The Charlotte News
Friday, February 1, 1957
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that rising criticism of Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson's remarks before the House Armed Services Committee the prior Monday, branding enlistees of the National Guard during the Korean War as having been draft-dodgers, along with the Secretary's wife's reaction to that outcry, had raised the question as to how long before the Secretary would resign. Quitting at present would make it appear that he was leaving because of the criticism. He had stated to newsmen that he planned to stay at least until Congress completed action on the military budget late during the spring or during the summer, but that had been several weeks earlier, before his statement that "a sort of scandal … a draft dodging business" had developed during the Korean War when youths below 18 1/2, the minimum draft age, could enlist in the National Guard "and not be drafted to fight." Angry outcries from National Guard leaders had ensued, one of them calling it "a damn lie", with members of Congress having joined the chorus, some demanding the Secretary's resignation. (Not even the dumbest of the dumbbells, however, you might note in our present time and times regarding action just taken by the 118th House, sought to introduce an article of impeachment against him or insisted on a vote on it despite the first vote having failed to achieve a majority and needing to rush on the second attempt because of the emergent need for the single vote for passage, which would fail after a special election in New York the next day to fill a seat previously occupied by a Republican grifter, all immediately after just having killed legislation which would have enabled the executive branch to take care of the issue about which complaint is being made in the unconstitutional impeachment article, in perhaps the dumbest and baldest election-year political maneuver in the history of the House, certainly in the history of impeachments, even exceeding the previous dumbest ever to date, that in late 1998 of President Clinton for lying about sex, a House then led by Newty-wooty and a committee by Jekyll's excessively dramatic counterpart.) The President had stated at his press conference on Wednesday that the remarks of the Secretary had been "unwise". The previous day, Mrs. Wilson had spoken indignantly, saying that the press conference criticism by the President was "uncalled for", and that the Wilsons thought that Mr. Wilson had earned the right to "take it easy now". The White House had responded with no comment regarding Mrs. Wilson's criticism. Mr. Wilson had not shown much concern over previous calls from members of Congress for his resignation, but it was known that Mrs. Wilson had been urging him to retire for a year or more before the recent incident. She stated in an interview that it was not true that she had asked Mr. Wilson to resign because of her health. She had been hospitalized in 1954 for treatment of ulcers and only two days earlier, in the midst of the latest uproar, had left Walter Reed Army Hospital after undergoing rest and treatment for eight days.
In Van Nuys, Calif., protests were
rising this date against the practice of testing airplanes over
populous areas, following a crash of a large airliner, on a test run,
into a crowded schoolyard the previous day, after a collision at
20,000 feet with a jet fighter, resulting in seven deaths and 78
injured, most of whom had been students at Pacoima Junior High
School
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that the commissioner of North Carolina's five training schools would ask the General Assembly for nearly two million dollars to provide additional facilities for young people with behavioral problems, telling the newspaper by telephone this date that the recommendations as outlined to the Advisory Budget Commission were the immediate needs of the schools, describing as "acute" the cramped conditions at the black training schools for boys and girls. He had the full backing of Mecklenburg authorities handling juvenile delinquents, with the juvenile court judge on many occasions having called the black schools "inadequate". The judge had said that there was a wait of between seven and eight months before black boys could obtain a delinquency admission to the Morrison Training School at Hoffman, and that it was a "rather hopeless situation with colored girls, too," though worse with the boys. He had said that there were black girls who were "totally delinquent and incorrigible who were walking the streets of Charlotte because I cannot get them in a training school. They defy the courts because they know we can't do anything with them." The recommended new improvements by the commissioner of corrections would cost about 1.7 million dollars. He also recommended that the total training school staff be increased by about 35 persons and that appropriations be made to employ two cottage parents for each cottage of 25 students. A social service worker was also recommended for each training school.
