The Charlotte News

Monday, December 29, 1958

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Havana that a climax in Cuba's two-year old civil war appeared to be drawing near this date, as Fidel Castro's rebels smashed at Government forces in eastern Cuba and El Presidente Fulgencio Batista's Army waged a fierce offensive against insurgents in the central part of the island. In Oriente Province, at the eastern end of the island, according to the rebel radio, four of Castro's columns were marching toward Oriente's capital, Santiago de Cuba, after hitting Army forces elsewhere in the province. The rebels said that their goal was to set up an insurgent government in Oriente shortly. In the central province of Las Villas, El Presidente's forces apparently had started a large-scale offensive to counter a series of rebel victories which had threatened the provincial capital of Santa Clara. The Government was sending in heavy artillery, tanks and bombers. The rebels reported that Government planes had bombed Santa Clara and the rebel-held town of Jatibonico in Camaguey Province near the Las Villas border, lying between the latter and Oriente. Other reports from Las Villas said that Sr. Batista's planes and artillery had heavily bombed and shelled the rebel concentrations around Santa Clara. One aim of the Government offensive appeared to be to remove a rebel threat to the main highway between Las Villas and Oriente. Despite rebel attempts to have populated places declared open cities, the Government warned that it would make an all-out counter-attack on towns held or threatened by the rebels. A rebel exile organization in Miami said that the planes had bombed and strafed cities, despite the Army knowing that the rebels were camped outside those cities. In New York, another group of exiles reported that Castro had broadcast an accusation that the Dominican Republic was "preparing an attack on Cuba" and that 30 warplanes with Cuban markings were "ready to fly in order to begin a general invasion of the island." The exiles said that the purpose of the attack was to "provoke the intervention of the Organization of American States or some international organization to thwart an otherwise inevitable rebel victory." Rebel reports from Oriente indicated that 10,000 troops of the Army were in desperate trouble. The insurgents claimed that they had captured the city of Palma Soriano, an important point on the main highway between Bayamo and Santiago, and had inflicted 600 casualties on Government forces, including the capture of 286 prisoners. They said that the highway from Bayamo to Santiago, a distance of about 75 miles, was under rebel control. They placed rebel casualties at 27 dead and 50 wounded. The rebel broadcasts said that a Government battalion was holding out at Maffo, near the highway town of Contramaestre between Bayamo and Palma Soriano, but indicated that it was surrounded and that the town was virtually destroyed.

In Paris, NATO this date unanimously approved the final drafts of notes from the Western Big Three and West Germany, rejecting Soviet pressure regarding Berlin, the notes to be sent to Moscow prior to January 1.

In London, it was reported that Russia this date had rattled its ICBM and a hydrogen bomb warhead for it in defense of East Germany, with the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda stating: "Any provocation in West Berlin and attempted aggression may start a major war." The piece had been quoted by Moscow Radio.

In Little America, Antarctica, a ten-man ground party had departed this date to set up a U.S. auxiliary base 160 miles from Little America on the trail to Byrd Station.

Scientists from the Lockheed Missile Systems Division of Sunnyvale, Calif., predicted that the space art would be advanced enough to develop a giantic wheel in space, intended as a laboratory 500 miles above the earth, in about ten years. It would cost more than an estimated two billion dollars. The wheel would have five spokes and would be assembled in space, with ready-made units launched up to a construction crew. In operation it would support a scientific crew of ten men for six months, completely independent of supply from earth. It would have a nuclear power supply as it orbited the earth. The basic rocket which would launch the space station compartments into orbit would be a three-stage missile, according to the Lockheed proposal. The first stage would develop a million pounds of thrust and would be designed to be recoverable. The second stage would add 300,000 pounds of thrust or something less than the total power of the largest U.S. missile to date, the Atlas. The third stage would lift the payload into orbit. As soon as four of the sealed self-sufficient compartments were launched into orbit, the crew would move in with a rocket designed for assembly work and another designed to return to earth. The assembly rocket was dubbed by Lockheed scientists as the Astrotug, with the job of capturing all of the space laboratory compartments as they were launched aloft and to fit them together into the wheel-shaped space laboratory. The Lockheed proposal was presented by Saunders Kramer and Richard Byers before the fifth annual meeting of the American Astronautical Society of the American Association for Advancement of Science. The Astrotug would have to locate, identify and capture the 23 space station compartments as they were needed. Some 15 compartments would go into the rim of the wheel. Crewmen would be able to return to earth in a special reentry vehicle which would glide gradually into the earth's atmosphere and drop below the speed of sound some 25,000 feet above the earth. At that stage, the return vehicle would turn on a turbojet engine and fly as a normal airplane until it would be captured piggy-back style by a mother airplane and brought in for a landing.

