The Charlotte News

Monday, September 29, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Counterplot" tells of the Nazi mentality in action: pushing and provoking, bullying others to react so that they might crack down. The editorial warns that time would come when from it would come the Czech revolt, but not yet.

The piece by Amy Bassett, who started occasionally appearing on the page earlier in the month, tells also of things to come, things which would occur forty-three months later, but a long and hard forty-three months it would be which lay ahead for the world, where every yard of territory regained was given in blood and grudgingly. The ringing of the bells at Notre Dame declaring a free France and victory over Hitler; then the ringing of the alarm clock to awake her from the dream. --A day in the life of war.

And as to the three-year old smoker in Winston-Salem who cautioned the dame to be wary of strange men, we think we met him once--yeah, right at the same corner maybe. Still three years old, still smoking and cautioning the older dames about the strange men smoking at the corners at 10:00 in the morning, when ostension betrayed truancy from high school maybe or at least delinquency from work down at the auto emporium. Asked him for a match as he leaned, half-surly, half-dearly, on the lightpost stroking his grizzled and furloughed chin in worried fret, his youth superannuated by sprouting fuzz indicative of incipient whiskers within a year's time, maybe even a gray hair already coming in above his furrowed brow. He obliged the simple request, lit it off his ear lobe as he clicked his chromium heels flashing a shaft of saturating sunlight onto the goods-box scraper across the street, said "Shakespeare's, he's in the alley, gone with some French girls." We took out a ball of beeswax from our left pocket, a length of string from our right, shaped the ball of beeswax into a cylinder, melding the string into its middle as we went, and then lit the configuration with the match, its flint sparking strange on the golden edge, setting off a magnetic vibration as if electrical current spread an arc against the purpled sky, as we said, "First light the candle, then explore the darkness." The three-year old then stamped his left foot down in the gutter three times, smiled a half-grin against his frown, the wrinkles of which told of being flay-flinted more than once by a misapprehending world, waved goodbye as he swirled into a disappearing medley of blue smoke halos and redly faint chill where the rain gets in. --A day in the life in downtown Winston-Salem, circa who knows when.