The Charlotte News
Monday, February 17, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, in a new letter to Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin, had suggested that both sides work through "normal channels" for an eventual East-West summit conference, describing present efforts as being at an "impasse".
In Chicago, a strategy conference had opened this date of top business, government and military specialists, with a keynote of warning that Russia might win a commanding military lead over the U.S. within the ensuing decade.
In Seoul, South Korea, it was reported that Pyongyang Radio in North Korea admitted this date that a South Korean passenger airliner, with two Americans and 30 others aboard, had flown to Communist North Korea the previous day.
In Jakarta, Indonesia's new rebel government on Sumatra had maintained an economic barrage at the central Government on Java this date, with no indication thus far of its effectiveness.
In Cairo, President Gamal Abdel Nasser conferred this date with U.S. Ambassador Raymond Hare at President Nasser's home, the Ambassador having requested the meeting.
In New York, one of the leading firms in the field of pay television had charged this date that a "'big lie' technique" was being used by major television networks in a campaign against pay television.
In Chattanooga, Tenn., a gun battle in a rural house the previous night had left a Michigan man dead and another charged with murder. A patrolman identified the dead man as being from Detroit. A man from Dayton, Tenn., had been charged with murder and released on a $2,500 bond. Whether the source of their dispute had been the teaching of evolution in the schools was not indicated, but they proved the theory correct in the process.
The Associated Press reports that the coldest weather of the winter had moved over a wide area of the Eastern U.S. this date in the wake of a raging snowstorm during the weekend, with at least 127 deaths having been attributed to the weather, sweeping from Mississippi to Maine. Little relief was forecast, as metropolitan areas began to dig their way out of traffic-crippling snows and normal business activities had been suspended in many smaller communities. In the Northeast, whether bureaus had said that the bitter cold would continue probably through Wednesday, and New York City faced the possibility of more snow by Thursday. The temperature in New York City had been 6 degrees, 15 below zero in upstate New York, while it reached down to 3 in St. Louis. States having large numbers of storm fatalities included Maryland, with 11, New Jersey, with 12, New York, with 13, and Pennsylvania, with 17. New England and upper New York bore much of the brunt of the snowstorm which this date was swirling in unabated power over the Gulf of St. Lawrence. A state of emergency had been declared in many New England towns where more than two feet of snow had accumulated. Drifts of up to 30 feet had been reported around Buffalo.
It was so cold that in Asbury Park, N.J., when the annual Jersey Coast Boat Show had closed its doors on Saturday night, the exhibitors found piles of snow outside, prompting a dozen of them to curl up in the sleeping facilities provided in the boats which they were exhibiting.
Emery Wister of The News tells of the forecast in Charlotte being zero for the following morning, after the low had reached seven during the current morning, the lowest reading in Charlotte since January 27, 1940, when it had reached three below zero. A high of 20 was predicted for this date. The high on Sunday had been 30, after the temperature had started dropping in Charlotte on Saturday at midnight, with the temperature continuing to drop despite the sun shining brightly all day on Sunday. As of the present, the daily February temperature was eight degrees below normal and unless there was a warming trend, it might become the coldest February on record. It had been reported from East Mecklenburg High School, where a cantankerous heating system was installed, that the building was colder than usual, though students normally had to don coats to stay warm. A number of fires had firemen hopping all night in Charlotte and plumbers had a busy day repairing pipes which had frozen. Wrecker services had also been busy extracting weather-bound cars. The Weather Bureau had said that the polar air mass was presently centered over Missouri and would give North Carolina cold weather for this night. The temperature had reached 23 below zero on Mt. Mitchell the previous night, the lowest temperature ever recorded in North Carolina.
Donald MacDonald of The News indicates that he and photographer Jeep Hunter had surveyed the weather situation in Charlotte this date and found that the low temperatures should not happen to such nice people, with the firemen having to stay out all night on the coldest night in over a decade.
The newspaper's garden editor, Cora Harris, indicated that broadleaf evergreens might lose leaves because of the extreme cold, but that the branches might still be alive and ought not be pruned. She said that the branches of the broadleaf evergreens would be brittle and should not be cut, that if the leaves dropped, the stems or branches should be left alone as there might be life in the branches which would be evident in the spring. It's all in the sap, the tree's life blood, not the leaves.
