Site Ed. Note: The front page reports a lull in the action in Tunisia, to go along with the lull during the past several days on the British-German interface at El Agheila. Mutual bombing raids between the two sides of the lines was the only activity.

The Office of War Information reported that, amid the Allied bombing raids on northern Italy, the population had nearly come to loggerheads with Mussolini and were threatening revolt, which, according to Elmer Davis, could be imminent.

In Lyon, for the first time in the formerly unoccupied zone of France, the Nazis had rounded up 100 “hostages” to pay for the attack on a German officer. Now, the Nazis were no longer even waiting for the kullah’s head to be shot through, but rather were engaged in pre-emption, the while alienating the population they hoped somehow to govern. They might have done well to analyze the situation in Italy; but that was too complex for the military genius of Hitler, who had other, more weighty, matters to consider.

His jungle-gunny goons only knew one method of control, as borne out repeatedly in Czechoslovakia, from which it was also reported that in Moravia, 157 had been executed the previous month and another 29 in one day for possession of arms and explosives, while another six were shot for sabotage activities in Prague. There would be many more Lidices before the slavering, predatory jowls of the military genius were finally satiated with blood, on the Lupercal.

In Indiana, a car was hijacked for its gasoline--probably so's they could go buy themselves a Christmas tree with sugarcanes on it and sip voluminous pots of coffee while eating steak and burning rubber.

The editorial page features the first piece for The News by syndicated columnist Samuel Grafton. He begins, referencing the loss in October by the farmers in the battle to achieve 110%, or in some cases as high as 117%, parity in prices--those prices extant, as adjusted for relative buying power, during the period 1909-1914, before World War I erupted to drive up prices artificially for its duration. He says the measure was defeated in Congress while the eyes of the nation were upon them. But now, that no one was giving a gander, they had gone and passed the Pace Bill in the dead of night which would accomplish much the same thing, while raising the cost of living by 3.5 billion dollars in the ensuing year, just not giving the President the authority to regulate the prices to control inflation.

Mr. Grafton carps that being anti-FDR was no ground to go whole hog and don a Halloween costume--probably that of a ghost of the Olde Deal, but he didn’t say that; we did.

As to the hillbilly from Tennessee dating Nelly with a choice of intentions in mind, whether his intentions were also minded on Rosalie or the diamonds in the sky mine of Clementyne, we don’t rightly know. But, whatever the rosebuds on which his eyne fell were, it would positively sleigh you, in all likelihood, come Christmas. (Ourselves, we got an Authentic Model Turnpike racetrack for Christmas, 1963--all plastic, except the brass electric rails under the plastic strips you had to screw into place, interconnected by the little brads which held the rails one to another, the Dickens to get your fingers on and make the connections. Man, though, when it was together, it looked sharp. Thing was, however, it didn’t work worth a damn. Cars moved so fast around the curves, they’d just spin right off into oblivion, leave rubber tracks all over the room. Couldn’t ever get them to go more than one or two laps at a time without spinning out. It was awful. Just a waste of money. Somebody didn’t engineer that sucker right. Came with a 1962 Thunderbird, cream-colored. That looked sharp, just like the scale model version for off-track driving. But it wouldn’t stay on the track. 'Twas $49.95 for the whole she-bang. Got us a light blue 1962 Pontiac Bonneville to go with it on our birthday a few days later. It didn’t work worth a damn either. But it sure did look good in the magazine. We still have it all, in pieces, somewhere back there. Those little copper brads they had to connect the rails under the plastic strips were the devil to keep in place, and the track would just drive itself to pieces after awhile from the vibration of the cars moving so damned fast you couldn’t keep up with them. Had to tack the track down good with little bitty tacks, to some plywood, after awhile to keep it all from driving itself apart. Liked to banged our fingers to death getting those little bitty tacks in place though. Better, but, once the track was down good, the damned cars just drove right off the track. You couldn’t win for losing in those days.)

Where were we? Oh. There’s some article about Charlotte’s reading habits, being no worse than the rest of the South, full of technical manuals and light novels about westerns and such, a regular merry-go-round of print, it says. More books being written in the South than read. But we hain’t had time to read the article fully yet. Too busy remembering about that racetrack there in 1963. You have at it.

The piece from the Army Weekly addresses the proclivity of man to stick guns on everything he gets that moves. The article's rendition of the friendly, rosy set-up abiding at the beginning of World War I, with the opposing reconnaissance pilots chatting back and forth amicably in French and German, until one of the German pilots threw a rotten tomato at an onion soup and inadvertently--as in the slaying of Hyacinthus with the quoit blown off course by Zephyrus in a fit of jealous rage for Apollo‘s favor of him--hit a French pilot square in the jaw, or something like that, causing the French pilot to retaliate, causing the German pilot to grab a blunderbuss, and the whole thing was off and running from there--the arms' race. One side rustlin' the arms of the other for their secrets, the other side guarding against the theft with spies of the other, until everyone on either side finally went pretty nigh on bat-nuts.

Now, in the Second World War, with the advance of the B-17, Yank says, the fighting got so fierce that pilots landed on their motors, things getting desperate up there in the wild blue yonder, obviously--probably swaggering side-to-side on top of the bomb, waving a ten-gallon hat and yelling "Yee-haaa!" to boot, as they sought to land the sucker on some hapless target below.

In any event, the Yank's version seems to ring sympathetically with a segment of the Alexander de Seversky film which was produced by Walt Disney and to which we referred you, "Victory Through Air Power"; but that had not been released yet, wouldn’t be until the following July. So, perhaps Yank had a foretaste of the fare, or perhaps the Disney producers read the same piece and drew the idea from it. We don’t know. We weren’t there.

Incidentally, Walt Disney also designed the logo--angels’ wings stuck on either side of a boxcar riding beneath the motto, "Securité en Nuages", meaning "Security in Clouds"--for the badge worn by the men of the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command, vital suppliers to the men fighting in the Solomons,--the acronym for which was SCAT, though, in point of fact, you would pronounce it "Spicketcy".

The sub-motto might have been: "Nobody loves you when you’re down and out."

You can read the rest; we’re too busy with True Story.

Anyway, the sub-caption for Herblock to-day might well have been: "There is a House in New Orleans--on Camp Street."

On second thought, maybe that acronym was actually PATC, a sort of a half-rhymed version of the fuller brushed version, SoPacCAT'sEye-gren, code-named Opearation Boxcar. (The missing link to Ra Gato is now here. Give up, Miss Kitty. You can't hide from us.)

Chan Chan.

Framed Edition

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