The Charlotte News
Saturday, February 16, 1957
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Thomasville, Ga., that Secretary of State Dulles had conferred with the President this date and afterward spoke of "further action which may be taken by the United States" in an effort to obtain Israeli troop withdrawal from Egyptian territory, though not indicating what the action might be and stating that he and the President had made no definite decision on the matter, pending further clarification of the position of the Israeli Government. Secretary Dulles and U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., met with the President at his vacation headquarters at the plantation estate of Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, who also sat in on the conference. They conferred for two hours during the morning and 45 minutes the previous night. Israel the previous day had rejected, in effect, a U.S. plan for withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba. Before leaving Washington, Secretary Dulles had conferred for 75 minutes with Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban, who turned down the U.S. plan for withdrawal, offering a counter-proposal which the State Department promptly called "not responsive". Secretary Dulles authorized a statement of "regret" at the outcome. Reportedly, the stumbling block was Israeli insistence on a non-belligerency pledge from Egypt or greater assurance of U.S. support before withdrawal from territory claimed by Egypt. The two-part proposal outlined to Israel by Secretary Dulles on Monday had called for Israel to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the Aqaba area on assurances that the U.S. would support the right of all ships to "innocent passage" through the Strait of Tiran into the Gulf of Aqaba, and promised to work for stationing of U.N. forces and observers along the Gaza Strip to prevent terror raids.
In New York, internal strife among leaders of the International Longshoremen's Association had stalled negotiations aimed at settling the waterfront strike in the Northeast. A meeting the previous day of the 110-man bargaining committee of the union had resulted in the leaders of three powerful Manhattan locals walking out, after the president of the ILA shouted that they would either follow him and stay in, or go out. The dissenters had gone back inside and a few minutes later, the union recessed talks until this date. Ports from Portland, Me., to Hampton Roads, Va., continued to be idled by the strike of 45,000 longshoremen who had walked out on Tuesday after expiration of an 80-day Taft-Hartley cooling-off period called by the President on November 24, halting a nine-day strike. The previous two days, the union had been considering the final offer made by the employers, the 170-member New York Shipping Association. The ILA president and Brooklyn local boss Anthony "Tough Tony" Anastasia, apparently were willing to accept the terms and end the strike, but the head of the "pistol" Local 824, who headed the locals controlling Hudson River piers on lower Manhattan, and the head of the local with jurisdiction over East River piers and Hudson River piers from the Battery to Vesey Street, were opposed. The "pistol" local got its name from its long record of violence. Losses in the struck ports were estimated at three million dollars per day, and several railroads had begun laying off men with the flow of freight choked off to the piers by self-imposed embargo. The situation had been worsened by the strike of tugboat crewmen in New York, presently more than two weeks in duration. Prior to the beginning of the current strike, both parties had generally agreed to a 32-cent hourly wage increase over the current basic hourly wage of $2.48 in a three-year contract, with the settlement of fringe benefits being the remaining issue.
In St. Louis, a 25-year old man had shot and seriously wounded a woman on the street, then threatened patients and employees of a veterans hospital with a loaded pistol the previous night, before being disarmed by a hospital doctor, a fireman and a guard. Police said that the man admitted firing three shots at the woman, who was wounded in the chest, right arm and right leg, currently in serious condition. He had departed an elevator on the seventh floor and demanded a sedative and treatment for a skinned knee, then ordered patients to stay in their rooms. The three men who disarmed him slowly approached as he was talking to others and then leaped at him, the man then firing wildly, hitting no one. He was removed from the hospital, fighting and cursing, by six policemen.
In Raleigh, the General Assembly completed its first working week this date, during which a record State budget was introduced and the first major battle had begun over the appropriations and tax bills introduced on Tuesday, which would establish State spending at 79.5 million dollars during the ensuing fiscal biennium while reducing State revenue by 9 million dollars, as advocated by Governor Luther Hodges in his message opening the week's deliberations on Monday night. While the Governor had received warm praise for his proposed program, some legislators disagreed with proposed teacher and State employee pay raises recommended by the Governor and the Advisory Budget Commission, with an alternative proposal for a 20 percent pay increase for teachers having been introduced by Representative Jack Love of Mecklenburg and two other Representatives. The Governor and Budget Commission had requested a 9.1 percent increase and the establishment of a merit system for pay increases, leaving individual pay increases up to school principals. The merit system had also been heavily criticized, with the introduced alternative bill proposing across-the-board increases.
