The Charlotte News

Monday, May 2, 1955

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Saigon in South Vietnam that Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, having been reassured by the State Department of support, had struck anew this date at the shrinking private army of the Binh Xuyen rebels who had caused two days of violence in Saigon and the Chinese suburb of Cho Lon where they had their headquarters, as four battalions of National Army troops stormed over three bridges leading to the latter section where two battalions of the rebels held out in civil warfare, with the objective of the Army being to mop up the remaining rebels and permit five battalions which had deserted the rebels to switch to the Army's side. Following two days of relative quiet, a mortar barrage had begun the attack, with the Government troops quickly capturing the old headquarters of the commander of the rebels, General Le Van Vien, then moving southwestward to a bridge two miles away, where a bitter battle was joined. During the weekend, the Premier had put down the attempted coup by the rebels and had launched a fresh political offensive against Chief of State Bao Dai, who was residing in the French Riviera. The Premier's office announced that a national assembly would meet on Wednesday to depose the former Emperor, who had tried unsuccessfully to oust the Premier the previous week. The announcement had been issued after Diem had conferred with U.S. General J. Lawton Collins, the President's special envoy to South Vietnam, who had returned by plane from Washington this date. Shortly after his arrival in Saigon, the U.S. Charge d'Affaires, Randolph Kidder, had told newsmen at the airport that American backing for the Premier continued. The French were expected to oppose strongly any move to oust Bao Dai, whom they had installed as Chief of State in 1949, though he had rarely been a resident of the country since the end of World War II. The French News Agency, in a dispatch from Saigon, had reported this date that remnants of the rebel private army had re-opened fire with mortars on National Army posts near Cho Lon.

The White House announced this date through press secretary James Hagerty that Admiral Arthur Radford, Joint Chiefs chairman, would report to the President the following day on his trip to Formosa. Mr. Hagerty indicated that he did not know whether the Admiral would be joined at the conference by Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern affairs, Walter Robertson, who had accompanied him on the trip, where they had conferred with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and other Nationalist officials on a variety of subjects, prime among which had been the prospect of a cease-fire with the Communist Chinese in the area of Formosa. The two representatives had been gone for about ten days. The leisurely plans for their report to the President tended to eliminate an air of urgency about their findings. They had arrived back in the U.S. in time for a weekend report but had instead gone to Richmond, Va., for a stop at Mr. Robertson's home before coming to Washington the previous night. Mr. Robertson had returned to his office during the morning but rather than having an immediate conference with Secretary of State Dulles, had begun his day by reviewing accumulated paperwork. Peiping radio in Communist China had dropped mention early this date of the prospect of a cease-fire. Premier Chou En-lai had indicated at the end of the Asian-African conference in Indonesia a week earlier that the Communist Chinese would be willing to meet with the U.S. to discuss Formosa and the possibility of a peaceful solution. The issue was the extent to which the Nationalists would have to be involved in those talks, from the perspective of the U.S., before negotiations could begin. The President and the State Department, after Secretary Dulles had initially indicated that the Nationalists would have to be involved in any such discussions, had altered that view to indicate that the U.S. could directly negotiate with the Chinese Communists under the treaty with the Nationalists, without the latter necessarily being involved in cease-fire talks, though they would have to be consulted regarding anything affecting directly their interests.

In Monterey, Calif., all five crewmen of a raft, undertaking its second ill-fated attempt to drift to Hawaii, had been rescued this date by a Coast Guard cutter, abandoning the raft for the time being, with it to be placed in tow sometime later. A message monitored by a ham radio operator in Santa Cruz had quoted the skipper of the raft as saying he was "reluctant to be rescued." The skipper, from Petaluma, and his crew had made their first attempt to drift on the currents to Hawaii the previous year when they were picked up by a banana boat after drifting into a storm about 250 miles south of San Francisco, from which they had started. The previous night, the raft was reported breaking up in eight-foot seas about 20 miles off the coast of Santa Cruz, but in no immediate danger. The skipper of the raft said that he and his crew had begun the voyage the prior Friday from San Francisco after a series of miscues, the skipper and three of the crewmen having belatedly boarded the 40-foot raft after it had been towed outside the Golden Gate with only one crewman aboard. In recent weeks, the raft had been attached by the Coast Guard in lieu of fines assessed against the first raft for violation of navigation regulations, but in Oakland, a bondsman had cleared the second raft of that attachment and other financial liabilities. They had hoped to subsist only on rainwater, distilled seawater and whatever food they could obtain from the sea. Good luck, next year. The third time's the charm. Contact Mr. Heyerdahl for advice.