The Rand Corporation in Washington, which did research work for the Pentagon, had estimated that within 18 months the Soviet Union would have 300 ICBM's and that at least half of them would be operational. The prediction had been made public during the week at a session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The deputy research director of the legislative reference service of the Library of Congress, had provided the estimate. He related it to an article about a Rand study in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. The article, by Albert Wohlstetter, said that the "delicate balance of terror" on which American policy was based was not automatic and that while feasible, "it will be much harder to achieve in the 1960s than is generally believed." He had been referring in part to the increased Soviet ICBM capabilities. The deputy research director of the Library of Congress said that the Soviet capability meant that it might be possible for the Russians to wipe out in a single blow the U.S. Strategic Air Command, the nation's principal retaliatory force.

The Associated Press reports that belated reports this date had increased the nation's death toll from traffic accidents during the four-day, 102-hour Christmas holiday weekend to nearly 600, at 592, with 93 persons having died in fires and 96 in miscellaneous accidents, for a total of 781. The long holiday, which had begun at 6:00 p.m. Christmas Eve, had ended the prior midnight. The number of traffic fatalities had been fewer than the pre-holiday estimate of 620. Early in the holiday, with highway deaths occurring at a much faster rate than anticipated, it appeared that the final count would be far greater than the estimate. But three-quarters of the way through the holiday, the rate of deaths had slowed as motorists, apparently shocked by the reported toll during the first three days, had exerted greater caution. Safety experts had expressed alarm at the slaughter on the highways from the start of the holiday period on the prior Wednesday evening, through late Saturday. They had feared that the pace would surpass the all-time record of 706 traffic fatalities set in a four-day 1956 Christmas weekend if the pace continued at the rate of seven fatalities per hour. The National Safety Council had been hopeful that the toll would not exceed its estimate of 620. The worst single fire had taken the lives of a mother and eight of her children in a farmhouse near Auburn, Wash. The record number of holiday fire deaths had been 111 during the four-day 1951 Christmas holiday.

In North Carolina, 24 people had been reported killed in traffic accidents, eight in fires and five in miscellaneous accidents. At least one person had died on an icy highway during the period but the Highway Patrol had noted that prolonged weekend rains had melted the ice in the western part of the state and also had apparently slowed down drivers.

In New York, it was reported that the costliest newspaper strike in the city's history had ended. Deliverers had gone back to work early this date with a new two-year contract, which gave them a $5.30 wage increase and fringe benefits. They had ratified the contract on Sunday by a vote of 2,091 to 537, ending the 20-day walkout. The strike had cost an estimated 50 million dollars. All four morning newspapers had published this date, with editions hitting the streets of the news-starved city at about 2:00 a.m., four hours after the end of the strike. They were the first newspapers available since December 11, when the nine major daily newspapers had halted operations. Plants of the five afternoon newspapers had operated again, resuming normal schedules. Hundreds of newsstand dealers had opened again. New Yorkers normally purchased 5.5 million copies of daily and 8.5 million copies of Sunday newspapers. A back-to-work call had gone out to the independent Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union's 4,400 members and to 15,000 non-striking newspaper employees laid off when the plants had shut down. Terms of the agreement had been settled by negotiators on Friday night. The new contract had included a $3.55 pay increase during the first year and a $1.75 increase the second year. Benefits included Columbus Day off as a ninth paid holiday and three days of sick leave annually, to begin in 1960. Unused sick leave would be paid in wages at the new scale. The deliverers also had won a reduction from 53 to 50 pounds in the weight of bundles they handled. The basic pre-strike wage had been $103.82 cents per week. The new pact was estimated to be worth seven dollars weekly to the delivery men. An attorney for the union said that the new contract would be effective retroactively to December 7, when the old pact had expired. The union president said that they were ready to go back to work at the best wages and working conditions the members of the union had ever had. Asked whether he thought the strike had been worthwhile, he said only that he was happy that it was over. The president of the Publishers Association of New York City estimated that the cost of the strike to the newspaper publishing business alone had been 25 million dollars in lost revenue.