Emery Wister of The News reports that a surveillance radar system to effect safer and more efficient landings and takeoffs would be installed at the Charlotte airport, probably sometime during the year. The head of the Civil Aeronautics Administration control tower at the field said that he did not know the approximate cost of the system but that installation of such complex equipment would likely require several months.
In Charlotte, the City Police switchboard had lit up with concerns about the deadline for having new 1957 license tags by midnight the previous night. A man who said he was a traveling salesman and had just arrived back in town requested permission to drive to the motor club to obtain his tag, but was advised instead to take a taxi. Another motorist said that she had been unable to obtain a tag because they had sold out, after she had assumed there would be an adequate supply. Another woman pleaded that she had ordered her tags from Raleigh and that they had not yet arrived. None of the callers had claimed a lack of memory of the deadline. County police reported that three drivers without current tags had been picked up early during the current morning. One motorist had apparently taken a new tag from someone else's car to put on his own, and officers were now searching for that tag number. Both City and County police reported that there was no flood of arrests before noon this date. The Carolina Motor Club reported that there was a long line.
Harold Stassen, assistant to the President, was scheduled to speak on Tuesday in Charlotte at Queens College at its centennial convocation, sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce and to be held at Ovens Auditorium. No topic had been announced for the speech, but he was currently the assistant for world disarmament. The Chamber had conducted a public ticket sale since February 1. Avoid the long lines and buy your tickets early. No one wants to miss a speech by Harold Stassen.
A profit had been generated of $16,681 during the three months ending December 31 for the Auditorium-Coliseum complex, with "retained income" being $11,698, compared to $28,377 for the same period of 1955, when the complex had originally opened. The two buildings had a gross income of slightly more than $50,000 in the 1956 period, $317 less than the gross for the 1955 period. Total operating expenses for the 1956 fourth quarter had been $33,345, compared to $21,996 for the 1955 quarter. Higher utility bills, increased personnel and greater insurance costs were provided as reasons for the increase in overhead. The manager of the complex, Paul Buck, said that the buildings had not been used for ice-skating or ice hockey in the 1955 quarter as it had been in 1956, and operating the ice rink cost the City approximately $200 per day.
Julian Scheer of The News reports of various local and state items around government, and imparts of former News editor and associate editor Burke Davis, now a part-time newspaperman in Greensboro, and author of various Civil War books, having said that he had overheard a conversation in Raleigh during the week, to the effect: "Yes, you know Margaret Price. She's the gynecologist at State Library now," to which had come the reply, "My, they've sort of expanded their services over there, haven't they?" Mrs. Price was in fact the genealogist of the library.
In Bowman, S.C., a garage operator had been elected as the new mayor, defeating another man in the primary by a three to two margin.
On the editorial page, "Second Licensing Station Is Needed" indicates that the stubbornness of a County commissioner was worthy of the approbation of everyone living in the county who had to drive a motor vehicle, as the commissioner had refused to end his campaign for a second driver's license examination station for Mecklenburg. Several weeks earlier, at his insistence, the Board of County Commissioners had offered to lease to the State two acres of County Home property fronting on U.S. 29 North for a second office, but the State Motor Vehicles commissioner Ed Scheidt had stated it was too far from town and declined the offer.
The County commissioner disagreed and so does the piece, indicating that the site was convenient to thousands of residents who now had to waste valuable time and patience waiting in line at the single licensing bureau on Wilkinson Boulevard, a great distance from town. Even with an appointment, prospective licensees often had to wait at the single location, which was small and cramped, totally inadequate to the needs of a large and growing metropolitan community. Only a token fee would be taken by the County for use of the land, two dollars per year. It finds it an excellent opportunity for the State to enable greater convenience to several hundred thousand people in the area.
The following week, the County commissioner would lead a County delegation to Raleigh to renew his campaign with the Legislature. It finds it a worthy effort and hopes that he would receive a sympathetic hearing.
Well, out on Wilkinson Boulevard, known as "blood alley", and future site of the Charlotte Motor Speedway, motorists would, during any driving test, get an immediate life-lesson of that to which a moment's fatal lapse of attention might lead. Wilkinson Boulevard, in addition to a bloody wreck, the aftermath of which we once witnessed on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, provided us with our most lasting impression of bloody automobile accidents, and, as to Wilkinson, long before we could drive an automobile. One does not dally in blood alley, any more than at the border. Speed along apace, but not too fast, or lose your face.
