The Charlotte News
Thursday, March 7, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President said this date at his press conference that he was seeking to slow down the rate of Government spending in an effort to prevent the cost of living from rising even more. He said that he had ordered a study be performed to determine whether the rate of Government spending could be reduced. He said that a cut in the rate of spending would take pressure off inflation. Regarding the Middle East, he said that beginning as early as 1948, he had never discussed Israel with anyone without saying that the nation's existence was an historic fact and that its problems had to be dealt with, that regarding Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the prospect of withdrawal from the Gulf of Aqaba area, the U.S. had taken the position that the Gulf was an international waterway and planned to use it together with other nations. He said that he was pleased by the size of the vote, 72 to 19, by which the Senate had approved its version of the Administration's Middle East resolution. He also said that he and Secretary of State Dulles had insisted that settlement of one or two preliminary phases of the Middle East situation would not solve the underlying causes of difficulty in that area. He also said that his lingering cough had developed into a head cold and that he was having a difficult time hearing. When asked whether he might take some time in Tucson to try to shake the cold, he said that at present the Vice-President and the Secretary of State were out of the country and so it would be awkward for him to leave Washington.
Before the Senate Select Committee
investigating racketeering and organized crime influence on the
Teamsters Union, presently focusing on activities in Portland, Ore.,
racketeer James Elkins again testified this date regarding a gambling
associate whom he said had told him in September, 1955 that he had
paid $500 to then-Sheriff Terry Schrunk to call off a gambling raid
in Portland. Mr. Schrunk was now Mayor. (Whether Mr. Schrunk knew
Mrs. Helen Smalley and whether Senator Sam J. Ervin was perhaps tempted to quote some more Shakespeare, this time from Jacques in As You Like It, is not indicated.) Mr. Elkins said that he was a
partner of Clifford Bennett in a Portland gambling joint known as the
8212 Club in the Kenton district of the city, that in early
September, 1955, the Sheriff and a group of
deputies had shown up at the club and indicated that they were going
to arrest everyone in the place, but that only three or four drunks had actually been arrested
and fined $10, after an "arrangement" was made between Mr.
Bennett and the Sheriff, the arrangement consisting of Mr. Bennett
paying the Sheriff $500. Mr. Elkins said that he had previously paid from the club's profits between $312 and $314, which he understood went through intermediaries to the campaign manager of Mr. Schrunk, but that the amount had been deemed not enough and so Sheriff Schrunk had shown up on the night in September, 1955, threatening to arrest everyone in the club. But no action was
taken against Mr. Bennett for operating a gambling joint, the
place instead having simply voluntarily closed and moved to another site where it continued
to operate. He said that Mr. Bennett had told him that he had given
the $500 to Sheriff Schrunk. Mr. Elkins said that he was financing
the place by providing it $1,500 and that his bookkeeper had told him
that Mr. Bennett had returned only $1,000 of that sum when the place
had reopened at the new site. He said that when he asked Mr. Bennett
about the difference, the latter had told him that he had paid $500
to Mr. Schrunk "because he thought it was better to do that than
get pinched, and have to pay the whole $1,500 or perhaps $2,000 in
fines." Mr. Elkins conceded that his knowledge of the alleged
payment was only hearsay from what he said Mr. Bennett had told him.
Committee counsel Robert F. Kennedy asked him about the possibility
that Mr. Bennett had simply put the $500 in his pocket and had not
given it to the Sheriff, to which Mr. Elkins had replied that he did
not believe he had done that. He also said that he had told Mr.
Bennett that the alleged payment was "unnecessary", as he did not think the place would have been pinched anyway by the Sheriff because of favors he had done for his campaign, as he had been informed by deputy Wally Wallen (who may have been stoned), and that
Mr. Bennett would have to repay the $500 to Mr. Elkins to meet the
full amount of the $1,500 investment. Mr. Elkins said to Senator McCarthy of the Committee that he was
under two dozen state and Federal indictments, "more or less",
repeating his sworn denials that he had ever been involved in
prostitution rackets. (That's nothing. The present presumptive
Republican Party nominee for the presidency has that beat by a mile,
and apparently has also been involved in prostitution in the past, albeit as a customer only.
