The Charlotte News

Monday, July 21, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "And there are no diamonds in the mine..."

Oh goodness, we didn't see you there.

The piece by the RAF tail gunner brings the war up close to the reader's eyes, in blinding light.

Ray Clapper's piece tells of many things, and then gets to it: The audience on the West Coast, hearing the pacifist speaker, applauded when he informed them of his belief that the United States would not fight if Germany attacked, but stood silent as stone when informed that if Japan attacked, it was likely we would likewise not retaliate. Ah, the tale-teller.

As to that little piece in the column titled "Home Canning", we note that Cash's mother had a truck garden, and she and her husband used to delight in jarring and canning fruits and vegetables from it.

We had occasion once upon a time to tour their basement in Shelby where they had all sorts of curious manual machines for the purpose, all of which delighted our youthful sense of mystery at the time about what these various cranks and strangely shaped objects did for the practical world around us, yet to be explored.

Home preserves--they're the best.

We never found a shard of glass in any of them. Just berries, lots and lots of berries. Probably some onions and carrots, too.

Peaches, they were the best.

Okra--yuck.

We used to sing to Cash's mother. That's a fact. She wrote it down somewhere once as to how delightful it was to hear us serenade her. We couldn't ask for a better source of critique of our singing.

They never had any o'possum though, did the Cashes. We always wondered what that would taste like. We still do. They say its sort o' stringy, maybe.

Mr. Cash liked fish roe in his latter years. We have yet to acquire a taste for it though.

Finally, toward the end of 1938, he hears the bad news--Firelie was thrown into the Gestapo prison where Jan once was tortured at the hands of Inspector Kraus. Firelie died while there, reason unknown. His son became a ward of the Nazi state and he has never heard from him since.

The aftermath of the story is that Jan, just days later in 1941, was pardoned for his previous California felony conviction for assault, the one for which he spent three years in San Quentin and on which basis his deportation had been sought by the U.S. Government throughout the period these 43 installments appeared in newspapers. The deportation proceedings were suspended and he was allowed to stay in the U.S., eventually becoming a citizen.

He never saw his son again. Later, he testified before HUAC. He wrote one more book, remarried, and took up residence in Baltimore as a solid citizen. In 1951, he contracted pneumonia and died in a fever, hallucinating about the inhuman tortures he had endured at the hands of the Nazis in the mid-1930's.

The segments of the book, incidentally, as presented in The News, were abstracts, as the original published version was 750 pages long. It was a Book of the Month Club selection in early 1941. As to how many other newspapers also presented the story during this time, we don't know.

But it was strangely significant.

Many things, as we have already mentioned, happened during this fateful time between June 2 at the start of that publication and this July 21 at its end. The fate of the world, indeed, had changed. Entering the period, Great Britain was on the ropes and the isolationists in America had written it off, the war lost, the Wave of the Future begun. Things appeared fast to be falling apart, to leave America alone to fight the Nazi and Japanese horde on two oceans, ill-equipped for such a fight.

By its end, just 49 days later, the pressure on Great Britain had ceased for a time, the Russian invasion commenced; the increased British bombing of German cities and French cities had brought the war home for the first time dramatically to the German civilian population and to the Nazis who started it. Japan made its plans to move south in the Pacific, and, with it, the plans to attack Pearl Harbor, plans first conceived in the Japanese military circles the previous summer of 1940.

The first fledgling American intelligence gathering service was inaugurated by FDR, to be followed by the OSS in the spring, by the CIA in 1947.

A young man from Boston, who had visited Charlotte on February 8-9, 1941 to seek a ghost writer for his father's memoirs, was busy making himself more physically fit to join the armed forces after being rejected in the spring for service in the Army because of his bad back. He would succeed in entry to the Navy shortly, and from there was quickly brought into the Office of Naval Intelligence in the fall.

The world had changed.

And, of course, in the midst of it all, W. J. Cash died in an untelling hotel room in Mexico City, labeled the victim of his own hand.

