The Charlotte News

Friday, March 8, 1957

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Israeli forces this date had begun their withdrawal from the last territory in Egypt, but that Egyptian officials had said that Israeli ships were barred from use of the Suez Canal on the basis that Egypt remained at war with Israel, despite an Israeli military spokesman having said that all troops, except a garrison of 100 men and women, were being withdrawn. Israel said that the small garrison would remain for only a few days to complete the removal of equipment. Finnish troops of the U.N. Emergency Force had moved into the Sinai Peninsula to take over the mission of policing the area against renewed violence. The Egyptian ban on Israeli shipping through the canal had been in effect long before the Israelis and the French-British attack on Egypt had occurred the prior October and November. The owner of a Dutch vessel had protested against seizure of his cargo bound for the Israeli port of Haifa, but the protest to Egyptian authorities had thus far produced no result, the ship having been held at Suez since the prior October. Two small ships started moving through the canal this date, and Egypt was expected to allow removal of two remaining major obstructions which would open the canal to medium-sized ships for the first time since early November. The canal Authority had announced the previous night that it would be open at daybreak to ships of less than 500 tons. Under the Authority's rules, the two small ships did not have to pay tolls because they were under 300 tons. The offices of the Authority were closed this date and there was no confirmation of reports that it would demand payment of all tolls to Egypt, including tolls for passage of British and French ships, when the canal would be reopened to normal shipping. Before the canal had been closed, the Egyptians had claimed the right to the tolls, but permitted them to be paid into accounts blocked in London and Paris. The semi-official Middle East News Agency had reported that Egypt would give permission to the head of U.N. salvage to go ahead with removal of the two major blocks in the 103-mile canal.

Before the Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime influence on the Teamsters Union, focusing initially on activities in Portland, Ore., investigators for the Committee reported this date that a lie detector test which had been demanded by Nathan Zusman, the nightclub owner in Portland who had testified two days earlier, denying that he had ever received money from two admitted madams for referral of customers to their houses of prostitution, had produced reactions which indicated untruthfulness. The Secret Service had administered the test and it was certified in a letter from the chief of the Service. Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, chairman of the Committee, made the announcement as the Committee opened its eighth day of hearings this date, reading from the report slowly and distinctly, as Mr. Zusman, present, followed along from his place in the witness chair. The test had asked Mr. Zusman whether he had offered to finance a "call house operation" for admitted madam, Helen Hardy, whether he had offered to finance such an operation for another madam, Helen Smalley, whether Helen Hardy had paid him $120 for referring two men to her call house soon after she had begun its operation, whether Helen Smalley had paid him $120 for a similar referral, whether he had ever told Helen Hardy that he had information that Portland District Attorney William Langley was going to permit call houses to operate, and whether he was told by Thomas Maloney that Mr. Langley would allow call houses to operate, with Mr. Zusman having answered "no" to each of those questions. The Portland Mayor, Terry Schrunk, who had testified the previous afternoon and also testified this date, had also demanded a lie detector test this date, to support his denials that he had ever accepted money from the operator of a gambling house which he, while Sheriff, had raided in September, 1955, as adduced in the testimony of admitted racketeer James Elkins the previous day, testimony as to a $500 pay-off from Clifford Bennett to Mr. Schrunk being generally corroborated by the testimony the previous day of two Sheriff's deputies and another independent witness who said that they saw Mr. Schrunk pick up an envelope near a water fountain, which the latter this date denied picking up while admitting he may have stopped to take a drink from the fountain, that envelope and its location fitting with testimony that Mr. Bennett had been seen placing the money in an envelope, which he then left by the water fountain in question. The Committee promised to try to arrange a polygraph test. (Starting in 1969, there was an establishment on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill called "The Shrunken Head", a so-called head shop, which sold hookahs, rolling papers, and other drug paraphernalia, now a sports apparel shop in its newer incarnation. May we be permitted the liberty to interject, since Senator Sam Ervin was on the Committee and a graduate of UNC in a much earlier era, that the Committee fairly shrunk the Portland Mayor, who nevertheless continued in that role through 1972, to a fairly small stature, in terms of Alice through the glass?) "Big Hel" Helen Hardy had testified two days earlier that she had paid Mr. Zusman for sending customers to her from his nightclub, the Desert Room, indicating that she had opened her house of prostitution with assurances from Mr. Zusman and a gambler, Mr. Maloney, described as being friendly with high officials of the Teamsters Union, that it would not be closed by District Attorney Langley. Mr. Zusman had demanded the lie detector test, not only for himself, but for Mrs. Hardy. She had returned in the meantime to her home in Montana before the test could be arranged for Mr. Zusman, with the Committee indicating that it was trying to reach her to see if she was willing to take the test also. Another type of test, we trow, might be more salient to the salubrity, if not the sobriety, of the witnesses.