In Venice, Italy, the sister of the the 20-year old woman who had been found dead on the beach outside a wealthy playboy's hunting lodge in April, 1953, with negligent responsibility for her death now being alleged in the criminal trial charging manslaughter against a jazz pianist who was the son of a former foreign minister of Italy, with the former police chief of Rome, the playboy, and others as co-defendants on charges of having given previous false testimony during an inquest or having otherwise aided and abetted the pianist in covering up his involvement in her death, testified, as had the young woman's father, that she had gone to the sea to wash her feet, not for a drug and sex orgy, as had been alleged by other witnesses. The sister had broken down on the witness stand, saying that it was no mystery, that her sister had died of a terrible accident. She said that she and her sister had planned to go to the beach together to wash their feet in the salt water because of an inflammation they both had, indicating that she still had the trouble and felt in a way responsible for her sister's death because she had declined to go with her. The father had testified on Wednesday that his daughter had planned for a long time to bathe her feet in the sea to try to relieve the ailment.
In Richmond, Ind., the 23-year old manicurist who was accused of having married seven men and having divorced only four of them, was being held in custody on a bigamy charge, with officials uncertain as to when she would be arraigned. Her most recent marriage had been on January 14, lasting two weeks until her sixth husband, a 24-year old student at Wilmington College, had walked in on the couple's trailer at Dayton, O. The woman had never divorced her fifth husband, and authorities said that he had confirmed by telephone that they had been married on February 27, 1954 and had never been divorced. She told police at Dayton that she was expecting a baby and that no one seemed to want her. The father of the child was not yet identified. Both the sixth and seventh husbands had been quoted as saying that they wanted her back if she could straighten out her entanglement, but the seventh husband denied that report at Dayton, saying that he, being a boxer, was going to punch someone in the nose, as he would never marry her again, indicating that he felt sorry for her but would not stand by her. He said that when her sixth husband had walked in on them early one morning, he was asleep and saw a man standing there, rubbed his eyes and thought that he was dreaming. She had told him that she had a foster brother and he thought it was that brother, that when he and the other man learned what the situation was, he packed his bags and left with the other man, leaving the woman alone in the trailer. Look on the bright side. It could have been worse. At least the man who barged into their cohabited trailer was fully clothed.
In Toledo, O., four heavily armed men had robbed an employees' Federal Credit Union of $50,000 during the morning, the robbers having appeared just after the Brinks express had delivered the money, entering the office and declaring, "We want the bundle that Brinks just delivered." (At least the man in the previous story made no such statement.) The manager of the credit union told police that he had told the robbers that the money had been separated and placed in drawers, that the man, using abusive language, had emptied six cash registers, skipping all of the change, which included several hundred silver dollars. The men used a wastebasket for the money and then pulled out the telephone lines, except for one, and ordered seven employees and several customers to stand against a wall, before fleeing in an automobile which had been parked nearby, with witnesses indicating that they believed the driver had remained in the automobile during the robbery. The robbers were described as between 30 and 45 years old, one having his face masked with a stocking, while another, the leader of the four, had a heavy mustache, the other three holding their hands over their faces. If you see three men, one of whom has a heavy mustache, holding their hands over their faces, accompanied by another man in a stocking mask and another driving a car, all between 30 and 45, none appearing in their twenties or late forties, be sure and call the police.
The death and destruction from one of the worst floods in the history of the Appalachian Mountain region had mounted this date as new, heavy rains fed the flooding and carried the threat deeper into the South. Thirteen persons were reported dead in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia from the flooding which had begun four days earlier. The President declared portions of Kentucky and West Virginia a disaster area, as damage was estimated in the millions. Virginia Governor Thomas Stanley had requested disaster relief for six southwestern counties of the state, where 2,000 persons were homeless and 18,000 had lost their jobs from the flooding. General Alfred Gruenther, president of the American Red Cross, said that the organization was allocating half a million dollars for flood relief in the three states. New flood warnings had been issued in Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northeast Georgia. The Warrior River was rising swiftly in Alabama, where the Tombigbee also was expected to exceed its banks. Heavy rains continued to pound east Tennessee from Chattanooga to Knoxville, with 8 1/2 inches having fallen in 12 days, more than twice the norm for the month. The latest drowning victim had been an 11-year old Kentucky girl, swept away when flood waters had partially destroyed her home at Feds Creek in Pike County.