In Parris Island, S.C., a Marine staff sergeant had pleaded not guilty at his general court-martial this date on charges that he assaulted and solicited money from members of an Ohio recruit platoon. The 26-year old Korean War veteran from Racine, Wisc., could receive a maximum penalty of 9 1/2 years in prison and a dishonorable discharge if convicted on all four counts. His military trial was the first of three scheduled for drill instructors who the previous summer had led the Steel Valley recruit platoon through its 12-week basic training program at the Marine training center at Parris Island. The staff sergeant was the senior drill instructor, charged with soliciting contributions from a platoon and with receiving a gift in the amount of $230. One charge alleged that he had intentionally done grievous bodily harm to a particular recruit by hitting him on the head with a plastic mess cup, causing a wound requiring 11 stitches. He was also charged with striking a named private with a mess cup. The defense, in its opening statement, claimed that the sergeant himself had repeatedly advised members of his platoon of Navy regulations against proffering gifts to supervisors. The defense also said that it would show that the private in question had received the scalp wound from a rifle sight in a training accident.

In Los Angeles, it was reported that a Japanese admiral had told an American schoolboy of his fear of a trap which had led him to withdraw his fleet when the Americans had invaded the Philippines during World War II. The 2,000-word letter from Vice-Admiral Kiyohide Shima to a 16-year old boy of Pacoima had broken the admiral's long silence on a mystery which had puzzled war historians. The boy had asked the admiral why he had pulled his forces out of the crucial battle of Leyte Gulf in October, 1944. He would use the information in a history term paper in junior high school. Expressing gratitude for the admiral's response, the boy added: "I hope I get an A on the paper." While U.S. forces were fighting for a foothold on Leyte, the admiral had withdrawn the ships of his Second Division from a running sea battle in Surigao Strait. He had written the student that the Japanese First Division of Vice-Admiral Nishimura had been destroyed by the Americans. His own flagship, the heavy cruiser Nachi, had been crippled by collision with another Japanese cruiser and was limited to a top speed of 20 knots. All of those factors had made him decide that the Americans were waiting for him in force. He said: "It was quite clear that we should only fall into a ready trap. I considered all such things—events, circumstances, possibilities. Then I came to my decision that it would be better to retreat from the strait and wait a chance to know how everything went." The Los Angeles Examiner, which had published the copyrighted letter, said that it was "certain to become one of the great historical documents of the war in the Pacific."

Also in Los Angeles, it was reported that the grief-stricken father of a murdered Santa Barbara nurse had met his son-in-law for the first time on Sunday. Friends said that the dead woman's husband had sobbed as he and her father discussed tentative arrangements for her funeral at a meeting in the husband's Hollywood apartment. The funeral would be private, followed by cremation, as requested by the 30-year old victim. The date of the funeral had not been set. Ventura County authorities charged that the woman had died because her mother-in-law, 54, had been jealous of the younger woman. At a grand jury session on Friday, two men repeated confessions which investigators said they had provided earlier, in which they told how the mother-in-law had offered them $6,000 to kill the woman who was five months pregnant. The body had been found December 21 in a shallow grave in Ventura County. The coroner's office said that the victim had been beaten and throttled and that death was the result of suffocation, possibly from being buried alive. The mother-in-law and the two men who had confessed would be arraigned in Ventura, 65 miles north of Los Angeles, on murder charges the following day.

