The Charlotte News
Tuesday, March 19, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that before the Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime influence in the Teamsters Union, Frank Brewster, West Coast Teamsters boss, had said this date that he could not remember whether the son of a race horse trainer had traveled by air at union expense, when Robert F. Kennedy, counsel for the Committee, showed Mr. Brewster documents which he said indicated that the son of the trainer had made trips by air in California, one costing $46.09 and another, $55.22, charged to the union. Mr. Brewster said his former horse trainer had a son by the name which the records showed but that he could not remember whether the son as well as the father had traveled at union expense. He said that the trainer had been in his employ for three or four years, sometimes doing side jobs involving union work, and had finally shifted to the union's payroll as a $150 per week organizer, and was no longer on his stable payroll at that time. Mr. Kennedy had asked him what experience the man had to qualify him as an organizer, and Mr. Brewster said that the man's intelligence was very much above average and he was chosen as a young man whom he thought would develop. He said the man had also picked up some organizing experience at the tracks, where grooms and parking lot attendants discussed labor problems with him. He said that he was interested in organizing stable grooms, but that a prior effort to organize them had fallen flat and he was very skeptical about another attempt without information which he believed the trainer might obtain for him. Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, chairman of the Committee, asked whether it was true that prior to that time, the union paid the trainer no salary or compensation, and Mr. Brewster had replied that it was true. He also said that the man had done organizing, but when asked to name places where he had done the organizing work, Mr. Brewster said that a director for the union had given "very favorable reports" on his work. Mr. Brewster had been indicted the previous day by a Federal grand jury for contempt of Congress, along with Teamsters vice-president Einar Mohn and two lesser Teamster officials, all accused of having contemptuously refused to answer questions during a prior inquiry conducted in January by a Senate Investigations subcommittee. Both Mr. Brewster and Mr. Mohn challenged the authority of that subcommittee, which had begun the probe now taken over by the Select Committee. In advance of the session, Mr. Kennedy had told reporters that the questioning of Mr. Brewster might have a "vital" bearing on a later inquiry of Dave Beck, president of the Teamsters. He also said that Mr. Beck's story of borrowing some $300,000 to $400,000 of union funds was not the same as the Committee's information. Mr. Beck had stated in a television interview on Sunday that he had borrowed $300,000 to $400,000 of union funds some years earlier without interest, and had paid back all of it. The session began the fourth week of the investigation and was the 13th day of public hearings.
In London, a 58-year old society doctor, accused of murdering a wealthy elderly woman, appeared in a confident, almost jaunty mood as he sat in the dock at the Old Bailey, breaking into faint smiles as his chief defense lawyer cross-examined the star prosecution witness, a nurse, who conceded that the elderly woman was "deteriorating rapidly" a month before her death. The doctor was charged with murdering the 81-year old widow whom he was treating, the prosecution claiming that the doctor had killed her with drugs after winning her confidence, with the object of benefiting under her will. The nurse had also testified that the patient had attacks of great irritability which the nurse attributed to "the great amount of drugs she had had." She described the woman as "neurotic". The prosecution had opened its case the previous day, charging that the doctor had administered massive doses of drugs to the elderly woman, although there was no indication she had been in great physical pain. The nurse said that the woman in her final days had been "rambling" at times, had complained of pain a month before her death, and was going more rapidly downhill at that stage.
In Jeffersonville, Ind., it was reported that a fleeing bank robber had killed a veteran State police officer in a roadblock the previous day and had then died in a gun duel with the officer's friend, a Methodist minister. The minister had fired twice with a shotgun through the rear window of the trooper's car after the 19-year veteran of the State Police had been killed by a bullet which entered his forehead. The 25-year old assailant from Louisville was killed instantly. The State police officer and the minister had been returning from looking at fishing sites when the State Police radio broadcast that a bank in Sellersburg had been robbed of $1,655 by a gunman. Although it was his day off, the State policeman was directed to a roadblock four miles north of Jeffersonville and the minister accompanied him. The officer stopped the robber's car, and the robber then got out and said that he hoped it would not take too long, whereupon the trooper had searched him and found nothing significant, but when he looked in the car, spotted a brown leather jacket which was a key item in the description of the robber. Eventually, the minister saw the two men scuffling in the front seat of the robber's car after the trooper had tried to look under the front seat, and eventually the robber got out of the car and ran around to the other side of it, and was crossing the road toward the minister with a gun, whereupon the minister picked up the pump-action riot gun from the patrol car's seat and leveled it out the side window, pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. The robber ducked and ran around behind the car, after which the minister shot him.