"Civil Rights & Dynamite: A Question" indicates that able and eloquent Southern spokesmen had made arguments against the Administration's proposed civil rights bill by asking whether enactment of it would create a powerful national police force, would disturb the delicate Constitutional balance between Federal and state relations, would work against the rights of other groups by protecting the civil rights of minorities, and whether Southern resentment would defeat the purpose of the legislation.
It finds that the strategy was brilliant, removing the proposals from popular passion into the realm of individual judgment.
Then came news of another dynamite blast in Clinton, Tenn., the eighth since the high school there had admitted 12 black students under a Federal court order the prior September. It suggests that it raised another question: "What good does it do to pose delicate constitutional arguments while dynamite is going off in the streets?"
Authorities should probably have been looking closely at Robert Chambliss of Birmingham—a truck driver later known as "Dynamite Bob" for his deadly exploits, including the 16th Street Church bombing of September, 1963, in which four young girls were killed and for which Mr. Chambliss was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 1977—, who had been a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by him and three other men the prior March against Autherine Lucy, the first black student admitted, pursuant to Federal court order, to the University of Alabama, as well as against another student admitted at the same time but who never attended classes, the NAACP as an organization, and three attorneys for the NAACP, including future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, for alleged defamation based on assertions in a contempt petition that Mr. Chambliss and the other three men had been participants in mob action designed to prevent Ms. Lucy from attending classes.
"Let Penalties Stand for Drunk Driving" tells of an Indiana judge having once rejected a defense request for psychiatric examination of jurors in a robbery case by ruling that there was no statutory requirement that a juror be sane.
It indicates that there was also no requirement that jurors had to be wise, logical or public-spirited. But State Senator W. Lunsford Crew was trying to do just that with his bill diluting penalties for drunk driving, on the theory that if penalties were less severe, more drunk drivers would be found guilty by juries. But it suggests that the only certain result would be lighter penalties for all who were convicted, less of a deterrent and less proportionate to the severity of the crime.
It finds that the basic defect of leniency in drunk driving cases was the encouragement to continue with highway slaughter. It urges that the law should not be weakened with the shortsightedness of those who failed to enforce it, and that instead of being modified, present penalties ought be reaffirmed and more widely publicized. It indicates that while judges and juries might not prescribe punishment uniformly for drunk driving, the current law did carry a stern warning and should be left alone.
"How's That Again?" indicates that after delivering a stern lecture on the virtues of old-fashioned harshness in dealing with youthful naughtiness, via the razor strap and hickory stick, local Judge Frank Huskins had suspended the prison sentence given a 17-year old girl for embezzlement. "Modern mercy is apparently catching."
"There is Always Just One Trouble" quotes Plato as having said, "Everything that deceives may be said to enchant." It suggests that the arrival of the split-personality season only underscored his wisdom.
It finds that with so many impostors
in the news, the former prison inmate masquerading as a preacher in
Kansas and the man in Maine who provided a false name and background
to obtain a teaching certificate, one was tempted to ask for the
postman's credentials next time he rang twice
The final unmasking was always accompanied by unspeakable disillusionment, as when an agent burst into a producer's office to announce that he had his sensational talent, "Built like Lancaster, sings like Pinza and acts like Brando", and when the producer then exclaimed, "Bring him in!" the agent indicated that there was one problem, it was a girl.
It is suggestive of that which we witnessed last night for about a minute, all we could manage to stomach without incurring severe indigestion, in the Republican "kitchen response" to President Biden's State of the Union address. Instead of that message
A piece from the Roanoke Times, titled "Possum up a Yankee Tree", tells of news that the Southern 'possum had migrated to New England and was increasing its numbers rapidly, that when one had turned up in a New Hampshire community, it was viewed as a novelty. According to Connecticut's wildlife director, the 'possums were now so numerous in that state that they could no longer be considered exclusively native to the Deep South, spreading into other New England states from Connecticut.
It finds it sad that New England Yankees were exhibiting an inhospitable attitude toward 'possums, branding them chicken thieves and therefore nuisances and vermin to be exterminated. Motorists complained that the 'possums were careless pedestrians when on the highways.
It cannot account for why the 'possums wanted to leave their happy habitat in the South for indifferent attractions in Connecticut, for Southerners were fond of them, and believes them to show poor judgment in going where they were not wanted.
