The Charlotte News
Friday, January 18, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from the U.N. in New York that a four-man mission, which had visited Budapest between January 4 and 7 to look into the needs for relief as a result of the rebellion against Soviet domination of the prior October and November, had reported this date that Hungary faced a severe food shortage and 12 percent unemployment by mid-year. The group said that to stave off the food shortage, Hungary needed 440,000 tons of various foods, 14,500 tons of seed and 10,150 tons of chemical fertilizer. The food items included 400,000 tons of wheat, 20,000 tons of sugar, 10,000 tons each of lard and tallow, and 5,000 tons of lemons. The observers approved a suggestion from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had been distributing U.N. relief goods in Hungary, that the nation be given the needed foods and farm supplies but that they in turn should be sold to the Hungarian people through normal economic channels at "the basic average world prices". The Red Cross and the mission recommended that the funds thus realized be paid to the Hungarian Red Cross for "assistance to the needy, hospitals, social institutions and related welfare programs as well as operational costs of the relief program." The Red Cross committee also recommended that Hungary be provided 260,000 tons of coal for hospitals, schools and other institutions. The U.N. group said that free distribution of the relief supplies would be difficult, if not impossible, and would be "undesirable on general economic grounds." Channels for distribution of free supplies were primarily in the hands of the Soviet-supported Communist Government, and some refugees had charged that Communists were faring better than others. But the mission said that it found the Red Cross job "exemplary". The mission had confined itself entirely to Hungary's economic situation and relief needs. The Hungarian Government still refused to admit U.N. political observers to the country. The report said that Hungary's chronic coal shortage "was greatly intensified by recent events, which resulted in a sharp drop in the labor force." As a result, "the heavy industry of the country has either been brought to a standstill or is working at a low level." Unemployment was expected to reach "possibly as much is 300,000 by mid-year." That would be around 12 percent of the last reported total of 2,435,000 Hungarian wage and salary earners.
At March Air Force Base in California, it was reported that the first round-the-world flight by jet planes was expected to land at the base this date. The Air Force would neither confirm nor deny reports that three B-52 intercontinental jet bombers were flying homeward after a record nonstop round-the-world flight, but a spokesman issued the announcement that an event of historical importance would take place in the morning on Friday at the Air Force Base in Riverside. Newsmen were invited to be present and special buses were dispatched to bring reporters to the base from Los Angeles, 60 miles to the west. A propeller driven B-50 bomber had circled the earth nonstop in 1949, refueling four times in midair, requiring 94 hours to make the trip. A B-52 had landed early the previous day in England, the first of eight jet bombers to touch down there. The Air Force had confirmed the landing but refused to say whether the plane had started with a round-the-world flight.
In Eastbourne, England, in the preliminary hearing of the doctor charged with murder of an elderly patient by having allegedly provided her with addictive narcotics before then providing her a lethal dose, a medical associate of the doctor testified this date that the doctor would not allow a rich widow, whom he was also accused of killing, though not charged with that crime, to be moved to a hospital. The testifying doctor said that he had told the defendant of his suspicion that the woman was suffering from an overdose of drugs, but the defendant had said that it was not possible. The doctor stood accused of killing three of his patients for benefit from their wills, but was charged only with the one murder. The doctor testified said that he found the widow in question in a comatose state when he first examined her three days before her death the previous July in answer to an emergency call because the defendant was not available. He consulted with the defendant later about the woman's condition and the defendant said that his diagnosis was cerebral hemorrhage. The coroner was expected to testify later this date, and the prosecutor wanted to ask him about a telephone call which he received from the defendant late one night the prior July. Police said that the defendant had told the coroner that he was not satisfied about the death of a patient and wanted the coroner to arrange a private postmortem, but when the coroner had asked when the patient had died, the defendant had said, according to police, she had not died yet.
