The Charlotte News
Tuesday, December 16, 1958
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Paris that the foreign ministers of the NATO countries this date flatly rejected Russian pressure on Berlin, but held out the possibility of high-level talks with the Soviet Union on East-West problems. The Western leaders had agreed, however, that such talks could not be successful under the threats of any Soviet ultimatum on West Berlin. Secretary of State Dulles told his colleagues in the NATO council that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev would not risk war over Berlin. He stated that therefore the West could proceed with confidence and not give an appearance of success to a bold and reckless move, comparing Mr. Khrushchev to Hitler, saying that if the West gave him an inch, he would take a mile. A NATO spokesman said that the majority of the 15 foreign ministers agreed with the position of Mr. Dulles, describing the broad lines as being that Premier Khrushchev's proposals were unacceptable, that the West had to stand firm and could not tolerate the unilateral violation of international agreements, and that the West was agreed that it was always ready for discussions on the reunification of Germany. Mr. Dulles said that the allies were strong enough not to be frightened by threats from Soviet propaganda. The outcome of the short opening meeting had been greeted jubilantly by the West Germans, with a German press spokesman indicating that it had been a "first-rate meeting". The foreign ministers decided that there would be further consultation by the Big Three after the NATO meetings to determine how to frame replies to the Berlin notes from Mr. Khrushchev. The keynote of the morning session, according to the NATO spokesman, had been "the complete and unqualified solidarity of the alliance in support of the three powers principally responsible for Berlin." West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano was also in support of future talks with the Russians, saying that those talks were essential to a solution of the Berlin question, which was a world problem, not just a German or European problem. He indicated that the Soviet ultimatum had first to be flatly turned down. Mr. Dulles recalled that at the 1955 Big Four summit conference in Geneva, the Russians had agreed that the four powers were responsible for the reunification of Germany. He stated in reference to Soviet threats to withdraw unilaterally from their part in the Berlin agreement, "It would be grotesque to suggest that a new agreement could be erected on the wreckage of the old." Mr. Dulles appeared before the NATO foreign ministers with a prepared map showing the demarcation line between East and West Germany.
In Washington, a committee had developed this date a design for a build-it-yourself bomb shelter costing $106.50, its designers stating that it would give a person an 80 percent chance of surviving a missile attack. The dome-shaped underground structure was a key item in a civil defense program recommended to the Montgomery County, Md., council by its Civil Defense Advisory Board. A director of Johns Hopkins University's operations research office headed the County study. The Johns Hopkins office did work for the armed forces also. The committee called for a bigger information program about civil defense and found also that the county's siren warning system would alert only about 9 to 13 percent of the people indoors and so it pushed for a cheap alarm which could be plugged into any electrical socket. The biggest emphasis was placed on a home shelter simple and cheap enough that almost anyone could build it. The committee figured that most people would be at home after dark, the likeliest time for surprise attack, (about the time that "Naked City" would be on the air), and that four out of five persons in the Washington area could survive if they were in fallout shelters able to withstand the blast pressure of at least ten pounds per square inch. Basement shelters were ruled out because blasts could collapse the building above, trapping those underneath. So the committee recommended a shelter nearby with a tube entrance from the basement and a tube exit into the open. The shelter's top would be three feet underground. Under the proposed design, the basic building material would be earth mixed with cement and water. The most expensive item would be the metal lath forming for the structure and wood bracing, costing $31. The air-vent piping and pump would be next, at $23.60.
In Berkeley, Calif., it was reported that a German physics student had been shot to death in a University of California laboratory this date and a campus policeman had captured a jealous husband who had admitted the killing. The victim was a 26-year old man identified by a campus spokesman as a German citizen from Herrnhut who had served two years in the U.S. Army as an electronics technician in the Far East and had entered the University from New York, having been a research assistant and student. The man who was captured was 31 and unemployed. Three janitors in Le Conte Hall, a physics building, had heard shots at 12:50 a.m. and one of them had seen a man run out, while another, looking out a window, saw the man vault over a railing into an eight-foot light well and then climb out and flee. Police found the student dead from at least two bullet wounds. A janitor led a police sergeant to the light well from which he had seen the gunman flee and the officer, hearing a noise in the well, found and captured the man. He admitted the killing and accused the student of "messing around with my wife". He offered no resistance and was quoted as saying that he had dropped his weapon used in the homicide, a .22-caliber automatic pistol, when he vaulted into the light well the first time. He drove away from the campus before discovering its loss and then returned for it. The sergeant found the pistol and other police officers found five discharged cartridges at the scene. The man was not placed under formal arrest immediately.
In San Diego, a man stared at a lanky youth who had just confessed to slaying the man's wife and four children, asking him why he had done it as they were all he had in the world. The 16-year old runaway from New York slumped in his chair and opened and shut his mouth several times, but no sound had been emitted until finally he blurted out, "I … I didn't want to," addressing the man by his first name, as the latter had befriended the youth. They had met on Monday night after the boy had been captured in a beach community a few miles north of San Diego. Police had been looking for him since the prior Friday when the bodies of the 37-year old woman and her four children had been found in their home, the mother having been shot and the children having been slashed and stabbed with a knife. A resident of Mission Beach had recognized the description of the boy and he was arrested by an off-duty police officer and a lifeguard. After a brief show of defiance, the boy started crying and admitted that he had killed the woman and four children, saying, "I just flipped." At the San Diego police station, officers said they received a detailed confession from him. The husband and father had picked up the boy as a hitchhiker six weeks earlier and taken him in because he felt sorry for him. The boy told police that he had become angry because one of the children, a four-year old girl, was making a lot of noise and he had stormed into the bedroom and thrown her on the floor, cutting her head. The mother had then rushed in and taken the child into the bathroom to bandage her and told the boy to call a doctor. Instead, he got a pistol from the garage and came back and shot the mother, then killed the four-year old girl and her two-year old brother by cutting their throats with a hunting knife, and then when the two other boys came home, ages nine and six, he likewise killed them.
