The Charlotte News

Sunday, October 30, 1938

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Well, this night of the eve of soulin', we would like to suggest whispers, on the eve of our annual costume regalia, the eve of All Saints, as they go marching, gently, along our roads and by-ways, winded by drift of the little lanterns and soft candles and sweets.

We could tell you the one about "The War of the Worlds", you know, that night when the Martians landed in New Jersey, or the one about "The Purple People Eater" by Sheb, or the one about "The Day the Earth Stood Still", you know, about Einstein.

But, it being Sunday evening, and our daily deadline overrun here, (and with the delivery boys and girls out there chomping at the bit to get their papers delivered before too much after nightfall) and as it finds us being a little foggy on it all this eve, we shall let you explore the below at your leisurely pace.

Candidly, we have never heard of such things, ourselves.

In fact, we should say that that bit about Bacon sure hits us as a surprise. Had no idea anyone ever doubted that the Bard wrote the Plays or that one Play in particular had some hidden expressions within it. None whatsoever. Never heard such a thing and wouldn't even so much as wish to consider or explore all of that for a minute ourselves, for we know who wrote those Plays. And it would scare us silly to go digging the Bard's bones and wind up burned by that curse of which his Epitaph warns in his Tombstone Territory.

Well, time for a little four and four now, and R and R.

But before that, we will say that right now, we have so many discs spinning, we thought we'd pause and listen to a few of 'em.

Here's one:

Here's another excised bit, previously:

And here's yet another outtake, from one about the mine strikes, we think it was:

Did you ever see the old fifties tv show, "One Step Beyond"? Now, there was a scary show, especially the one about the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the other one about The Flying Dutchman on the Titanic, forerunner to Rod's pieces.

Starts us to shutdering, just thinking about it.

Boo.

There'll probably be a lot of moral indignation loosed about the marriage near Prestonsburg, Ky., of Rosie Columbus, aged ten, to Fleming Tackett, 34-year-old miner. The husband will be denounced and the blacksmith-parson who married them will be denounced, and, above all, the parents will be denounced--all as being nothing less than inhuman monsters. In all the denunciation, probably not much attention will be paid to the rest of the story, which according to the Associated Press goes like this:

But there's no use in getting steamed about the marriage unless you get steamed up about this, too. For such child marriages in America are invariably the issue of the animal ignorance and degradation bred by just such animal poverty and want. As long as there are people who have to live under cliffs two Winters, as long as there are people who have to live crowded by the dozen into two-room cabins, there will go right on being people who do not see anything wrong in the marriage of ten-year-old children.

In the study of Christ Church rectory on St. Simons Island, Georgia, one night last February, Dr. Charles H. Lee, 71 and a second cousin to Marse Robert, sat preparing his Sunday sermon. With him was his wife, like him slightly deaf. They heard a sharp noise, as though a motor had backfired, but thought nothing of it. Then Mrs. Lee retired, and there came a second noise. Dr. Lee fell over in his chair, a bullet through his temple.

This cruel murder was described for St. Simons police last week. A Negro named George Cleyborn said that he and another Negro known as "Willie" or "Looney" had done it. Cleyborn fired the first shot, the "backfire," and missed, and after lying low for awhile "Willie" took the pistol and fired a second time.

Cleyborn told the police also that a white man, Henry Cofer, owner of the Golden Isle Hotel & Casino, had given him $150 and the gun to murder the rector, and that Cofer's brother, proprietor of The Brass Rail, a liquor store had employed "Willie" to assist him. Motive the police are working on is that the rector was exercised at the number and the nature of dives in his island neighborhood, and that the Cofer brothers, apparently very stupid men, set out to remove him.

But as all of us know, the only way dives can operate is with the tolerance of the police. Hence it stands to reason that the police officers who worked for more than eight months to bring the murderers of Dr. Lee to justice were the very same police officers who had permitted conditions to exist which were directly responsible for the crime. There is a moral in that which the little reader may phrase for himself.

Site Ed. Note: Having some further years on Cash, we think we understand the phrasing, ourselves, and only too, too well.

Got the key, now. Just Pickett.

But now up steps the American Guild of Musical Artists to say that Mr. Menuhin can't play for the Philharmonic until he first signs up a membership slip with that union, authorizes it to be his "exclusive agent," and pays it $70 in membership fees. The union does not at all dispute Mr. Menuhin when he says "I have always sympathized with organized labor... But I have no interest requiring collective bargaining..." It does not pretend that Mr. Menuhin needs protection. It simply lays down the law that nobody, whatever his stature, can play for the Philharmonic save on the conditions it (the union) specifies. And Mr. Menuhin, thinking that "if this continues, we soon will have only one kind of art--and that which conforms to union regulations," politely declines.