In Barberton, O., a 14-year old boy who had tried to extort $300,000 from his favorite movie star, Roy Rogers, was going to be helped rather than punished by authorities. Postal inspectors and police said that no formal charges would be filed against him and that he would be placed on probation. The local juvenile council, made up of church, school and juvenile court representatives, would confer the following day to arrange professional help for the boy. An honor student, the boy, whose name had been withheld by authorities, was trapped the previous day in the boiler room of a junior high school. A police officer, masquerading as a Western Union messenger, had taken a fake money package to the school, following an elaborate plan thought up by the boy. The boy admitted mailing to Mr. Rogers on December 22 a threat that unless he paid a half million dollars, he would be subjected to "moral disgrace", that being to have "altered photographs", showing him nude, distributed to schoolchildren. Mr. Rogers was instructed to insert a coded classified ad in the Akron Beacon Journal to indicate that the money package had been sent to a "Peter Jones" at an Akron bus terminal where the boy had a Western Union messenger pick it up. The boy claimed that he had done it as a "big joke" and insisted that he had not meant to harm anyone or cause concern to Mr. Rogers and his family.
In Raleigh, an elaborate two-day program, including a 19-gun salute, had been planned for the inauguration of Governor Luther Hodges. The inauguration would begin on February 6, with the convening of the State Senate, and the State House an hour later. At noon on February 7, the Governor would be inaugurated in the traditional ceremonies before a joint session of the General Assembly. An inaugural parade would follow. Previously, inaugurations had occurred in early January because the General Assembly had previously convened its biennial sessions in early January.
More snow and continued cold was the forecast for broad areas of the nation this date, as the cold had continued for more than a week in some Midwestern and Eastern areas, bringing record low temperatures and heavy snowfall. Nearly a foot of snow had fallen the previous day in Buffalo, N.Y., as a near blizzard had come off Lake Erie. Snow had fallen during the night and early morning in most of the Great Lakes region and southward into the Ohio Valley, and also in the middle of the Mississippi Valley.
Emery Wister of The News indicates that a new and powerful cold air mass was roaring down on the ice-crusted Carolinas this date, threatening a repeat of the morning weather which had brought the lowest temperatures of the season. A low of 17, a degree over the morning's 16, was forecast for Charlotte. Throughout the state, lows were predicted of between eight and fifteen degrees in mountain areas, between 15 and 22 in the Piedmont, and about 20 along the coast. The Weather Bureau said that the weather should remain fair through Sunday. The temperature was expected to reach a high of 36 in Charlotte this date and rise to 42 the following day. Winston-Salem had a low of 12 degrees, the coldest morning in 41 years. Greensboro had hit 10, the lowest in the Piedmont, and New Bern had recorded 18, the lowest along the coastal plain. The temperature was five below zero on Mt. Mitchell and 13 in Asheville.
Charlotte police had discovered on their beat early in the evening a front window smashed at a loan shop, and inside, the officers found a brick which had been tossed through the glass, with a pocket watch valued at $27.50 missing.
In Paris, it was reported that Ingrid Bergman was flying to the U.S. this night for the first time since she had begun her self-imposed exile seven years earlier, indicating that she could not help being emotional about the trip, as she loved New York and missed it. She would be in New York for just 36 hours, long enough to receive the New York Film Critics' Award as best actress of 1956 and to attend the Broadway hit musical, "My Fair Lady". She would then return to Paris, departing on Sunday night, in time for her curtain call on Monday night's performance of Robert Anderson's "Tea and Sympathy", in which she was starring with great success. She had not been in the U.S. since she had departed to make the film "Stromboli" with Roberto Rossellini in Italy. She and Mr. Rossellini had a son and then married after Ms. Bergman's divorce from her American husband. A daughter by that marriage was in college in Colorado, but Ms. Bergman said that her visit would be too short for them to have their first meeting in years. During her interview in her Paris hotel suite, surrounded by her three children by Mr. Rossellini, seven-year old Robertino, and the four-year old twins, Isabella and Ingrid, she indicated that she was quite happy with her European career, but suggested that she might one day return to America.
On the editorial page, "King Cotton: Ends vs. the Means" indicates that to the people along Tryon Street in Charlotte, the Japanese program for the control of cotton textile imports might seem remote and inconsequential, but it was neither. Mecklenburg County's economy was based to a significant degree on textiles as it was the hub of one of the South's oldest cotton kingdoms and was still directly affected by the lifeblood of cotton commerce.
