The Charlotte News

Monday, October 12, 1953

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that at Panmunjom, the Communists indicated this date that they were prepared to begin their interviews on Wednesday of the North Korean and Chinese prisoners of war who were resisting repatriation to their homelands, a process of "explanation" provided by the Armistice and set to last until December 24.

Meanwhile, the U.N. Command charged that the Communists had shipped two crated combat aircraft into North Korea in violation of the Armistice. A Command spokesman said that an urgent request for investigation had been handed to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, the four-nation body charged with policing the truce. The new U.N. Far East Commander, General John Hull, told newsmen that he knew of no serious violations of the Armistice by the Communists, though there had been indications of some violations.

In Georgetown, British Guiana, a general strike had been called by the ousted leftist Cabinet ministers, paralyzing two of the country's 14 sugar factories this date, and halting about 40 percent of the cane-cutting. Workers on at least two sugar estates, the main source of revenue for the colony, answered the call for the strike, but major effects were not expected until the following day, as it was Pan-American Day, a holiday in the colony. An anti-British boycott had also been ordered by ousted Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party, based on their country having been invaded by "foreign troops" and their democratic rights having been taken away. The British had sent troops to the colony in response to the request of the Colonial Governor Sir Alfred Savage, given broad emergency powers, in response to complaints that the PPP were plotting to bring the colony under the domination of Communism linked with the Soviet Union.

In Indianapolis, Congressman W. Sterling Cole of New York, chairman of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, said this date, in a speech prepared for the state and national officers of the American Legion, that the U.S. should assign wartime urgency to its hydrogen bomb program because Russia might shortly have hundreds or even thousands of hydrogen bombs, that the Soviets had it within their capacity to outproduce the U.S. in that area if the U.S. let its hydrogen bomb production falter. He pointed out that the Soviets had taken only four years between their first atomic bomb test and their first hydrogen bomb test, whereas it had taken the U.S. seven years from the time of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs in August, 1945 to develop its first thermonuclear device, tested on Eniwetok the prior November 1. He found the time differential not very comforting, indicative of the Soviets having progressed with unanticipated speed, based on their assignment of supreme priority to the project. He said that the current U.S. stockpile was large enough to inflict a devastating reprisal on any aggressor but that it was not big enough and bold enough to answer the challenge of the hour, encouraging hydrogen bomb development comparable in scale, cost and speed to the Manhattan Project of World War II. He said one of the more troubling aspects of the Soviet development was that harnessing of hydrogen energy for military purposes might be far easier than was commonly supposed a few years earlier, that the Soviets, previously thought able only to manufacture such weapons in small quantities, would likely be able to manufacture large numbers. The piece notes that reliable reports had been made that U.S. scientists had found a way to trigger the hydrogen bomb without employing a conventional atomic bomb as the heat-producing trigger.

The President, recovering from a bout of intestinal flu which had confined him to living quarters in the White House the previous day, had returned to his desk during the morning of this date, and the White House press office said that all of his appointments were on schedule for the day.

In Detroit, evangelist Billy Graham and the mother of a Minnesota soldier, who had refused repatriation from North Korea, asked a nationwide television audience the previous night to pray for the woman's son, that he might be reached by the "word of God". The telecast had been carried by more than 35 television stations.

In Dallas, Tex., a nude black man was jailed this date after being captured by four or five other black citizens, in response to a community alert having been issued in the wake of the September 30 rape-slaying of a white housewife, who said in her dying breaths that a black man had stabbed her. Homicide Captain Will Fritz—who, ten years later, would lead the initial investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy and was present at the time Jack Ruby fatally shot the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, two days later—said that the man had been released hours earlier after being questioned, along with several other black men, regarding the rape and the homicide. The arrested man contended that he had been in jail on a drunk and disorderly charge at the time of the slaying, but a check of records corroborated only his jailing on September 29, indicating his release the next day, prior to the slaying. Police said that the place where he was caught, at an intersection near downtown, was not far from the home of another victim of a rape, beaten and left for dead, occurring several days prior to the rape-murder. The September 30 attack had been the culmination of a series of sex offenses and home entries attributed to a naked black man, causing local residents to make runs on sporting goods stores to purchase firearms, and to form neighborhood patrols. The arrested man said that he had not killed the woman. Captain Fritz said that the man had been picked up for questioning the previous week after he had called and named another black man as the killer of the woman. A Dallas patrolman, T. M. Hansen, Jr.,—who would later testify to the Warren Commission that he had known Jack Ruby since around 1950 or 1951, patrolled and directed traffic in the area of his Carousel Club in 1963, saw him and exchanged greetings on either the morning of November 21 or 22 in front of City Hall on Harwood Street, in the basement of which Mr. Ruby shot Mr. Oswald on November 24—, said that it was a good thing they reached the man when they did, as the black citizens who caught him were armed with boards and "might have beaten his brains out." A $7,000 reward had been offered for information leading to the conviction of the woman's killer, and another sizable fund was being collected for her seriously ill widower and their four-year old son.

