getting out the votes on election day. He assured that they were going to beat the Republicans in November. More than 40,000 miles of cables and wires were used in the conference calls and a total of 21 telephone companies worked with Illinois Bell to arrange the hookup. Mr. Stevenson, meanwhile, was resting at his farm before beginning a barnstorming tour to the West Coast the following day. He would be joined in the tour by Governors Robert Meyner of New Jersey and George Leader of Pennsylvania, and Senators Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Albert Gore of Tennessee, who would meet him at a rally on Thursday night in Oakland, Calif. On Friday, he would address a midday rally at the courthouse in Fresno, and his assistants would then fan out in light planes to attend other rallies in the area, before linking up with him again on Friday afternoon in Long Beach, after which they would then split up again before rendezvousing on Friday night at a rally in San Diego.
Samuel Lubell, who was interviewing people in various states to tap their choice and reasons for it in the presidential election, in his continuing series of articles, the penultimate entry in the series, indicates that the major political story of the election was not so much how the American people felt about the President but rather how their attitude toward both the Democratic and Republican Parties was changing. Many people to whom he had talked made remarks such as, "Eisenhower is a man of character," or "he's brought dignity" to the Presidency, but there continued to be speculation as to how much of a vote for him was "just for the man" and how much of it was for the Republican Party, put another way, whether the Democrats remained the "normal majority" party in the country or whether the Republicans could win a national election without a popular leader such as President Eisenhower. He indicates that through all of his "grass roots" interviews with typical voters, he had made a special effort to obtain the answer to those questions, with it not being easy, as many persons insisted that they were voting for the man and not the party, despite having voted for the party's presidential candidates five or six times in succession. But he was able to discern a pattern whereby during the previous four years there had been a significant reshuffling of party loyalty. During both the 1952 general election and the 1954 midterm election campaigns, when he had asked people what they believed the major difference was between the parties, the usual response had been that the Democrats were for the poor people while the Republicans were for those with money. That remained the stock answer at present from Democratic stalwarts and the smaller farmers who were turning against the President, but a different response was now being heard from those former supporters of FDR and President Truman who said that they would vote for President Eisenhower this November. A Minneapolis truck driver had said that he had always been told that the Republicans had no use for the worker, that he had voted for Adlai Stevenson in 1952 but would shift to the President in 1956, as the old saw was no longer applicable, for he could not see how working conditions could be any better. Mr. Lubell had received scores of such replies, with many indicating that both parties were now considering "the little man" more than they once had. Some said that there were not many poor people left in the country, others indicating that the Republicans had changed while the President had been in office, that the Republicans were also now for the working man. The little man has not vacated his chair yet on this movie, for goodness sake, as there is an intermission and a whole second act left to convince the little man that it is a superb presentation, with a splendid time guaranteed for all.
The Agriculture Department this date estimated that the year's cotton crop would be 13,268,000 bales of 500 pounds gross weight each, 153,000 bales more than the previous month's forecast, and much larger than the ten million bales which the Department had set as its goal under planting and marketing controls. The previous year's crop had been 14.7 million bales and the ten-year average through 1954 had been 13.1 million.
The Associated Press reports that at the start of the second month of school across the country, the controversy over blacks and whites attending the same schools had appeared to quiet down to a "persistent murmur", now more than two years after Brown v. Board of Education had been decided and more than a year after the May, 1955 implementing decision, requiring desegregation "with all deliberate speed". Most of the present conflicts were in the courts, with a series of appeals on the Supreme Court's docket for the new term, and several Federal District Courts also having on their dockets pending cases involving the issue. Children attending integrated classes were doing so in the majority of cases without any major incident, as the locales where riots had occurred during the first week or two of the school term had generally become quiet. Southern School News of Nashville had stated that a survey had shown that 208 school districts, mainly in the border states, had desegregated since the opening of the previous school year, that about 39,000 black students and nearly two million white students were presently in "integrated situations", either attending mixed schools, eligible to attend those schools or enrolled in school districts which had begun desegregation, while about 2.4 million black students remained in segregated districts. The publication, which was put out by a board of Southern editors and educators, also reported that 110 tax-supported colleges out of 208 in the South were now opened to black applicants, but that all of the public colleges in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina remained segregated.