But that was yesterday, and yesterday's gone
In Dublin, Ireland, Eamon De Valera, 74 and nearly blind, had won control of the Irish parliament, the Dail, this date in a political comeback, replacing John Costello as the new Prime Minister following three years on the sidelines as opposition leader. His Fianna Fail Party already had secured 71 seats, with the prospect of gaining more, and four rebellious Sinn Fein members said that they would boycott the Dail. It meant that Mr. De Valera would have a working majority in the 147-seat body, as he could count on the support of three and perhaps four members who had run as independents in the Tuesday election.
In New Castle, Del., it was reported that a freighter and a Navy tanker had collided in the lower Delaware River early this date, touching off a blast which had set fire to both vessels, with the result that nine men on the tanker, including the captain, were missing and feared dead, while 35 others on the tanker and the entire 23-member crew of the freighter had been saved, with ten having been fished out of the burning oil-slicked water. The pre-dawn crash had occurred off the northern end of Pea Patch Island, three miles south of New Castle. The sky had been overcast and rain was falling when the tanker had collided with the freighter, with visibility at the time reportedly being six miles. Both vessels had been empty of cargo. Moments after the collision, a big blast occurred, tearing off the tanker's superstructure and the bridge where the captain had been standing with some of his officers. The flames covered the bow of the freighter as it started backing swiftly away from the point of collision. The stern of the tanker was still burning ten hours after the collision and little hope was held out that the captain and the eight other missing men could have survived the explosion and resulting fire.
In Englewood, N.J., a 23-year old construction worker who was being sought for the shooting and wounding of four persons, had been found shot to death early this date, with police indicating that he had committed suicide. His slumped body was found in a yard at the rear of a house by an unidentified man on his way to work. Police said that he had gone berserk the previous night and fired a double-barreled shotgun into a rooming house, wounding three women and a boy. He had then apparently placed the shotgun between his legs and fired it into his mouth, the shotgun having been found beside his body. Following the shooting spree, he had fled in a stolen automobile, crashing it into the rear of a truck, but managed to escape with the shotgun. Police said the shootings followed a quarrel the man had with his girlfriend.
In Nashville, N.C., a black man who was a deaf mute said that he had intended to have intercourse with a white woman, a 43-year old mother of four sons, telling police officers that he had killed her after she resisted his advances, according to the sheriff, who said that the man had provided a full statement by means of exchange of notes. He would be charged with murder of the woman, whose body had been found in a patch of woods on Tuesday night. He was transported to the State Prison at Raleigh. The sheriff said that they had several little clues pointing to the man and had picked him up and brought him to Nashville where they questioned him, that after checking his shoe tracks and the measurement of his shoes, plus finding blood on his clothing, he began admitting the whole thing. He said that after the woman had refused his advances, he had hit her with a fire poker on the back of her head, at some point had stabbed her, drove her into the woods in the car, removed her and carried her or dragged her into the woods and left her, intending to escape in the car before getting stuck and having to walk home in the rain. He said that he had been feeding hogs at the rear of the victim's home and had gone to the house during the afternoon, and the woman had let him in. She had died on Tuesday from a neck wound apparently inflicted with a short knife. Her body was fully clothed except for the shoes, found in a Boy Scout camp four miles southeast of Bailey. The family car was found mired in mud about 25 yards away.
In Camden, S.C., reports of alleged economic pressure against some local merchants had emerged from the community this date, appearing to be related to the flogging case of bandmaster Guy Hutchins. A Charlotte News correspondent said this date that one of six men who had originally been arrested in the case was reported to have approached merchants with a threat of a boycott if they supported an "unfriendly" Camden newspaper, the Chronicle, which had repeatedly voiced strong opposition to mob violence. The opposition weekly newspaper, the Camden News, apparently was receiving support from a group known as "the club". According to the report, at least three advertisers in the Chronicle had been asked to support the News. Three merchants said that one of the men indicted in the December flogging case had told them that "the club" had met and voted to support the advertisers of the competition to the Chronicle.