Low-priced cotton imports from Japan had threatened the community's cotton economy and adequate defensive measures had been demanded by the industry's leaders. Relief had come during the week through self-imposed Japanese quotas, which would begin during the current year and continue for five years.
It indicates that the effect of the limitations would be beneficial to the U.S. cotton textile industry and to the area's economy. Many lives were wrapped up in the prosperity of thousands of individual mills and supporting institutions and businesses.
But it was a palliative rather than a cure. It finds that the new limitations were similar in some ways to the prewar quotas adopted in 1937 by Japanese cotton manufacturers in an agreement with their U.S. competitors. Both agreements followed a time of sharp increases in Japanese exports of cotton goods to the U.S. market, and both had been accepted by the Japanese in the hope of avoiding or easing other U.S. tariff barriers. Present restrictions had been imposed after diplomatic talks and had the official blessing of the White House. The Japanese Government, through export licenses, would be able to police the agreement.
It finds the latter part of the agreement one which should be subjected to serious scrutiny. It questions, along with Senator Sam J. Ervin, the advisability of delegating to the Japanese one of the sovereign powers of the United States, the power to regulate the commerce of the nation. It finds such agreements not satisfactory substitutes for a national trade policy which had to be balanced against the country's long-range strategic and economic interests. The long-range implications of providing quota protection for single industries were tremendous, and another industry might not be so deserving of special consideration.
It questions how the official encouragement of such devices would fit into the country's role as a leader in the drive for freer and larger world trade, finding that sooner or later the question would have to be answered. Eventually, it posits, the Southern textile industry would have to have something sturdier than the benevolence of a foreign competitor to remain competitive in the world market.
"Give Charlotte College Bricks & Mortar" indicates that while it would take a century or more for a college or university to obtain ivy over its bricks, it was possible to have a college in a cotton patch as long as the teacher and student were present.
Charlotte had one in a high school building, Charlotte College. Its tenth anniversary had been celebrated the previous night. Books and equipment had been slowly collected and used, but there was teaching and learning ongoing. During the ten years of its existence, the College had amply demonstrated its need and usefulness. The College had given much to the community and the state, and it would be wasteful not to provide it with the material necessities for enlarging its contribution. It finds that pride and appreciation in the College had now to compel renewed efforts to provide the tools which it needed.
"'This Is Very Midsummer Madness'" finds that it was already August on the nation's front pages, as it was the only way to account for the sudden outbreak of midsummer madness.
The year's first flying saucers had been sighted in West Virginia. Bogus bomb scares had turned a serious Manhattan manhunt into a comedy of errors. Perverse sadists had scared people out of schools, theaters and airliners as far away as Kansas City with dynamite threats. A missing Hollywood pinup queen finally had been found, telling of a wild and woolly adventure story about being kidnaped. A marathon swimmer had announced plans to swim across Lake Ontario to the accompaniment of bagpipe music. It suggests that such occurrences were usually peculiar to the brooding heat of July or August.
It finds that in earlier days, midsummer would usher in the popular sport of catching baseballs dropped from monuments, rendering it unsafe to walk within 50 feet of such edifices as the Washington Monument and the Bunker Hill Monument. According to Sports Illustrated, a man had caught three such tosses in a row from the top of the Bunker Hill Monument on September 17, 1910. But the magazine's statisticians said that the definitive catch had been made five years earlier by an Englishman posing as a Japanese juggler, who had caught a turnip by impaling it on a fork held in his teeth.
It predicts that such things would be equaled or surpassed in 1957, even before the first robin came in for a landing. As Shakespeare had written, probably in a similarly wacky January, "This is very midsummer madness."
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "A Case for Cat Owners", indicates that most cat owners were not as unruly as the London resident who stole all of the prize ribbons at Britain's National Cat Show and pinned them on his own cat's cage, then dumped a can of cat food on one of the judges when officials complained.