In Charlotte, a group of black school patrons this date asked for an opportunity to appear before the City School Board the following morning to discuss the assignment of students in certain grades and to consolidate Carver Negro College with Charlotte College. Kelly Alexander of Charlotte, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, would be a member of the delegation, and he said this date that the committee was concerned particularly with those students presently in the sixth grade at Myers Street School, who the following year would be transferred to the new black junior high school near Southside Homes. He said that those students living in the Brooklyn section of Charlotte would have to go halfway across town to attend the new junior high school. He did not specifically mention Alexander Graham Junior High, a white school, but it was located on the edge of the Brooklyn section. Mr. Alexander also said that based on Brown v. Board of Education, he could not see the feasibility of current discussion of State financing of two institutions like Charlotte and Carver Colleges and thus wanted to discuss with school officials the possibility of combining the two institutions.
In Raleigh, a 15-year old boy armed with a rifle, a butcher knife and a book of matches had kept the Raleigh Fire Department busy for awhile the previous day, with police indicating that he had touched off seven fires before they caught up with him. The police had declined to identify him and he was placed in the Wake County Juvenile Detention Home until he was released under a $200 bond. They said that he later had admitted setting the fires. The officer said that in quick succession, fires had been set in a residence toolshed causing about $500 in damage, among some trash and then at lawns of five homes.
Also in Raleigh, it was reported that Mecklenburg County Senator J. Spencer Bell had declared this date that if the Legislature failed to act on the reapportionment issue, they would hand the Republicans the means to turn the state into a Republican administration within the ensuing ten years. At a public hearing on State constitutional amendments dealing with reapportionment, Senator Bell asserted that the people wanted the Legislature reapportioned and that if they could not get it through the Democrats, they would get it through the Republicans. He criticized Representative John Kerr of Warrenton, chairman of the House Committee on Constitutional Amendments, who had been quoted as saying that reapportionment measures would be "buried" when they reached the Committee. Senator Bell said that Mr. Kerr ought bury his conscience also, since the State Constitution required reapportionment every ten years following the decennial census.
Charles Kuralt of The News reports on the proposed merger of the City and County schools in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, with the subject having been resurrected the previous day at the meeting of the County Commission, finding rapid support after the idea had lain relatively dormant for eight years since a recommendation for it had been made by the Institute of Government at UNC. He reports that the effect of consolidation would be one school system of about 50,000 children, nearly three times as large as any other system in the state. It would own about 88 buildings, 50 from the City system and 38 from the County system. It would also inherit utter confusion in the form of two complete administrative systems, a large differential in pay of teachers and in such special programs as music, physical education and remedial reading. Those differences constituted the reason that the school systems would not be immediately consolidated. City School superintendent, Dr. Elmer Garinger, County Commission member Sam McNinch, two County School Board members, and County School superintendent J. W. Wilson all were on record in favor of consolidation, with certain reservations. A number of other local educators and politicians also were understood to be in favor of it. Dr. N. L. Engelhardt, a consultant previously hired to study City-County consolidation generally, believed that consolidation would solve a number of the educational problems in the city and county. Those in favor of consolidation believed that that it would bring the County's rural schools up to City standards by increasing teacher pay and increasing the variety of subjects offered, that it would allow more efficient school construction planning, that it would ease the squeeze on children in the perimeter areas presently attending County schools in double sessions when City schools had room for some of them, and that it would be economical, providing for centralized purchasing, maintenance and supervision instead of two separate systems. It would also eliminate competition for teachers between the two systems. But it would also mean increased costs for the whole county, as rural residents would have to increase their school supplement from the present 20 cents per hundred dollars of property valuation to that equal to the City supplement of 50 cents per hundred dollars. But the increase would not amount to as much in raw dollars in the county as in the city, as the valuation of city property was higher. It would also exceed by four times the minimum size set by the State Education Commission, but the Institute's report had said that with adequate administration, single units functioned well with a total population up to 400,000, considerably larger than the present population of Mecklenburg County.
In Charlotte, Lambert Schwartz, a linen supply executive who had intended to become a candidate for the City Council, said this date that he was unable to run. Thus far, only two candidates had definitely announced for the race, C. M. Bogan and Nathan Sharp.
Dick Young of The News reports that the names of a Charlotte businesswoman, Myrtle Fink, the secretary-treasurer of A. Z. Price & Associates, a heating and air-conditioning contractor, and an elementary school principal, Mrs. Robert Howerton, were being mentioned as possible nominees, along with others, for an open spot on the Park & Recreation Commission at the session of the City Council the following day.
