The Charlotte News
Saturday, September 26, 1942
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of an RAF raid on Oslo, scattering a rally assembled by Vidkun Quisling to muster support for his pro-Nazi party. The raid hit Nazi headquarters; Quisling proclaimed the RAF to be murderous.
Josef Stalin appears dwarfed by Wendell Willkie as the two met to receive the good will assurances of the roving personal ambassador of FDR. Mr. Willkie publicly urged the Allies to open a second front forthwith, that waiting until the following summer might be too late for the Russians, thus too late for the Allies in sum.
Neither Comrade Stalin nor Mr. Willkie would have too much longer to wait. Operation Torch was on its way, replete with George Patton at its head, 45 days from landing on the welcome mat in North Africa.
Vichy attempts to cuittle Morocco’s governor-general were well-founded; continuing Nazi-adduced rumors that the Allies intended an invasion at Dakar missed the masque.
The head of rubber rationing, William Jeffers, announced that nationwide gas rationing to conserve rubber would soon be implemented, probably on the same formula in effect since the beginning of July in seventeen eastern seaboard states, four gallons per week—call it Formula 4. The outcries of discrimination prevalent since the plan went into effect in the East could now at last subside. The West and Midwest were about to cease being hotrod city for the duration’s ride.
A report says that the local vice-chairman of war bond sales announced a record purchase for the month in Mecklenburg, that by September 31, the total might exceed 1.5 million dollars for the month. Indeed, a record burst. And, no doubt, sales were expected to be especially brisk on September the 31st.
Did you lose your purse containing a few hundred dollars in September 1942? Inquire, sir or madame, at the Charlotte Police Department. But be sure to have with you your proof, lest you wind up in Morganton.
On the editorial page, "Zoot Suit" struggles to find explanation for the persistency of the fashion despite the exigencies of war passion seeking to intervene on the material needs of virtually all else. No shortage of weave, however, with which to conceive those extended sleeves, luff the cuffs, make the drape-capes, the bag-swags, the fulgent bulges, the fancy pants, the dangling chains, the shining finery.
As to the term’s etymological mysteries, not explained by the 1942 dictionary to which The News gave consultation, Oxford provides elucidation in quotation from Baker in 1945’s Austral. Lang. (which may be "Australian" or "Australasian", all to effect the same): "Zoot suit (which, of course, came originally from U.S. jive slang) for the crude civilian clothes given to discharged servicemen." For its strict etymology, Oxford says that it is a reduplicative rhyming formation on suit.
But every hepcat knows which way the wind blows and what the true meaning of zoot really is, unless you’re a loot.
We don’t have to recapitulate for you all that stuff about "Gargantua", the giant bomber airplane and the dead giraffe’s circus. Or that hepcat named Patsy in Asbury Park, New Jersey, who twisted round on his arm’s seat until he dislocated his shoulder, mercy for Mer sea--became too much of the misted-found Dharma feat screwed down, sun-filled knee, mithridated phiz bolder, didn’t he?
But Dimini-Jiminy, if they were shortening dresses of those who wore tresses, to make use of the bolters for uniforms of trained soldiers, then why would the zoot be immune from the boot of wartime lain moulder or the demiurgic bones strung by the trees with the ease of a demi-vierge’s kicked rhone to muddy-torn rondeñas gone to flaming-cold verdure?
No fair could be had, but the zoot-suit’s galligaskins and its juke’s root lair had to live on because the world itself had turned bad, a hurri-harassed stend, shoving to its brains the punched-broken nose-bone, fist-pushed by those seeking far more than even their prodigal share of precious rosetta hinged stones.
The Republicans, says Clapper, had suddenly turned from their ways of isolation to embrace sounder paydays by lending their tepid support to the war policies of the Roosevelt Administration. Yet room was left in the not too tight language to afford ground to renounce a fight they didn’t like at the coral-reefed lagoons beneath the arches of Phoenicians' Rang-Bang bridge in Carthage. But you’ll have in defense to admit that to find a Republican who would renounce censorship was a find indeed to a find in need, worthy of a clap or two, be you him, be you her, or be you just, you be.
Mr. Mallon says that Mr. Lister Hill underwrote Mr. McNutt’s challenge to draft a bill to permit the President to draft labor, yet on balance, beating his tabor, uttered that to do so would be to foster that which we fought, the totalitarian valence, the attraction to that faction, the foe foul Italian’s swingletree gallus action.
And the RAF dropped its bombs on the Nazi Quisling show at Oslo in Norway as he charged them with murder from the shore distant and far away. But by the numbers of those reported executed as resisters, Mr. Quisling had no room in which to talk of prepense malice, three weird sisters, nor any space to ascribe to another a license callous. As Priapus, he hung himself ‘round his neck with his own encompassing tree-put ballast. Five inches in a tub in Paris and an electric live wire would have been to his corrupt quisling soul nothing embarrassed.
The fire chief’s wife, Mrs. Palmer, reports Dick Young, started a single-alarum conflagration in her kitchen when the grease hit the pan--but when the ration card administrator, his lash parted to the page pun, found out that she had been hoarding grease, fit for the front lines’ glycerine extract to fill the lend-lease guns, he marched her right down where the pan hits the crease, and now she’s in the jailhouse, all because she didn’t mind her hoppin’ barbecue and blossomin’ lit peas. (Dick Young didn’t impart that post-dash part.)
It was just another Saturday in September 1942. Everyone in the world remaining sensate was glad, no doubt, just to have some inglenook from which to fetch embers, some role still to fill, some task still fit to do.
Framed Edition
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