The Charlotte News

Wednesday, June 24, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We wind up being a day late on today's editorial page. We became so engrossed in writing the note of Tuesday while sitting in O'Hare Airport in Chicago that we lost track of time and missed the connecting flight. Actually, we didn't lose track of time. We had mistakenly set our clock an hour earlier than it should have been set, as we had stopped earlier in the day in Denver which runs on Mountain Time. We knew that Chicago was on Central Time but forgot to reset the clock.

We were reminded while in O'Hare, as we passed the exhibit with a full-size replica of an F4F/FM Wildcat, of the heroics of the Wildcat's best known pilot, Butch O'Hare, who flew to glory on February 20, 1942 at Rabaul, earning the Congressional Medal of Honor for making quick work of six Japanese fliers. The original of his agile plane is in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. Young O'Hare would be killed November 26, 1943 while flying a night mission in the Gilbert Islands.

As we previously pointed out, the renaming in 1949 of Orchard Airport (hence "ORD" on your bag tags), was ironically at the behest of Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, staunch isolationist, against whom many editorialists of the day caviled, attributing to him, along with William Randolph Hearst, a large measure of the responsibility for America having to become directly involved in such a long and cruel war, their having created such a climate of negative public opinion toward Britain that aid was forestalled entirely before fall, 1940, and then further encumbered thereafter until the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In any event, there being nothing on the page today of which we have not previously commented at some length, we shall let you read it for yourself.