Charles Kuralt of The News tells of seven property owners and a real estate developer having sought from Judge Susie Sharpe—future State Supreme Court Justice and Chief Justice—a permanent restraining order to stop five Pineville Road firms from dumping chemical waste into smelly Little Hope Creek. The firms asked that the complaint be dismissed, but Judge Sharpe overruled the motion. The first witness was a resident of the area, testifying that the odor had started in about the fall of 1952, was terrible and penetrated through his house to such an extent that they were ashamed to have visitors. At one point, attorney Frank McCleneghan had corrected another attorney when he referred to the creek as being named "Little Hope", suggesting it as "Sugar Creek", prompting the other attorney to state that he was correct in the first instance, that there was "hope for Sugar Creek ". Mr. McCleneghan, incidentally, and his wife, Laura, had accompanied W. J. and Mary Cash late on Christmas Eve, 1940, to be married in York, S.C.
Jim Scotton of The News tells of a true story with a happy ending in which no one had been injured except a confused and lonely young man who would remain anonymous. When he had arrived in the United States from his native Greece, he had wanted to do one thing, to become an American and repay the people who had helped him get to the country. He was young and strong and believed he could find a good job and that through hard work, he would soon have a home, a family and be very happy. He came to Charlotte where there were many jobs and many people had helped him. He could speak no English, but was willing to learn, and eventually was able to do so. He was happy with new friends and was working hard. But the previous week, he had fallen and broken his arm, and while his arm was healing, he could not work. His sponsors had pledged to take care of him when he could not work. The man felt, however, that he could not ask his friends who sponsored him to take care of him like he was a child. He thus obtained a knife and stabbed himself, thinking he would be no more trouble to his friends who had helped him so much. His friends found him gravely wounded and rushed him to the hospital, where those in attendance would not listen to his pleas to leave him alone because he was no good and could not work. The doctors bandaged his wounds and put him in a bed in a room at the hospital. A friend told him that he was very foolish, that everyone had accidents, but it did not mean that he must be thrown away like a horse with two broken legs, that he was still strong and should use his strength to get well so that he could work again. Now, the man was still at the hospital in Charlotte, but he would get well and would work again.
In New York, Mickey Mantle had hit a home run in the fourth inning of the fifth game of the World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking a hitless pitching duel between the Yankees' Don Larsen and the Dodgers' Sal Maglie, giving the Yankees a 1-0 lead. The Series, tied at two games apiece, would run through Wednesday, after the Yankees would win this date, 2-0, with Mr. Larsen pitching the first perfect World Series game—a record which still stands in 2023 for a single pitcher in a Series game—, and the Dodgers would win the following day, 1-0, with the Yankees shutting out the Dodgers 9 to 0 in the seventh game on Wednesday. There they go with that "flied" business again, instead of "flew". Why don't you just say they "throwed him out" after he "done bunted". Is it any wonder that American schoolchildren sometimes have difficulty speaking the English language? What is wrong with: "He was out by a caught fly ball" or other such words which provide a more or less proper English sentence, while still being reasonably parsimonious of typeface, newsprint and ink? Editors need to get out their red pencils more.
On the editorial page, "Justice Served in the McKeon Case" finds that Secretary of the Navy Charles Thomas had exercised wisdom by allowing former Staff Sergeant Matthew McKeon to remain in the Marine Corps, notwithstanding his court-martial for his direction of a nighttime forced march of his platoon into a tidal stream next to the Parris Island Marine Base the prior April 8, during which six Marines had drowned. Originally, in addition to his sentence of nine months at hard labor and a fine, the court-martial had imposed a bad conduct discharge.
It finds that he was not the only guilty party, as his act had been part of the fabric of a Marine training program which ostensibly prohibited cruelties while winking at them, giving drill instructors too much responsibility. Thus, Secretary Thomas could not have ruled with justice that the sergeant ought be kicked out of the Corps in disgrace, effectively placing all the blame on him and marking him with an indelible stigma while absolving the Corps of any error.
Instead, he had been demoted to private, which the piece finds fitting justice, removing him from control over troops. He had served time and been penalized financially and suffered greater punishment in his own memory of a grievous and terrible mistake. It hopes that he could find some area of obscurity in which he and his family could be shielded from interminable rehash of the tragedy. In the meantime, the Marine Corps had an obligation to examine its training programs to prevent recurrence in the future, and would continue on trial until the magnificence of its tradition could rid the stain left by the tragedy.