Bob Quincy, sports editor for The News, would be reporting from Kansas City, starting the following day on the sports page, regarding the NCAA basketball Tournament semifinals and finals, to occur on Friday and Saturday nights, respectively. He would be staying at the Hotel Continental with the UNC basketball team, currently undefeated at 30-0 and number one in the nation. They would be facing Michigan State, number 11 in the final Associated Press poll, on Friday night, and the other regional winners, the number two-ranked University of Kansas, with its star Wilt Chamberlain, and defending national champion from 1955 and 1956, the unranked University of San Francisco, would face off in the other semifinal, with the winners to meet on Saturday night and the losers to meet in a preliminary consolation game. UNC had already set a record for number of consecutive wins without a loss in a single season. Will they be able to win one or even two more? The suspense builds as the days pass. The primary question pending at present is whether the game between UNC and Michigan State on Friday will be televised locally by WBTV, with the other game definitely not going to be carried.
Of course, while you may laugh at the state of television relative to NCAA basketball in 1957, we find the situation very little different from present times when TBS is allotted "coverage", if you want to call it that, of the national semifinals and finals, which, believe it or not, NCAA, a large part of the country is, effectively, deprived from seeing without paying a special one-weekend premium, if they do not already subscribe to the ever-devolving wasteland which is cable television but rely on the internet for tv reception when desired. TBS, for your information, does not operate very well in that environment, unless you prize such sporadically freeze-framed slow motion throughout the games that each game would likely take four or five hours to view in whole. Whoever came up with that brilliant plan of spreading the coverage around really is quite the little busy bee, placing dollars far ahead of customer satisfaction, which seems to be a theme of modern business these days more often than not. But why let it infect the championship rounds, NCAA? Hopefully, in years to come, you might address that issue and get back to having CBS as the carrier of the Final Four. Incidentally, they did not call it that in 1957, just the national semifinals and national finals.
On the editorial page, "Charlotte & Mecklenburg Are Ready for a Consolidated School System" finds that consolidation of the school systems was a public necessity. Eight years earlier, the Institute of Government at UNC had recommended that a merger be given "serious thought".
Enthusiasm for the idea the previous day on the part of the County Commission, members of the County School Board and State Representative Frank Snepp had provided solid evidence of an awakened appreciation of the inevitability of the decision.
The opportunity for joint City-County discussions of consolidation, it opines, could not be wasted. A comprehensive plan to translate eight years of timid talk into action regarding the merger was necessary. It was probably too late to prepare appropriate enabling legislation for the current General Assembly, but a suitable target date would be 1959. By that time, an annexation plan ought be in operation and the urgency of school consolidation would be even more apparent.
It concludes that consolidation was the only sensible solution and that the ideal ought be approached thoughtfully but determinedly.
"Zoning: Council's Blunder Is Showing" indicates that State Senator Spencer Bell had no confidence in the City Council's willingness to support fair and effective zoning, as discerned from his move to require a two-thirds Council majority to override decisions of the City-County Planning Commission.
It generally opposes the proposal as majority rule ought suffice for an elected body to govern, and in the future, planning and zoning might have a better friend in a council than in a commission.
"'An Open Letter to Busy Executives'" tells of having felt avaricious awe at an advertisement by a Miami Beach hotel titled "An Open Letter To Busy Executives", asking: "What do you do about frayed nerves? Tension?" Below it was a sales pitch for the hotel, explaining in a P.S. that "the reconditioning of executives is a tax-deductible expense."
It indicates that it was shook up by the advertisement. Lacking plane fare to Miami, nothing would please more many salaried employees suffering from the same frayed nerves than a tax deductible trip to the corner pub once per week to be thoroughly and methodically reconditioned. It finds that nervous farmers ought be provided equal consideration, that a few carloads of tax-deductible fertilizer would ease tension and recondition the spirit about once per spring.
"Just sitting here thinking about it re-conditions us to the tune of a rather tidy sum. But it isn't our nerves that are frayed. It's our credulity."
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Slingshots and Hoops", finds that slingshots and hoops which were rolled up with a stick seemed to have been relegated to limbo by some diabolical misfortune, despite once having been cherished possessions, with it having been imperative for a youngster to have both.
A boy searched diligently for the proper forked stick, and then, with the aid of a little string, two inner tube strips and a patch of leather, fashioned a masterpiece, then filled his hip pocket with pebbles, placed tin cans on the backyard fence and gradually backed up until being able to deliver unerring salvos at a considerable distance.