Flash flooding of streams and rivers posed problems across North Carolina this date, with early afternoon reports indicating that three persons had been injured, many houses and fields flooded and three freight trains blocked by rock and dirt slides, as the mountain areas of the state had been the hardest hit. The Asheville Weather Bureau had issued a flash flood and heavy rain advisory, but said that no large-scale flooding was expected. The Raleigh-Durham Airport Weather Bureau station had said that moderate flooding of river lowlands in the east was forecast for the ensuing few days. Waters had reached flood stages this date on the Neuse and Cape Fear Rivers and their tributaries, with minor flooding expected by the following day. No flooding of consequence was forecast on the Tar River, but some small tributaries above Rocky Mount might hit minor flood stages prior to the following day. Some of the heavy rain from the flood areas in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia had spread into the extreme upper portions of the Yadkin River in North Carolina, with a slight rise to about half of flood stage having occurred in the North Wilkesboro-Elkin section of the state. The Yadkin fed the Pee Dee River, which was expected to rise gradually in the ensuing several days. That eventually feeds right down into our back yard. Man the lifeboats. Board two of each animal species. Weather bureaus advised that all interests concerned ought continue to be alert for warnings. Keep the radio up and humming, with the tubes aglow and hot.
In Twin Falls, Ida., police had been advised that a man was "having a fit or something" in the middle of the street, and had dispatched an officer to address the problem, finding a man squirming around in the street, explaining to the officer that he was only trying to turn a water tap set in a hole in the road. Seems that you could write a song about that.
The newspaper indicates that it was aware that the following day was Groundhog Day and reminds readers that it was so, saying that it did not know any groundhogs, and that if one did come by, they would not take its picture, interview it or even put its name in the newspaper, not holding to the legend that when Mr. Groundhog emerged from his hole on February 2 after a long winter's nap, he determined the extension or not of winter by whether or not he saw his shadow. "Go on back in your hole, Mr. Groundhog. Go on back before you even come out." It concludes that it was the last word readers would see in the newspaper during the year about groundhogs, unless a groundhog did something newsworthy, "like biting the President", in which case they would report the facts.
We have never heard of a groundhog biting a President, but a President once had a fierce and much-publicized battle with a rabbit while fishing on a pond in Georgia.
According to the Weather Bureau, rain was ending in Charlotte, as cooler air was blowing in from the northwest, chasing away the warm moist clouds by the following day, when the skies would begin to clear, enabling you to see clearly. Occasional showers were forecast for the present afternoon and nighttime. The cool front was expected to lower the temperature to 50 in the morning, with a low of 52 during the current morning and 65 as a high during the afternoon, with 58 predicted as the high the following day.
On the editorial page, "Teapot Tempest Blurs Annexation" finds that a storm over school district lines during the week had been the wrong way to solve the complex problems accompanying annexation. A State legislator, Frank Snepp, had mentioned that it would be nice if extension of the city school district could be accomplished at the same time the city limits were extended. County School superintendent J. W. Wilson had brought the matter up at a school board meeting, concerned that the perimeter residents might lose their legal right to vote separately on which school system they wanted to join. For about three hours, school board members had debated the problem, which appeared insoluble, threatening the whole school system.
But North Carolina law provided that no act of the Legislature was required to extend school district lines, that it only took approval by the city and county school boards, the State Board of Education and the people living in the area concerned. Thus, the vote in the perimeter area could be taken simultaneously with the vote on annexation, or it could be taken separately. It suggests that someone could have checked the law and saved a lot of time and trouble, that there were too many actual problems connected with annexation for officials to become exercised over phony ones.
"The Court's 'Swing' Man Served Well" tells of Justice Stanley Reed, who had announced the previous day his retirement from the Supreme Court after having served for 19 years, to have spoken, for a quiet man, with surprising authority during his tenure. For years, Justice Reed had been the "swing" man on the Court, providing the deciding vote often in 5 to 4 decisions during the decade after his appointment by FDR in 1938. In one case, Justice Reed might find himself on the side of the liberals, while in another, with the conservatives on the Court. It had thus become inevitable that his key position was recognized, often determining how particular cases were presented to the Court.