As we also pointed out once before, Cash's mother had in the mid-1890's been a founding member of a small newspaper in Boiling Springs, N.C., The Rural Reformer.

So, we shall leave the chronology of The News now, for the nonce at least.

You will have to find out for yourself in your favorite public library, from your favorite newspaper of the day, what eventually happened with Tops and Sally, Skeezix and Nina, as Skeezix arrived at Uncle Will's to play baseball with the kids. Whether Superman was able to foil the plot of "Lippy" Jenks and the dastardly Coker, out to lure him into the trap, the one set by the police on top of the Farnsworth Building. What it was that drove Hoops to the edge of the cliff rather than tell Jethro about Ellie. Honi sois qui mal y pense. Whether Bess went back to town with Boots and Her Buddies. Whether the Bumsteads ever got their washing done. Whether Slim, having lost his wages at poker, provided Barbary Pete's gang with the gold they sought from Red Ryder. What happened to Easy down in Peru by way of the Maria Maru. Whether Jesse ever became Senator. And whether the Mermaid, Miss Anchovy, ever grew her legs for Wimpy, and whether Popeye ever got to see Davy Jones in his locker, and whether in fact Davy wasn't really Popeye's papa.

As we have said, we never much cared for the comics when we were growing up, except searching for "Lois" amid the editorial cartoon. But, we admit, we did liked the Popeye cartoons as a little tyke, sometimes. Rocky, Bulwinkle, Fred and Wilma 'tweren't bad neither.

We have the files on the rest of July and August, and will likely retrieve the remainder of 1941, and perhaps in the future we shall put that here for you as well. We do intend, as no story is worth its salt without a proper denouement, to place December, 1941 here for you, probably in December, 2008, if the creek, ever rising, manages not to rise too high in the meantime.

But for now, we shall take a much needed hiatus for a month, as we have been going at it nonstop since last October, and the little squigglies are starting to curl their way into our sleep.

We do still have left to do all of November, 1939 and about two-thirds of September, 1940. Why they wound up left out that way, we can't explain to you. It just is. We read and dictated the September, 1940 pieces back in September and October, 2004, but, for whatever reason, nothing much came to mind to say about them that we hadn't already said recently, and so we left them to cool in the refrigerator. Maybe we shall have better luck with them this time around. We haven't yet gone through the November, 1939 pieces, as we rarely read ahead on matter not posted for you in real time the same day we read them for the first time, except where indicated. In any event, we intend to get to those last two months for you, probably in the fall.

We also, in due course, but before Hell freezes over, intend to put here the other 32 months worth of the whole editorial pages not yet posted. As we do so, with all deliberate speed, we shall also perhaps add a few more comments along the way on them--for your edification, or not.

There are also some 400 missing editorials which we skipped originally in the process of putting this site online over the last decade, especially those from March, 1938, and about 12 other of the initial months we placed online. We skipped those as we were not certain of their attribution to Cash, as they mainly concerned local, state, and national politics. But the more we discovered along the way, the more we came to understand that Cash's beat was by no means limited to the war and international affairs. So, though many of those editorials left out are likely not by Cash, and undoubtedly some we have posted are probably not by Cash either, for compleatness--as every poet and angler surely knows is the path to further uncertainty--we shall nevertheless place them here for you. For the more one knows, as they say, the less one knows. But, that's life. Probably all for the better.

We have enjoyed the work on this project and hope you have and will continue to obtain, here and there, a nugget or two for your store, and your story. We are not done, and so we are not saying good-bye or offering farewells.

We shall simply say hello. The beginning is near.

Should you be new to this site and are fond of starting at the back of the book, we urge you to go not so much to the beginning, but perhaps follow the chronology we used, as indicated by the months of posting--the serendipitous route through it. We think that the more illuminating way. But you may find a better path for yourself than the one we have set forth.