The President hoped to go to Florida about the middle of the ensuing week for sun and exercise to help him shake his head cold, cough and inflamed ear, according to White House press secretary James Hagerty, who also indicated that the cough was a little better during the morning, with the President still having a slight inflammation in his inner ear but no longer using a cotton plug which he had during his press conference the previous day. The weather in Washington had been generally damp for weeks and it was raining at the time of the announcement, as it had been for hours. It was being hoped that the President would fly to Florida for five or six days before going to Bermuda on March 20 to participate in conferences with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Britain. A trip to Tucson or somewhere in the Far West had been ruled out because it would take too long for the President to have to return to Washington if the need were to arise, with both the Vice-President and Secretary of State Dulles out of the country.

In Raleigh, the chairman of the State Highway Commission, A. H. Graham, told the State House Roads Committee this date that Highway Commission reorganization legislation had been improved by amendments, that, speaking for a majority of the Commission, he recommended voting for the amended bill which had struck out a section limiting political activity of highway workers, indicating that he did not support the Commission being a political organization, but favored the Legislature providing for all State departments being prohibited from political activities and not just one. He also indicated to the press, after his appearance before the Committee, that the proposed seven-member Commission would not be able to provide as much service to the people in the secondary road programs as the current 14-member body. At the start of the hearing, the chairman of the Committee had asked it not to vote this date on the measure, similar to one which had been passed by the State Senate the previous day. The major difference in the two bills was that the Senate had eliminated the section forbidding highway workers from engaging in partisan political activities, whereas the House bill still contained such a section. The Senate had passed its version the previous day with little opposition.

In Charlotte, Jack Blythe, 68, the State Senator for Mecklenburg County until he had retired the previous month, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his home the previous night. He had been head of Blythe Brothers Construction Co., one of the largest such companies in the South, and had entered political life in 1949, being selected to fill the unexpired term of his brother, Joe Blythe. He had been elected to the office in 1953 and again in 1955, but had resigned the prior February 5 on the advice of his doctor. While eating supper the previous night, he complained of feeling ill, went to his bedroom, where he lapsed into a coma from which he never regained consciousness. Funeral services would be held the following day at Trinity Presbyterian Church. He had been a native of Mecklenburg County, born in 1888 near Huntersville, and was a direct descendant of two signers of the controversial "Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence"—its putative origins prior to the Philadelphia Declaration being shrouded in considerable doubt through time, including by Thomas Jefferson.

In Raleigh, some 27 N.C. State students had been arrested the previous night during a riot which had erupted as basketball fans had been leaving the first round of the ACC basketball tournament. They were to be tried in City Court this date on charges of breach of the peace. A police lieutenant said that four police officers on the scene had used teargas in their effort to quell the demonstration at its inception. Several hundred students had participated, the lieutenant indicating that he had the impression that they were upset because basketball fans had blocked the student dormitory parking lots with their parked cars. The riots had begun around 11:30, had then calmed down, only to erupt again after midnight. The lieutenant said that he had arrived at around 12:45, observing about 300 students in the street, about a block from Reynolds Coliseum, where the tournament was being played. He said that they were disorderly, throwing rocks and damaging cars and using "some of the worst language" he had ever heard. "There were gangs of about 50 boys and when they broke one up, a new one would form." Witnesses at the earlier demonstration said that the officers had to back the demonstrators away so that some of the basketball fans could get their cars out, reporting that two cars had been overturned. The four officers on duty at the start of the melee had been reinforced by other police officers, highway patrolmen and deputy sheriffs, until a force of about 25 officers were on duty. The lieutenant said that students had slashed automobile tires with knives, had broken windshields with rocks, and let air out of tires, with one officer having been hit on the arm by a rock. He said that tires had been slashed on about six or eight vehicles and three windshields had been broken, including one of a police vehicle. One police officer had been slightly burned on the hand by teargas and another had been scratched on the nose in a scuffle. The State Prison Department had furnished a bus which the police used to haul some of the students to the police station, with about ten of the students having been jailed briefly while the officers were bringing the riot under control. Early in the morning, all 27 of the arrested students had been released to the custody of an N.C. State official. This is what happens when Everett Case and Frank McGuire vie for getting their basketball recruits from the New York City area. Like players, like fans… It is why, we admit, that we grew up sometimes speaking with a slight New York accent, having come by it quite naturally. What dya gonna do about it?