It finds that the current times were
an age of movement, with all of America going places and shifting,
and it suggests that New Englanders ought be grateful for a little
touch of the South. "But whether they like it or not, 'Possum
Hollow is on the move
Drew Pearson suggests that wives and mothers concerned about their husbands or sons becoming Air Force jet pilots ought stop worrying. He says that his wife had been worried about him taking a ride in an Air Force fighter, jet-interceptor. But he had concluded that in peacetime, they were even safer than commercial planes. He had gone to Andrews Air Force Base recently to obtain an idea of how well the Atlantic Coast was protected. Andrews was headquarters to the 85th Air Division, which guarded the Eastern U.S. from New Jersey to North Carolina, part of an efficient network of warnings, including Canada and Mexico and extending out to sea, in which the Army, Navy and Civil Defense participated.
He indicates that the Air Force would not let a person fly in a jet without a rigorous physical, which had lasted half a day, plus a training course in handling a parachute, a life jacket, a lifeboat and emergency landing, one reason he had concluded that flying in an Air Force plane was safer than flying in a commercial plane, as one could bail out in the event of an emergency. He says that he had a hard time remembering when the use of a sea-marker was appropriate, where to find the signal mirror and the whistle for use in calling rescue ships, whether to use smoke flares at night or red flares in the daytime, or vice versa, and how long to leave the charcoal tablets in a rubber pale of seawater before it was potable. His helmet resembled that of a football player and was well-built, attached to which was the oxygen mask, which had to be worn at all times at high altitudes. Right under the nose was a tiny microphone, connected by a wire to the cockpit, enabling him to talk to the captain as if he were alongside him in a Washington sitting room.
He was taken aloft in an F-94 C Starfire in a simulated "scramble", the quick getaway of fighter jets when the alarm was sounded. Pilots could get from their bunks into the plane and aloft in five minutes. The plane in which he rode became the "enemy" plane and two F-86 D's simulated knocking his plane out of the skies in a very exciting maneuver. The two interceptors had come from Langley Field in Virginia to knock them out, first appearing on the horizon as small blackbirds south of Wilmington, Del., so small one could hardly see them—not to be confused with the decades later Stealth Blackbird. In about 30 seconds, they were on top of their plane, so close that they could not miss.
"At this point, lack of newsprint forces me to suspend reporting of what many Washington bureaucrats hope will be an unhappy ending. I don't like to keep them in suspense, but I'll tell the rest of the story in a future column."
Joseph Alsop, in Akmolinsk Province, Russia, indicates that the traveler in western Siberia had to be prepared for surprises, some of which, as the open plumbing in 40 below zero temperatures, were even reasonably severe. Yet, no surprise had been quite so great as that produced by the first sight of the Siberian version of the carefree trailer life. He encountered one parked outside his primitive but cozy hotel. It was composed of a heavy tractor, coupled to a sledge piled high with drums of diesel and spare parts, coupled to a second sledge on which had been built a small wooden hut with tiny windows and a stovepipe. From within had come sounds of happy, vodka-inspired Russian song and in the cab of the tractor, a young man, dressed in typical Siberian winter uniform, was making some sort of repair by the flickering light of a lamp. Upon being asked about his tractor-trailer, he replied that they needed some spare parts to finish their winter machinery repairs and so the chairman of their collective farm had sent him and his buddies into town, to which the only means of travel was by tractor, that they were heading back the next day, a five-day journey if they were lucky, and one which, despite the hut being warm, was not very comfortable, requiring some vodka to endure.
Mr. Alsop remarks that it would give some inkling of the long winter solitude which had to be accepted by the tens of thousands of people who had come to the region to plow its virgin lands, which had a bad weather-failure in 1955 and then gave the Soviet Union a plentiful harvest the previous year. During the current year, the plowing would embrace nearly 90 million acres or a bit less than the equivalent of a third of the entire area of cultivated land in the U.S. Within the province of Akmolinsk, the expansion of collective farms and the establishment of new State-owned farms had already brought the plow to considerably more than 9 million acres of previously unplowed steppes. About 80,000 new farm workers had come to the province with their families, and the collective farms had invested 200 million rubles in their expansion. The State had put another 300 million rubles into the motor tractor stations which provided the collective farms with their major mechanical equipment. In the new State-owned farms, where the work started from scratch, the investment would eventually reach 2.6 billion rubles. Thus, in that single province, the total investment in U.S. dollars would be more than 309 million and the investment for all of the virgin lands would be about ten times that amount, all originating in the strange society from a single order out of the Kremlin.