Paul Yost had written in 1952: "In presenting arguments to the full bench of nine justices, [lawyers] tried to figure in advance how to win Reed to their views. Occasionally attorneys showed their anxiety to win over Reed by directing their arguments directly to him."
It suggests that the South had reason to remember him as he had announced the Smith v. Allwright decision out of Texas, which had struck down the practice of barring black citizens from voting in primary elections in some states in the South, the party having sought to privatize primary elections as party functions, thus able to determine whom they wished to invite to the party. The opinion stated that "Constitutional rights would be of little value if they could be thus indirectly denied." Although he had frequently voted to uphold the authority of the Federal Government in its relations to the states, he had once declared that it was "beyond imagination" that there could ever be any "serious impairment of the supremacy of the states." He further stated: "Undoubtedly the more extended use of national powers in some degree detracts from the power of the states. But so long as the national powers are used only in these situations where states' actions can have little effect, the efficiency of the state governments in the affairs most important to their people will not be affected."
It indicates that defenders of the Bill of Rights had special reason to be grateful for Justice Reed's eloquence exhibited in Pennekamp v. State of Florida, a 1946 case, reliant heavily on the 1941 case, Bridges v. State of California, Pennekamp involving the Miami Herald, Bridges, the Los Angeles Times, the Herald having been accused of contempt because of publication of two editorials and a cartoon criticizing local court proceedings. Delivering the unanimous opinion of the Court in striking down the contempt judgment in Pennekamp, Justice Reed had said: "Freedom of discussion [by newspapers] should be given the widest range compatible with the essential requirements of the fair and orderly administration of justice. Without a free press there can be no free society."
It concludes that Justice Reed had served his nation and the cause of justice well.
"Local Weather Gets a Terrible Press" tells of the Shelby Star asserting that weather news was selling Cleveland County to the world, recalling that a couple seeking a salubrious climate had moved to Shelby after making a study of weather stories in the newspaper's columns and in other Southern papers. The Star hoped that it would provide industry and others a positive example in seeking a new home.
It indicates that Mecklenburg County had to woo greatness in subtler ways, that though the weather was fine, or about what one would expect from a "weepy, toothless winter", the city received terrible press. Great ice storms were forecast, along with precipitous drops in the temperature and blizzards of sleet. Meanwhile, the camellias bloomed, jonquils budded and forsythia exercised its customary impudence. Even the people were beginning to tire of the Weather Bureau's continued dabbling in doom and gloom, and igloo construction had practically ceased. It suggests that if the Weather Bureau had to persist in undue pessimism, it should forecast a good snowstorm, giving the kids a momentary thrill and causing no one any extra trouble. "Everybody knows it's going to rain."
Whether, incidentally, the fact that Lee Weathers was the publisher of the Shelby Star had anything to do with its boast, we know not.
"Charlotte's Slogan Has a Blunted Point" tells of the Chamber of Commerce having informed that Charlotte's slogan was "The Spearhead of the New South", finding it blunted by the fact that the city was a missile manufacturer for the nation, with its Nike facility. But it finds that it was difficult to think of a better slogan.
"Smogville on the Catawba" had been discarded in the hope that the city's smoke engineer would cleanse the atmosphere. "Colossus of the Carolinas" sounded a bit pretentious for a city having trouble extending its borders. "Hockey-Happy City" sounded too seasonal. "The One-TV City" would not fit circumstances much longer, as everyone was hoping that the approved channel 9 would soon go on the air.
It finds that Charlotte was pretty hard to point up a slogan and that "spearhead" would serve as well as anything.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "The Old Candy Store", indicates that nowadays, candy usually came from afar, at least in smaller towns, not made fresh on the day one consumed it. But it had not been many years earlier that practically every county seat in the state had its own candy store. Raleigh still had one, Royster's, a rare survivor. In earlier days, such stores made candy on the premises daily and the odor of it permeated the surrounding area. Schoolboys coming within a block of it might lose self-control and become as helpless as a child of Hamelin under the spell of the Pied Piper.