Mr. McKeon would die in 2003 at age 79.
"Engineers Are Not All We Need" tells of the earnest plea of Capus Waynick, the former editor-diplomat, speaking before the American Society of Tool Engineers in Raleigh during the weekend, for more North Carolina engineers to join the country's battle for technological superiority in the atomic era, finding it to be as the echo of a grimly familiar refrain. He said that Soviet Russia was graduating 2.5 times as many engineers each year as was the U.S., questioning the wisdom of dropping from the high school curriculum or reducing emphasis on several subjects essential to engineering, also warning that the nation could "endanger our whole way of life by ignoring the need for scientifically trained minds."
It had reminded the writer of the piece of a want-ad appearing in a North Carolina newspaper earlier in the year, which sought a high school coach who could teach science. It finds the misplaced emphasis obvious and fairly typical, that high schools would seek a coach first and only incidentally a science teacher on the side. It finds it "topsy-turvy nonsense", prompting wonder when North Carolina high schools would begin advertising for science teachers who could also coach.
In addition to science, English, history and all of the higher forms of knowledge were also being slighted. It indicates its sympathy with the campaign to recruit more engineers, as the country's survival depended to a large extent on technological progress. But it finds just as urgently needed trained manpower in other fields, such as the humanities. "The expansion and maintenance of our civilization is dependent upon thinkers of all kinds. In philosophy, and politics, and diplomacy, and the social sciences and even in the arts, the United States needs people who are trained in intellectual exercises."
It advocates for balanced educational programs, avoiding overemphasis of any particular field.
"The Golden Boys: Decline and Fall" indicates that the 1956 World Series had caused some nostalgia to arise in many older people, suggesting that a generation or so earlier, the Series would have caused millions to bow down in worshipful awe at a speakeasy or street-corner shrine while the genuine giants of the sport performed, players such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Mel Ott, Jimmie Foxx, Dizzy Dean and others. But that had been another era, "the golden age of heroism in sports", when "great and glittering personalities had captured the imagination of every American who ever tentatively fingered a sports page." They had been exciting even off the field.
It hastens to add that, athletically, the performance of the present stars was magnificent, but as personalities and heroes, they were "tin-plate fakes". It was not only in baseball, but in other sports as well.
It finds there was no longer a domineering figure in U.S. golf to match Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen or Bobby Jones, with even the later giants, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Ralph Guldahl, Lawson Little and Paul Runyon being faded or fading has-beens. (Don't worry. A former Wake Forest golfer will soon take his place on the stage to replace some of the lost color to that sport.)
The recent death from cancer in September of professional golfer and former Olympic gold and silver medal winner in track and field, Babe Didrickson Zaharias, had, it ventures, pulled the curtain on women's athletics, possibly for years to come.
Tennis was devoid of its heroic stars as well.
The current football season had produced no acceptable hero, much less anyone to match the likes of Red Grange, Jim Thorpe or Notre Dame's Four Horsemen.
Heavyweight boxing had lost its last great star when Joe Louis had finally retired, and the grandeur of Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Jack Johnson, Jim Jeffries, Bob Fitzsimmons, Jim Corbett, and John L. Sullivan was no more. Sugar Ray Robinson, a shadow of his former self, was all that remained of the glories of the lighter weights.
Even the recent breaking of the four-minute mile had failed to bring back track to the golden age it had enjoyed when Jesse Owens reigned as its star.
George Mikan was the only remaining big-time basketball hero. Who?
Swimming did not have a Johnny Weismuller and horseracing did not have a Man O' War.
"For sheer drama, nothing in modern sports has matched the Dempsey-Firpo heavyweight title fight at the Polo Grounds in 1923. No World Series has quite contained the shattering excitement of the 'upset of all time'—the four-straight victory of the Boston Braves over the Philadelphia Athletics in 1914."
It concludes that even while admitting that the "golden age" had overestimated the worth of its own achievement and that there was underestimation of the present stars of sports, the "golden age" had "the nerve proper to its excesses", something which people admired most, having low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis, with now the mythic, rather than the real, prompting feelings and actions. "Long live the sweet memories!"