In Atlanta, it was reported that police in neighboring states were on the lookout this date for two armed and dangerous convicts who had escaped from a Stone Mountain work detail after tying up a guard and six prisoners.

In Portland, Ore., a black cloth glove provided police with their only lead as the search for a Portland family of five entered its fourth week this date. The glove had been found Sunday on the shoulder of a highway near the site of an abandoned car about 45 miles east of Portland. Police had shown the gloves to relatives and one said that it might have belonged to the wife and mother of the family. Police planned to show it to more of the family's friends this date. The wife, husband and their three daughters had vanished on December 7 after setting out in their station wagon to find a Christmas tree. In New York, the only son of the couple, 28, said that he was convinced that his parents and sisters were dead. Police said that witnesses had reported seeing the abandoned car, reported stolen from Venice, Calif., parked along the highway near Cascade Locks since December 8, the day when the family had vanished. It was in a recheck of the area where the family had purchased gasoline with a credit card on December 7 that the glove had been discovered 15 feet from where the car was abandoned. Police had speculated that the family's station wagon might have plunged into an isolated canyon or river. The credit card purchase was the only thing to pinpoint the movements of the family. As indicated, late in 2024, a diver who had spent seven years seeking the long-unresolved mystery of what had happened to the family, located the car in the river at the Cascade Locks, and eventually had been able to ascertain that it had belonged to the family. Trace human remains and clothing belonging to the family were found inside the car, which had been buried beneath sediment at the bottom of the river bed. No indication has been ascertained as to whether the family merely suffered a fatal accident by driving into the Locks inadvertently, or whether there was some foul play involved, though the weight of opinion tends to be toward the former.

On the editorial page, "The Mess in Metropolitan Mecklenburg" indicates that a survey four years earlier had turned up 472 duplicate street names in Charlotte, complicating the efforts by the police and fire personnel to respond. It thus fails to see any humor in the duplications.

A new study by the Chamber of Commerce had produced more than 500 such identical or nearly identical street names. And the Chamber had not bothered to document names which sounded alike, for instance, the two Lee Avenues and Leigh Avenue. There were also two Lee Streets.

The City Council long earlier had recognized the need for an orderly street name system, but had not hesitated to duplicate more names on occasion. In January, 1955, it had indicated that "one more duplication wouldn't make a great deal of difference." It finds the attitude to be nonsense as each duplication compounded the confusion. It indicates that common sense demanded that corrections be made at once to the existing duplications and that there was no satisfactory reason why there ought be nine First Streets, nine Second Streets, four Third Streets, three Fourth Streets and three Fifth Streets in one metropolitan community. It finds the confusion not only not funny but potentially dangerous and urges straightening out the mess at once before it resulted in a major fire loss or crime.

"Passport-Misers Come Back for More" finds that the State Department did not seem to know where to stop when it came to being stingy about issuing passports. The Supreme Court the previous spring had told Secretary of State Dulles, in effect, that he could not withhold passports on his own personal "discretion". While the Court had not reached the constitutional question of whether travel could be restricted because of political belief, it did say that Congress would have to draft a uniform set of rules on the subject. Justice William O. Douglas, who had delivered the decision, had spoken of constitutional "liberty" to travel, which "we assume Congress will be faithful to respect."

But it was clear that the State Department would continue going in the same direction. The real issue had been, when the Court had denied passport discretion to the Secretary, that professional informants were by secret testimony preventing people from obtaining passports. The State Department security chief and passport miser, Roderick O'Connell, had appeared recently before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee to ask for legislation which would effectively allow the practice to continue.

When asked who the "known Communists" were who had applied for passports, an embarrassed Mr. O'Connell had confessed to the subcommittee that they were people who "would have been screened" before the Court's ruling. He said that he had been "somewhat imprecise" when he described them as "known Communists". He had produced a sample list of 30 controversial passport applicants, including such old-time fellow-travelers as Earl Browder, who had run for the presidency as a Communist, and Anna Louise Strong, American Trotskyite who had been booted from Russia in 1955. There had been a host of unknowns who were "reported to have been", "described as", "named as", or "alleged to have been" party functionaries of one sort or another. But there was no indication as to who had named them, only that they were "confidential informants" in the employ of the State Department, whose anonymous activity the Court was trying to curb in the first place.

