Site Ed. Note: …The name of the ship on which we booked passage, mind you, was Flavia.

We can see in the dark, you know. We’ve been here quite awhile.

The following piece also comes from this day's page:

C. M. Douglas, Transylvania Times

Know what a KIERAN is? Publisher W. Carey Dowd of Charlotte News pulled that one on me last week and I hunted all through the dictionaries and reference books to no avail... Oliver Orr came along and told me to read the Ladies Home Journal and I would find that Mr. Kieran is a fellow who knows most of the answers, and conducts a radio program of answers to hard questions...next time you wish to brag about how much you know, and fool the other fellow even more than you already have, just tell him you are a KIERAN.

Charlotte Doesn't Seem To Have A Monopoly On This

In Baltimore last Sunday a young man went out to a skating rink. That was quite proper under Baltimore's Blue Laws. Quite proper it was also for him to rent the skates, pay a fee, and go a-skating. And when he needed some cigarettes and some ice cream and a drink of soda pop and a piece of candy--why, still, the fellow could buy them quite legally from the places of business located about the rink.

But, alas and alack, in the course of his spinning about the floor, he broke a shoe lace, and hied himself hastily to one of the places of business. He got a shoestring all right. But then--then a police lieutenant who had been standing guard over the place went into action. The hapless merchant was ordered to prepare to go to jail. And when he tried to dodge out of justice by pointing out that his place of business was just outside the lieutenant's lawful jurisdiction, the latter triumphantly settled that by calling a patrol car. Tuesday in a Baltimore court the fellow paid a fine of $31.45, including the costs.

What it seems to demonstrate, in addition to the incurable silliness of the human race, is that Charlotte doesn't have any monopoly on that silliness--as we are sometimes, in exasperation, tempted to think. In Charlotte it is quite legal to buy all the beer and wine and shoe laces you like on Sunday, illegal to go to a movie. In Baltimore, you can buy the wine and beer and go a-skating, but you can't buy a shoe lace. That seems to make the silly score about even as between the two cities.

But Even Rabbits Get Wise After Many Object Lessons

The Nazi offer to "guarantee" Rumania's borders in return for increased supplies of oil, wheat, and other raw materials, must make even the harassed Rumanians smile derisively and think of Aesop or Uncle Remus.

Joker is that, as the first condition of such an agreement, the Rumanians would be required to demobilize all but 510,000 of the million and a half troops now under arms and to send them into the fields. Which is to say that Rumania would be required to make herself helpless before Germany, when the other should decide to take over the Rumanian oil wells and wheat fields--to become a Nazi "protectorate."

A Nazi guarantee, as all the little Balkans know well, is about the worst thing that can happen to small nations. Poland, for instance, had a Nazi guarantee for the inviolability of her borders over a period of ten years--but look at what happened to her. And Czechoslovakia was offered such a guarantee, got one when she gave up the Sudetenland--and look at what happened to her. And there were all sorts of guarantees that Austria would not be incorporated into the Reich, that there would be "no more territorial demands in Europe," and this and that.

"Ah, no, my little," says Master Reynard to Brer Rabbit, "be assured that I have no designs on you. All I want is that we shall make an alliance, under which you will agree to let me eat you up when I shall desire."

House Cynically Confesses Its Prevailing Aim

The House yesterday gave itself completely away. It voted the $20,000,000 loan to Finland, the cruel mockery of a loan which forbids the expenditure of the money for the one thing Finland needs most: arms. And it did it by standing vote so as to keep the names of the members off the record.

And it did that, admittedly, because it was afraid that the confused electorate which imagines that this is somehow a step toward war and that the sale of arms is very wicked, might resent it, and that the people who believe that arms should be sold might resent it, also.

In short, it was an open admission that the House is out to play both ends against the middle, and that the main consideration which motivates it, in the most serious period the world has faced in modern times, is the desire of the [indiscernible word] to get re-elected.

This motive and the admitted motivation [indiscernible word] a most formidable [indiscernible words] place, of the type of man who gets elected to Congress, and of the workings of democracy itself. The Fathers of this Republic knew very well that men are human. But they nevertheless hoped to set up a system under which the flower of the nation would gravitate automatically to the national legislature--men who, however much they might yield to picayune considerations in small matters, would have the dignity and the courage to stand up for logic and the national interest, regardless of mob ignorance and passions, in times of peril. Washington himself lucidly set forth exactly that hope.

What we seem to have got is a gang of jobholders.

A Thriving Community Always Needs Additions To Its Plans

Over and over again one hears the disgruntled remark, "There's too much raising of money in this town." At times it certainly seems so. Every year there's the Community Chest and the Boy Scouts, and in the last couple of years there have been the YMCA, Memorial Hospital (twice), Presbyterian Hospital (though only among a select few), and various assorted charities and benevolent undertakings.

Not to mention, also, elections on public services such as parks and playgrounds, the Sanatorium, the Library, all of which cost money and add to the chorus of gimmies.

And yet, it would be an adverse commentary on the town if it did not need more and more and even more money for its public and civic enterprises. The price of growth is replacement, as the mother of any sprouting child can tell you. Likewise, a thriving business establishment requires greater investment and equipment than one that is simply holding its own.

Memorial Hospital is a case in point. It's not wholly pleasant, we concede, to have to go out among the people of the town and raise an additional $215,000. Nobody relishes the task for its own sake.

But suppose that we had no use for a medical center of such size and up-to-dateness. Suppose that instead of the people of the Carolinas coming to Charlotte to consult and be treated by eminent medical specialists, the people of Charlotte had to go elsewhere for comparable services.

There'd be the immediate saving of our $215,000 in capital, to be sure. There'd be no distasteful campaigning for funds. Our past hospital facilities would be entirely adequate--adequate, that is, to a town which, having ceased to flourish, had commenced to languish. And in the long run we should be heavy losers.

In Charlotte there is a lot of raising of money, undeniably. No sooner is something provided that something else is needed. And the far-seeing among us hope that it always will be so, for the alternative to progress and expansion is to decline.

Writing 'Em Down Violates The Rights Of Nobody

The United States circuit courts are in diametrical opposition as to whether or not the Wagner Act requires an agreement reached through collective bargaining to be put into writing. First, the Chicago court said it didn't. Now the New York court says it does.

What the Wagner Act means to the case we don't know. But of the different positions taken by the two courts, that of the New York court seems the more logical and reasonable.

The employer involved in the New York case argued, indeed, that to require him to put an agreement into writing was to abridge his absolute freedom of contract. But to that the court remarked:

Which seems pretty conclusive. Bad faith is about the only reason imaginable for refusing to put a contract into writing. Far from injuring the employer, the practice is one calculated to insure him in his rights in case of bad faith on the part of the bargaining agency with which he has contracted.