The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 17, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Havana that Fidel Castro had estimated this date that
450 persons would die before the current wave of executions ended in
Cuba. Already 205 persons had been reported shot on charges of crimes
against the people during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and
Cuban prisons reportedly held recently an estimated 5,000 to 6,000
more persons for trial on similar charges, though some had been
released and others had been given jail terms. Sr. Castro had given
his estimate to a crowd of about 10,000 persons in front of the
presidential palace on Friday night, calling for a rally of half a
million persons in Havana the following Wednesday to signify approval
of the executions. The Cuban people generally had applauded the
trials and executions. Police had broken up 200 persons in front of a
police station on Friday demonstrating for lynching of one suspect.
The actions had aroused sharp criticism in the U.S. and other
countries. Sr. Castro, however, had invited foreign newsmen and
diplomats to attend the trials to assess their fairness. Newspapers
in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina and Costa Rica had called for a
halt to the bloodshed. The Uruguayan representative to the U.N.—most likely, unless a rustican of potential ardor de la revolucion y facil, from Montevideo—had
appealed to the provisional President, Manuel Urrutia, to stop the
killing, and other Latin American delegates at the U.N. had
reportedly been planning a similar appeal. Senator Wayne Morse of
Oregon had suggested in Washington that Sr. Castro invite U.N. observers
to check the trials and execution methods. Some U.S. and Cuban
businessmen and industrialists were paying advance taxes to help the
revolutionary Government, according to the New York Times. A
dispatch from Havana said that a Treasury official had estimated that
about three million dollars had been paid in advance in recent days.
The Times had quoted the official as listing some of the U.S.
companies as being the First National Bank of Boston, which had paid
$175,000 (and, incidentally, had been one of the primary intermediate exchanges through which the slick William Rhodes Davis had transacted his oily, complex exchange via Southern cotton, if memory serves, to enable getting around trade embargoes to visit the expropriated oil of 1938 Mexico, boycotted by Dutch Shell, B.P., and the other major oil companies whose properties were taken without just compensation, ultimately over to his pal, Herr Hitler, to feed his third-cylinder blocked Panzers to crash into Poland on September 1, 1939, cf., Mystery Man by Dale Harrington, 2001, but we digress—); International Harvester Co., $125,000 (no doubt for the tractors and other such equipment to till the acreage for the Agrarian Reform program of land redistribution to afford the raising of burghers); First National City
Bank of New York, $100,000; United Fruit Co., $500,000 (for obvious sugar cane reinvestment); Nicaro Nickel
Co., owned by the U.S. Government, $375,000; and the Crusellas Co., a
subsidiary of Colgate-Palmolive Co., $300,000 (to help ensure menos caries con agua purificada
The President and Soviet Deputy
Premier Anastas Mikoyan had conferred at the White House for an hour
and 45 minutes this date, the Russian leader discussing at least five
outstanding East-West issues but failing to offer any new proposals
or concessions. White House press secretary James Hagerty said that
the President and Secretary of State Dulles had agreed with the
Deputy Premier that the talks had been useful. Among the subjects
discussed, according to Mr. Hagerty, had been the Berlin situation,
the questions of Germany, disarmament, increased trade, and freer
exchanges of persons between Russia and the U.S.—which, undoubtedly, would, ultimately, smooth the way eight months hence for Lee Oswald to defect, for awhile. Mr. Hagerty added
that there were also new proposals during the discussion. He made
clear that his comment referred specifically to speculation in
advance of the visit that Mr. Mikoyan would probably bring some new
proposals or offer some concession on the Berlin situation. He said
that there was no mention of any visit by Soviet Premier Nikita
Khrushchev to the U.S., nor a visit of Vice-President Nixon to the
Soviet Union, as there had been speculation about such visits
An atomic device with no moving parts and small enough to be tucked in a handbag might be the forerunner of means of providing the electricity to help man in space, based on a new development hailed by the Atomic Energy Commission as "highly significant", announced Friday at the White House. Col. Jack Armstrong, deputy chief of the AEC's aircraft reactor division, had predicted this date that such batteryless power might also be used in the future to provide power for instruments in large, unmanned satellites for long periods of time, for any shelter, heat and power for communications and weather instruments in remote areas such as the Arctic and Antarctic, provide new types of navigational aid for air and sea traffic, and allow use of radio-controlled beacons which might forecast the development of hurricanes. The device employed radioactive polonium 210 as a heat source and chemicals which converted the heat into electricity without any moving parts. The AEC called it SNAP 3, which stood for System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power. Development at present consisted of a five-pound device, 4 inches in diameter and 5.5 inches high, somewhat resemblant to a ship's barometer. Officials estimated that the weight could be cut to three pounds. The model cost $15,000, but AEC spokesmen said that it probably could be turned out on a production basis for about $200 per unit. Technicians for the AEC, which had sponsored the development, said that the device was the most efficient for its particular purpose known to exist anywhere, including in the Soviet Union.
