Site Ed. Note: Incidentally, one of the more touching scenes in "Terror at High Point" occurs near the beginning of the episode when the young retarded fellow approaches the good doctor, again acting furtively next to an earth-mover which shields the view of him from a police car which has stopped at the construction site to obtain mechanical assistance because of a leaky oil filter, the gasket being the problem, and as the retarded fellow approaches the good doctor, he says, "You Haydn?" in response to which the doctor, a little startled naturally, resisting the more normal instant reaction, "No, Beaumont's the name, jive-mama time-keeping's the game," simply turns, allowing the young lad an opportunity to correct his misperception, at which point the young retarded fellow clarifies his meaning, "You Haydn, Paul?" whereupon the doctor then says, maintaining a serious countenance so as not to make the boy feel badly, "Not Haydn, Jamie," at which juncture in time the young fellow then asks naively, "Are ye playin' games? Can I play? I know lots o' games," to which the doctor responds, "We both got a lot of work to do," obviously seeking to make the slothful young laddie feel more at home with the loose colloquial language, which the young neophyte does not seem quick enough to use himself but rather insists on proper English, saying, "Well, maybe Sunday when I'm off," the doctor turning quickly away now, obviously discomfited at the thought of playing games with Jamie when he was off on Sunday, but, with celerity, adjusting to the socially inappropriate and dysfunctional, irrelevant remarks of the young proselyte, humors him, even if the while acting as enabler to his social dysfunction by creating false and unrealistic expectations of socialization in the normal course by one so irremediably retarded, by responding to his second entreaty, "Paul?" by saying, "Oh yeah, yeah, maybe Sunday," knowing the while that there could be no meaningful intercourse between the two on Sunday, as the doctor was just stringing Jamie along.

By Sunday, Jamie, however, would himself be a wanted man--by Dan.

This scene, incidentally, takes place immediately after a scene in which Felix, the foreman, approaches the good doctor as he is filling out time sheets in the construction office, after Felix has responded to the police emergency by diagnosing the oil filter problem, certifying himself fit for the purpose by identifying his credentials, graduate civil engineer, sending the copper over to the mechanic’s shop on the site, for a quick tightening down of the filter with the oil filter wrench, the time-clock on the wall behind the good doctor then reading 12:30 p.m., Pacific Time, or actually, within the setting, Mountain Time, whether Standard or Daylight depending on when the scene was shot.

All of that by way of saying this.

The front page photograph reminds of "A Canterbury Tale" which we viewed last September for the first time, and then mentioned, a film which gained some unfortunate, ghostly notoriety for being the film to which Margaret Mitchell Marsh was headed when she was struck crossing at the corner of 13^th and Peachtree in Atlanta by an off-duty cab driver, August 11, 1949, dying five days later.

It's a very nice film, ahead of its time. Watch it sometime.

The story accompanying the photograph is very touching, especially heightened, if combined with a viewing of "A Canterbury Tale". We'll let you read it and watch it, should you so desire, for yourself.

The Nazis were now practicing their own scorched-earth policy on the Soviets within their own territory, burning Rostov as they fled--like all good obscurantist pirates do.

Nineteen men escaped from Parchman Farm in Mississippi, the largest break-out in the prison’s history. Run, baby, run.

They had eaten their eggs, being the fugitive kind, the defiant ones.

Bowling Green, sewing machine.

Former New York playboy, Private Jacob Webb, was arrested, A.W.O.L., in Reno, Nevada.

He was arrested, running as a jackrabbit, at 3:22 a.m., by Detective Sergeants Pete Reed and Al Fiorine, operating on the early morning watch out of the Reno Police Department, after an informant read his description in the newspaper.

He was a descendant of Commodore Vanderbilt and, thus, the Chevy Chase of Dinah Shore, having also endowed the Vanderbilt Commodores of Nashville.

He was still wearing his red bathrobe and tan Army boots in which he had escaped from the Army Base Hospital the previous evening.