But every generation thinks likewise, do they not?
Why, there was that 1957 UNC NCAA championship basketball team which went undefeated, 32-0, three overtimes two nights in a row, capped by the one-point win, 54-53, over Kansas and Wilt the Stilt, never one like it before or since. Too bad we slept through it, and that our papa and older brother were attending a rained-out Boy Scout Jamboree somewhere in the wilderness, able to tune in to Kansas City only by static-infused radio that late Saturday night. Ah, well. We have always heard of it and know that it must have been something to see on the tv.
A piece from the Southern Pines Pilot , titled "Asparagus Story", tells of two French epicures who met to share the first picking of asparagus in the spring, the host wanting to put vinaigrette on the asparagus, and the guest, horrified, saying that only hollandaise sauce would do, prompting the host to protest until it was finally decided that the cook would make both sauces and put each over half of the asparagus.
But the ordeal was too much for the guest and he suddenly fell back, mortally stricken, prompting the host to go to the cook and state that all of the asparagus would now have the vinaigrette.
We are not certain, but feel pretty sure that you can save your asparagus stories henceforth, as being utterly and completely inconsequential to the world at large.
Drew Pearson indicates that despite Ed Foote's hasty resignation as the second person in the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, Congressional investigators were still examining his stock-market transactions carefully. He had bought some $65,000 worth of oil stock in the Warren Petroleum-Gulf Oil merger just after being called upon to pass on the merger in his official capacity. He had approved the merger and then bought the stock in his wife's name. He had also bought and sold stock in many companies which had been under investigation by the Antitrust Division, all purchased in his wife's name while Mr. Foote personally placed most of the orders. Mr. Pearson provides the figures of several of the other stock transactions, the most notable of which had been $14,000 worth of General Motors stock, sold the same day for $13,469 while the Antitrust Division was supposed to be investigating GM's handling of passenger cars. He had also invested heavily in Chrysler and Ford, while their contracts with dealers were being investigated by his Division, making a $1,400 profit from the Chrysler stock in the course of 16 months, and losing $139 in two months in early 1956 on Ford stock. The House investigators were also checking other possible conflicts of interests in his stock purchases.
The President's farm had attracted so many tourists to Gettysburg that the local Travel Council was soliciting campaign contributions to keep the President in office. He quotes from a letter to businessmen-members asking for donations, not for political reasons, but for their own "self-interest".
Joseph & Stewart Alsop indicate that at least one thing was reasonably certain about the mysterious trips of Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev to Belgrade and of Marshal Tito to Yalta, that the prime cause of the commotion within the Soviet bloc was in Poland rather than in Yugoslavia. In Washington, the Polish situation was regarded as so significant that it had become the subject of a major behind-the-scenes policy debate, with the issue being whether the Administration really meant anything by its talk of "liberation" of the satellite nations at the time of the 1952 election campaign.
All signs indicated that the Poles were presently tending to claim real independence from the Kremlin, with issues arising in the U.S. State Department as to whether it was wise to encourage that independence and how most effectively it could be accomplished, as well as, if encouragement was deemed wise, whether it could be done without angering Senator William Knowland's wing of the Republican Party, whose members favored breaking relations even with Communist Yugoslavia. Thus far, the policymakers could not make up their minds what to do about the situation.
Secretary of State Dulles and many others had pointed out long earlier that the Kremlin's downgrading of the late Joseph Stalin and reunion with Marshal Tito was provoking a ferment toward Kremlin independence within the satellites. It was clear, even prior to the worker riots in Poznan the prior late June, that the signs of that ferment were present, but it was not generally realized that from the standpoint of the Kremlin, the post-Poznan developments had been even more serious than the riots. Immediately after the riots, Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin was sent to Warsaw to read a lecture to the Polish comrades, warning that Poland should not go too far too fast with the process which passed for "liberalization" within the Soviet sphere, seeking to strengthen the Polish Communist faction centering around the Russo-Polish Marshal Rokossovsky, a faction which followed the old line of unquestioning obedience to the Kremlin. But Premier Bulganin had been unable to shake the majority support of Premier Cyrankiewicz, and the Kremlin thus tried a novel expedient of appeasing the Polish satellite, granting a moratorium on Poland's outstanding debt to the Soviet Union, the total of which was 800 million rubles, granting also a new credit of 100 million rubles in gold and raw materials.
