The Charlotte News
Tuesday, April 15, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Havana that the guerrillas of Fidel Castro had staged hit-and-run raids in three Cuban provinces this date in their war against El Presidente Fulgencio Batista. A rebel band had burned six large tobacco warehouses in Pinar del Rio Province of western Cuba, with an estimated damage of $40,000. In Oriente Province, 600 miles east of Havana, rebel units had blazed with gunfire at vehicles and trains. Communications between the Oriente capital of Santiago and the rest of Cuba remained out. In Las Villas Province of central Cuba, between 200 and 300 rebels had concentrated on sabotaging transportation and communications. The Government had sent reinforcements to La Coloma in Pinar del Rio to run down a band of about 50 rebels who had landed over the weekend on a yacht from Mexico. Army headquarters said that six of the invading rebels had been killed by El Presidente's troops. Government forces had seized the yacht El Corojo in La Coloma Bay, indicating that it was owned by a Cuban doctor, Diego Cesar Rodriguez, who had left for Tampa five days before the landing, and was a former member of the Cuban House of Representatives. The Army also claimed it had seized quantities of arms and ammunition which the invaders had cached in a farmhouse owned by the brother of Dr. Rodriguez. The rebels had scattered into the hills after landing, apparently to join a band of 80 others roaming the area. If the new group kept out of Army hands, it would be in a position to open up a third front in the guerrilla war against El Presidente. The eastern province of Oriente, where Sr. Castro had landed from Mexico with 81 men in December, 1956, was the focal point of the revolt. A second front was operating in central Cuba's Las Villas Province. The main rebel force in Oriente had struck at several points around Guantánamo, site of the U.S. Navy base. Army headquarters said that the insurgents had suffered heavy losses. The rebels had shot up Caimanera, a sugar mill town north of the base. There were no casualty reports, but the Army said that four rebels had been slain in an attack on Jamaica, a town 6 miles north of Guantánamo, and that 26 had been killed in the town of Lima, near the base.
A witness told the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct of unions and management that Ray Cohen, a lieutenant of Jimmy Hoffa, had "stacked" the meeting at which Mr. Cohen had seized control of Philadelphia Teamsters Union Local 107 in 1953. Raymond Kelly, former official of the local, had testified as the first witness in hearings by the Committee to explore charges that corruption and goon-squad violence had marked Mr. Cohen's administration of the local. Mr. Kelly, a portly motor court operator from St. Augustine Beach, Fla., said that Mr. Cohen had later bragged that "he thought he did a goddamn swell job" the night his followers had installed him as the local's secretary-treasurer and real boss, by shouting down attempts to nominate rival candidates. The hearing opened with Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, the chairman, reading a prepared statement indicating that, among other things, the evidence would regard allegations of bribery and extortion. He said that not the least of the charges was that favoritism had been extended to certain companies which gave those firms competitive advantage over their rivals, and that the committee would be interested in determining whether any financial favors had been offered to union officials by management. He did not mention the name of Mr. Hoffa, president of the Teamsters, on whose hand-picked election slate Mr. Cohen had been elevated to the post of an international trustee of the union the prior fall.
Senator McClellan challenged the Congress this date to show the courage to chart by law a code for labor union leaders and to impose tough penalties on those who strayed from it. He announced that he was introducing a bill designed to curb abuses by "arrogant and dishonest union officials", that it had been based on findings of the Committee, but that he was acting only as an individual Senator and not on behalf of the Committee in introducing it. The measure would give the Secretary of Labor broad new powers to police and clean up union affairs, and would punish as felonies such crimes as bribery, extortion, collusion or falsification of union books and records. It also would arm the Secretary with authority to void union elections upon a finding of fraud or improper practice in the balloting. Its provisions would strip unions of their Federal tax exempt status and deny them any standing before the NLRB for failure to comply with the measure's strict provisions. The Senator said that the Committee's hearings had shown exploitation of union members and the public by arrogant and crooked union leaders, which he said had "reached proportions that … constitute a serious threat to free trade unionism…" and that the practices had to be stopped.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2 to 1 this date to reverse the contempt of Congress conviction of Frank Brewster, the western boss of the Teamsters Union.