It finds that a good case could be made that cat owners were the most reasonable of people, that the mere fact of ownership indicated a give-and-take sort of person who entered into a compact knowing that the cat reserved the freedom to act in defense of its vital interests without prior consultation, just as Secretary of State Dulles. The cat owner had to play the role of U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, negotiating with a feline Nasser who insisted on laying down terms of the agreement as to what it would eat, when it would eat, and where it would sleep and sit.
Likewise, a cat was as difficult to win over as an uncommitted nation fresh from the yoke of colonialism. The cat remained neutral, becoming friendly only on terms suitable to the cat. It was axiomatic among cat owners that if a cat jumped on one's lap, that meant that the floor was cold.
It suggests that psychiatrists would probably explain the Briton's behavior at the National Cat Show by indicating that he was taking his frustrations out on officials and judges. It finds that it might be a case for the U.N.
Drew Pearson indicates that the latest U.S. disarmament proposals had been sent back to the U.N. only after backstage bickering in Washington. The friction had been primarily between Secretary of State Dulles and the President's disarmament adviser, Harold Stassen, partly involving the problem of seeking to entice the Russians to withdraw from Hungary, Poland and other satellite countries. The trouble between the two men had reached a climax in mid-December, following receipt of the last note from Premier Nikolai Bulganin to the President regarding disarmament. Mr. Stassen had believed that it offered genuine opportunities and called a semi-off-the-record conference with newspapermen, with no right to quote from it, indicating that the Bulganin note for the first time had partially accepted the President's "open skies" proposal and offered optimistic possibilities for a genuine disarmament understanding. The following day, newspapers had come forth with headlines making it appear that the U.S. and Russia were moving toward disarmament and peace.
But the day after that, Secretary Dulles, reading the headlines in Paris, held his own background news conference, calling in favored members of the press, putting the quietus on the optimism which had issued from Mr. Stassen. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey was with Mr. Dulles in Paris and prompted by the Secretary of State, he also had spanked Mr. Stassen. Privately, he had complained to the White House upon his return that Mr. Stassen was interfering with the conduct of foreign affairs by Secretary Dulles.
The primary difference between Mr. Stassen's stance and that of Mr. Dulles was that the former wanted to explore the possibility of Russia withdrawing from the satellite countries and had read into the Bulganin note a possible move by the Kremlin gracefully to withdraw from the Hungarian mess. If the Soviet leaders were to sign a disarmament agreement whereby the U.S. would withdraw from its NATO bases in Europe, Mr. Stassen believed the Russians might jump at the chance to save face and withdraw from Hungary, Poland and the other satellite countries. Some State Department advisers had agreed with Mr. Stassen and wanted to probe the situation further. But Secretary Dulles did not and he got his way.
A curt note was sent in response to Premier Bulganin, indicating that future disarmament proposals should be transacted through the U.N. Accordingly, the next U.S. proposal was put before the U.N. during the current week, ironically containing many of the ideas of Mr. Stassen, though it did not give any opening to the Russians for a graceful withdrawal from the satellites. It also had gone a long way toward adopting the proposal by Adlai Stevenson for banning hydrogen bomb tests, which the President had vigorously opposed during the fall campaign, making voters believe that Mr. Stevenson was incompetent to handle such problems.
Mr. Pearson indicates that Mr. Stassen worked harder and gave more thought to disarmament than anyone else in the Administration, and was also the most boycotted member of the Administration. Mr. Dulles shunned him as much as possible, and Vice-President Nixon, still resentful over Mr. Stassen's opposition to him on the ticket the previous summer, was cold toward him. The President still stood up for Mr. Stassen, but Mr. Pearson indicates that the tragedy was that the problem of peace, so precious to the American people, was caught in a bitter clash of personalities.