Parenthetically, UNC, the undefeated number one team in the nation, having gone 24-0 in the regular season, won its first-round game handily the previous night, defeating Clemson by 20 points, with star Lennie Rosenbluth scoring a tournament record 45 points and grabbing 12 rebounds. UNC this night in the semifinals would face Wake Forest, which had easily defeated N.C. State, winner of the first three ACC Tournaments between 1954 and 1956—which was likely the actual reason that the State fans rioted, having been induced to believe that they were the anointed team in the league, especially as they got to play in the tournament on their home floor, which would continue through 1966. South Carolina, upset winner over Duke, would face Maryland, winner over Virginia the previous night, in the other semifinal contest.

Incidentally, we congratulate the N.C. State basketball team of 2024 for having done the improbable, winning five straight games in five days to win the ACC Tournament, after entering it 17-14 on the season, the tenth team in the league out of 15, thus destined only for the NIT, winding up instead with the automatic qualifying bid to the NCAA Tournament, where they continued their improbable run as an eleventh seeded team in the South region, defeating, in order, the regional's number 6 seed, Texas Tech, the number 14 seed, Oakland, which had upset the number three seeded Kentucky, followed by a victory over the number two seed, Marquette, and in the regional finals, the number four seed, Duke, which State had also improbably beaten in the quarterfinals of the ACC Tournament, beating then Virginia and regular season champion UNC to win the conference tournament, thus beating the two, three and top-seeded teams in the league, respectively, eventually reaching the national semifinals before being beaten this date by Purdue, the number two team overall in the NCAA Tournament. It was a job well done and we commend the effort, proving that teams should "never give up". And there were no riots in Raleigh this year. But the night is still young...

And while on the subject, we say again that the NCAA needs to abandon this silly quadrant system, which makes no sense whatsoever, when posed against objective reality, as games are actually played, as a quadrant-one win in November or December can become a mere quadrant-four win by March, depending on how the early opponent subsequently fared the rest of the year, having nothing to do with the game in the early part of the season or with the winning team at that time or the losing team, with an early season defeat by a large margin over a team previously undefeated sometimes having a demoralizing effect which carries through the remainder of the year to the detriment of that team or teams in the interim having suffered key injuries. It is a system built on statistics and probabilities rather than reality, and is part and parcel of what is wrong with the "expertise" of which we speak, the lack of common sense at play in viewing a game, not as a statistical machine subject to computer analysis by some airhead who knows nothing of the psychology, the actualized reality and flow of the game. On a related but different note, we are always intrigued by the ESPN status predictor during games, whether football or basketball, such that a heavily favored team with a one-point lead ten minutes into the contest suddenly has a 90 percent chance of winning, as often as not winding up losing. Again, it is an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable, the human spirit which is out on the field or the court, augmented on occasion by the collective spirit of the spectators watching it. It is also an attempt, subtly inserted to the proceedings, to psych out disfavored contestants for the sake of laying good bets. A computer model is only as good as its programmer, and, whoever programs the ESPN computer, not to mention the NCAA quadrant computer, needs, being tin men, to obtain a human brain after being forced to watch sports and write reports on same for a season or so without reference to computer scripts or statistical probabilities, best left to the weathermen and other prognosticators of natural phenomena given to such predictive analysis. Human endeavors, being quite variable, are not, stupid. And if these statistical wizards seek to promote the fact that two number one regional seeds are left this year vying on Monday for the national championship, please remind them that a broken clock is correct twice per day.