They were size 9 boots; the bathrobe was size 33 large, had a little pink tassel and a red rose embroidered on the left breast pocket, with a yellow canary on the shoulder and a rather decorative floral pattern on the back. It was designed by Mr. Haggar, but as one of their cut-rate blemished goods and so not the expensive kind.

He told the cab driver who transported him from downtown Reno, after he had walked nine miles into town from the cantonment, that he was dressed as he was because he had an argument with his father.

The argument was over, he explained, his fear of horses leading to his having burned the family horse-farm barn down back in Ellsmore, Ky.

He had $39.25 on his person, consisting of nine ones, three fives, a ten, two twos, and forty-five quarters.

The man was now under shotgun protection back at the hospital awaiting court martial, stuck between another guard standing six feet, six inches tall, whether in his boots or stocking feet, however, not being elucidated. His nickname was "Mutt".

The private said that he was a doctor and was seeking out Howard Hughes to address to him a new plan for a spruce airbus which he had heard Howard was furiously busy designing down there in Los Angeles. So, he said that he had been seeking a ride to that locale. It was a fact. Just ask his sergeant: Carter was the name.

Then the private said something very peculiar: "I wish to go there to Malibu and write love letters in the sand in April."

Nobody knows about what he was talking.

He had a defense. Can you catch it?

British Mosquitoes, plywood planes, bombed Germany while American Mustangs bombed railroads and other vitally contributory infrastructure of the war in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

The Luftwaffe was blowing Bone in Tunisia.

Senator Guy Gillette, spurned by the advancement of General Eisenhower to four stars in charge of all Allied North African operations, urged appointment of a worldwide Allied commander. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire agreed.

Gandhi experienced nausea during his 31-day fast, which somehow, according to the account, had been shortened to 21 days.

We're with him.

At the twentieth annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, President Roosevelt told a few darkly sardonic jokes.

Nobody seemed to understand and reported it all as seriously stated fact.

Meanwhile, Domei, the Japanese puppet press, reported to its readers that the Japanese had successfully sunk 98 Allied warships and damaged 42 more during the Guadalcanal and New Guinea campaigns against 19 sunk and 16 damaged of their own, but conceded that the Allies had shot down 215 planes to 205 Japanese planes.

Whether the President related these jokes also to the correspondents was not reported.

On the editorial page, "The Encore" gleaned from the President’s speech the night before that bold new moves were about to be launched both in Europe and in the Pacific, with bombing raids to occur on Tokyo, itself.

Mr. Davis, continuing in the optimistic hope of swift victory, misunderstood the capability of the Allied forces at this juncture, and while the long range goals thus set forth would be accomplished, it would yet be another 18 to 24 months before they could be realized. Island hopping in the Pacific would, perforce, first be the order of the day, while slow, incremental fighting lay ahead grimly, in North Africa for the ensuing two and a half months, about to take a harsh turn, then in Sicily and Italy, before France could be liberated and Germany impelled to its knees. There would be no end to the carnage in 1943.

The grim details of the grim reaper's feast set forth in the article on the front page concerning Lieutenant Walton Goodwin’s heroic ordeal in seeking to save his tank crew in a desperate fight for Sened in Tunisia the previous week explained in microcosm why that which sounded splendidly capable of accomplishment, strategically, was not going to be so easy when boiled to reality in the field.

"Tide of Blood" draws, however, quite accurately the picture of Italy, on its last legs in the fight, with Birnam Wood fast approaching Dunsinane Castle and the Throne's chief inhabitant, the original paradigmatic Fascist who set afire the torch and showed the way for the others to burn liberty, about to be deposed within the ensuing five months. The Italian citizen "could see, now, the price of following his jackal Fascist Government." Casualties rose rapidly, ruin from Allied bombs pervaded, occupation by Nazi troops stormed his peace of mind, all spelling in bold relief a dismal defeat.

"La Strada" was shortly ahead, the road, nevertheless, with post-war Allied assistance, to "La Dolce Vita".

Just remember not to row too far, boys. Those knives are sharp.

So are the swords. We stick them, however, with relish, just because.