Julian Scheer of The News indicates that the next wise guy who said, "Is it cold enough for you?" would receive a flick on his frozen ear. He says that it was indeed cold enough for the whole freezing winter, the present year's and the next one. And it would also be cold enough the following day and the one after that as well. He says that they were indignant because they were supposed to be in a Southern climate and were thin-blooded Southerners. They had been warned about that type of weather and the weather man had done a good job of building up the public for it, but… They were indignant about the car steaming over during the morning, about the furnace which could not keep the house warm enough, about the fuel bill rising faster than Explorer, about the water pipes busting, about the office being half warm this date causing the worker to have to don a sweater, for a job which kept a person outside all day, for a trip which had been canceled by the bad weather, for the child with a runny nose from snow-playing all weekend, for having had the person's turn come up this date for carpooling, etc. "We'll warm up to it sooner or later. We'll warm up, all right, as soon as the weather does!"
In Charlotte, over 100 million dollars in currency and securities had been moved from the old Wachovia Bank Building to the new one the prior Saturday, the movement having been made by trucks of the Armored Motor Service, completed during the afternoon in a driving snowstorm. The cashier of the bank said that two teams of experienced bank employees had been called in to move the money and securities and each team had consisted of two persons, one team having prepared a shipment to the new location, and as soon as it was completed, the team had gone to work in the new building to receive the shipment, while the second team then prepared the second shipment and received it at the new location. Lock boxes had been moved to the vault the previous week.
The Reverend Billy Graham, according to reports received in Charlotte this date via the Associated Press out of Texas, might be suffering from altitude sickness and he may have been flown from Mexico City to San Antonio for treatment. Mrs. Graham, contacted in Montreat, N.C., said that she knew nothing of the reported illness but suspected altitude sickness may have affected him, as he had experienced the difficulty once in Switzerland and had complained about "feeling peculiar" in a telephone call to his home on Friday night. The evangelist had been broadcasting from Mexico City the previous day.
On the editorial page, "Some Notes on Bombs & Brotherhood" indicates that it was Brotherhood Week, as would be made evident in various speeches, gatherings and public proclamations.
It preferred to regard the annual observance as a celebration of man's progress toward ridding society of baseless hates and fears rather than as a time of exhortations and admonitions. "For all the current frenzies over racial issues and the moonlit marches of sheeted boobs, social manias erected on the shoddy sills of 'difference' between human beings, their religions, customs and colors, are slowly crumbling away in America. That shrill note in the cries of the hate merchants is one of alarm—not triumph. Man will retain his 'difference' in myriad divisions of race, religion and custom, but the time will come when these divisions will become matters of human interest and sources of understanding rather than of sick suspicion."
It finds that Brotherhood Week had arrived in the Charlotte area with some "icy reminders that termites are still at work behind the façade of good will", that despite the efforts of the police, the "mental pygmies" who had endangered the lives of 40 Charlotte residents by setting up a bomb at Temple Beth-El the prior November, were still at large, as were those who had attempted to destroy Temple Emanuel in Gastonia. Meanwhile, County police were holding five men accused of trying to dynamite the Woodland School, a black school, which was the scene of a cross-burning earlier in the month.
Although the hate merchants and boobs were a distinct minority, they could soil in an instant the fruits of years of effort by men of good will to promote human understanding and accord. Despite the speeches, gatherings and public proclamations, the "crackpot fringe" never heard about Brotherhood Week. It suggests therefore that the admonition ought be that although the destructiveness of the hate merchants might be aimed at one or another group, the injury was inflicted on everyone. "Hate, like all other diseases, is no respecter of persons."
But these superannuated juvenile delinquents who engaged in such activity, as with their somewhat younger counterparts in ordinary vandalism, were so possessed with hate for the generalized other that to condemn their actions as "hate" was only to give them the satisfaction of knowing they had accomplished their goal of making the other uneasy and perhaps as little able to sleep at night as they obviously were, though the reason for it was quite different.
"It's Time To Save the Symphony" finds that the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Jak Zadikov, the previous Saturday night had demonstrated the breadth and beauty of its expressive power. It had also provided the orchestra's board of directors an opportunity to promote their drive for community support, as well as giving the public an opportunity to show its gratitude for the fine music in Charlotte.
The appeal was for subscribers to provide the additional support needed to keep the Orchestra operating, which all orchestras had to have, as ticket sales made up only about half of the normal operating expenses of any large orchestra. Many individuals and firms would be contacted in the process and it suggests that the burden of support ought be shared by many, as many enjoyed the music.
The Charlotte Symphony was holding on, despite only slight finances, and could be restored to economic health provided the citizens in Charlotte and surrounding communities wanted the enrichment to continue by supporting it.