In Raleigh, a State Senate Judiciary Committee this date heard Motor Vehicles commissioner Ed Scheidt express strong opposition to a bill which would reduce the punishment in many cases of drunk driving. The bill was sent to a subcommittee for further study. Under it, the Motor Vehicles Department could suspend a driver's license for between 60 days and a year following a conviction of a first offense of drunk driving, with the present law requiring a one-year suspension. An amendment had been offered before the bill was sent to the subcommittee, which would require the Department to follow recommendations of trial judges for suspensions between 60 days and a year, and if there were no recommendation, the Department could suspend for those same periods. Mr. Scheidt had said that there were practical reasons why the Department ought be in charge of the suspensions and that placing it in the hands of other agencies would cause confusion, that at present every driver knew what their position was and would be in no position to complain if their license was suspended. He also indicated that the Department had complete records on all drivers while judges did not, and that reducing the periods of suspension could lead the public to believe that the Legislature regarded drunk driving less seriously than in the past.
In New York, seven women had been advised that they definitely had been on the wrong track by making their home in the Pennsylvania Station restroom. The women, ages 45 to 72, had been rounded up the previous day from the women's lounge and brought before a magistrate, all carrying their belongings in paper bags. The magistrate said it was the most unusual thing he had ever seen, seven women hoboing in Pennsylvania Station. The 72-year old woman had $224 in cash on her and sought to explain that the lounge was a pleasant place in which to live, with the fun of seeing new faces all the time. She said that the women had a routine which included sleeping between midnight and 6 o'clock, breakfast, window shopping, perhaps trying to obtain a job, then taking a nap in the lounge if the weather was bad. She said they went to a public bath or to a hotel for a day or two to bathe. She said she received a pension of $100 per month. The magistrate turned her over to the City Welfare Department, suspending charges of loitering, which he also did with respect to four of the other women. He found two of the women, ages 59 and 60, not guilty of loitering, after one told the court that she had formerly worked at Father Divine's peace mission in Newark and wanted to return, the magistrate providing her a dollar for carfare, while the other woman promised that she would rent a room in the future and had only lived in the ladies lounge for two weeks, producing two bank books showing a balance of $1,410, prompting the magistrate to comment that she had more money in the bank than he did. He also sent out for coffee and doughnuts for the women.
On the editorial page, "TV Teaching? A City Rightly Wonders" indicates that Thomas Edison had once said that the shortest route to the intelligence runs over the optic nerve, a lesson not wasted on the City School Board the previous day when its members had voted to send a task force of local teachers to Hagerstown, Md., to study that city's experiment in educational television.
It finds it a commendable decision, illustrative of the city's enlightened interest in television as a potential teaching tool, an interest which ought be encouraged, as the numbers to be educated in the community and elsewhere would continue to grow in ensuing years, requiring that educational programs expand in quantity and quality accordingly. The teacher shortage also was so severe that school officials had to find a new way of making more efficient use of its existing teachers. Television could help to fill the community's increasing educational needs, able to perform certain functions previously relegated to teachers.
Dr. Thomas Pollock of NYU had said recently: "It now seems clear, however, that television offers the greatest opportunity for the advancement of education since the introduction of printing by movable type. This comparison is made soberly." It finds that the significance of his comparison deserved sober consideration by fellow educators. While there was resistance to television as a teaching tool, there had also been resistance to printed books many centuries earlier, when repressive legislation had been enacted to prevent the possible bad social effects from increasing numbers of printed books.
Dr. Alexander Stoddard, former superintendent of the Philadelphia and Los Angeles schools, had said a few weeks earlier: "There are some who warn that television may turn education from an active participation by the learner in an educational experience to a passive sitting before a television set, merely looking and listening to vicarious experiences ready-made for the purpose. It should be recalled that there have been those who objected to books in education because of placing too much reliance on printed material! It is highly unlikely that education will suffer from the multiplication of the means of communication." It finds the point well taken and that the potential of television as a teaching tool promising, as was the School Board's determination to consider that potential swiftly and intelligently.