"One-Fourth" tells of the high rate of functional illiteracy abroad the land, accounting for fully one-fourth of North Carolina's population superannuating the age of 25, whether mentally or chronologically not being provided. Functional illiteracy was charted, based on whether a person had fourth-grade achievement skills and could read a newspaper.

--Bunch o' damn niggers and nigger-lovers drag us down. That's why we need put some more of 'em in jail or, better, just lynch 'em all and be done with it.

No, three to one, nearly: white:black. Go figure, honky.

--Really? We have that many more whites?

"Hush Money" does not like the Government's offer of a hundred million smackers to the farmer as incentive to increase production, but rather suggests that the farmer, with the problems besetting him of labor shortage and price ceilings on everything except eggs--which have no ceilings, as Mrs. Roosevelt informed an inquiring press a year earlier, goo-goo-goo-joob, being ceilingless and oval--, merely wanted a fair return to keep pace with rising costs of living and the ability to hire adequate labor.

But wasn't the hundred million designed to do that? Why was it considered by Mr. Davis to be hush money? Had the farmers broken into Republican headquarters and undertaken some plumbing operations? Maybe, the well pumps needed new sucker washers in them, even if the leather was dry.

Got milk?

Dick Young writes in opposition to the plan of the doctors who owned the Charlotte Sanatorium--the deplorable, segregated conditions of which Cash had written movingly in a by-lined piece of June 11, 1939--to turn it over to the City Government for operation at taxpayer expense. His naysaying the plan derives from the operative fact that the City already operated Memorial Hospital and that its facilities were adequate for the care of the indigent.

Well, was it? Perhaps, a better question is: how well did it operate? And if it was thusly equipped, why were there still patients at the Sanatorium?

Prentiss Brown called to say, you can make it okay, keep the Old Brown Shoe for the duration, then buy the new spats.

It turned out that it was Mayor La Guardia who had caused the idle wild stampede to hold up shoe stores in the Bronx and incite Brooklyn to break out in fights, as the news had reported Monday, thus summoning up the gendarmerie to toot the horns and obtain exeunt from the stores by the patrons seeking their little pink pumps for presentation at the ballet and opera.

Sam Grafton again inveighs against the dodging art of obscurantism. He writes of the paradoxes inherent in the dichotomy afoot between the home front protectionists and the war front gung-hoers, often the same people set at odds to themselves by their circuitous reasoning gone awry and run amok, without contemplation of their own dissociation.

Well, in your heart, you know they were right.

In your spare tire, you had some questions.

It has snowed where we are three Fridays running; lest we become absent without leave next week, having worked our quota for this week, and having to go shopping before the shelves are cleared of all the rationed and soon to be rationed goods, as discussed by Raymond Clapper, we hereby take our leave.

At home a year or more had elapsed without change. The occasional appearance of Nigel Penruddock was the only event. It was to all a pleasing, and to some of the family a deeply interesting one. Nigel, though a student and devoted to the holy profession for which he was destined, was also a sportsman. His Christianity was muscular, and Endymion, to whom he had taken a fancy, became the companion of his pastimes. All the shooting of the estate was at Nigel's command, but as there were no keepers, it was of course very rough work. Still it was a novel and animating life for Endymion; and though the sport was slight, the pursuit was keen. Then Nigel was a great fisherman, and here their efforts had a surer return, for they dwelt in a land of trout streams, and in their vicinity was a not inconsiderable river. It was an adventure of delight to pursue some of these streams to their source, throwing, as they rambled on, the fly in the rippling waters. Myra, too, took some pleasure in these fishing expeditions, carrying their luncheon and a German book in her wallet, and sitting quietly on the bank for hours, when they had fixed upon some favoured pool for a prolonged campaign.

--from Endymion, Chapter 14, by Benjamin Disraeli

Frame 132, Red lines up with Red, also. Then you have four corners, and a center point person in the tan dress.

When the horseman comes into view,
Advance to 132, stop,
Wait for feathers Blue,
Fire 1, at the Coos, fire 2;
Then your job is done, flash the Banner,
Your bridge will be the Spanner...

--from "Your Friend and Mine"