It indicates that, as in the case of the notorious Harvey Matusow, who had confessed that he had lied in branding "known Communists", such faceless sources had more than once proved to be profiteering shams. The fact remained that, Communist or not, American citizens were being deprived of passports on the basis of political beliefs, which had not even been substantiated. It finds that the inescapable impression was that Congress, if it bothered to give the State Department the legislation, would be "waving chairs at toothless lions". The vast majority would go abroad upon receiving passports, "there to pluck eagle feathers, harmlessly, sophomorically, before admiring and approving friends. The question is: Would that be sedition—or entertainment? Our guess is, entertainment."

"Who Will Own the 'Speed of Light'?" indicates that it was struck by the controversy about who "owned" or would own "space", finding something missing, that the interstellar diplomats were decades behind in their science, as everyone with high school general science knew that since Albert Einstein, there was no longer just "space" but a "space-time continuum".

"Don't ask us for diagrams or formulas; it has to do with the speed of light and comes much clearer in a limerick we know: 'There was a young lady named Bright/ Who could travel much faster than light;/ She departed one day,/ In a relative way,/ And came back on the previous night."

Distances in outer space, the farther one got, had to be measured in light-years and light traveled at 186,300 miles per second, about 6,000 billion miles in a year. It leaves it to suppose, for instance, that if one owned a hunk of outer space several light-years away, from a position on earth, by the time the person knew that he owned it, that person would not really know that he owned it. Thus, there could be no "massive retaliation" as a means of aggression, for by the time some spotter at Mount Palomar detected the aggression, a rocket ship would have to be dispatched faster than the speed of light to put it down.

Physicists generally believed that such speed was impossible. "But just suppose the Russians get to tinkering with the speed of light. It has us worried silly."

A piece from the Shelby Daily Star, titled "Get the Point?" asserts that medical science could make a great contribution to the Red Cross blood program if they could find a way to eliminate the finger-pricking portion of the donor's visit. The writer points out that he was having to type the piece with only four fingers on one hand because one digit was still throbbing from giving blood and it had reduced his hunt 'n' peck method as a typist by 25 percent for at least an hour after the donation.

Nurses and doctors scoffed at complaints concerning the finger-pricking, suggesting that any full-blooded American ought not worry about a little pin-prick. "We'll have to assume that only full-blooded people go to the bloodmobile. But the finger deal is still a stumbling block."

The medical people said that the reason for it was to determine whether there was enough iron in the donor's blood to be useful, but it suggests that there had to be another way, that perhaps one could spit on a nail the night before and check the rate of rust or perhaps a Geiger counter could be geared to iron instead of radiation. It insists that science had to find a way around the prick or the trip to the bloodmobile would be less of an enjoyable coffee break and more of a trip to a torture chamber. "Get the point?"

Drew Pearson, still on his annual Christmas trip to Alaska to entertain American troops, has his column again written by his assistant, Jack Anderson, who indicates that Dr. Bernard Schwartz, who had been the erstwhile counsel for the House Legislative Oversight subcommittee, and the previous February had brought charges against White House chief of staff Sherman Adams and FCC commissioner Richard Mack, was about to explode another bombshell. He would soon go to press with a book charging that the subcommittee had failed to investigate several scandals which he had started to develop during his six months as chief counsel.

Among the cases he claimed had been neglected were the political intervention by White House press secretary James Hagerty in an Albany-Schenectady television case; exemption from SEC regulations of a company "controlled by a member of the President's Cabinet"; pressure on the Civil Aeronautics Board by "a high Department of Commerce official" to award the Great Circle Pacific air route to an airline which had later hired the same official at a high salary; back-stage lobbying by Vice-President Nixon's former campaign manager, Murray Chotiner, in several cases, including a Fresno, Calif., television application; and "criminal improprieties" in the Interstate Commerce Commission brought to the attention of Dr. Schwartz by a "retired employee".