In Hopkinton, N.Y., State troopers had killed two of three desperate fugitives this date, as the pair hid in woods near the northern New York community, with one report stating that the fugitives, who had escaped along with two others from a jail in Canton the previous Wednesday, had gone for their guns but had no chance to fire. At State Police headquarters in Albany, however, the superintendent said that the fugitives had opened fire first. The third fugitive had been with the pair shortly before the shooting began and was still at large. The fourth fugitive had been captured the prior Friday, after the other three had fled from a farmhouse in a remote area, following a shootout with one of two troopers who had found and cornered them, wounding the officer. The four were being held on burglary and/or assault charges before their escape, accomplished by slugging a jailer and stealing a .38 caliber revolver and a .357 Magnum from the jail.

In Tulsa, Okla., a woman, who had confessed to the killings of four of her five husbands, would have a hearing before a jury this date to decide whether she was legally sane enough to stand trial for the murder of her fifth spouse. She was also charged with the fatal poisoning of four prior husbands in three other states, and had admitted all of those murders except that of her mother of Lexington, N.C., where her third husband had died in 1952. To find her sane, the jury would have to determine that she was aware of what she was doing at the time when she had allegedly spiked the coffee of her fifth husband with rat poison, and was aware of the consequences of her actions. If they found her not sane, she would be committed to a hospital and not tried for the murder until such time as she recovered her sanity. The Eastern Oklahoma Hospital, where the widow had spent 90 days under observation by court order, had reported that she was "mentally defective" and in need of treatment. The county attorney had reported, however, that three prosecution-retained psychiatrists who had examined her had concluded that she was sane, the prosecutor having disclosed earlier that State-retained psychiatrists who had observed her during her commitment had not all been in accord with the hospital report, with at least two dissenting.

Julian Scheer of The News reports from Pinehurst that support for the Mecklenburg County Medical Society's stand on admitting black physicians was beginning to show itself this date, as the North Carolina Medical Society's house of delegates prepared to discuss the issue, having summoned the Mecklenburg members before it to show cause why their society's members should not be expelled for having violated the organization's constitution and bylaws by their vote the previous May to admit black members. The previous night, the state society's executive committee had censured the Mecklenburg society on the issue, and that might be the only direct action which the state group would undertake, as all talk of expulsion of the members had ended. The house of delegates would take up the matter during the afternoon this date, but behind the scenes meetings had revealed a desire to keep the matter from boiling over onto the house floor. There had been good support for the action of the Mecklenburg society from other groups across the state, notably the Guilford society in Greensboro. At the previous year's meeting, when the race issue had first come to the floor, Guilford and Buncombe Counties' medical societies, the latter in Asheville, had joined with Charlotte as the primary sponsors of the move to admit black physicians to the state society's membership. The state society had appointed a committee the previous year to study the entire issue and that committee was scheduled to report during the afternoon or evening of this date. Membership in the AMA was contingent on membership in a state medical society, and the AMA admitted black physicians. Thus, the question had arisen as to what to do with the black members of the Mecklenburg society in relation to the state society.