A letter writer wants the newspapers of the city to bring to the attention of the people the extreme discourtesy which some of them were showing at the various entertainments presented at Ovens Auditorium, that at every intermission, many remained out so long that the entertainers were embarrassed, and those who had already taken their seats, annoyed. He indicates that in larger cities, such as Cincinnati, a bugle was blown a few minutes before the beginning of the performance, as a signal to everyone that the doors would be closed when the lights went on and that unless they were in their seats when the lights went off in the audience, they would not be permitted to take their seats until another intermission. He says that on Tuesday evening, the director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was compelled to leave the podium and appeal to the audience to take their seats after an intermission, requesting that the doors be closed after waiting an embarrassing amount of time for people to find their seats. He says that there were out-of-town visitors who were astonished at the rudeness on the part of the Charlotte audience. He says that the astonishment showed on the faces of the orchestra on Saturday evening.
Don't mind some of the audience members. They are probably just accustomed to going to the stock-car races on Saturday nights, where they can obtain plenty of greasy french fries and hotdogs on which to munch during and after intermission, probably were not accustomed to having to finish their refreshments out on the concourse.
A letter writer, a captain in the Marine Corps, comments on a recent editorial published in the newspaper regarding the inadequacies of the draft law, says that he agrees that it was short of being optimum, and offers a solution to the uncertainty under which youths had to live with the present draft laws. He says that reserve components of all the branches of the service would accept qualified men between the ages of 17 and 18 1/2 and that since military service was inevitable, a young man ought begin fulfilling his obligation at an early age and remove the cloud of uncertainty, with his association with the reserve enabling him to plan his military service, his educational program, and his vocational career.
A letter writer from Great Falls, S.C., suggests that were there a definite foreign policy to follow and had the State Department not first encouraged Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and then let him down, the Communists would not have moved into the Middle East so easily. He asserts that the Administration had been appeasing the Soviets and the Arab nations, hoping for something to happen, but that nothing could happen except the worst for the U.S. unless it could decide on a definite course through a definite policy and let everyone know what that was. He says that even J. Edgar Hoover had recently expressed himself through the newspapers to the effect that as long as the Communists hung around, the U.S. could not expect peace. He urges that a situation such as had occurred in the Middle Ease the previous October, when both the President and Secretary Dulles had assured the country that the situation between the Arabs and Israelis was settling down, could not be allowed to repeat itself and could be avoided only if the Administration finally declared a clear foreign policy, including what it expected to do as between Israel and the Arab nations.
A letter writer from Pittsboro indicates that he was delighted to see the promotion of Cecil Prince from associate editor to editor of the newspaper, but wants to register a dissent to an editorial titled "The South Is Captive of a Dream". He indicates that he had no respect for the the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, regards it as "mischievous folly". He believes the editorial in question was acquiescing in the gradual elimination of the white race in the Western Hemisphere, as he asserts that wherever the racial barriers had been lowered in the Western Hemisphere, amalgamation of the races had followed, such as in Jamaica, the Virgin Islands and other countries generally to the south. He says he was not prejudiced but only reliant on fact when he said that the citizenship of those countries was far from being something about which to boast. He believes that preservation of the best of men was to be found in God's natural laws "which say that each of His creatures should reproduce after its kind. Integration from the kindergarten to the grave means amalgamation, and amalgamation means an inferior human product." He says that "a land of less than thoroughbreds can't be a land that anyone 'can live in with pride.'"
A letter from the president and corresponding secretary of the Mecklenburg County Council of the PTA expresses appreciation for the newspaper's efforts in publicizing the recent bond election on the construction and improvement of schools held in the county on January 5, indicating that the newspaper performed a great service to the community and the schools of the county.
A letter from City Council member Martha Evans expresses appreciation to Margaret Watkins of the newspaper and her article appearing on January 5 regarding recreational findings of a special report. She finds that the skillful presentation of the viewpoints of the administration and of private citizens indicated a comprehensive understanding and thorough study of the subject, arousing public interest and being responsible for a large attendance at the luncheon on the subject. She thanks the newspaper and its staff for the continuing interest in public affairs.
A letter writer from Hamlet says that in order for others to live, the present population had to die, just as progenitors had to die for the presently living to live. He quotes words carved in stone over the gate of a cemetery in Savannah, Ga.: "Anything as universal as death is bound to be a blessing."
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