Anyone reflecting back to their youthful days in grade school, however, might apprise the School Board that it was rather foolhardy to expect restless students, accustomed to watching television for entertainment and not usually as an information medium, at least not for more than about 15 minutes at a time during the news broadcast each evening, to sit rapt before a set in a classroom on a regular basis and not expect students to wander in their minds or take a nap. Candidly, in our youth, it was rare that we could pin ourselves for a full hour to watch even the most entertaining or compelling of programs and completely follow the story line without wandering in thought—is the homework due tomorrow completed, yet; what about that book report due next week on a book not yet started; what about the special project due next month? And if you are completely honest with yourself, you will likely find a common experience, even if not limited to unfinished school work, free thought streams of which might be self-censored for fear of putting your head in a caught sling.
The only experience we have, however, with television in the classroom was on the Monday morning following the assassination of President Kennedy, November 25, 1963, and, prior to that, on each of the first three Mercury mission launches. While each of those events commanded our attention, that was only because of the understood historical import of them at the time, plus, in the case of the President's assassination, the shock at the event and its brutality, and the need for common closure.
But on a routine basis, television as a medium for imparting knowledge would be tantamount to those silly, boring filmstrips which we used to have occasionally presented, which, in the end, imparted exactly nothing which we retain in memory, other than the monotonous tone on the accompanying record to cue the projector operator to turn to the next frame.
Our only other experience with television in the classroom came many years later during our bar review course for taking the bar exam. Most of the classes were taught by a live instructor, but some were on video. Because of what was at stake, we had to be attentive, but were obviously far more mature by that time than we had been during our grade school years.
While television might have a place in higher education, therefore, we posit that it has little or none in the lower grades by the nature of the beasts being taught. Young students who went through the recent pandemic with remote classroom instruction might better relate to how that played out in reality. From seeing some of the results which wound up on YouTube, while making room for the fact that only the most sensational and humorous episodes would likely wind up there, we do find our premise borne out more or less. And that was why so many parents were clamoring to reopen the schools, sometimes before it was prudent to do so, being spurned on by the crazy people, some of whom died as a result, who rejected the whole pandemic as fake, in turn urged into their state of denial by the then occupant of the White House—but we digress...
"Growing Charlotte's New Chief Tailor" indicates that George Wilkinson had been elected to succeed Spencer Bell as chairman of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, after Mr. Bell had been appointed to the State Senate to succeed retiring Jack Blythe.
It offers congratulations to Mr. Wilkinson and the Commission and finds the community fortunate to have someone of Mr. Wilkinson's strong purpose and ability to serve in the role as chief tailor of community planning. He said, upon being elected, that one of the distressing things about the community was that there were no new park areas being set aside in most of the new subdivisions and that with the city's growth, if they did not work out something, one day they would find that they did not have park facilities in many areas and could not get them. He also said that the Commission would be concerned with planning boulevards and thoroughfares, facing a danger from small, crowded streets which could not be allowed to strangle the community.
It views him as the type of chairman which the community needed, close to the effective chairman it had in Mr. Bell. It views both of his goals as much needed and urges that the Commission had to continue to realize and act its indispensable role in shaping growth to the needs and best interests of the citizens.
"'Political' Governor Gets No Thanks" indicates that a group of local teachers had been somewhat disdainful of their new ally in the fight for higher salaries than Governor Luther Hodges and the Advisory Budget Commission had originally recommended, that ally being the Governor, himself, whom the teachers deemed too "political" to be praised for reversing his initial recommendation and moving closer to the demand of the teachers.
He was thus deprived of any thanks on a day when it might have soothed the wounds of public embarrassment. But it finds that the teachers were correct, as the Governor had made a "political" decision, largely based on the result of political pressures brought to bear by the teachers, parents and press of the state, primarily the teachers.