Eventually, he would meet others who had likewise practiced their aim and they would engage in competition in the woods, continuing until the pebbles were gone or darkness fell. The young boy was "the monarch of the woods, a young David demolishing a hundred inanimate Goliaths."
Or he would obtain a hoop from an old barrel and, with a straight stick, start rolling it, eventually setting out to conquer the world after some slow rounds of the backyard, learning to run at breakneck speed with the hoop which seemed entranced, "almost like the wheel that Ezekiel saw. It was poetry in motion, fervor in flight. It was the runningest thing on the planet. It was charmed and it charmed the boy. He wouldn't swap his slingshot and his hoop for the gold at Fort Knox. Maybe, some intrepid boy in this generation will turn discoverer, and unearth these two marvels and give them back to youth the way Edison gave light to the world."
The slingshot has been replaced by the football tee and the goal, the hoop by the hoop on the hardwoods. Get with the program, daddy-o.
Drew Pearson indicates that the ramification of Teamster Union politics was almost as complicated as the rivals and jealousies of Washington society, citing as an instance that there was likely no one happier than Teamsters president Dave Beck at the hot water in which Teamsters vice-president Jimmy Hoffa now found himself, following his arrest the previous week for attempting to bribe, in exchange for documents, an attorney of the Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime infiltration to the Teamsters. He says that Mr. Beck would never admit that and had stated just the opposite, but had been quite upset about Mr. Hoffa having been competing with him for the presidency of the union. Some had said that the story of Mr. Beck's house and its sale for $163,000 to the Teamsters had been suggested to Mr. Beck by the Hoffa faction and then deliberately leaked to the press. The member of the executive council of the union, who had proposed in secret session that the Teamsters purchase the house, had been Sidney Brennan of Minneapolis, convicted under the Taft-Hartley Act for taking money from an employer to cross a picket line against a strike called by District 50 of the UMW. The Teamster official credited with leaking the story was Tom Hickey of New York, later engaged in a battle with Teamster John O'Rourke, former Governor Thomas Dewey's former labor campaign manager. Both Mr. Beck and Mr. Hoffa hated Mr. Hickey, having now shunted him to the sidelines. Whether he or someone else had leaked the story about the purchase of the Beck home would never be known, as the Teamsters high command played their cards too close to their chest.
But the rivalry between Mr. Beck and Mr. Hoffa was much less closely held. When John Herlong, labor specialist for the Washington News, had published a story two years earlier which had begun, "Dave Beck has been dethroned as the undisputed head of America's largest union," Mr. Beck had hit the ceiling, calling a special press conference to tell newsmen in no uncertain terms that he was still boss of the Teamsters and would continue in that role.
But actually there was much truth in Mr. Herlong's story, as it marked the beginning of the ascendancy of Mr. Hoffa, "the tough little Teamster from Detroit who began as a grocery clerk and has taken over more and more power in the far-flung Teamsters Union."
Doris Fleeson discusses the need of the Republicans for attractive candidates, as expressed by new RNC chairman Meade Alcorn, echoing a comment made by the national committeewoman of New York, Mrs. Seymour Weiss, who had first made the observation at the 1957 inauguration, when, during the parade, she saw many attractive young Democratic governors roll by but failed to see offsetting Republican stars. Impending retirements, age and illness made the situation particularly difficult for Republicans as they sought to obtain control of Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. While Mr. Alcorn understood the problem, there was not much he could do about it.
If Washington were to lay its hands, even lightly, on a state primary, the cry of "purge" would erupt, and that would be true even if the local politicians accepted Washington's control, as the voters often did not. During the previous fall, the President had picked two senatorial candidates and campaigned personally for them, former Interior Secretary Douglas McKay in Oregon and Governor Arthur Langlie in Washington, with both losing despite the President's landslide victory.
At the height of the prestige of FDR, he had sought in 1938 to undertake reform at the state level but succeeded only in placing the word "purge" into the political lexicon. Thus, Mr. Alcorn had to be discreet even in his private conversations.
The President, with his two landslide victories and his preemption of the Democratic welfare state issues, had hurt and disheartened Democrats without helping his own party to a similar extent. Democrats found their divisions accentuated as they sought new ideas and policies. The President and his businessman's Administration had not created the Republican division between the right and left, but had done little if anything to build a strong center. They did not have much to work with in Congress, which raised the candidate problem.