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, it was reported that an Argentine airliner with 52 persons aboard had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on Friday night off the seaside resort of Mar del Plata, with only one survivor having been found. Almost 4 hours after the vacation flight had crashed, a man had been found alive on the beach with his clothes burned or ripped off. All others on the twin-engine plane had apparently perished. Only three bodies had thus far been recovered in predawn darkness. Searchers had been hampered by stormy waters and said that many of those in the plane presumably had been trapped inside and had drowned. Among those on the passenger manifest had been Eduardo Braun Menendez, one of Argentina's most famous scientists, and Dr. Jose Mezzadra, another well-known scientist. There was no immediate confirmation that they had actually been aboard the plane which belonged to Austral Airlines, a new company known throughout the country for its penguin trademark because of flights to Argentina's cold and bleak southland. The airliner was on a special summertime vacation flight from Buenos Aires to Mar del Plata, 240 miles to the south and then to Bahia Blanca, another 260 miles to the west.
In Livermore, Calif., it was reported that a Navy nurse found dead and on fire beside her automobile alongside a busy highway had been pregnant, according to an autopsy of the previous day. The badly burned body of the 29-year old lieutenant, junior grade, was found by three sailors on Thursday 15 feet off of U.S. Highway 50. The acting coroner said that the autopsy had failed to establish the cause of death but had revealed that she was between three and five months pregnant. He said that barbiturates had been found in her system but not enough to cause death. Her mother, of Chicago, had learned only the previous night that her daughter was dead. She had accompanied her daughter to California earlier in the week and was informed of the tragedy by newsmen who met her bus in Des Moines as she was returning home. The grief stricken mother said that her daughter, by a previous marriage, had been in good spirits when she had departed from her on Wednesday. She said that her father was dead. The mother said that she was a "very quiet, very religious Catholic girl who had no steady boyfriend." She added that her daughter was enthusiastic about a new assignment on Guam. Among many aspects of her death still shrouded in mystery was a .25-caliber pistol found in the charred car, a gun too damaged to determine whether it had been fired, but no bullet wound had been found in the body. Commenting on the report of pregnancy, Navy officials said that the nurse would have been given an automatic but honorable discharge if her condition had been discovered. Her records at Treasure Island in San Francisco, where she had registered at the bachelor women's quarters, listed her as unmarried. Sheriff's officers emphasized that the possibility of foul play, suicide, and mishap were all under consideration. Pathological examination results would take several days. Until the previous November 18, she had been stationed at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., and was to have left nearby Travis Air Force Base on Thursday afternoon by plane for Guam. She had last been seen alive on Treasure Island in the early morning hours on Thursday, having told a sailor that she was going to drive around "to burn up a tankful of gasoline" before shipping her car to Guam. One of the baffling parts of the case was the source of the intense flames which consumed the car, as gasoline in the vehicle's tank had not ignited.