Mr. Menuhin is going to be deprived of his nice fat fee. And over the nation some millions of music lovers--in great part liberals with an active sympathy for labor unions--who listen to the Philharmonic concerts on Sunday afternoons, are going to be deprived of the coveted privilege of hearing Mr. Menuhin. And so, we bet you that Mr. Menuhin and all those millions are hereafter going to feel more and more actively sympathetic toward labor unions. We bet you--like heck!

Site Ed. Note: Of course, had Mr. Menuhin first been allowed to play at the Philharmonic and only then did the union seek the fee or refuse to allow the Philharmonic to pay him, then he could have taken 'em to Court, on quantum meruit principles of contract law, you see. So, best not mess too much with skilled musicians. Boo.

To a lot of people it will be somewhat startling news that North Carolina has become the first member of the union to establish State-supported birth control clinics, that it already has 57 such clinics, and that one of the oldest of them is located in Charlotte. And, indeed, it is a little startling when you consider the exceedingly conservative character of the people of the state.

But it is not startling from another viewpoint. For many years, the North Carolina Health Department has been one of the best and most progressive in the country. Considering the resources it commands, it is perhaps the best in America. And so it was natural enough that it should be a pioneer in these clinics--which, in fact, are not simply birth control clinics. The one here, for instance, concerns itself also with general pre-natal care, with the delivery of indigent mothers, and the eradication of syphilis in new-born babes.

And nowhere were such clinics more needed than in North Carolina. The South, with 13 per cent of the national income and 28 per cent of the population of the nation, has a general birth rate 50 per cent higher than the national average. And North Carolina has the highest birth-rate in the South. More, North Carolina ranks among the first states for high infant and maternity death-rate due to lack of proper pre-natal care, and also for congenital syphilis.

The greater part of our excess birth rate is accounted for by the day laborer and sharecropper classes--which is to say people who are already too numerous to find a place in our economic system and whose share in the low Southern income is already grossly inadequate to decent living. It is in these classes too, that the waste of human life consequent upon lack of pre-natal care is most evident. And it is among the poor generally that congenital syphilis most flourishes.

We have, in short, simply been multiplying human misery. And at the same time we have been hanging an almost intolerable burden around the state's neck. North Carolina, with one-forth the per capita income of New York City, has one-third more children, in proportion to population, to educate. And the inadequate care of mothers and congenital syphilis provides us with an institutional and crime bill all out of keeping with the size of our population.

These clinics are the first sensible approach to the problem that has ever been made, and the Health Department deserves to be given much larger appropriations than it has yet had for the carrying on of this work.

In Westminster Abbey workmen are digging for the bones of Edmund Spenser, author of the Faerie Queen and dead these 339 years. Reason is that William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and others are supposed to have dropped scraps of paper, with certain writings on them, into his grave when they buried him. And scholars are hopeful that if those scraps can be found, they will settle the controversy as to whether Shakespeare himself or Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans and sometime Lord Chancellor of England, wrote the Shakespearean plays.

It is curious, but little is likely to come of it. The notion that Bacon wrote the plays was never heard of until the middle of the nineteenth century. No contemporary, including Ben Jonson who was jealous of him, seems to have any notion that anybody but William of Stratford had a hand in the writings. All of the evidence for the Bacon theory is of the sketchiest sort. Thus, it is said that Shakespeare was not an educated man, whereas the author of the plays obviously knew much about many things, including the law. But little is really known about Shakespeare's education. Again, it is said that the language of Bacon and the language of Shakespeare are much alike. But that is only natural, seeing that they were contemporaries. The prize piece of evidence however, is that which was offered by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence in his Bacon Is Shakespeare, published in 1910. According to that learned savant the mock-humorous word "honorificabilituditatibus" in Love's Labour Lost, is an anagram which really spells "hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi"--which is to say, "These plays F. Bacon's offspring preserved for the world!"

Site Ed. Note: It is not the toothy or be? What is he talkin' about? This feller needs him a lesson. Callin' us Animals, like that. Does he not know "hi-Lillie, hi-Low? House o' the Risin'...?...

Wait, a minute. Draft?!

Ni-tat!

Quare chirrah, not sirrah?

Wally?

No, Beav.

If yon I offend thee, pluck it out!

Most definitely not.

Go do your homework. Quo vadis.

But, afore you goeth, hint-helper: "1791-1823 D'Israeli Cur. Lit. (1866) 287 Such were flap-dragons, which were small combustible bodies fired at one end and floated in a glass of liquor, which an experienced toper swallowed unharmed, while still blazing."

And here's another, ye wight, might which ye not find lest ye do some raddin': Faerie, is, we glean, the female version of the fair steened, the male being just some knightly wight, yclept then by the lonesome queen as not so necessarily quare, but of the most handsome faire. But, anyway, that might take ye some teem to comprend, so be of sloth, if need it be, and learn your lessons well, ye childe of we and thee.

Boo.