A billion-dollar public works bill, sidetracked by a Republican-led move before the ten-day Easter recess, would come up for renewed Senate debate this date, but signs of mounting opposition had brought forecast that several days of debate were likely before it would reach the voting stage. There were indications that the bill, described by its backers as an anti-recession measure, faced strong Republican opposition on grounds that it conflicted with the President's program for fighting the business slump. The bill called for a billion-dollar loan fund to help states, cities and other local agencies undertake various types of public works, such as schools, public buildings, streets, bridges and water and sewage systems. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the author of the bill, had sought strenuously to have the bill considered before the Easter recess, but Senate Republican leader William Knowland of California had rallied nearly solid Republican backing to achieve a postponement of its consideration by a vote of 41 to 39. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, who had cautioned at the time against "rushing into a program that might prove highly inflationary", had said the previous day that he found little support for the bill in New England during the recess. Asked the previous day if he intended to push for action on the bill, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson cited the Republican delaying maneuver and said: "If the minority doesn't want to face up to this recession, that's their responsibility." Senator Fulbright's measure proposed expansion of the community facilities act which presently was limited to a fund of 100 million dollars to provide loans, chiefly for construction of water and sewer facilities.
Republican Congressional leaders, noting Administration objections to new highways and water project bills, had left open this date the possibility that the President might veto both.
The President this date told the Republican Congressional leaders that he had no intention of seeking blanket authority for the Secretary of Defense to control all military spending.
In New York, it was reported that the Atomic Energy Commission had this date disclosed the time and place of 15 previous nuclear explosions, according to a Washington dispatch to the New York Times, which said that the disclosure was being made to aid scientists in learning more about the structure of the earth.
In Paris, NATO defense ministers this date heard General Lauris Norstad's plan for deploying American-built missiles in four or more of their countries.
In Warsaw, Poland, waters from the swollen Bug and Narew Rivers had flooded 63 villages and thousands of acres of farmland around Warsaw during the previous 24 hours.
In Calcutta, India, a shortage of ambulances was hampering the fight against Calcutta's annual cholera epidemic, from which four persons had died on the streets the previous day after transport had not been available to take them to the hospital.
Near San Sebastian, Spain, a 8,284-ton German freighter had sunk this date in Pasajes Harbor, a few miles north of the city. There had been no casualties. The freighter had run aground and holed its starboard bow in a heavy fog.
In Barcelona, Spain, a Spanish four-engine commercial plane had crashed in the Mediterranean in a driving rain the previous night, killing all 16 aboard. Wreckage of the plane was found underwater about 6 miles south of Barcelona.
In St. Petersburg, Fla., a B-47 bomber from MacDill Air Force Base had exploded in the air this date in an electrical storm and had barely missed crashing into the Sunshine Skyway in Tampa Bay.
Bloody riots in two prisons in two states had left five guards injured and furniture destroyed this date as officials began investigations. Inmates in the Concord, Mass., reformatory had injured five guards and reduced the furniture shop to ruins this date. About 40 men in the reformatory section of the South Dakota Prison at Sioux Falls had staged a two-hour riot the previous night, wrecking furnishings of the prison school and four dormitories. No one had been injured. Eighteen Concord Reformatory convicts had been herded into solitary confinement cells and questioned in relays after what was described as one of the worst inmate riots in the state's penal history. Desperate convicts had set fire to the huge furniture shop, had tried to wreck other buildings and had slugged correction officers and instructors with iron pipes, pieces of lumber and work tools. The superintendent of the reformatory said that 18 inmates who had participated in the brutal attack and arson plot the previous day apparently had no motive except destruction. Officials had found no paraphernalia which might have helped convicts escape and no guards had been taken hostage or any attempt made to charge through the gates. The fire had broken out as several violent attacks had been launched on guards and instructors at different spots in the sprawling reformatory. The South Dakota rioters, subdued around midnight, had been locked in isolation cells. Prison guards, reinforced by off-duty officers, had broken up the riot with tear gas. The warden estimated that the damage had amounted to approximately $5,000, including around 2000 broken windows. Water from smashed plumbing ran through the reformatory for a time until repairs could be made. Furniture and typewriters in the school had been smashed. It had not been determined what precipitated the riot. The warden said it could have been caused by something like a radio program not being liked by the prisoners or by an order to quiet down, or the like. Prison section inmates had rioted on October 11, 1954 when four guards had been taken hostage, an uprising which had lasted about 24 hours.