Yet, the Polish ferment continued, with an extraordinary freedom of discussion permitted in the press, Warsaw newspapers now advocating a complete end to press censorship except regarding military subjects. There was also a drive toward something like partially free elections to the Polish parliament, which was done with impunity vis-à-vis the Kremlin and still continued. The original Moscow propaganda line, that the Poznan riots had been the work of foreign agitators, was openly rejected, and the rioters were now being provided respectable trials.
There were also increasing contacts between Poland and the West, with vague hints having been dropped that a day might come when there would be need for Western sympathy and support for Polish independence, albeit along the pattern of Tito, but still a type of independence which would dramatically alter the monolithic character of the Soviet bloc.
The Alsops conclude that it was thus easy to see why the debate was ongoing in Washington over the policy.
A letter writer from Lincolnton discusses the Congressional race in the Tenth Congressional District, including Mecklenburg County, between former Charlotte Mayor Ben Douglas and incumbent Charles Jonas, finding that Governor Luther Hodges and Speaker Sam Rayburn had left unanswered for him some questions which he had, by saying that all good Democrats ought vote for their party. He wonders why that was, whether Mr. Douglas would go to Washington and do as Southern Democrats had done a few years earlier, filibustering the 75-cent minimum wage law on the basis that it would bankrupt the South. He also wonders why the two men could not say anything against the record and character of Mr. Jonas during his first term.
The letter writer appears not to be mindful of the fact that filibusters only occur in the Senate, with the favored stalling technique in the House being either to vote to relegate an undesirable measure back to committee for "further study", allowing it then to die there, or by a committee chairman never allowing it onto the floor for a vote in the first place, with individual House members not chairmen of committees, especially as freshmen, usually unable to do much in the way of stalling or prohibiting legislation beyond merely casting a nay vote.
That said, in more recent times, of course, the present Republican House of the 118th Congress has within it a few self-proclaimed "star" freshmen or nearly-freshmen members who, following the Trump line of self-promotion, are able to gain free advertisement notoriety for their Neanderthalic positions by participating in extra-Congressional performance art via social media, right-wing podcasts, and other such modern media innovations in reaching their constituents and voters through the grapevine of discontent with everything, life in general among the lemmings, seeking to politicize existential notions and, whenever the stretch can possibly be imagined within the realm of discourse, logical or not, to blame any perceived shortcoming in policy, distinctions as to local, state or national being only incidental to the discourse, or in society in general on the current Administration, such that Q-anon theories and other such specious notions gain some measure of currency, to the point of becoming respectable talking points among the cliff-jumper population headed out to sea without so much as a raft or provisions for the journey.
A letter writer from Wilmington, writing anonymously, relates of an incident in which the writer was recently "unjustly" involved, suggesting that something ought be done with the patrolman which would bring the latter into court and cost him time and money. He indicates that he was traveling westward on Highway 74 between Wadesboro and Monroe on September 26 at around 8:30 p.m. when a patrol car had passed his car at a high rate of speed, and within a couple of miles, he came upon the patrol car parked by the roadside with its red light blinking, the patrolman stepping into the roadway and motioning the driver to stop behind his car, then asking the driver what his hurry was, and when he said no particular hurry, the officer said that he must be because he had chased him ten miles at 80 mph. The driver told him that he was mistaken, that he had not been traveling at any such speed. The officer then said he had met a 1955 or 1956 Buick some ten miles back down the road and had turned around and pursued it in the direction the driver had been traveling, that he thought the car was the man's car, though was not sure because, as he admitted, his reason for passing him was to determine whether the car in front of him was a Buick. It was raining at the time and visibility was poor. He did not mention giving him a ticket until he found out that he was from another city quite a distance away, and then gave him a ticket charging him with speeding at 65 mph in a 55 mph zone, of which the writer says he was not guilty. When the case came to court, the patrolman stated his case, and when it came time for the writer to testify, he admitted traveling between 55 and 60 mph. The court then stated that it had to find him guilty on the basis of his own admission that he was exceeding the speed limit. He did not blame the judge, as his own testimony had convicted him, but did blame the patrolman for hauling him into court based on the false assumption that his car had been the one traveling at 80 mph. He could have appealed to Superior Court, but decided that the expense of traveling to the county and hiring an attorney there was more than it was worth. He says that something ought be done with such an officer, that he ought to have to repay the motorist for such an unjust ticket or lose his job.