It tells of there having been probably a hundred different kinds of penny candies, suckers, chocolates, caramels, marshmallows, oranges, lemons and limes, with the only problem confronting the lad with a nickel being the momentous decision as to which of the "heavenly delicacies" to choose. "The old candy store was the rarest perfume of the gods miraculously bringing to Main Street the mystery and excitement of the ages. Oh, the times might be precarious and the crop short, but the most vacuous hour was saturated with the quintessence of the brightest, most enchanted day that the heart and mind of Maytime ever imagined."
Let's not get carried away, fat candy boy.
Drew Pearson indicates that there was a major thread running through U.S. policy for the Middle East as it affected several events, including the manner in which House Speaker Sam Rayburn had rammed the so-called "Eisenhower doctrine" through the House under a gag rule forbidding amendment, which Mr. Pearson comments should have been open to full debate and amendment regardless of its merits. But Mr. Rayburn, who did not like the President, had been dictatorial in demanding that the House support the doctrine, while Representative Joseph Martin, the Minority Leader, had been lukewarm. Likewise, Senator Lyndon Johnson, the Majority Leader in the Senate, had also demanded that the doctrine be passed soon. The facts that the President was welcoming King Saud of Saudi Arabia to Washington just after refusing to meet with the British and French heads of state, and that he had taken the somewhat unpopular step of greeting the King at the airport personally, the only time he had thus greeted any foreign visitor, were also significant. The manner in which the Administration had dropped criminal charges in the antitrust lawsuit, started against the oil industry by the Truman Administration, and had dragged out the civil suit, was also significant. The interminable delay in the Justice Department's case against the Arabian-American oil group for overcharging the U.S. Navy by about 67 million dollars, with some of those companies supporting King Saud, was likewise significant. The loans, economic aid and shipments of arms to Saudi Arabia at the expense of U.S. taxpayers further provided significance. All of those circumstances could be taken together to summarize U.S. policy toward the Middle East as being protection of oil.
In some cases, the critics' description of it as "kowtowing to oil" was quite accurate, as the State Department and the Texas leaders in Congress had gone to amazing lengths not only to protect oil but also to give the oil industry many breaks which ordinary citizens, companies and taxpayers had not received. When Mr. Rayburn dictated that the Eisenhower doctrine would pass without free debate or amendment, it meant partly that Texas oil friends had spoken, and when the Speaker refused to permit any member of the House to oppose the 27.5 percent oil depletion allowance, it definitely meant that the Texas oil lobby had spoken. The Texas oil lobby could put Mr. Rayburn out of Congress any time it chose, merely by redistricting his 4th District and infiltrating it with Republicans from Dallas, with the result that the lobbyists did not have to speak too loud to get their way.
While the oil companies' influence was not so apparent in nudging the State Department generally, sometimes it was, as when the Washington lobbyist for Aramco had provided air-cooling equipment to Loy Henderson, the State Department official in charge of the Middle East, a gift similar to the freezer given to President Truman's military aide, General Harry Vaughan, which had become the center of a well-publicized controversy. On the whole, however, the oil companies were not obviously guiding major foreign policy, but it was present, influencing both war and peace and guiding the question of aid and gifts, affecting the money which the average taxpayer had to pay when filling out tax returns.