The Governor had initially proposed a 9.1 percent increase for teachers on the basis that it was all the state could afford to pay at present. But then it became apparent that the public and the General Assembly disagreed, at which point he decided to do the "political" thing and yield to the majority.
It indicates its admiration for politicians who openly abandoned untenable positions and that praise for it was neither bad etiquette nor bad politics, that the politicians about whom it worried were those who were always right.
A piece from the Smithfield Herald, titled "What's Our State Really Like?" indicates that the Chamber of Commerce might say it was "Variety Vacationland", that book publishers might say that it was a state which wrote more books than it bought, that the Census Bureau stated that it was one of the states with the lowest per capita income, while songwriters called it "the land of the long-leaf pine" or the home of the "Carolina moon", with old people thinking it a good state in which to retire and young people considering it a good state to leave for better opportunities elsewhere, politicians viewing it as a state still safe for the Democratic Party, while blacks viewed it as a state moving too slowly toward integration. South Carolina and Virginia considered it a radical upstart, while North Carolina thought it combined the best traditions of the Old South with progressive ideas of the New North.
It suggests, for a lyrical and perceptive word picture of the state, "North Carolina" by Ovid Williams Pierce, appearing in the February issue of Holiday magazine. Mr. Pierce was a native of Weldon and had grown up loving North Carolina, had moved away to teach in New Orleans and then in Texas, and had now returned to teach creative writing at East Carolina College in Greenville. He wrote: "North Carolina begins with the brightness of sea sands and ends with the loneliness of the Smokies reaching in chill and cloud to the sky."
He described the Outer Banks, visited "The Lost Colony" pageant at Manteo, had talked to an old black man near Halifax, saw the little towns "raw and ugly under the Southern sun", looked into a tobacco warehouse at Rocky Mount, appraised the value of UNC at Chapel Hill and Duke in Durham, drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway, sat down on the porch of an old hotel in the mountains, looked at wayside displays of baskets and rugs, paid a visit to the Thomas Wolfe shrine in Asheville and ruefully watched a bedecked Indian selling souvenirs at Cherokee.
He would say, however, that those were only the outer trappings which revealed the inner spirit of the state to the perceptive student. He looked beneath the surface for the significance of those outer signs, as he had demonstrated in his novel, The Plantation. After he had examined all three regions of the state, the Tidewater, the Piedmont and the Smokies, he summed up the state by saying: "Mountaineer, small farmer, planter; log cabin, growing town, river house; ax, mill, land."
Drew Pearson tells of former Ambassador to Egypt Henry Byroade, formerly Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, now Ambassador to South Africa, having admitted to the Joint Senate Foreign Relations-Armed Services Committee recently that he had never heard of Prime Minister Bourguiba of Tunisia, one of America's best friends in the region. Because of his vast knowledge of the Middle East, he had been flown in specially to appear before the Committee to discuss the President's Middle East doctrine.
Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota had asked him the question about the Prime Minister of Tunisia and then asked incredulously how he could have occupied such important positions without knowing who he was, saying that he was one of the most prominent leaders and one of the country's best friends in the region. The admission had been made in a hearing held behind closed doors, and before the release of the transcript to the public, the State Department had carefully excised the admission from the record.
When the President heard that Secretary of State Dulles had delayed for ten days answering a letter from Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson regarding the U.S. position on Israeli sanctions prior to their recent agreement to withdraw forces from the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba, he had bawled out Mr. Dulles, which was why the Secretary had so hastily sent a reply by hand and leaked the fact to the press. Senator Johnson had been so upset about the matter that he went to the Senate gym for a rubdown and refused to receive the letter.
Senator Paul Neuberger of Oregon, in his newsletter to constituents, had indicated that the President had ordered champagne bottles kept under the table at his recent second term inauguration, adding: "Alfred E. Smith was wet and unashamed. Herbert Hoover was dry and proud of it."