Buy a Ford and decrease the odds of being mistaken for just another G.M. cookie-cutter car, even if the Buicks were distinguished by their row of faux front fender vents, with the possibility of confusion with another model in the Ford line-up being then limited to Mercurys, though admittedly, especially with the introduction of the new 1957's with their new dual headlamps, the Chrysler line presents quite a bit of uniqueness for each model, and then some, more than most consumers actually want in their garage, lest it turn on them as an anthropomorphized monster out to get them and electronically engage the wrong button on the transmission at the wrong time.
A letter writer suggests that erecting a health department building on Independence Boulevard would be tantamount to erecting a regular deathtrap, out of the way, without convenience for the people who had to go to the department for advice and treatment, including women and little children, who would have to cross the dangerous thoroughfare, both driving and walking. He hopes that the citizens of Charlotte would protest the location, and suggests as an alternative that the upper end of Independence Park, near all hospitals and doctors buildings, was an ideal location.
A letter writer, Coleman Roberts, head of the North Carolina Motor Club, indicates that certainty of punishment, increased fines, and the requirement that traffic violators take driver training were mandatory to enable any substantial reduction in traffic accidents and fatalities, that it was encouraging to note that prosecutors and judges were in sympathy with those ideas, which the Club had long encouraged. He says that details of a plan to set up a traffic training school, operated by the police departments of the city and county under the supervision of the courts, would be presented to the county and city officials by the Club in the near future, indicating that in the cities where traffic violators were required to attend such schools, accidents and fatalities had been drastically reduced. "The needless slaughter on the streets and highways will only be reduced by very drastic action by the courts and the police departments. All the traffic lights and stop signs which we may erect will not solve the situation until the people understand there is to be a certainty of punishment by the violation of our traffic laws."
Just go ask the somewhat pitiful 12-year old girl who murdered her aunt in Oakland the previous Thursday, committed in November to the California Youth Authority, which lost jurisdiction at age 21, and wound up therefore "free" by that point, upside down and dead in her 1955 convertible in 1965 on a lonely highway in South Dakota a few miles from her home, for which she claimed "homesickness" as her reason for axing and stabbing to death her aunt, what she thinks about the need for traffic safety—and, perhaps, while about it, instruction in school, by no later than sixth grade, regarding how to appreciate movies, their characters, how movies come to be made, and how to distinguish them from reality, a good multimedia course, starting with a study of Marshall McLuhan. By the sixth grade, as with other illusions of childhood, it is time to be done with them and receive education in such matters of reality, to expose the manipulating hand behind the marionette, as it were. We had sex education in the sixth grade, but had to ferret out the movies on our own and through discussion with peers and vicarious discussion with Mr. Cavett and his guests, reading of reviews in newspapers, magazines and the like, careful analysis while watching and post-analysis after watching, at least through high school.
Of course, we had good English literature teachers along the way, who stressed the symbolic, the metaphor, the allegory, within assigned novels, short stories or poetry being studied of the moment, to which we could, on our own, then analogize to film. But the temptation among filmgoers, even those who would ordinarily be more sophisticated in reading novels and the like, is to be passive viewers, to suspend the critical faculties during and after the presentation and simply see what their mind is nevertheless involuntarily taking in as "just a movie", without the perceived need for much analysis of the system of stimuli being communicated to the mind perhaps as "real" images, evoking present interaction with the characters, producing actual empathy with their fictional plight of the moment as if actually participating in their depicted emotions, whether fright, flight, satisfaction, happiness, sadness, etc., depending on the directorial and acting skill deployed, along with the dexterity displayed in the overriding cinematic trick, unique to the medium, not so easily accomplished in print, of the cut from one scene to the next, from one perspective of the same scene to the next, the juxtaposition of scenes, an analogue more readily obtainable in print, and, in the process, the compression of time to two hours or 90 minutes, from the passage of days, weeks, months, years or decades, merely in the course of entry to and exit from the local Bijou.