A letter writer from Pittsboro says that he agreed with News publisher Thomas L. Robinson that the state's Pearsall Plan, approved the prior September by the voters in the form of State Constitutional amendments to allow school districts to vote to abolish their public schools and to provide public funds for private tuition grants to those students wishing to attend private schools, had not yet been tested, and finds that at best they were tools of limited application in an effort to maintain segregation in the public schools. The writer indicates that while he was a segregationist, he was also a realist, and had thus voted against the amendments as they were only trying to ease the transition from segregated to integrated public schools, with the fear of violence having prompted their submission to the people and adoption, rather than a determination to maintain segregated schools. He believes that the people should have been given an opportunity to vote directly on whether tax money ought be made available for the support of integrated schools. He says that "the doctrine of one-race-and-one-blood has been promulgated by the churches of the North and accepted by many of our southern churches. This doctrine is essentially an amalgamation of the races doctrine, and the question is being asked by our young people in the church, the institutions of higher learning and even the non-state-supported colleges why integration should be delayed at any level, and when the young people of today become the supporting laymen and taxpayers of tomorrow the churches, schools and all other walks of life will be integrated and then we will have what the great old Charlotte warrior, Warren W. Woods [another letter writer], predicts, interracial marriages generally, and I will go him one better, that they will be celebrated in the top Protestant and Catholic churches of both races and that within the next 50 years." He thus thinks that the only way to prevent it would be to challenge and confute "the one-race-one-blood doctrine." The churchmen whom he knew best hated the idea of amalgamation of the races, but still supported the policy-making organization of their churches. He indicates that the Institute of Religion was presently in session in Raleigh and one of its big attractions was the appearance of the superintendent of the Louisville public schools, who would tell the Institute how to integrate North Carolina's public schools. He says that the "one-race-one-blood" doctrine had worked in the countries to the south of the U.S. to produce citizens who were neither white, black nor red, "but definitely an inferior human product." He says that one morning in the fall of 1907, he had walked into the philosophy class of Horace Williams at UNC and found the professor looking out the window, eventually turning to the class and saying that man's knowledge did not transcend his experience. At the time, they were moving the library from the old building to the new Carnegie building—later named Hill Hall, housing the music department—, and he had been one of the assistant librarians helping in the transfer. He had asked the professor what was the use of moving the books into the new building, suggesting that they should burn them and forget the whole thing, with the professor responding that, as usual, his student had gone off half-cocked, that the professor was talking about one thing and the writer another, that he was talking about information, while the professor was talking about knowledge, something they learned the "hard way" through experience, that he would make the same mistake as his father, thinking that the professor was an old fogy and did not know what he was talking about, that history meant nothing to people, learning only by way of experience. The writer says that he had now found that Arnold Toynbee, in his essay, "Civilization on Trial", had stated that man's behavior had not perceptibly improved since the beginning of the species. So he was satisfied that the white man would be integrated out of existence in the northern half of the Western Hemisphere, just as he had been in the southern half, and that it would be done in the name of God and in the furtherance of His Kingdom, "to mean a misapplication of the teachings of the Old and New Testament alike."
This person obviously still did not grasp what his professor had tried to teach him 50 years earlier, having nothing at all to do with integration of the public schools, which is the topic to which he seeks to extend a general statement. By coincidence, in our philosophy of the law course at UNC, we studied primarily two Supreme Court cases, Brown v. Board of Education and Bakke v. Regents of the University of California, albeit the latter not yet having then reached beyond the California trial stage, regarding alleged reverse discrimination in the admission of minority students to U.C.-Davis medical school under Affirmative Action principles, and ahead of a more qualified white student, the minority students having been bumped up in admission status because of a quota system for admission of minority students to compensate for disabilities imposed by past discrimination, and whether that was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause as applied to the more qualified white applicant, the Supreme Court eventually holding in 1978 that while Affirmative Action remained valid, quotas could not be used to deprive more qualified applicants admission based solely on race or ethnicity. The class could not have been in the same building, however, Caldwell Hall, once the medical school, wherein the letter writer heard Professor Williams make his statement, for Caldwell was not erected until 1912—though we often thought we heard past sapient echoes from within those and other walls of the hallowed older buildings on campus, especially as we sat down to draft a paper or study for an exam, able to glean from the plaster-trapped earlier soundings, perhaps, the reverberating waves still able to reach our tympana and communicate thoughts of lost past scholars drifting still among the classrooms on a late spring or fall night when all was quiet. In any event, regardless of the building in which he heard the lectures, the letter writer appears to have benefited little from his study of philosophy at the University. Start on the Cartesian plane with "Cogito ergo sum", and all will follow well from there on the quadrangle.