In Stuart, Fla., one unidentified man had been burned to death and another was missing and presumed dead as a result of an early morning fire at a downtown hotel this date. Seven of the nine registered guests had gotten out of the two-story, 40-room Commodore Hotel but the coroner said that other persons might have been trapped in the building. The missing man was a 31-year old bartender who had last been seen in his room and had refused to leave, according to witnesses. Two men said that they tried to get the hefty bartender out of the room but when he refused to leave, they had gone outside and gotten a step ladder. One of the men said that smoke was billowing from the room when he reached it from the outside and he believed that the missing man had been trapped inside. The ruins of the hotel were still smoldering five hours after the fire had erupted, but the fire was confined to the stucco-over-wood building. The town was 102 miles north of Miami and 40 miles north of West Palm Beach and was noted for its fishing and citrus groves. The hotel's register had been destroyed, complicating the job of identifying the victims. The hotel was a total loss, with damage estimated at $100,000.
In Garden Grove, Calif., hundreds of officers with drawn guns searched a square-mile area of the Los Angeles suburb this date for a young gunman believed to be holding a family hostage for the second time in a week. The youth and his partner had been ambushed by police the previous night and had sought to shoot their way out, with one of them being captured and the other, trailing blood, having disappeared in a residential area. Police officers were rushed in from a dozen nearby cities, stopping every car and going into every house and garage with guns at the ready. The officers were seeking an identified 19-year old male of Long Beach, indicating that he and his 20-year old male companion, also of Long Beach, had terrorized a family in nearby Anaheim a week earlier after escaping from police who had caught them in a liquor store hold-up. They had been sought throughout Southern California since that time. The previous night, the police had been tipped that they were going to call on a teenage girlfriend and six policemen had hidden out in her house. When one of them appeared at the door, the girl had let him in, but he spotted an officer hiding behind a door and immediately opened fire. He had been answered by a burst of fire from a submachine gun and apparently was wounded in the neck. Firing as he went, he ran back to the car in which his companion was waiting and then they roared off with the police in close pursuit, firing rifles and shotguns. A block away, the car failed to make a turn and crashed into the curb, whereupon the men split up, with the man who had called at the girlfriend's house disappearing into an orange grove and the other man running into a nearby house carrying a rifle but making no attempt to use it before being grabbed by officers inside the house. Some 14 bullet holes had been found in the car and there were bloodstains on the front seat. One officer of Anaheim had suffered a flesh wound in the abdomen during the gunfight. Just a week earlier, similar house-to-house searches had been made in Anaheim for two men who had disappeared after a gun battle with police. They had hidden in the home of a family whom they threatened with death if they were exposed to the police and managed to slip through a blockade the following morning by donning sailor suits taken from two occupants of the house, and forcing the wife to drive them. Both men had long police records and were wanted for numerous recent holdups and burglaries, according to police.
Stormy weather and biting cold had struck crippling blows across broad sections of the Eastern half of the country this date. A dozen or more communities in northeastern Indiana and lower western Michigan had been digging out of a freak snowstorm which nearly paralyzed some cities the previous day. A state of emergency was declared in South Bend, Ind., hit by 17 inches of snow. Ice and snow storms created hazardous driving conditions in many sections of the Northeast, and blizzard conditions were forecast in parts of the lower Great Lakes region. Temperatures tumbled to 25 degrees below zero in northern Minnesota as the huge mass of icy air spread eastward to the Atlantic Coast. The South shivered in the fresh surge of frigid air, with temperatures dropping into the teens in northern sections of Alabama and Georgia. It was freezing in northern Florida. The biggest drop in temperature during the previous 24 hours had been in the Middle and South Atlantic states. Washington recorded readings around 10 above during the morning, compared to a fairly mild 57 24 hours earlier. Temperatures averaged about 30 degrees or more lower than those of the previous day in most areas from southern Pennsylvania to northern Florida. Comparatively mild weather persisted in most of New England during the night, with readings in the 20's and 30's, but much colder air was headed into the region. The freak snowstorm spread across areas in Michigan and Indiana for 65 miles from the southeastern corner of Lake Michigan. Winds of 20 or more miles per hour whipped the heavy snowfall in the South Bend area into huge drifts, but maintenance crews had worked throughout the night clearing most of the main roads. Classes at Notre Dame and St. Mary's College had been canceled this date and most public schools, the city hall and many business places and industries had shut down the previous day as the storm had lashed the city of 115,000. Traffic had been virtually halted.