We thank many out there on the waves--you know who you are, for their assistance in the past decade, those who wrote e-mails to us, those who didn't but read it all, or most of it, anyway with us. We thank the helpful staff personnel of the Charlotte Public Library, Wilson Library in Chapel Hill, the Oakland Public Library, and those who were helpful during a memorable Monday, August 27, 2001 spent in part at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center on the University of Texas campus, beneath the lindens, as well as at the LBJ Library a short walk away, all because of a serendipitous gully washer which stranded us there the night before.

We thank Bruce Clayton for his 1991 biography of Cash, which got us interested in this topic when we first read it one July day of 1991 on an airplane back to California. We thank Joseph Morrison whose 1967 book on Cash we read only for the first time in early 1992. We thank the many participants in both seminars, at Wake Forest and the University of Mississippi, in 1991 and 1992, a couple of whom once taught us, and taught us well, we think, in college days. They, too, had a large hand in serving up the inspiration for this presentation.

But most of all we thank the dedicated staff of The Charlotte News, who labored for little money and recognition during those fateful years of the 1930's and early 1940's, sticking their fingers into an impertinent little apparatus full of jingles and jangles as the carriage clattered right to left, one without cooling fans or hard drives for storage, only their own wits with which to set it down by the black ribbons and pencils provided them there in the Ivory Tower, the one with the platinum air conditioner constantly whirring away during the humid months of Summer into Autumn and back again, as the gold-plated chauffeur-driven Cadillac awaited each and every reporter and writer each new day to whisk them to and fro the newest story amid the petulant blocks of space and time which then comprised the world around them.

We thank J. E. Dowd for putting together what had to be one of the most enterprising and refreshing newspapers in Dixie, after he took over its editorial reigns.

We also thank a helpful lot, no doubt, of Disney gnomes in the production of this site.

And our teachers, all of them.

And we dedicate this site, not just to the memory of its principal subject, W. J. Cash and his writing, but also to the many men and women, not only of the armed forces, but also those who endured the many sacrifices of the home front in many lands across the globe, often comprising, too, the front lines, who fought, and some of whom lost their lives, in that terrible thing set in motion by the blind who could not see.

War Is Over--as someone born into the bombing of Liverpool, England during that fateful time once said.

We may only learn from it. If what we learn from it, however, is to hate, even our enemy, we only lend cause to give that which those ultimately who fought and gave their lives in it for the Allied cause to preserve, democracy and freedom, a bad name. And by so doing, run the danger of starting the War all over again.

Many things have happened in the world during the past decade since June, 1998 when we first began preparing the American Mercury articles of Cash for presentation here, after the idea to do this project struck us serendipitously one basketball night in March of that year. Some big, some small. But all really, in truth, pale beside what our parents' generation, at least for those of us who came along sometime only a few years after that war, endured during that time.

Once, somewhere around 1967, while we were in Atlanta, our mother stated, uncharacteristically, that our generation was spoiled by comparison to hers, one which had gone through the Depression intervening both world wars. In her case, born 1910, she had a point. But, we were at the time inclined to disagree and thus reminded her of the many travails we were enduring then in our lives, the tangle in the streets of most major cities over something so simple as affording all citizens equal civil rights, the war in Vietnam, the omnipresent threat to those over the age of 18 of being drafted and sent to a rice paddy to die, the assassination of our President just four years earlier, the hatred pealed from racism or from spite toward those perceived to have more, and all the other universal ills which have plagued mankind since the beginning of time.

She listened, being a patient third-grade school teacher, backtracked and quietly agreed with us.

But of course, she had endured those things we mentioned along with us, too, in addition to the travails of her own generation before we came along.

It was a time. And we understand it a little better now. And we understand her and her generation a little better now, too, maybe.

Our mother, with her intuition, as usual, was right.

Your mother, after all, should know.

Why deny the obvious child?

It's sort of like O.N.I.

Now, to go out and try to find us some of those twenty-cent a gallon cherries. They run about $3.77 per lb. down where we shop these days. The Rainiers run double that. If you know where we might find them cheaper, let us know.

We need them for our climb next month, all four peaks of the Kilimanjaros, somewhere in the Himalayas.

Good 'ay.