In Bennettsville, S.C., it appeared that an earthen dam which had burst at one of two State Wildlife Commission lakes and routed 600 persons from their homes In March appeared on the verge of breaking again. This time, it held back six times as much water as the previous one, according to an individual of radio station WBSC, and could lead to a real catastrophe. He said that police had issued the warning early in the morning to more than 200 families in Shady Rest, a village occupied by blacks which lay between the twin lakes. The lakes had been built 18 months earlier by the State Wildlife Commission, and the lake which threatened to burst during the morning contained fish put there by the Commission. No lives had been lost in the March 15 disaster. National Guardsmen using trucks in fender-deep water had plucked men, women and children from rooftops and porches at the time. Bennettsville was approximately 15 miles from the North Carolina border, south of Laurinburg. The lakes were in the northern part of the town of 6,000 people, off a highway leading to Gibson, N.C. The evacuees of the previous month's flood had been given shelter in the Bennettsville Armory and in homes of the town's citizens. The Red Cross had rationed food to them while they waited for the waters to recede.
John Kilgo of The News reports that a homemade rocket had been fired on the East Mecklenburg High School grounds the previous night, but County police were not sure whether the secret launching had been a success. The police were examining the long, thin metal tube at headquarters, after investigating officers had found the tube tied to a sawhorse behind the school building the previous night, packed with explosive powder of an undetermined type. A patrolman said that when they arrived on the scene, the rocket had been aimed skyward and a large amount of powder was lying on the ground. A heavy haze of smoke covered the field and the front end of the rocket was missing. They could not be sure whether the rocket had actually been launched or not. Let us know when you figure that out, as the nation's defense may hang in the balance.
In Newark, N.J., a thief who had stolen $2,000 from a movie theater the previous day might have changed his mind had he gone inside to see the show, "The Ten Commandments".
In Chicago, the mother of four children said that she was in a dilemma about her birth date, her reported death and her true name, hoping to straighten out the statistics. She had discovered the previous day that she had been legally dead for nearly 42 years. She believed that she was 44 years old and said that the discovery had been made while arrangements were being made to bury her brother in a family plot, finding that the cemetery records had shown that three persons buried in the plot were her mother, her father and a person having her name. She said that her mother had died 42 years earlier but that before her death, she and a younger sister had been temporarily placed in an orphanage, after which the sister had died at about the same time as her mother and had been buried in the family plot, mistaken for her. She wondered, however, whether the child who died had actually borne her name and whether she had used the wrong name all through the years.
In Hollywood, actor Darren McGavin
and his wife Melanie had a seven-pound, ten-ounce baby girl on Sunday
night. Mr. McGavin played Mike Hammer in a new television series.
They had another daughter and a son as well. After the new model roll-out the following fall, as mentioned below by Joseph Alsop, even patriarchal Ben, who, much to our consternation, would later favor Chevrolets, would experience familial problems
On the editorial page, "Literacy Tests Must Be Given Fairly" indicates that literacy tests which North Carolina and other states required of voters had a bad reputation, approved by some state legislatures in thinly disguised or open attempts to discriminate against voters by race, used for discrimination against political parties and candidates. There was a distaste for the theory that an unlettered person was incapable per se of participating in the affairs of government.