There were eight million stories in
the Naked City
Ann Sawyer of The News again reports on the schoolchildren unable to pay for lunches in Charlotte City schools and Mecklenburg County schools. The indications were that it stood alone in the state in terms of the number of children who were going hungry. The director of the lunchroom program for the State Department of Public Instruction had told the newspaper that they had very few complaints about youngsters not getting meals where needed. The 1,800 schools in the state which participated in the National School Lunch Program had served 86,341,435 meals the previous year, between six and eight percent of which were served free to children who could not afford to purchase lunch. She said that for the most part, needy hungry children were pretty well taken care of in the state, as one rule for the lunchrooms participating in the National School Lunch Program was that they had to take care of needy children. The lunchrooms in the program, which encompassed nearly all of those in the state, would receive about 6 million dollars in Federal commodities during the year and about 3.5 million in cash reimbursements from the State. As a condition of accepting that aid, which had to be used to reduce lunch costs for all children, the lunchrooms had to feed what was called a "Type A" meal, a balanced plate lunch (as good as any A-1 used car). She said that there could be no exception to the rule in North Carolina, and to offer less than a balanced meal would be to defeat the purpose of the program. She added that more often than not it was the child on the free lunch program who most needed a balanced meal. In other North Carolina school systems, she said, the communities had accepted part of the responsibility for supplying free lunches to needy children and it was definitely a community responsibility when the schools could not do it themselves. Communities had various ways of meeting that responsibility. In several cities, United Fund supported the program and in some rural areas, the people raised money through community programs, movies, talent shows, and Brunswick stews. Some of the city systems in the state used the same type of promotions, and often received support from men's or women's service clubs, PTA's and churches.
Bob Slough of The News reports that sub-freezing weather had little effect on the big-time commercial moonshiner, but to the small-time operator, it was sad news in terms of receiving money. When temperatures dropped to 13 degrees, as they had the previous night, the fermentation of mash stopped unless proper precautions were taken to heat the mash vats, according to Federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit officials. Big-time liquor makers made arrangements to move their operations underground or into barns before cold weather hit. The extremely cold weather might have caught some of the smaller operators with their vats unheated, in other words, with their moonshine shining like a mackerel in the sun, not where the moon don't shine. Most commercial operators allowed their mash to ferment in vats before putting it through the still which produced the liquor, and heat was an element necessary to the fermentation process. The big-time operators set up their underground operations by scooping out a hole in the ground with a bulldozer and covering the top with logs and dirt, calling it a "cave". Bad weather, snow and ice, also had an effect on the movement and supply of illegal liquor, as it was hard to transport a load of liquor over a snow-covered road. Even though illegal liquor supply and small-time operations were impacted by the cold weather, the ATTU agents had their work cut out for them as it was almost Christmas and the demand for illegal liquor increased at about that time of year. As long as the cold weather continued, the small-time illegal operator was going to have trouble meeting the demand.
In the sixth in the series of articles by prominent Charlotte residents regarding "The Christmas I Remember Best", former Charlotte newspaperman and author LeGette Blythe says that he could not select the best of the more than 50 he had experienced. He had traveled in strange and exotic places but had never spent a Christmas in Paris, Cairo, Honolulu or Istanbul, having spent every Christmas in mundane Huntersville, within half a mile of the home in which he was born and more than half of them in the home in which he presently lived. Christmas therefore had always been centered around home and family. Among their fondest memories of their parents was their enthusiasm for Christmas and what it meant. He and his four-year younger brother had their Christmas breakfasts and dinners together ever since the latter had been born, and his sister had missed only one Christmas being with them and on that occasion had talked to them on the telephone. The youngest sibling, also a sister, had missed only two Christmases with the family. None of them had ever missed a Christmas with their children. That had made all of their Christmases delightful and tender memories. They always had Christmas breakfast and Christmas dinner, the meal during the middle of the day, together, along with children and grandchildren. They usually had breakfast long before daylight and when the children had been young they were often through eating before 6:00 a.m. They ate by candlelight and the meal had become somewhat traditional, consisting of fruit juice, scrambled eggs, grits possibly, sausage or ham, often Virginia ham from his sister's home in Halifax County, Virginia, beyond Danville, hot biscuits, blackberry jelly, milk for the kids, and gallons of scalding coffee for the adults. When breakfast was over, everybody piled into the big room, which 150 years earlier had been the drawing room of their great, great, great uncle in Hopewell, and before a roaring fire and a huge Christmas tree brought from the woods, not from a Charlotte lot, they exchanged Christmas gifts. Usually that was all completed by 8:00 a.m. and then they took a breather before going to the home of one of his sisters, which had been their parents' home, where they would have dinner consisting of turkey and dressing, ham, salads, vegetables, ambrosia, more hot biscuits, and more steaming coffee. They had wonderful cooks in their family. After the dinner, they began to scatter and on numerous Christmas afternoons had gone with the children to visit his sister's family in Virginia, while his brother and his wife had gone with their boys to South Carolina to her mother's house, and usually were back together in time to have another meal in the evening. They liked their Christmases as they had been through the years, "simple, warm, loving and loved—after the fashion of that very first one, we dare to feel, and in the spirit of that young villager whose day it is." He thus concludes that he could not remember which Christmas was best as they had all been best.
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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