Locally in Charlotte, the weather
man had forecast another 10-degree low temperature for the following
morning to match the 10 which had chilled the air in the early
morning this date. After climbing to 13 an hour later, the mercury
had dipped to 11 by 8:00. A warming trend, however, appeared on the
horizon as this date's high of 30 was expected to jump to 35 the
following day with clear skies. We hope you will be able to see
clearly tomorrow, after suffering through all that crazy woman's ice
in Minnesota for weeks. If she is not an utter psychopath
Meanwhile, you had better be sure of who
On the editorial page, "The Diplomatic Arrows Fall in Germany" finds that the masters of world affairs were shooting arrows into the air and saying that they could not imagine where they had fallen to earth, that among the archers stood the porcine Nikita Khrushchev, suddenly wanting to proclaim West Berlin as a "free city" and to turn over its supply arteries to the East Germans. Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan was observed insouciantly eyeing doughnuts in an American supermarket, breaking bread with the high world of American finance, and asking for more "da" diplomacy. Secretary of State Dulles said of the Russian scheme for a neutralized and unoccupied Berlin, "It's a stupid plan because we don't think it will work," while also giving mysterious clues that his thoughts on Germany might be in transition. Finally, the capitals of America's allies quaked with an uncommon cases of nerves.
Parenthetically, what if Secretary Dulles suddenly blurted out: "We gotta have Greenland for our security or else we may feel the need to take it by force. We need it. And besides Norway slighted me for the Noble Peace Prize and I no longer feel disposed to work for peace, as the only reason anyone wants peace is for prizes." Undoubtedly, a quick conference would have been held in the Cabinet room and for the good of the Secretary, as well as everyone else, he would have been retired.
It finds, therefore, that all of the
arrows were falling oddly along the Rhine. If something were about to
break, hopefully, it suggests, it would have to break along the
Rhine, directly at the Maginot Line of the cold war and would have to
concern the questions of free Berlin and a divided Germany, with the
intimately connected questions of the NATO and Warsaw Pact garrisons.
If a break came, its shape would be made by secretaries of state,
prime ministers and party chairmen, all of whom had been growing
weary of cold war, brinksmanship and military rivalry. Those rules
had become tyrannical and impersonal in that tyranny, with forces
having slipped out of human hands
The Kremlin could not go on shunning
the thrusts of independence in its East European satellites. If
columnist Joseph Alsop was correct in saying that free West Berlin
had become a "cancer" in the heart of East Germany—not yet turning to a festering tumor on the Presidency in the form of a water wheel
On the Western side, there was a growing feeling that the U.S. and its allies had to yield and negotiate, that the Marxist world had to be accepted as a reality which would not suddenly crumble. In Britain, the next election could conceivably bring in a Labor government much in favor of coming to terms with the Russians, while in France, Premier Charles de Gaulle had long had visions of himself as the great mediator between Washington and Moscow, and in Germany, the military goal of 12 divisions would soon make the West German Army the most powerful in Europe. Allied occupation forces would not be needed for immediate conventional reasons and would loom as but a check on the German future.
