The Charlotte News
Saturday, December 13, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Army had launched a Jupiter IRBM with a monkey aboard as a nosecone passenger, but after a 1,500-mile flight achieving an altitude of 300 miles, lasting six hours, the flight had touched down in the south Atlantic and the search was eventually abandoned. It had been the first attempt by the U.S. to place a primate into space, seeking to study the effects of space travel on man. The Army said that the spaceflight had been completely successful, but that there appeared to have been "a mishap in the tricky recovery gear which is carried in the nosecone to assist search planes and ships" in recovery efforts. Brig. General J. A. Barclay, commander of the Army missile agency, said that observers on naval vessels stationed in the target area had reported seeing three sections of the Jupiter reenter the earth's atmosphere, but they had been unable to locate them in the south Atlantic. He said that the parts reentering the atmosphere were the booster-stage rocket, the instrument compartment containing guidance devices and the nosecone itself. Despite failure to recover the monkey from the ocean, the flight had provided much information on the effects of space travel on a higher order of animal. A Navy doctor, Capt. Norman Lee Barr, said that the most significant information radioed from the nosecone was that weightless space travel appeared to have little physical effect on the monkey. The radio signals from the nosecone carrying the monkey, nicknamed variously "Gordo" and "Little Old Reliable", continued providing data on the passenger's reaction for 13.3 minutes of the estimated 15-minute flight.
In Washington, it was reported that four gunmen, one of whom was disguised as a priest, had stormed the home of a well-to-do building contractor the previous night, then ran into a police ambush and a barrage of bullets. One of the gunmen had been killed and two others wounded critically. The fourth had escaped. The deputy police chief said that the four men had intended to kidnap a 61-year old man, but a tip from the FBI had foiled the plot. The man who was the object of the kidnaping had been shot in the shoulder during the gunfire which almost wrecked the living room of his fashionable home in northeast Washington. His wound was not considered serious.
In Philadelphia, a former convict sought for the shooting of a Springfield, Mass., policeman had been killed this date in a struggle with FBI agents, one of whom had been wounded. The 22-year old man had died when a bullet from his own .32-caliber revolver hit him in the temple. An FBI agent had wounded him and was struggling with him when the fatal shot was fired. FBI agents had been acting on a tip that the man had returned to Philadelphia after the near fatal shooting of an off-duty Springfield patrolman, and had burst through a locked door to a West Philadelphia apartment to find the man naked in bed. He leaped up, grabbed a pistol from a dresser and fired point-blank at the oncoming agent. The bullet had passed through his thigh and embedded itself in a wall. The agent's momentum carried him to the man before he could fire again, the two fell to the floor, the agent was able to grab the man's gun, and as he did so, it had discharged and the bullet struck the man in the left temple.
In Avenel, N.J., it was reported that a family of five had been found in their heatless, frost-coated trailer this date and police said that three of them were dead, two of whom were children, ages six and nine. They had either frozen to death or were suffocated. Another son, four, was taken to the hospital with his legs frozen and the deceased man's wife, 33, was also taken to the hospital, frozen from the waist down. A neighbor found the family after she had heard the woman banging on her trailer crying, "We're sick and freezing." She was reported to be in fair condition but her son was in poor condition. The temperature had been in the low 20's during the night and police said that the inside of the trailer was coated with frost, with one officer indicating it was "like a refrigerator". There was no heat in the trailer and a kerosene stove inside was empty, as was the storage tank outside. The fuel line inside was disconnected.
The fourth in a series of stories by prominent Charlotte residents regarding "The Christmas I Remember Best" is by Bob Provence, new to Charlotte, a program director of WSOC-TV and a well-known newscaster, imparting that he had never experienced a Christmas at his grandmother's house and so his recollections over the years did not have the focal point which seemed to be the pattern of most mental pictures of a family scene during the Yuletide season. Having been reared in the soft coal fields of southwestern Pennsylvania, he vividly recalled that Christmas was fine when the mines were working and was almost tragic when they were closed. He recalled the Russian Orthodox children making their selection of the discarded pine trees behind the homes in their small town, because their Christmas was celebrated in January. He had felt then, as he still did, that there was too much commercialization of Christmas and too much emphasis on the receiving and too little on the giving. He recalls the frustration of his five-year old brother, bitterly disappointed that his maiden great aunts would give a boy a jump rope as a gift for Christmas. At Christmas, 1942, with a stalled train in Virginia, he had hitchhiked 60 miles through two feet of snow late at night to surprise his wife on Christmas Eve, wearing Air Force khaki and a hat too small, but proudly displaying a corporal's stripes on his sleeves. At Christmas, 1943, in California, they spent the only Christmas without a real tree. He had a Christmas in England in 1944, saddened by the loss of four complete crews from their bomber group. One of his nicest holiday seasons had been in 1945 in West Virginia with his wife's family. The family circle was complete with all seven children and their wives or husbands home from service, all well and together again. He recalled the consternation of trying to put together a metal doll house for his daughter and his thoughts about the fellow who invented the do-it-yourself craze. With three children born in three different states, and each in a city starting with a "C", they recalled the different houses in those years when they were younger and the thrill which a parent received just watching the children and the excitement of Christmas morning. They could not help but feel fortunate with their array of gifts when compared to others, and one was never quite sure that they understood that. He could never forget his wife's yearly problem in trying to keep track of what was sent to whom from which relative for the proper thank-you note to follow. With so many uncles, aunts and cousins, it never failed that in the unwrapping of a gift, the proper association between gifts and giver failed to be made. His family also would remember the many years during which he was not home on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day because he was behind a microphone or in front of a camera. (In a large extended family, to ameliorate that problem with the thank-you notes, try a rotational system whereby each aunt and uncle is assigned the gifts for the offspting of one of the other siblings in a given year, and then rotating around the next year and so on, such that gifts would not have to be sent by each aunt and uncle to more than one set of offspring each year.)
Bob Slough of The News reports on the progress of the Empty Stocking Fund to provide Christmas for needy families, having collected thus far $10,473.45, with the list of the most recent donors included.
It is all beginning to sound
somewhat jejune and insipid, life at an all too dull pace. Perhaps, they needed a Spanish dancer
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further comments on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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