The tests nevertheless were constitutional, as the North Carolina Supreme Court had held the previous week in a case out of Northampton County, involving a registrar's refusal to register a black applicant who refused to read or write the Constitution, claiming that the requirement was unconstitutional. The State Supreme Court disagreed, citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the right of states to establish such tests and declaring that the North Carolina test applied "alike to all persons" without "discrimination in favor of, or against any by reason of race, creed or color."
The piece indicates that while a statute might be constitutional on its face, it could be perverted by unfair and partisan application. If North Carolina registrars administered the test fairly and impartially, it might serve to raise the intelligence level of the electorate and to prevent registration of "blocs" of puppet voters, which it finds to be worthy goals. But unless the registrar worked on the assumption that such voters were found in all races, creeds, colors and parties, there was no chance that the person would fulfill the public trust they occupied. Proper administration of the literacy tests required a certain vigilance toward all potential voters who came before the registrar. It also required a certain vigilance toward registrars by the public entrusting them with fair and impartial administration of a law which was easy to distort.
In 1959, the Supreme Court, in Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, would unanimously uphold the constitutionality of the literacy tests as long as they were not used in a discriminatory manner. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act suspended the use of literacy tests in states where under 50 percent of the eligible voters were registered November 1, 1964 or under 50 percent voted in the 1964 presidential election, and subsequently, the Supreme Court upheld the power of Congress to do so under the 15th Amendment. In 1970, the Act was amended to ban all literacy tests nationwide for five years, and in 1975, the ban was made permanent, also subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court as a proper exercise of power by Congress.
Thus, while technically constitutional, such tests are effectively a dead letter.
And, don't worry. Even the current Republican Congress would not be so stupid to try to repeal or amend the law banning such tests as they well know that the tests would serve to eliminate from the voter rolls probably two-thirds of the Trump voters, not to mention probably half of the Republican members of Congress.
Incidentally, despite a new State Constitution having been adopted in 1971, the provision requiring a literacy test was retained under section 4 of Article VI, but is obviously no longer effective. When we were voting there, we never had to done do that.
"The 'Flyspecks' Got Bigger & Bigger" indicates that the interim report which Congress had received from the House Special Committee on Legislative Oversight proved, among other things, that the Committee was aptly named. There had been plenty of legislative oversight in the creation of regulatory agencies, such as the FCC, and leaving those quasi-judicial agencies to set up their own standards of conduct. Standards had been set and had been defended with piety by some FCC commissioners, including the ousted Richard Mack. There was a tendency in Congress, even among subcommittee members, to defend them before Mr. Mack's record had begun to become public knowledge. The subcommittee had fired its hotheaded and impetuous counsel, Dr. Bernard Schwartz, for making too vigorous assaults on the FCC's way of doing business.
But at the end of the first phase of its investigation, the subcommittee had taken a different view of those "flyspecks" that had excited Dr. Schwartz, finding that the FCC commissioners had been taking expense money from both the Federal Government and the industry they regulated, that some commissioners had accepted "excessive entertainment" from the industry while some of the commissioners "were insensitive to the requirements of their high office."
The subcommittee generally had found nothing transparently illegal in the FCC record, but the situation was such that if the record had been an apple, the subcommittee would not swallow it for fear of a soft core inside. It indicates that neither would the editors. The Commission had condoned an atmosphere which invited suspicion on the part of the public, and attempts by the communications industry to make things cozy for the commissioners. The Commission had seemed to feel since the investigation started that, in the phrase of Gerald Johnson, as "public office is a public trust, it is an outrage not to trust everyone in public office."
Congress could do the public and the Commission a favor by accepting as a starter the subcommittee's recommendation of laws requiring the FCC to adopt a code of ethics, giving the President power to remove commissioners for misconduct, barring commissioners from informal contracts with litigants, and from accepting fees for speeches.
It also suggests that it would not hurt if someone stood up in the House and shouted "shame" at the FCC, that is, if he were sure that no one at the FCC could shout the same thing back at him.