Even if Germany and the satellites
could be demilitarized, the cold war would not come to an abrupt
halt. The Soviets would still have their incurable sugarplum visions of a
Communist world and the West would still be trying to thwart those
visions by all means available, but "perhaps, then, peace would
not hang by such a weak and instantly breakable thread," as, it might have added, the ornaments on der Weihnachts baum
"Senator Kennedy Is No Damon Runyon" finds that there was more humor than brimstone in Senator John F. Kennedy's speech on labor racketeering to the Chamber of Commerce banquet on Thursday night. Recounting his committee's findings under Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, he had spun a rye tale of air-conditioned Cadillacs, pleasure yachts, and profits, all being enjoyed by union brass such as Jimmy Hoffa, at the expense of rank-and-file union members. The audience had laughed heartily. But they were all, including the Senator, laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all, at the preposterous gangsters parading as "union leadership". (It is not unlike the laughter one feels when one looks at the current occupant of the White House, who regularly takes on the persona alternately of either an organized crime boss or a dictator in the same mold as Hitler and Mussolini.)
It indicates that Senator Kennedy was not a mere Damon Runyon of the Senate. He laughed, but wanted action. The failure the prior summer in the House of the bill which he had cosponsored with Senator Irving Ives of New York made it doubly imperative that a law be enacted to curb the antics of Mr. Hoffa and his like. Senator Kennedy had proposed strict accountability for the expenditure of union funds, establishment of democracy in union elections, a provision to keep convicted felons from serving as union officers, decentralization of union trusteeships, so as to keep union leadership local and avoid "paper" unions, and disclosure of any possible conflicts of interest.
For the rank-and-file of labor, the requirements appeared elemental, but labor itself had the strongest interest in the cases cited, as the ordinary union member was being flagrantly victimized by his own "servants".
We suggest that the Constitution be amended to bar anyone convicted of a felony, which is not subsequently pardoned, from holding any Federal office, most assuredly including the Presidency. Perhaps, the current occupant's outrageous behavior would stimulate passage and ratification of such an amendment when the Democrats swamp the Republicans in the coming midterm elections. If there is any shame left in the Republican Party, taken over by a convicted felon, it would be. But we wonder whether two-thirds of each house would agree on much of anything these days, and so any such effort would have to arise from two-thirds of the states meeting in conventions. The Founders assumed, because of the original intent of the electoral college to be a true college of electors chosen from the most prestigious people in each state, that felons would be automatically excluded from having any serious impact on presidential elections. Unfortunately, the decadence expressed in the following editorial on juvenile crime had translated to the older generation who once were those juveniles.
"Authority: Trampled in the Rush?" indicates that Charlotte's Youth Bureau director, J. R. Hall, had been able to present a comparatively good report during the week on juvenile crime in the city, with 1958 showing a sharp decline in the rate of increase, from 9.7 percent to about 1 percent.
While a good record, Charlotte was relatively alone in that decline, as juveniles had grown in number all over the country every year, with national figures showing that 45 percent of major crimes in the country had been committed by persons 18 and under.
It comments that if America had a "lost generation" it was not Gertrude Stein's band of expatriate writers of the Twenties, but rather the phalanx of young outlaws who prowled the streets with knives and zip guns. Children were knifing each other in automobiles. American soldiers spied and collaborated shamelessly in foreign prison camps. Despite college diplomas abounding, the country seemed to be becoming less literate every year.
It opines that authority had long since been trampled to death, particularly in the home. The late James Street of Chapel Hill had once remarked that every time he sat down to write or stood up to speak, "God, my grandmother, and Robert E. Lee were always watching." They represented invisible monitors, an authority he respected.
"As for today's juvenile criminal, hauled with his zip guns still smoking into a police station—is anyone watching? Anyone at all? Or is everyone too busy to watch?"
A piece from the Richmond News Leader, titled "Monogamy down Under", indicates that like most government press releases, the Australian Weekly Review was generally heavy reading, stocked with arid items on currency exchange, trade surveys, ministerial arrivals and departures, and seldom a note of levity. Occasionally, however, some trivia slipped in as the report during the week on the Short-tailed Shearwater, an Australian waterfowl commonly known as the "mutton-bird" phoebe. Some 150 million phoebes annually migrated 20,000 miles from Australia up to the Central Pacific to Japan, across the Bering Strait, down the West Coast of the U.S., across the Pacific to the south coast of Australia and then to the Bass Strait, which the "mutton-bird" regarded as home. The phoebes' warm affection for the familiar hearth was attested by an Australian bird-watcher, Dr. D. Serventy, who tagged them so that their comings and goings could be observed. This week he had reported that he had established that one Short-tailed Shearwater had inhabited the same nesting burrow on Bass Strait Island for eight consecutive years and that the female phoebe had turned up each nesting season with the same mate, implying that it was unusual for the commonly promiscuous phoebe.