MGM now had on its board of directors Louis Johnson, former Secretary of Defense under President Truman, John Sullivan, former Secretary of the Navy, and Frank Pace, former Secretary of the Army, both also having served under President Truman. Mr. Pearson wonders if they would make movies or fight.
A letter writer says that residential heating installations being done in the community were being performed "by a bunch of jack-leg gyp artists who call themselves heating contractors—yea—engineers." He finds part of the blame resting on the fact that there was no code for heating installations in either the city or the county, posing a serious threat to safety and the value of property. He also finds it the fault of architects and engineers who did not include in their designs any plans or specifications about the quality of workmanship of the heating and cooling installations, the heart of the home. Finally, he blames the contractors, themselves, whom he says would replace existing furnaces with cheap ones they had removed from previous homes after irate homeowners had complained. He finds that while other construction trades were carefully regulated, the heating and air-conditioning contractors were not, urging the need for a code with teeth in it.
A letter writer finds that the present imminent problems between East and West in the Middle East were the result of Israeli nationalism and the Suez Canal, as well as the so-called "Eisenhower doctrine". He finds the latter to boil down to collection of taxes of 600 million dollars to give to the political rulers of several small industrially-weak nations for the purpose of influencing their control of the deposits of oil within their boundaries, while pledging military action in case Russia also sought to obtain control of Middle Eastern oil. He indicates that if the U.S. Army were to enter that region, it would remain as long as the Russian policy remained, which would be as long as the oil continued to flow, and if the financial aid were given now, it would have to go on into the future as long as the oil remained. He finds the motive and purpose of the Eisenhower doctrine to boil down to oil, amounting to an inevitably conservative policy, as the oil interests in the country belonged to those with immense wealth, and that as the Republican Party was the epitome of conservatism, it was the Republican policy which would become the American policy when passed by Congress, jeopardizing the lives of the youth, all based on the notion that if the oil became available to Russia, it would enhance its military power. But as the country was not at war with Russia, he finds the only visible result to be the enhancement of the wealth and power of American multi-millionaires.
A letter writer from Cheraw, S.C., wants the government to explain current unemployment. He says that he, as an unemployed worker, wanted to warn those who were responsible for those needing jobs of the seriousness of the problem and urges finding a remedy before it would get out of control, keeping money at home for the purpose rather than sending it to the Middle East.
A letter writer says that he had
recently been lured to the movies on the pretext of seeing
entertainment classified as comedy, with one film starring Bob Hope
and Katharine Hepburn being a "fiasco
He probably has a good point, but
has to make room for the fact that during times of depression and war
in the Thirties and early Forties, screwball comedies flourished and
for good reason. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it is somewhat harder
to be funny in better times, when problems tend inward, the realm of psychology, as opposed to when basic collective survival is at stake. And when those earlier films came out, not only was it a time coincident with the first decade and a half of talkies, drawing audiences from among those who otherwise got their mass-media derived entertainment at home listening to radio drama and comedy, made evident by the generally fast, snappy dialogue of the movie comedies, there
was also no competition from television, which had by now usurped
much of the visual comedy and made it harder for movies to find their
own comedy niche, leaving for the movie screens the more salacious
material which could not be aired on television. In any event, he probably should have gone to the Center, where he would have found a more profound entertainment
A letter writer from Lincolnton says that he had read and enjoyed the newspaper for many years, especially the editorials and the letters column, responds to one letter from March 1 relative to the liquor business, in which the writer had said that a minister many years earlier had gotten down on his knees and prayed that a certain liquor establishment would be destroyed, and that while he had been praying, the place had burned down. He wishes to ask the writer where the church janitor was at the time. He says that Lincoln County was legally dry and that everyone knew what had happened to the blockaders in the county during the previous four months, and yet there were still plenty of them around. He counsels that the solution to the liquor problem was to have ABC stores, as in Mecklenburg and other counties. He also mentions that another writer had stated that Christ, when crucified, did not actually have a crown of thorns on his head, says, "Next please."
Framed Edition
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