"Wanted: Cannon that Conked Hooker" discusses the move by the National Park Service to acquire El Dominante, a cannon which had been parked in the front yard of Alexander Graham Junior High School, and before that, at the Military Institute in Charlotte, placed originally by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909, and exchange it for a genuine Confederate cannon out of the Civil War, to be acquired from the battlegrounds. El Dominante would be placed at Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Fla.
It finds the swap fair as Florida had more truck with the Spanish than had the Carolinas, while the Carolinas had been more heavily engaged than Florida in the Civil War. Yet, the UDC possessed the cannon and it seemed unseemly for them to yield it to the Federal Government without exacting the same heavy price which had always been paid to gain possession of Confederate cannon. It suggests that the Daughters demand that the Park Service rummage around the battlefields to see if it could produce the cannon which had hurled a ball toward a colonnaded house at Chancellorsville, which had slapped Union General Joseph Hooker into a daze which had retreated less slowly than his Army.
It had thought also to suggest that the Park Service might ship from South Carolina one of the cannons which had reduced Fort Sumter in April, 1861. It concludes that all it really wanted was some sharp trading, not a Disunited Daughters of the Confederacy.
It must have watched "Maverick" the previous night.
"U.S. Complacency's Broken Crutch" indicates that Americans, who had smugly resisted seeing portents of Soviet scientific prowess in the flight of the two Sputnik satellites, had a simple explanation, that captured German scientists after the war had supplied the skills required to put the Russian satellites into orbit, that as a nation, Russia remained without such skills, with no hope of challenging the technical superiority of the West.
But it finds that the argument avoided the point that Russia had succeeded in making startling scientific progress and the fact that a ballistic missile made by German scientists was no more humane than one made by Russians. Thus, the argument being put forward was not any real argument but a device for softening the impact of the facts, with the portent of the satellites remaining clear, that Russian technology, which had been far more primitive than that in the U.S. at the end of World War II, had achieved a rate of scientific and technological development which was faster than that of the U.S., as had been recently stated by Walter Lippmann.
As for the German scientists, included among those who had been responsible for the Jupiter-C rocket which had launched the Explorer into orbit, were Wernher Von Braun, Kurt Debus, Hermann Oberth, and Ernst Stuhlinger, among others.
Some mystery surrounded the part in which German scientists had contributed to Russia's successful satellite launchings, but there was no mystery about their part in launching Explorer. A team of more than a hundred German scientists, headed by Dr. Von Braun, had been essentially responsible for doing so.
A piece from the Sanford Herald, titled "Who Ordered Cole Slaw?" indicates that there was good news in the recent edition of the Moore County News, supplied by Penn Seawell, who had written in an editorial page column that cole slaw was not an habitual dish at the Carthage Hotel, where he often stopped to muse and ponder. The Carthage was becoming noted all over the South for its meals, the hospitality of its management and preparation of the food which it served, as well as its relatively low price. But there was no cole slaw unless one asked for it.
It indicates that in the average Southern restaurant, cole slaw was as much a standard part of the table setting as paper napkins and a smear of margarine on a piece of cardboard. Usually, it was pale and watery and sometimes had been further contaminated with celery seed and a solution stained with mustard.
It suggests that cabbage was no worse than Jeter Lester's turnips and was no doubt good for the pigs, and so could be justified. But the South could not justify its policy of shoving cole slaw at hungry people and so it hopes that the host at the Carthage would live long and prosper on sounder fare.
Drew Pearson indicates that how friendly the FCC had been with the heads of the major networks had been revealed in private correspondence between Frank Stanton, president of CBS, and George McConnaughey, former chairman of the FCC, and his son. It revealed that instead of operating in a quasi-judicial posture, the FCC members had lunch, junketed with and asked favors of the executives whom they were supposed to regulate for the benefit of the public, with the public having little opportunity to lunch or dine with the commissioners or take them on free airplane rides.
In the case of Mr. McConnaughey, he even had the temerity to ask the president of the leading network for a job for his son, despite the fact that he was passing on important network applications. Mr. Stanton, of whom he had sought the favor, had been careful not to place himself in an embarrassing position and gave the son wise advice, not to take a job with a television station which had matters pending before the Commission. In contrast, Pan American Airways, which had matters pending constantly before the Civil Aeronautics Board and the White House, had hired the President's nephew, Milton Eisenhower, Jr.