The natural pressures on the Republicans were to split and revert to type as the end of the second Eisenhower term would come into sight, and that could be fatal for them. The best direction was hard to find, as the voters increasingly showed independence from party, which had given the President both a landslide and a Democratic Congress. But there was no evidence that the country wanted to revert to traditional Republican policies.
She finds the present furor over the record national budget to be much more an attack on foreign policy, as so much of the budget was for spending abroad and defense, than it was on domestic issues. The domestic policy of the Administration was popular and the foreign policy was creating disillusionment, finding expression in the mood to cut spending. She finds it not illogical, for the big money was going into defense and foreign aid, military and economic.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, indicates that he would soon be returning to New York for his "biennial fling at the fleshpots", something which he dreaded because he would be introduced anew to the progeny of his friends. He did not mind the older ones, who were painfully polite and called him "Sir", because they would either be drafted or married soon and out from under foot, and were at least old enough to have dates and to have developed an aversion to staying home and kibitzing their elders.
The ones he dreaded were "the
post-scripted apples of the parental eye who, having arrived in the
early autumn of their progenitors' lives, are freely accorded rights
and privileges which should be painfully earned, even by adults."
He refers to the child of between six and ten who had been raised
without the benefit of a razor strap or a hard word, "no",
mostly by doting parents who saw "their monster
They were the "monsters" who had to have a sip of the mother's cocktail so that they would not grow up thinking that booze was evil, "although a fair squint at Mommy doing a handstand at 2 a.m. or necking in the garden with the neighbor might have some deterrent effect on the child, at that."
The "darlings" grabbed food from the guest's plate, upset cocktail sauce on their best suit, crawled around under the table with lethal weapons, demanded bedtime stories from strangers and set up a howl when bedtime was timidly mentioned.
He finds American children of the modern unrestricted raising to be the worst brats in the world, and of those children, New York and Washington children were the champions. By contrast, he found the child of the average European family to be a treasure, with the life of the home revolving around the children but without spoiling the child. They managed to be polite to each other, respectful of elders, well-mannered and cheerfully obedient without throwing a tantrum.
He finds no greater whiners and "argufiers" than the modern juvenile. He says it would not be so bad if parents allowed the "monsters" to practice their delinquencies on their own time, but they insisted on feeding the guest "a heaping share of their own intramural miseries."
All he knew was that he was caught
up on tricycles ridden at full speed across his ankles, "and the
next incipient genius who knocks a highball out of my fist is on its
own, sex of subject notwithstanding. I used to smack little girls
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., comments on the "How's Your I.Q?" column of March 6, wherein the question had been, "Was Hezekiah a prophet?" with the answer provided being "yes", the writer indicating that Hezekiah was a king, associated with the prophet Isaiah during his reign, citing 2nd Kings 16:20 through the conclusion of the 20th chapter, and 2nd Chronicles 28:27 to the conclusion of the 32nd chapter.
A letter writer from Monroe indicates that the right of protest had been challenged recently, pointing out that the Associated Press on March 4 had reported a statement by Glenn Archer, executive director of POAU, in which he stated that because a television station in Chicago had canceled the showing of the film "Martin Luther" after receiving numerous protests from individuals, his organization was indulging in recrimination against two Catholic colleges in the South by attempting to prevent them from receiving television licenses, indicating that their challenge to Jesuit ownership of television stations was part of a counter-attack against the sectarian pressure which had caused the banning of "Martin Luther" in Chicago, proving that Catholic control of television meant suppression of free criticism. The writer finds that, aside from the baseless charge that there was Catholic control of television, it was doubtful that a more brazen challenge to the American right to protest had ever been recorded. He finds that the POAU effectively was saying that unless American Catholics forfeited their right of protest, then the POAU would subject the church in any part of the country to recrimination. He wonders at the silence which had met the POAU's base challenge.
A letter writer from Cheraw, S.C., invites everyone to visit their city and county and investigate what they had to offer any industry, congratulating industries which had seen the good opportunities which the South had to offer industrial plants wishing to relocate.
A letter writer from Monroe indicates that racist America had to take cognizance of the fact that a chauvinistic nation was not qualified to stand at the leadership position of the world, that a nation which was too weak-kneed to extend liberty to its own minorities was "a dirt-poor example before a world clamoring for a universal social order devoid of race egoism." He indicates that given that the American white man was a world minority, he should be the first to realize the danger inherent in oppression of minorities. "If the world is not to continue to be led to believe that the traditional pattern of the oppression of the weak by the strong as the white man's concept of democratic justice, then the white man would do well to stop sowing the ubiquitous seeds of his distorted concept of democracy."
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