He had caused a front-page uproar earlier in the year with similar charges that the subcommittee had suppressed an investigation of Mr. Adams and Mr. Mack. He was promptly hauled before his own subcommittee as a witness and ordered to put up or shut up, causing him to fire back with facts that forced the subcommittee to go ahead with the year's principal investigation, which had led to the ouster of both Mr. Adams and Mr. Mack. In the new investigation he was preparing, he accused the subcommittee of conducting a "grasshopper" investigation, which had jumped around without landing on the big scandals. He said: "Chairman Oren Harris and his colleagues have not gone further than they have been compelled to by press and public pressure." It was impossible for him to present many details about "the various cases and leads which were in the files when I left the subcommittee," because the files had been taken from him and the libel laws prevented a private citizen from making specific charges without documentation.

Mr. Anderson indicates that he had packed enough explosive information into his new book, however, to blow the lid off a few more Washington scandals. Citing some of the oversight subcommittee's oversights, he had stated: "I had slated some 17 comparative television cases for full-scale inquiry."

In addition to the cases involving Mr. Hagerty and Mr. Chotiner, he had listed others in Petersburg, Va., "where the deciding FCC vote was cast by a commissioner who had been entertained by the winning applicant"; in Chicago "where there were constant private meetings between network officials and commission members"; in Madison, Wisc., "where a commissioner participated in a victory celebration of the winning applicant"; and in Mobile, Ala., "where a leading Republican had influenced the commission against a Democratic newspaper"; plus clouded cases in Indianapolis, Denver, St. Louis, Tampa, Hartford and elsewhere.

Dr. Schwartz had decried also the "almost complete lack of effective FCC regulations of telephones and telegraphs" and had demanded to know why the FCC, under chairman George McConnaughey, a former telephone company lawyer, had overridden staff recommendations and terminated an investigation into American Telephone & Telegraph and why the same Commission permitted AT&T to earn during 1955-57 some 159 million dollars more than that to which they had been entitled under the generally followed theory of rate-making.

Joseph Alsop, in Berlin, indicates that Premier Nikita Khrushchev's threats to withdraw unilaterally from East Berlin and demands that the Western allies withdraw from West Berlin and that West Berlin would then become a "free city", were primarily intended to secure the surrender of free Berlin and not to force the West to recognize the East German government, to promote German confederation, or to produce another summit conference.

He suggests that the moment when the conception had formed to undertake the scheme had been the previous summer when the Kremlin extended a huge credit to the East German government to help it get its economic and political house in order. Mr. Khrushchev had been reportedly severe with the "slimy" Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader.

In almost every discussion Mr. Khrushchev had with Westerners, one of the two or three main themes had been the need to "recognize and accept the status quo," meaning several things, one of which was recognition and acceptance of the status quo in Eastern Europe. But that status quo could never really be accepted by the West as long as the West insisted on protecting free Berlin, as the Eastern European status quo could never be stabilized as long as Berlin lived in glittering freedom in the very midst of the drab slave state which was East Germany. For that reason, Mr. Khrushchev called Berlin a "cancer".

The great number of refugees from East Germany into Berlin was serious, but not the root cause of the trouble. Otherwise, steps would already have been taken to stop the hemorrhage, as could quite easily be done by Draconian police measures. The often silly Western propaganda carried on from free Berlin was not the root of the trouble either. The root of the trouble was the city, itself.

He suggests that anyone who doubted that point would only need to drive to the Brandenberger tor, where slave Berlin began, and note the contrast between the terrible grayness on one side of the line and the brilliance and bustle on the other, a contrast which could not be hidden. Those who had experienced wartime internment knew only too well that the first rule of all efficient commandants was that if the inmates could be made to forget there was any other way of life, which was the case after awhile, the camp settled into a routine, however horrible. Mr. Ulbricht was merely the commandant of an unusually large internment camp, which could not be made to settle down because of free Berlin. As long as East Germany could not be truly stabilized, Eastern Europe could not be.