It concludes that "those who bewail the decay of public and private morals should take heart from Dr. Serventy's model of devotion, who has proven, it would seem, that monogamy is for the birds."
Drew Pearson indicates that wisecracks in the diplomatic corps were that HUAC ought investigate the manner in which Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan had won over some of the stanchest big business supporters of the President, pointing out that Mr. Mikoyan had spoken in such inner sanctums of American big business as the Union Club of Cleveland, the Detroit Club, the Chicago Club and Wall Street, which certainly looked down the nose at and might even have banned FDR and Harry Truman. Mr. Mikoyan's hosts had included Ed Ryerson, chairman of Inland Steel, one of the biggest big businessmen in Chicago, whom the President had appointed to study foreign aid; Walter Cisler, head of Detroit Edison, once a member of SHAEF under General Eisenhower; and Cyrus Eaton, head of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and one of the bigger investment bankers of the Midwest. They, together with Henry Ford II and others, all had seemed impressed with the sincerity, frankness and desire for peace of Mr. Mikoyan. In Cleveland, James Lincoln, head of the Lincoln Electric Co., dealing in welding supplies, had greeted the Soviet Deputy Premier at the Union Club by saying: "The thing we need in this country is to have more and more exchanges of visitors, exchange of goods, exchange of ideas… We say they are 'Communist', and yet we are going in that direction at a tremendously rapid speed. There is also every indication that the Communists are going toward capitalism, at least to some extent… Before long, agreement between the two ideas will be much closer than anything we have seen before."
European newspapers, especially those in Britain, had been horrified at the slipshod security provided to Mr. Mikoyan in Chicago and San Francisco. There had been much more comment in the West European press regarding hostile pickets and what could happen in case one of them got out of hand, than in the American press. Suspicion persisted among some of those who had entertained the Deputy Premier that the State Department might have wanted him to come into close contact with Hungarian refugees to get him to realize that one segment of the American public was very much against him. That about which European diplomats worried was that if he had been killed or hurt, Soviet-American relations would have reached the breaking point, especially in view of the loose security. They realized that it had been the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary during a visit to Sarajevo in 1914 which had precipitated World War I.
Doris Fleeson indicates that the President had defined the Republican whom he wanted to see succeed him as a man who believed that freedom could be saved only in coalition or cooperation with strong governments and who wanted America to "go ahead". He had been very much clearer and more emphatic about the internationalist qualifications which he deemed important than he had been about what constituted going ahead. (That, undoubtedly, was reference to the Chrysler Corporation's "Forward Look" of 1955, though it was former President Truman who had the Chrysler; Mr. Nixon had the famous Oldsmobile.)
The President had added that he could, but would not, write out a list of six or a dozen "fine, virile men" whom he would gladly support. He had spoken at a 50th anniversary luncheon of the National Press Club, an appearance he had substituted for a press conference. His remarks about his successor were being examined in the context of his recent emphasis on a balanced budget and economy, an attitude which had restored him to the good graces of conservative Republicans. Ms. Fleeson indicates that it appeared from what he said that he preferred a domestic conservative as his successor who was also an internationalist. That was a definition fitting a relatively small group in the Republican Party, where most conservatives tended also to be nationalists opposed to the Eisenhower foreign aid and reciprocal trade programs.
It had been noticed also that while the President refused to list his dozen possible successors, he had especially praised the former Texas Democrat who was now Treasury Secretary, Robert Anderson, who would certainly be among the plausible alternatives should the 1960 Republican convention produce a deadlock between the Vice-President and Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York.