Charles Kuralt, soon to join the News staff as a reporter and feature writer, still a student at UNC, where he had recently finished his year as editor of the student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, reports that the grammar school report card plan, adopted by Charlotte's central committee of parents and teachers, had received the approval of two UNC education experts, Dr. H. Arnold Perry, dean of the School of Education, and Dr. Carl F. Brown, professor of elementary education, both of whom had taken a look at the proposed compromise between detailed "progress reports" and grade markings consisting of "excellent", "good", "fair", and "poor", in lieu of normal letter grades, and had found the idea to be sound. Both appeared opposed to any further "back-sliding" toward the old, yellow report card with letter grades. (They were sort of orange at our school, that manila color maybe, but definitely not yellow—perhaps, on third thought, somewhat pink, maybe by the sixth grade.) Dr. Brown said that the progress report part of the system more nearly reflected the intricate purposes now accepted for the schools, which were broader and far more advanced than they had once been, requiring different report cards to serve them. Dr. Perry had said that the schools could not outrun the community and that a compromise between the progress report and the older grading system was needed if that was what the parents desired. He said that the parents might grow in their concepts and understanding of subjective grading later, but report cards were for the pupils and parents, and the system had to be directed toward satisfying them. He believed that the best grading system would be to amass all the objective evidence of a student's ability in performance and then to proceed subjectively, using criteria agreed upon by parents and teachers, that no system was the right one unless parents, teachers and school administrators agreed upon what should be measured by reports and on the best ways of measuring it. Both professors agreed that the dual reporting format proposed for the fourth through sixth grades in Charlotte could be a highly satisfactory plan, but believed there was danger in too much simplification of grading. Dr. Perry believed that a card should be adopted which, as the Charlotte schools had recognized, did not stop with a grade on reading, for instance, but that included an analysis of how the student read, whether the student read well aloud and independently for pleasure. Letter grades, he continued, did not tell a parent much about the child's personal growth, as letter grades did not inform, for instance, of the child's formation of good social habits, for which schools had a responsibility to teach, how to live and work with others, not easy to grade with letters. Dr. Perry believed that letter grades led to the children competing with each other for them and that the competition was not fair to the students, who, in a single classroom, might represent a very wide range of mental ability.

Now, that's not very nice, to call special attention to the slower students, who might, as the tortoise competing with the hare, later be first—just as the 2022 long-shot winner of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, last, Rich Strike, coming from the back of the pack, at 80 to 1 odds, to win the race in the final stretch. So, take heart, slow ones. Albert Einstein was reportedly thought slow by his parents because he did not talk much until he was about 5, remaining without a showing of significant scholarly aptitude until forming a fascination for geometry at about age 12, upon being given by his parents a book on the subject, even thereafter without celerity in grasping matter not related to mathematics. Schoolmates were likely given to taunt: "Buttons, lads, nix the esoteric questions, as here come 'Retard Al'..."

In Charlotte, leaders of the striking Communications Workers of America employees of Southern Bell reported this date that they were served with a court injunction intended to limit their picketing at establishments of the company, in consequence of which their picketing of the main exchange office in Charlotte had been modified somewhat to effect compliance, while picketing continued unaffected at the company's midtown business offices and at the Thomasboro suburban exchange. The injunction had been obtained about ten days earlier from the Superior Court in Asheville, limiting picketing in all North Carolina counties where the company operated, and it had specified that pickets had to be limited to ten in number and located not less than 200 feet from a telephone company establishment. The union representative said that the company's exchange building in Charlotte was located on the street and so they had posted their pickets across the street from the exchange.

Also in Charlotte, a 13-year old girl's bouffant skirt, with new-style crinoline petticoats, had led directly to an accident this date when the girl had slammed the door of a car on her skirt, after which she had been dragged about ten feet by the car, the driver of which, the next door neighbor of the girl, had just dropped her off at her junior high school, unaware that her skirt had been caught in the door or that she was being dragged, until a pedestrian had screamed for him to stop. She had received contusions to the right side of her head, right knee injuries and a laceration on her right hand, was taken by ambulance to Memorial Hospital. No further word is included regarding her condition. We hope that she gets well soon and adopts a new clothing style or is more careful in exiting vehicles.

On the editorial page, "Vote 'Yes' for Charlotte Progress" recommends voting affirmatively on the bonds on the ballot locally in the following day's municipal elections, listing those and explaining why they were necessary for the continued progress of the city.