"Life in America" indicates that a recent survey in the State of New York had found 82 school-owned indoor swimming pools, 15 under construction and 30 outdoor pools, cited by the State Education Department as part of the "impressive" 150 percent gain in that activity over a decade. The Council for Basic Education had stated that with that increase, they could lick "this vital educational shortage before too many years are out."
"What Is the Purpose of Passports?" indicates that reporter William Worthy had to go to court during the week to plead for a U.S. passport which had been denied him by the State Department after his "unauthorized" 1956 visit to Communist China. The action by the State Department had clearly been arbitrary and capricious interference with a newsman's right to earn his living as a foreign correspondent, differing sharply from the reasonable attitude of the British on the subject as described on March 27 in an item in The Economist, which had stated: "It has been laid down with obvious good sense by the English government that a British passport simply identifies a man by name as a British citizen, and neither can nor ought to attempt anything further. Even such a passport would not be necessary did not the jealousy of foreign governments require such an identification before admitting us into their territory; but while this remains so, two great ends should be kept in mind by the British government in granting passports—to commit the duty of ascertaining the general fact of citizenship to those who are at once most likely to know the applicant and most easily accessible to him; and at the same time to grant the passport under a name and authority which will be known to, and respected by, the various governments of the Continent."
The piece concludes that the U.S. still had a few lessons to learn from Britain.
A piece from the New York Times, titled "And No Fall-Out", tells of Ripple Rock between Seattle, Vancouver or Victoria and the Alaskan ports in the Seymour Narrows, the rock, during the course of a century, having been responsible for 20 large vessels and 100 smaller craft and more than 100 lives being lost. Now, that rock was no more, having been expertly mined in a 3 million dollar, three-year job the prior Saturday morning, destroyed by 1,375 tons of dynamite, one of the largest non-atomic explosions ever, though the Russians and Communist Chinese had immediately revealed that it was a mere firecracker compared with what they had done.
The mining engineer who had planned the event for the Canadian Department of Public Works, it assures, had not sought to smash a record, just the rock.
Drew Pearson indicates that Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn had been conducting a probe of the "untouchable" of the utility world which affected every taxpayer and telephone user in the country. That "untouchable" was AT&T, which, with assets of nearly 16 billion dollars, was ten times larger than the next biggest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric. AT&T not only dominated the supplying of phone service to the nation, but also had been charged with conducting a patent monopoly through its giant, wholly-owned subsidiary, Western Electric. It also received more Government contracts than any other company except General Motors and Boeing Aircraft. One contract for construction of SAGE warning systems against approaching enemy aircraft in the Arctic would cost 2.4 billion dollars, and because missiles were replacing bombers, SAGE might be out of date before it was even completed.
He finds the most interesting aspect of the investigation by Mr. Celler to be the manner in which top Government officials had become the virtual attorneys for the telephone company and how it placed its men in key jobs inside the Government. A total of 35 AT&T officials had served inside the Defense Department during the Eisenhower Administration, and some had been in and out of Government repeatedly. As of the present, 14 AT&T officials were still in the Defense Department, ranging from Deputy Secretary Donald Quarles on down. The backstage maneuvers to drop the big antitrust case against AT&T and Western Electric had begun during the Truman Administration, its Justice Department having brought the antitrust case in 1949. But in spring, 1952, the phone company had begun to get worried about going to trial, realizing that Graham Morison, the tough head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, really meant business. So AT&T officials approached Charles Coolidge, a Republican serving in the Defense Department, to try to get the trial postponed, and Mr. Coolidge had prepared a letter which was signed by Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett, also a Republican, and the letter was sent to the Justice Department asking it to go easy on AT&T because five officials of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, including the present Deputy Secretary of Defense, Mr. Quarles, had been working at the Sandia atomic energy laboratory in New Mexico.
Assistant Attorney General Morison had replied that it was "the same baloney every big business firm brings when they get in a tight place. The AT&T antitrust case won't disturb Bell Laboratories in the slightest." A few months later, Mr. Morison and the Truman Administration had ended and Attorney General Herbert Brownell came in, whereupon immediately the same thing had happened.