Charles Kuralt of The News tells of the construction of Highway 16 past a house which a woman owned on a roughly-paved narrow street north of Charlotte, not a very big house, but having a beautiful stand of pine trees growing in the yard for the previous 20 years, giving the little house shade and some measure of beauty, until the State Highway people had cut them down. The owner said that they had set up a line of stakes and then a bulldozer had come along and torn down the fence and sawn down the trees, with the bulldozer headed for the living room of the house when the owner came running and stopped them. A State right-of-way engineer said this date that it had been a mistake, that the bulldozer was supposed to take out the trees on the other side of the road and that they were sorry about it, offering $400 in compensation to the homeowner. She said she did not want the $400, that it was not enough to compensate for her lost trees, wondering how she could rent her home out now. She said that they were not rich people and lived up the street from the house, renting it out for $45 per month. She said that the State people had not said anything to anyone on the street, that they had just come in and cut down the trees a couple of months earlier, leaving her since wondering what to do. She compared the situation to Russia. The engineer said that a Charlotte Board of Realtors committee had appraised the damage and recommended $400 in damages and so that was what they had offered. The owner of the house said that a neighbor had been told that he would have to move to accommodate the right-of-way, so he had bought a lot, moved his rose bushes, only to be told that it had been a mistake and that he would not have to move after all. The engineer said that such things occasionally were bound to happen. Mr. Kuralt observes: "And so they are. When progress comes to a town, 15 pine trees must not stand in the way." The owner of the house said that she had come home from work that night and realized that the moon was shining on the house and that the trees had been cut down, causing her to stand on the porch and cry inside, saying that she would not have had the trees cut down for anything. "But soon," Mr. Kuralt concludes, "Highway 16 will be in, and paved, and the people in the cars that rush past will not notice the absence of 15 pine trees in front of a three-room house. They will be going too fast."

In Oxford, England, an Oxford University student had learned this date that his bass fiddle was a vehicle, as the amateur musician faced the same problem which for years had troubled bass players, the instrument being too big for taxis and too heavy to carry. He said that he thought that he had solved the problem by attaching a small, rubber-tired wheel to the bottom of the instrument so that he could push it along the sidewalks, but had been stopped by a police officer who said: "See here, that thing you're pushing. It's a vehicle. You must get in the road with it." The man complied, but that only had multiplied his troubles, as when he started pushing it through the streets on night jobs, he was stopped again by the police, who said that he had to have headlights and a red taillight. A student of philosophy, politics and economics, the young man said that he appealed to the chief constable, who sent around a sergeant with a tape measure, finding that the fiddle measured 23.5 inches in width, a half inch under the regulation minimum width to be classified as a vehicle. But it was also over six feet in height and thus was classified a vehicle. The student was president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, but asked the police to take a liberal view of the matter, indicating that since he pushed the instrument at an angle, its height was less than six feet, making it a musical instrument and not a vehicle. The sergeant found the problem too perplexing for him and appealed to a police inspector who provided a final ruling, that although the student would not be required to place headlights and a taillight on his bass fiddle, they believed it would be helpful if he carried a flashlight to provide adequate warning of his approach. The student promised to purchase such a flashlight.

In Petaluma, Calif., a traffic officer had retired after 15 years during the week, having issued traffic tickets to the mayor, a city judge, all six members of the City Council and his wife.

In Louisville, Ky., a woman was finding it difficult to continue her "ministry of sympathy", but the task was being assumed by others all over the country. For more than five years, she had been bringing comfort to bereaved persons who were listed as survivors in obituaries and death notices printed in local newspapers, regularly spending 4 to 5 hours per day looking up addresses and sending the survivors one or two religious tracts, offering hope and encouragement. She said that at least 15 other people in states ranging from California to New York, from Texas to Michigan, were conducting similar efforts. An eye ailment had forced her to interrupt her work temporarily, but she was anxious to return to it. She said that she had never intended to be on the receiving end of correspondence, and had remained anonymous until a local newspaper and the Associated Press had told of her story, but now received mountains of mail, with one letter she particularly prized having come from a man who received her tracts following the death of his father, that having been Vice-President Nixon, whose father had died during the Republican national convention the prior August.

On the editorial page, "Statewide Roads Concept Endangered" finds that the "minor adjustments" made during the week to bills reorganizing the State Highway Commission had actually weakened the philosophy and design of the legislation.