The President had said flatly that he could not possibly support any man who did not go along with his basic thinking "if my influence had anything to do with the matter." She indicates that he clearly thought that it had. But in defining that thinking, apart from a belief in collective security, he had left his potential successor a great deal of room in which to turn around.
He had spoken of his "general attitude toward the relation of the government to the private citizen", but had not defined it. He had coupled economic soundness with the maintenance of security and armaments and promised that the men he had in mind as his successor "really want America to go ahead." In response to a question, he had also touched on the argument between the Vice-President and Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri regarding the relative U.S. versus Soviet missile strength, acknowledging that the Russians were ahead in the missile area. That argument had not yet been resolved by a direct statement from the Vice-President, whose friends contended that he had been misquoted by the Associated Press.
The President had seen the press only twice since the midterm elections in November. The festive National Press Club luncheon was not quite a substitute for a press conference, both because female reporters were not members of the Club and because questions were either screened or, by choice, avoided embarrassing moments.
Socially, it had been a great success, with the President appearing affable and relaxed, a suntan giving him the appearance of robust health. He seemed much more like the pre-1953 Eisenhower than in any time since his original election. It had also been a step forward in the direction which spokesmen for the President insisted he would take, which was aggressive campaigning for his program. He was winning and being persuasive, reminder of the influence he still could wield when he saw people rather than when he remained isolated within the confines of the White House.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, indicates that in his column on Tuesday he had been talking about some of the inequities of the treatment of reserve officers by the armed forces, and that another aspect which needed fresh scrutiny was the mandatory retirement of commissioned reservists after 20 years of service. He says that he had a letter from a just-retired lieutenant colonel, not the chaplain of whom he had written in his prior column, which offered a viewpoint more clearly than he could possibly present himself.
The letter said: "I do not intend to beat the drum for a life of indolence for retired officers. I can think of nothing more nearly calculated to drive one to the chilly welcome of the undertaker than the sole vocation of sitting around listening for the first faint crackle of hardening arteries. I am fortunate in having found 'gainful employment', as the sociologists have it, and intend to remain employed for a number of years to come, given voluntary life expectancy.
"The point is, however, that at the time the average military man is entering his period of greatest value to his organization and consequently of greatest earning capacity, the 20-year reservist is patted lightly on the back, handed a piece of paper that says he has been a good boy and told to go out and compete with the current crop of eager young college graduates in finding a job commensurate with his age, his social position and, not least of all, his dignity.
"And, since we are not all Eisenhowers, MacArthurs, Lucius Clays, nor Walter Bedell Smiths, the civilian business world does not throw open its doors and offer us hundred-thousand-dollar jobs. Still in our prime, we are too old for most businesses to want us. Why employ a man with no specialized training in civilian work and with the potential of only 20 years or so when some youngster with a good college record and a 40-year potential can be hired for less money?
"This is all by way of preface. I don't blame industry. The real tragedy is the loss to the United States Army of the years of experience and ability which have been developed. The average officer spends his first 10 years learning how to be an officer, acquiring the military viewpoint, learning the ropes and having his errors caught and explained. The next 10 are spent acquiring rank, experience and confidence in developing his particular metier and his level of capability. His remaining years constitute his military raison d'être.
"The weak and the inefficient among his contemporaries have generally been weeded out. He has achieved a rank and position from which he can make the decisions and establish the policies for which his earlier training has fitted him. He proves (or very occasionally disproves) his worth to the Army and begins to repay the time and money the nation has spent in training him, and it is my contention that totally aside from the personal injustice it is a shameful waste of talent and experience to boot out a man of proven ability at the beginning of his most productive years.
"It's a one-sided relationship that is practically peonage. The Army can release the reservist at its own pleasure, but the reservist cannot get out without the Army's O.K. Well, I'm out now. I retired a year ago as a lieutenant colonel under the arbitrary 20-year retirement policy. And I wouldn't go back for eagles. I might consider it for a star because there are a few SOBs I'd like to take care of as a general officer; there are a lot of good men I'd like to take care of, too.