Marquis Childs tells of Senator Lyndon Johnson as Majority Leader knowing what he wanted and how to get it, that his attention to detail and drive qualified him just as easily to manage a major corporation as the Democrats in the Senate. Returning from the Easter recess, he was determined to set a pace in Congressional action which would prove to the country that the Congress and not the executive branch was solving the nation's problems. He believed he had done that in the first half of the session, pointing to measures on housing, highways and civil construction, which he insisted were way ahead of the requested action from the President.
The Senator was making a speech at the concluding banquet of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, pitting him against the President, who would speak at a luncheon on Thursday before the same group. Five years earlier, the President had made an historic address to the newspaper editors, coming not long after the death of Joseph Stalin in March, 1953, holding out the hope of negotiation for peace and calling on Russia for a demonstration of good will, such as the signing of an Austrian peace treaty to end the postwar occupation of that country.
Reports from the White House were that intensive work had gone into the President's forthcoming speech, with the intention of making it another major address. Thus, Senator Johnson would be on the spot and speeches were not his specialty. He tended in public to sound self-congratulatory and even pompous. His field of operation was the conference room, the telephone, and face-to-face talk, in which "with all of his vigor he pounds, pokes, thumps his spellbound listener." His paradox was that of an ambitious man renouncing ambition. He told all that he had put party leaders in his state on notice that, far from being a candidate for the presidency in 1960, he would not even attend the Democratic convention.
That remained a long way off and the Senator could change his mind, but presumably, it was Senator Johnson speaking as a realist, aware that he had a heart attack in July, 1955 and that the voters would look with great suspicion on a candidate with that handicap. He also was from the South, and with civil rights and the black vote so important, it was highly unlikely that his party would turn to the South for a presidential candidate. He would also have to put first the oil and gas interests of Texas, an offense to Northern voters.
While in all likelihood he would not be a candidate for the presidency, his influence and the record he was creating would have a lot to do with the nominee and the kind of platform on which he would run. On that basis, there was grumbling about the unyielding and all-embracing nature of his leadership. Some liberal Democrats believed that he was setting a too cautious line with respect to the recession. He and House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who directed the affairs of the House with similar authority, had an informal agreement with Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson, also from Texas, regarding a potential tax cut, that they would hold back pending the decision of the White House. Liberals complained that it put the Democrats on the same footing with the Republican Administration and that the speed-up in housing and highway construction was all very well but would not create many jobs during the current year and therefore would not check the recession.
Mr. Childs indicates that seldom were those complaints heard in public from Democrats and certainly not from those following the lead of Senator Johnson. The Senate Democrats, whatever their own political beliefs, were too much in awe of his capacities as an operator and the power he exercised as leader. Highly sensitive to criticism, Senator Johnson proved his own liberalism by pointing to his record on rural electrification, Social Security and the other measures from the New Deal. He saw himself as the heir of FDR, but an heir who had to be content to exercise his power in the Senate and not the White House.
Joseph Alsop, in Detroit, in the third of his columns on the automobile industry, indicates that the Administration's wait-and-see approach to the depression did not appear very sensible in that city, as shown by UAW Local No. 3 across from the old Dodge motor plant in Hamtramck. The same was true in the rows of little one-and-two-family houses inhabited by Dodge and other Chrysler Corporation employees in that town and East Detroit, where there was a feeling of cruel let-down among a vast army of industrial workers by the system they had been taught to trust implicitly.
The morning he had gone there, Pat Quinn, the president of the Dodge local, had been leading a protest march of jobless autoworkers to the state capital in Lansing, such that all activity temporarily centered in the small office of "Big Pete" Telisky, the local's hot-tempered vice-president. Mr. Alsop had hardly introduced himself when a young man who had been working for Dodge for ten years as a crane and elevator-hoist operator, hesitantly entered to ask Big Pete if he knew any place hiring. Big Pete said bitterly that a person could not "buy a job in this damn town", and the young man nodded disconsolately, as though it was the answer he expected.