The first document was a telegram dated November 11, 1955, from Mr. Stanton's secretary in New York, asking to wire the first name of the son of Mr. McConnaughey, with a notation at the bottom that the reply had been returned by phone, that the name was Dave. Mr. Stanton then had two meetings with Dave and then had written his father on December 3 while simultaneously writing the son. He also wrote a letter to Hugh Terry, president of KLZ-TV, a CBS affiliate in Denver.
Stewart Alsop indicates that members of the Federal regulatory agencies could be compared to mice trying to ride tigers in the dark, that they were relatively low-paid, little-known persons who were supposed to exercise life-and-death power over a huge segment of American industry, but operated in the dark most of the time, as ordinarily, the press and public paid very little attention to what they did. Federal agencies were getting more than their share of attention at present because of the controversy stirred up in the House subcommittee which was supposed to investigate them.
One reason for the controversy was the personality of the fired subcommittee counsel, Dr. Bernard Schwartz, who appeared to be a not unusual phenomenon, a foolish man with high intelligence. But there were also other reasons why such fierce emotions had been stirred.
Historian Sydney Hyman had suggested that the regulatory agencies had more power, in terms of "decisions which count most in the day-to-day life of Americans," than did the President, the Congress, or the Supreme Court. Mr. Alsop suggests that it might be putting the case too strongly, but it was certainly true that the power of the agencies was, at least theoretically, great. They determined how much people would pay for tickets on interstate transportation or gas for the stove, who owned television stations, etc. In the process, the agencies made decisions which ran into the millions of dollars of profit or loss for industries they regulated.
Some of the people populating the agencies were able and dedicated, but it was more or less accidental when they were, as membership on one of the regulatory agencies was a minor plum in the bureaucracy. Those who had the power of awarding television licenses, for example, worth tens of millions of dollars, received the inadequate salaries of a middle-level bureaucrat, and the members, including the chairman, lacked the prestige and personal glitter which attracted good people to government. No one could likely have named the chairman of the FCC, for example, or the Civil Aeronautics Board before the current controversy had been stirred. Even the press associations did not bother to provide regular coverage of those agencies, leaving it to the trade magazines which were naturally sympathetic to the industry to be regulated.
Thus, a commission member who alienated a powerful industry was likely to be bashed by the trade magazines, while his act of defiance was ignored elsewhere. In the past, members of the regulatory agencies had found good jobs in the industries they were supposed to regulate, making it no wonder that many members tended to identify themselves with the interests of those industries. It had never occurred undoubtedly to John Doerfer, chairman of the FCC, that he was doing anything at all unusual in accepting favors from the communications industry.
The industries supposedly regulated were, without exception, engaged in the business of politics, contributing heavily to both political parties, usually not so openly expressed as in the now-famous letter of Texas Republican national committeeman H. J. Porter, in which the latter had virtually invited his fellow Texans to invest in the Northern Republicans to get the bill to deregulate gas passed. But their purpose was there just the same.
Representative Oren Harris of Arkansas, the chief enemy of Dr. Schwartz, was both a Democrat and sponsor of the year's gas deregulation bill, with gas regulation by the Federal Power Commission already virtually nonexistent. Most of the other good friends of the gas industry were also Democrats.
As another example, Pan American Airways, a master of politics, had at least as much influence in the Truman Administration as in the present one, and had at least as many Democratic Congressional friends as Republicans. When the chairman of the CAB had refused to release the files on two cases involving Pan American, he had suggested that, if the committee insisted, correspondence with Congressmen could also be released, a veiled threat causing as many Democrats to shiver as Republicans.
Mr. Alsop concludes that such facts suggested why there was such frantic resistance on every side to any searching probe of the regulatory agencies, and that it was a good bet that the controversy revealed by Dr. Schwartz would be quelled and no really serious investigation of the agencies made.
Marquis Childs, in Detroit, again looks at the automobile industry, indicating it might determine the future with its great struggle just ahead involving the forces of a dominating industry, which had come a long way since the age of the T Model, which had been manufactured to sell for $500, while the sleek new models were selling for five or six times that amount, a measure of the changes which had occurred in the 40 years or more in the industry and in the country.
The impending struggle was regarding
a new kind of collective bargaining demand, profit-sharing by workers
as a matter of right. On the one side were the three major
manufacturers, G.M., Ford and Chrysler, which had all but a small
fraction of the automotive business, while on the other side was a
trade union, the UAW, with powers unknown in the era of the Tin
Lizzie
Detroit was again a battleground, as the deadline for beginning contract negotiations between G.M. and the UAW was March 29, with a new contract having to be agreed on within two months after that date to avoid a strike by the UAW which would bring the assembly line to a halt.