The surrender of Berlin was not the only aim of Mr. Khrushchev, also seeking to promote the fearful series of other Western defeats and surrenders, in all parts of the world, from Europe to the Far East, which would inevitably result from the surrender of Berlin. In this manner, as the Russian Premier saw it, he would assist the course of history. He had just finished trying to help out history in the same way but on a smaller scale regarding the offshore Nationalist Chinese island of Quemoy. Surrender there would have produced the same kind of result in the Far East which surrender of Berlin would have produced in the world. But at Quemoy, Mr. Khrushchev and his Chinese Communist allies had run into Secretary of State Dulles.

The Western alliance was far from presenting the same monolithic appearance as the partnership between Nationalist Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek and Mr. Dulles. Mr. Dulles could not make the decisions about Berlin virtually alone as he had regarding Quemoy. He had to have the British, French and West Germans with him in Europe. Mr. Khrushchev no doubt hoped that objections to firmness by one or the other of those partners would hamstring Mr. Dulles and hence might think that he had a better chance regarding Berlin than Quemoy. "Fortunately the signs to date suggest that these calculations will finally prove wrong."

Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, says that he had been reviewing the bundles under his Christmas tree with great suspicion and could tell to almost the tiniest detail what he had received. Prior to Christmas every year, he would write a note to Santa Claus telling him what he did not want, which was exactly what he got, things that were advertised as gifts in the better slick magazines. For instance, he knew that he would receive at least one pair of electrical socks at a cost of $12.95, which would act as tiny electric blankets, the battery for which was carried in his pocket, and would keep his feet warm all day. He would also receive a pair of cufflinks made of gold teeth for $60, with a matching tie tack costing $27.50, and one did not even have to send one's own teeth.

He goes on in that vein, describing the gifts he would inevitably receive which he did not want. "If these ghoulish toys are in my Christmas packages I'm going to start having the martinis analyzed when they flow from my special martini fountain (no price tag). I can remember when package-opening time was real fun. Grandma always sent handkerchiefs, and a fellow had a real sense of security."

A letter writer says that he was advised by the public that based on past history, there was a rule or order by one of the departments or the City Council to publish the pictures of all drunks in the daily newspapers, and he suggests that people request that the Council do so again in the interest of the public, for all such persons, not just those who were the offspring of a Charlotte leader. "We all know that liquor and gasoline will not mix successfully, so let's try to keep them separated. If you haven't tried them, give water and milk a chance."

A letter writer commends the editorial "Please Save Us from the Liberators" and assures that Senator Paul Douglas would continue to try to reform the South. He says that some months earlier, he had written Senator Sam Ervin regarding the "antics" of Senator Douglas and had asked his advice on whether he should write to the Senator in an effort to reform his thinking. Senator Ervin had replied that he did not think it would do any good to write him. Nevertheless, he had done so and had received a nice letter in reply, but believes that Senator Ervin had been correct. He finds that the Senator from Illinois looked on the South as would a modern-day carpetbagger sent forth to reform the region overnight or else. He suspects that the Senator would have the blessing of several highly placed persons if he could use the law on the South, sending again the bayonets as during Reconstruction or bullying it into submission or jailing the people outright for not becoming immediately reformed. He finds that the Southern Democrat, in many ways, was the hope of the world but that the Douglases of Illinois, including the Civil War-era Senator Stephen A. Douglas, had never seen it that way.

Just how, historically, he manages to equate the pro-slavery Senator Stephen Douglas, much more akin to the latter-day segregationists of the South, to the liberal Senator Paul Douglas is a mystery which only a confused and brainwashed traditional Southerner could manage without being embarrassed by his apparent lack of appreciation of history, either in the overall scope of it or in the devil-beset details. He would likely feel right at home today among the Trumpy-Dumpy-Doers. And, by 1973, he likely would not be singing the praises of Senator Ervin or seeking out his advice on anything. But, we do not know that to be a fact, and the plasticity of the minds of such people, so plastic that they can fit around almost any seemingly discordant concepts, no matter how incongruous to one another, never ceases to amaze.

Fifth Day of Christmas: No five-spoked space wheel or five shut-down NYC afternoon newspapers or three Fifth Streets in Charlotte or five gold hula-hoops out on a ledge.

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