The young man's father, who had worked for Dodge for a quarter of a century, had bought a house on time just before he died five years earlier. In those days, both father and son had been working and so the payments of $75 per month had been easy to carry. The young man had managed pretty well alone when he was bringing home $80 per week, enabling him to pay for his furniture, washer and dryer, and television set, leaving enough to keep his mother and younger brother fairly comfortable. But now the family's whole income was reduced to $42 per week of unemployment benefits, of which the house payments took nearly half. He had tried everything, even being a janitor, as had his 17-year old brother, but they were not hiring boys and they only had another 11 weeks of benefits to go, after which there would be nothing other than welfare.
He next met a man who had been a torch welder for 15 years, who had done all the "show jobs for the company except one year." Then he met a slow-spoken Southerner who had been threatened with repossession of his car. The procession had gone on all morning and all the men who came in had the same essential problem. Suddenly, their income had been cut in half after nine or ten or eleven years of steady work on the same job. Like most of Detroit's other jobless autoworkers, all were now between nine and eleven weeks away from the end of their unemployment benefits, when there would be no income at all. All had time payments to make, which they could barely carry even now. The first young man to whom he had talked had been the luckiest, for no other man he had seen had paid for everything except his house. The Detroit Welfare Department would at least try to help the latter young man keep his house, by offering the mortgage-holder the money allowed for relief recipients' rent.
In ringing doorbells along the gray streets, Mr. Alsop found essentially the same story, but it was grimmer and more poignant, as one actually saw the furniture, the washers and the cars, and the homes which were in danger of being lost. There were children who drank water, harassed wives who did not know how they could manage much longer, and men who seemed unable to overcome their surprise at being at home on a working day. As time had gone on, they had become obsessed with the thought of the end of the 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, of which they all spoke with defeated dread.
Maybe Congress would pass a bill adding another 13 weeks to the 26 and maybe automotive employment would pick up again when the new models would come out in September. But even so, half the things the people had gained would be lost in the interval because they could not meet the payments and feed their children. If there were no jobs to be had when the benefit period ended, the whole pattern of life of all of the people would simply fall into squalid ruin, and they stood in the shoes of many hundreds of thousands of jobless industrial workers in scores of other cities beyond Detroit.
A letter writer indicates that after reading a letter in the April 10 issue of the newspaper, her first impulse was to call the writer and see if he knew the names of the two officers who had given him a ticket for speeding, since she had a similar experience not too many months earlier and thought perhaps they might be the same two officers. She had seen both of the motorcycle policemen when they pulled from a side road and was quite aware that they were following her, as had been the letter writer. She was also very careful and did not exceed the speed limit. After following her for approximately two miles, one policeman had passed her and stopped the truck in front of her and the other proceeded to stop her, telling her that she had been clocked at 55 mph in a 35 mph zone, when she knew she was not even going 35, as she had an eye glued to the speedometer as soon as she had seen the officers. The experience had led her to believe that the only safe thing for a motorist to do when driving alone without witnesses and being followed by police officers was to pull off the road and let the policemen proceed about ten miles in front.
A letter writer comments on the editorial regarding the mothballing of the Charlotte post office building in exchange for a five-cent postage stamp, indicating that about 60 years earlier when he was a carrier for The News, his father had a little house in the garden where he did lots of reading, especially of fourth class or lower mail. Now, people had done away with such little houses and had no further use for the lower classes of mail which cluttered up the mailboxes each day, winding up in the trash, most of it not even opened or read. He suggests that they add enough postage to that type of mail to satisfy the whims of Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield and forget the nickel stamp. He also says that if they kept up the work they were presently doing, one day they would have a "pretty fair newspaper".
A letter from the district sales manager of Eastern Air Lines thanks the editorial staff for the editorial in connection with the recently authorized Charlotte to Chicago nonstop service, indicating that they hoped to receive official authorization from the Civil Aeronautics Board within the ensuing 60 to 90 days and would begin service shortly afterward. He says that the newspaper through the years had contributed substantially in many ways to aviation and they were not unmindful of the tremendous contribution.
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