"For the first time in my life I am working only 40 hours per week. No O.D. No parades. No formations. No responsibilities for lives or millions of dollars of government property. No sweating out efficiency reports. No more yanking my children out of school in the middle of the year and transferring them 4,000 miles away to another school system.
"I am buying a home and have a feeling of security and well-being that I never knew existed. I can plan ahead. I know the next time I move it is going to be because my wife and I want it—not because somebody in Washington decided it was time I transferred to Arizona, Alaska or the Antilles. I'm not afraid of being released from my job. Peace! It's wonderful. Like the wit who counseled against marriage, my advice to the young man contemplating the Army as a career is: Don't. At least unless you can get a regular appointment. If you are going to share everything else with a regular, you may as well share his security of position and his better chances of advancement."
Mr. Ruark concludes that the reader might agree that the colonel had a case.
A letter writer indicates that he was surprised to hear that Local 1492 had been disbanded. He believes that they had a right to belong to a union according to law and does not like the right-to-work law passed by the Legislature, thinks that if a person had to belong to a union to work, then he should not be fired if he did, that if a city hall could make laws to suit themselves, he wonders why they sent people to Raleigh to serve in the Legislature. He believes that the state laws would stand up over any laws which the City Council might pass, although he says he believes there were some fine men on the Council. Local 1492 and the Council had been getting along fine and the Mayor and City Manager were also doing fine with the local until pressure groups started "raising cane" [sic]. He says he did not know that there were so many anti-union people in Charlotte. If the City Council could outlaw one local, then they could do it to all of them and it would be necessary to build more houses like Piedmont Courts and Belvedere Homes for low income people. He had read where Senator John F. Kennedy was set to address the Chamber of Commerce regarding labor—which he had done Thursday evening. He believes that the Chamber was already anti-labor enough. He had read in the newspaper that the wage scale of police officers was not as much as it ought to be and agreed, but wonders who was going to ask for a raise for the police officers.
A letter from the field representative, Region 5, of the AFL-CIO, indicates that during the current police union dispute he had appeared before the City Council and the County Commission and in each instance had been correctly quoted by the news reports, but wants to indicate correction of erroneous titles bestowed on him. He had been referred to as AFL-CIO director, labor director, Carolinas director, etc. One employer, a transplanted Virginian, had referred to him as being from Washington. He says that he was a native of North Carolina from Shelby in 1925 and a registered, voting citizen of Mecklenburg County. He was a field representative of the AFL-CIO, assigned to region 5, North and South Carolina, and worked under the direction of Carey Haigler, who had been the region 5 director since the merger of the AFL and CIO in December, 1955. There were four field representatives and an office secretary working under his direction. Even though he was born in Alabama, Mr. Haigler, too, had deep roots in the two Carolinas and his and Mr. Haigler's ancestors had been among the first settlers in Mecklenburg and in the Orangeburg colony.
A letter from A. W. Black, who had not written in awhile, indicates that the implications by a television personality that only those entertaining religious superstitions were worthy of charity was to disregard completely the principles of benevolence and humanitarianism while glorifying hypocrisy at the expense of human misfortune. He suggests that the lack of religious belief was never justification for ignoring the principles of humanitarianism, nor cause for bartering charity at the sacrifice of individual beliefs. Benevolence was not something exclusive to religion, whether Christian or otherwise. And to administer to human need through charity on the basis of religious superstitions was contemptible and dastardly. He finds that if such sacrifices of charity were to be regarded as impulses of those who "believe in God", then it was time that intelligent people recognized the necessity of a more human concept of man's relationship to man based on atheism.
A letter writer from Houston indicates that he had found that one of the best ways to make friends and get along with people was to let everyone one met have his own way. "The mules and horses have to pull together to move the load."
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