A letter writer from Monroe indicates that the President had assured foreign nations in his inaugural address of January 21 that the U.S. did not seek "to buy their sovereignty" any more than the U.S. would sell its own, that "sovereignty is never bartered among free men." He finds that the first of the two phrases might be true, but that the second was not, as the country had sold its sovereignty both by treaty and executive agreement, having sold in 1953, "for a hill of beans", the Constitutional rights of the "heart of the nation", its members of the armed forces overseas. He finds that it had been done by approval of the Status of Forces Agreement, surrendering traditional American jurisdiction over servicemen accused of crimes while off duty in NATO countries. He says that only 15 Senators had refused thus to sell sovereignty to foreign powers in that instance. By another executive agreement, sovereignty had been sold to Japan, such that the latter now exercised jurisdiction over American servicemen serving in that country, which he finds appalling. He indicates that a resolution had been introduced in the House by Representative Frank Bow, requesting that the President take measures to regain the traditional rights of servicemen abroad. He urges that citizens make their views known on the matter to their Congressman, particularly those serving on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, with Congressman L. H. Fountain of Tarboro sitting on that Committee.
A letter from UNC chancellor Robert B. House states that he was deeply touched and delighted with the editorial of January 24, titled "UNC's House Will Remain at Home", stating that it really hit what he had been after all of his life, as well as it could be done, and was "an encouraging sort of thing" which he appreciated.
A letter writer finds that the "impudent statement" by New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, concerning the visit of King Saud, had been devoid of truth and contrary to common decency and better understanding among peoples, that the Mayor would have been acting within his right as an individual by choosing not to recognize the presence of the King on American soil, but as a public official, should have recognized the interests of the American people as a whole and not only those pressure groups who had put him in office. The King was the guest of the President, seeking to make relations between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. better, and his visit had nothing to do with New York City, per se, only the point of disembarkation, or Mayor Wagner. He finds the Mayor's remarks to have been another example of the type of false and fanciful propaganda which had been conducted against King Saud and his people, with the aim of disrupting and defeating the purpose of the visit.
A letter writer from Mooresville, the managing editor of the Mooresville Tribune, indicates that in the newspaper's "Strictly Political" column recently, it had stated that there would be two publishers in the 1957 North Carolina Legislature, "Tom McKnight, the Mooresville dynamo, and J. Roy Parker of Ahoskie." He says that only Mr. Parker was a publisher who was also a member of the Legislature, that Mr. McKnight was not in the body, that the writer of the column had confused him with James E. McKnight, a Mooresville representative for Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Co., no relation to publisher McKnight.
The editors respond: "We erred. But Publisher McKnight is indeed a dynamo."
A letter writer indicates that there were many radio stations around Charlotte and yet all of them sought to present practically the same kind of music with very little variation. He urges the need for one radio station in every large community which would disregard the modern music and the so-called Hit Parade. "We are badly in need of the original white man's music." He says that one little radio station in a community as large as Charlotte which would operate with individuality and present that kind of program would become more popular and have more listeners than a station trying to keep up with the signs of modern times. "Taking a drink of water is old-fashioned but it is still a very necessary part of life."
Are you referring to long-hair music when you say "white man's music", or just what are you suggesting? For virtually all of the Hit Parade numbers are "white man's music", especially those sung by Snooky Lanson.
A letter writer says that he agrees wholeheartedly with two letter writers who had made comments on singer Betty Johnson and her failure to acknowledge Charlotte as her hometown on the "Ed Sullivan Show" recently, also says that since another letter writer thought it acceptable for her to have identified her hometown as "Possum Walk", he adds for that writer's benefit that he believed she had been referring to old Possum Walk Road in the Oakdale section of the county, a road presently called Oakdale Road, having been so for many years, wonders whether Ms. Johnson wasn't aware of that. He says that he would be the first to admit that Possum Walk sounded quaint and backwoodsy, but that Ms. Johnson ought be proud to say that she was from Charlotte, "the most progressive city in the South."
Let's not get carried away.
Anyway, now you have the singers' cross-flight collisions to go along with the crossroads. What goes on here in the echoing hallowed halls of history? We had introductory psychology, Psych. 26, in New Davie, across the street from Caldwell, in the spring of freshman year. We can still recall going up the interior steps of New Davie to the first day of orientation the previous late summer, looking down at each modern step while ascending with some trepidation, just as on the first day of the first grade a couple of years earlier. Were you there?
Framed Edition
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