Pity the poor young
person who has not that available interaction and tries, from the
perspective of a callow pre-adolescent and adolescent, to understand
complex media matter on their own hook, which may wind up getting
them hooked on the wrong fare, on the wrong side, ultimately, of the
law and nature, the wrong side of the zeitgeist, the wrong side of the
wrong character portrayed in the film, becoming, in reality, "The
Bad Seed", even if not actually so predisposed by nature or
nurture, but only by a lack of firm identity, characteristic of many
at such an early age, lacking self-confidence in the ability to rise
above the crisis of the moment, no matter how small, even minuscule,
it will seem in later years and to adults, such as the loss of a
five-dollar allowance on which the girl in question dwelled all day
in school until she apparently ran herself quite nuts with it by the
time she got home. One can posit that she was, for some reason, quite
nuts already and that the loss of the five dollars, combined with her
"homesickness", constituted only the final tipping point.
But, nevertheless, the tipping point need not have occurred. Take
care of your five-dollar bills. Perhaps the aunt, meaning well and seeking overly to compensate for the child's new environs, was too generous for 1956, entrusting too much responsibility in a 12-year old to take care of so much money at one time, maybe should have dispensed only a dollar or so at a time. But for the loss of the five dollars,
would she have killed her aunt? But for killing her aunt and being
committed to CYA for a few years, would she have wound up behind the
wheel and dead at 21 in an automobile accident outside her South
Dakota hometown? Was it completely unrelated to her past, just one of
those unfortunate turns in the road? Or, without intending either facetious or fatuous riddles in affairs of death, leaving those to the witches and Macbeth, was it the result of some subliminally hidden matter in her basement
Incidentally, it appeared to be a Chevy, albeit with an Olds hubcap, which she was driving up around the shore of the levee at the time of the fatal accident. But, upside down and from a grainy, nighttime photo, it is hard to tell for sure.
We recall an incident involving lost allowance, occurring when we were 9, in the fourth grade. We had a dollar to spend on a Friday, which, had we waited until Saturday, would have had added to it another 50 cents. But we were impetuous with the dollar burning a hole in our pocket and so went to the nearby pharmacy after school and purchased a Cadillac. Well, it was a good car to drive after a war. But when we got the Cadillac home, we realized it was not the way it was depicted on the outside of the box in which it came. For starters, it was pitifully small, and, furthermore, the wheels did not even turn after putting it together, remaining static, glued in place by design, intended more as a shelf showpiece, some poor plastic excuse for objet d'art, than an object to drive around. It did not hold a candle to the Authentic Model Turnpike cars to which we had become accustomed. When our mama got home later in the afternoon, we explained the problem and begged for a reprieve from our plight so that we could obtain another new car as replacement for our weekend enjoyment ahead, one of those $1.50 jobs, which we could have afforded the next day had it not been for our impetuousness. But despite our display of ill humor, so much so that we still recall it, our mama remained quite adamant that we had to learn the lesson and not leap before looking in the purchase of automobiles, and that we would just have to survive until the following weekend when next we were due our weekly stipend. We were sorely displeased with that result, having to wait a full week to get another new car. But, nevertheless, we had no thought of picking up a butcher knife or the like and doing some untoward act with it, even though most sorely displeased we were with our mama's apparent lack of empathy with our desperate plight, in need of flight for the weekend in a new, moveable vehicle. Life, nevertheless, went on.
A letter from Matthew McCloskey, treasurer of the DNC in Washington, compliments the newspaper on its "fine editorial", "Pick Your Party and Pay the Fiddler", believing it to contain the kind of things which would bring to the attention of the people the idea of supporting the party of their choice.
A letter writer from Morganton indicates that people heard repeatedly that the President was "a good man but we are afraid he might die," asking what insurance company or assurance they had to guarantee that Adlai Stevenson would be alive in 1960. She thinks that those who had sons tortured and killed brutally in wartime were not so anxious to have another Democrat for "war prosperity". She finds the ballot in North Carolina to be very confusing, suggesting that thousands would circle the Democratic side of the ticket, to vote straight Democratic, while also marking the name of Republican Congressman Charles Jonas, which would, nevertheless, then result in a vote for Mr. Douglas.
Framed Edition
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