In Albuquerque, a 24-year old man was arrested, following a 20-mile chase by the New Mexico State Police the previous night, on a warrant out of Pennsylvania, charging him with being the "Phantom of the Turnpike" murderer. The man told a reporter a few hours after his arrest, as he lay shivering in a small, dark cell of the county jail, that he was not guilty and knew nothing of the murders, that he was just cold and tired. He stood accused of shooting two men on the Pennsylvania Turnpike the prior July, both of whom were truck drivers, shot in the head as they slept in their parked trucks, their bodies discovered within three days of each other, with police indicating that both had been robbed. The suspect denied knowing anything about the foreign-made pistol used in the two killings and believed to belong to him. Police said that the man had threatened to kill himself and had been placed in solitary confinement, but he told the reporter that he had told police that if he were ever found guilty of any type of murder, then he would hang himself, but that he did not mean that he would kill himself presently, because he was innocent. He said that he had left Pennsylvania a couple of weeks earlier in a borrowed car after a drinking spree with a friend and did not know anything about the car being stolen, that he had gone to California where he picked up two hitchhikers who were with him at the time the police pursuit began.

In St. Louis, the arrested couple in the kidnaping and murder of six-year old Bobby Greenlease signed confessions this date which included the admission that they had crossed state lines into Kansas where the man of the couple had killed the boy shortly after the kidnaping in Kansas City, Mo., prompting the Federal Government to re-enter the case, after having initially turned it over to the State of Missouri on the premise that they had not crossed state lines. The body of the boy was found in a shallow grave behind the couple's house in St. Joseph, Mo., after police received a tip from a cabbie regarding a free-spending fare, which led to the arrest of the man. The two defendants admitted having plotted the death of the boy prior to initiating the kidnaping, as the lime which the FBI had disclosed was found over the boy's body in the shallow grave had been purchased prior to the kidnaping. The FBI had determined that the boy had been killed just 12 miles from Kansas City, but in the State of Kansas, invoking the Federal Lindbergh Law, which carried the possibility of the death penalty in a kidnaping in which the victim was harmed. The FBI said that a mechanical pencil, a promotional item for his father's Cadillac dealership, known to have been in the possession of the boy at the time of his abduction from his Catholic school, had been found at the murder site. Under Missouri law, as previously reported, while a moot point in the instant case, the death penalty for kidnaping was applicable whether or not harm had come to the victim. State charges of murder and kidnaping were already pending against both defendants. The kidnaping had been effected through a ruse accomplished by the woman, pretending to be the boy's aunt and claiming to nuns at the school that she was going to take him forthwith to the hospital where his mother had been taken after being stricken with a heart attack. The man's confession exonerated the third suspect, whom he had originally sought to implicate as the killer of the boy. The man had also reportedly given to the FBI further information about the missing half of the $600,000 ransom, initially having said that he could not recall what happened to it as he had been on a drinking spree, but agents said that based on the additional information, they were not hopeful of recovering the money. That half of the ransom, the sum of which had been arranged by the President's banker brother, Arthur Eisenhower, would never be found. The woman, who initially claimed to the FBI that she had been conned into participation in the scheme on the belief that the boy was the man's son, had now confessed her role when confronted with evidence that a station wagon connected to the couple had been discovered soon after the arrests abandoned in Kansas City, and that it contained slugs fired from the weapon found in the possession of the man at the time of his arrest.

In Raleigh, State Senator John Larkins was in line, according to political sources, to succeed resigned Insurance commissioner Waldo Cheek. Mr. Larkins declined any statement on the matter at present.

In Charlotte, County commissioner Carl McEwen, 60, died this date in the hospital without regaining consciousness after a cerebral hemorrhage which he had suffered on October 3. He was serving his sixth term on the Board of County Commissioners. In 1921, he had taken over the family business, the McEwen Funeral Home in Mint Hill, and greatly expanded it in Monroe and then established its first mortuary in Charlotte in 1943, a mortuary which had become the largest in the Southeast. He had also established cemeteries in Mint Hill, Monroe, and Lancaster, S.C. He had also been one of the founders and the president of the McEwen Mutual Burial Association—about which we choose to remain ignorant.

In Jerome, Ariz., the Mayor of the ghost town said that he wanted "all the old souls" to come home for Hallowe'en, that it would be "a real night of spooks".

On the editorial page, "Britain Slaps Down a Communist Regime" indicates that the British action toward its colony in British Guiana, removing the People's Progressive Party Prime Minister, Cheddie Jagan, on the basis that he and his American wife were involved in a Communist conspiracy to eliminate British rule of the colony, had likely posed a puzzler for those who regularly accused Britain of being soft on Communism.