He had learned the facts from the two provincial representatives, respectively, of the Ministry of State Farms and the Ministry of Agriculture, one of whom believed that State farms were the best form of Soviet agriculture, and the other, that collective farms were the best. Otherwise, they thought exactly alike. Both were bull-necked sons of small peasants, dirt farmers of long experience, who had won higher agricultural training as a reward for superior performance and had worked their way up in their ministries. He found both impressive, appearing to know their business thoroughly and describing in loving detail their plowing, harvesting and crop rotation systems, closely resemblant to the systems used in the industrial wheat farms of the Dakotas. Only the deficient harvest of 1955 embarrassed them. The program was an enormous gamble, given the climate, and yet the two representatives appeared confident that they would win the gamble.
Mr. Alsop suggests that it was to be hoped that they would win, for the people he had met on the State farm he had visited by ski plane, and the workers from the collective farms he had run into within the province, had been fine, tough, courageous people, and the "human tragedy will be appalling if the gamble goes wrong."
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, indicates that he had seen where 1957 male graduates of colleges would achieve an average weekly salary of $100, about double that of ten years earlier. He says that his first job had paid $10 per week during the Thirties. He had once been turned down for credit by a firm which specialized in $14 suits.
He had seen a piece in Time recently which stated that there were not enough young applicants for newspaper positions, with the starting average pay at $316 per month. He recalls getting married while making $30 per week as a newspaperman, wondering what to do with the extra pay. On one occasion, he had worked for a newspaper as a reporter making between $10 and $15 more than the city editor. The only man he ever hated permanently was the city editor of a morning newspaper in Washington which had since been merged with several others. He was a Scandinavian and Mr. Ruark believes he was now dead, says that he was a scared kid in a big town looking for a job, and the city editor had him physically thrown out of the office for only asking for a job, any job. That had been in 1936. He had been so poor that he had not finished paying for his UNC education until after World War II. He had once stolen an alarm clock so that he could get up in time to attend a class which interested him in college. And the city editor, who had later married a rich woman, had thrown him out of the office for merely asking for a job which paid $12 per week on the Star, and $15 on the News.
Another man who was a major editor at present and whom he would never cease to love, was working on another newspaper, having been a piano player and a taxi driver, becoming an emergency managing editor. He had called him twice per week and each time he had looked up from his desk and said no, until, six months later, he finally said yes. It was the reason why he had never yet been impolite to any raw kid who wanted to work.
He goes on to tell further of the night editor at the Washington News, who was never so untalented, so lazy, so drunk or so rude that he did not have a lot of time to teach a gawky country kid the rudiments of the business. Mr. Ruark had learned a lot of things from him, all of which he regarded as good.
Another man who was presently editor-in-chief of a very large publication had once loaned him his coat for the purpose of covering a story, and the coat was much too large for him. He had not left the office until Mr. Ruark returned with the story, whereupon the latter went home without a coat and his editor put the story on the wire.
Yet another newspaperman had spent three years beating him over the head with his accumulated knowledge and fired him at the end of it because he felt that there was nothing further he could teach him.
"This has been such a great racket, full of such wonderful people, that I think it's a shame to start out for big dough. You ought to suffer just a little bit, for fun, before they make you rich."
A letter writer comments on the editorial of February 13, "Poets Make Poor Politicians, Anyway", finding it to have been intended as a back-handed slap at Governor Luther Hodges, but wound up complimenting him in stating that poets made poor politicians. He says that he knew of no statement from the Governor which indicated that he considered himself to be a politician. He claims to have a deep appreciation for good poetry and finds that the Governor was indeed a poet, that his original 1952 campaign platform had been poetic: "My name is Luther Hodges. You don't know me but I'm running for lieutenant governor. I'll appreciate your vote." He ventures that descendants would read in history that Mr. Hodges was their most valuable chief executive.
A letter writer from Myrtle Beach, S.C., indicates that there was greater incidence of injury to the "cervical spine" during childbirth than from rear-end automobile accidents, as described in an Associated Press article of February 13. He indicates that chiropractors had been trying to teach the people that fact, but had been maligned for 60 years and made social outcasts by the trade unionists of organized medicine. He wonders how long that would go on.
A letter writer says that the conditions of the City Dog Pound were deplorable and appreciates the newspaper exposing that truth, finds it intolerable that the City maintained one animal shelter while the County had another, each duplicating services.
A letter writer from Huntington Woods, Mich., suggests that the U.S. had sold its soul, honor and the right to lead the free world to Saudi Arabia.
Framed Edition
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