Both sides had issued propaganda statements before the Kefauver anti-monopoly committee and were presently sending scouting parties out to gauge what the respective strength of each side would be when the showdown would come.
The present recession had a lot to do with that strength, as neither the companies nor the union executives believed that the automotive industry had the slightest chance of the upturn in March which the President was predicting. They expected that unemployment would increase rather than decrease and when they talked in private, the company executives spoke frankly of yet further plant closings and work suspensions.
In the testimony before the Kefauver committee, various methods to remedy the recession had been suggested. Theodore Yntema, vice-president for finance at Ford, had suggested that which he believed would be a quick cure, not proposing reduction of taxes but providing a moratorium on the collection of personal income tax such that Federal withholding could be stopped immediately, in which case, he said, "the depression will vanish like the mist under the sun."
Walter Reuther of UAW had put forward a profit-sharing plan not just as a temporary remedy for the recession but as a panacea for the dilemma which invariably tended to wipe out wage increases. Under his plan, after the companies had paid all basic costs, including the "basic dividend" to stockholders and bonuses to executives out of a profit margin of 10 percent, "excess profits" would then be divided, half to stockholders and executives, a fourth to wage and salaried workers and another fourth to consumers through a year-end rebate on the cars which they had bought. He also proposed a generous wage increase and fringe benefit package to put to management.
The company executives believed that Mr. Reuther would never call a strike to obtain the profit-sharing plan, that he would obtain his wage increase, or part of it, and car prices would only rise as a result, with the blame then placed on the union.
Robert C. Ruark, in London, says
that he had talked by phone to New York and had been told that CBS
had just fired Ted Husing
Mr. Husing, the dean of sports broadcasters, had become quite ill with a brain tumor in 1954, losing complete control of his faculties, only after a long recuperative process having become sufficiently able to return to work. At one point, he had made $250,000 per year and had returned to work for $150 per week. He had also always been quite generous. He had re-obtained the partial use of his faculties, such that he was gifted with flawless flashbacks but could not focus on the present. Working with Tom Harmon, the aging All-American, he was doing West Coast sports broadcasts as color man to Mr. Harmon's play-by-play, and had been able to use his remarkable memory to recall events going back to 1935, for instance, during the broadcasts. It had not worked as CBS said that his voice register was not right and he was unable to perform his chores.
Someone had asked Mr. Husing what he would do next and he said that he would "starve". Mr. Ruark suggests that CBS might have quietly included him in its budget along with the martinis, airline tickets and nightclub tabs which went into its annual expenses while placing emphasis on astronomical salaries for comedians and old movies. Mr. Husing's suave, bland voice had been a voice of America as much as Artie Shaw had been the man with the clarinet who came to the listener in the dreary night. Football particularly had been his forte, as much as Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski had been football.
He believes that any industry owed a debt to the people who had made it and that radio certainly owed a decent, comfortable old age living to Mr. Husing, "even if it means cutting down on the luncheon tabs at Toots'."
Speaking of sports, not in The News this date, the evangelistic Krusade of Klan Grand Dragon of the Carolinas, James Cole, scheduled for the prior Saturday night near Burlington, had been cancelled because of the snow. The weather did not want the Klan to assemble in the name of God, even their totemic god, to hear "The Truth about Maxton" from Mr. Cole.
A letter writer from Clinton, S.C., indicates that UAW president Walter Reuther was a piker when it came to sharing the profits. "The Preacher said in Ecclesiastes: 'The profit of the earth is for all.'"
A letter writer indicates that the National Association for Prevention of Rat Trapping, meeting in its annual convention, had passed a resolution protesting the use of mice and rats in airborne space vehicles by amateur rocketeers. He finds that even when precautions were taken, certain casualties were to be expected in the experiments, including the loss of eyesight, fingers, hands and human lives. He indicates that if fireworks were not against the law, they could buy a 25-cent skyrocket which would probably go twice as high with considerably less danger than the objects they were shooting up at present. He suggests that in a future war, the rodents could be trapped and flown over enemy territory, to be parachuted down, where they would infiltrate the enemy's warehouses, homes and factories. Soon they would eat and destroy the enemy's food supply and clothing, thus prompting surrender. He insists that American mice and rats constituted the nation's greatest potential defense weapon and that it had to protect them.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.