The Charlotte News
Monday, January 2, 1956
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Key West, Fla., the President spent 45 minutes this date working on the final draft of his State of the Union message and took it easy the rest of the day. He had received suggestions on the draft from aides in Washington, but White House press secretary James Hagerty refused to discuss the changes, saying they were not major revisions. The President then sent the modified draft back to Washington and asked for a fresh copy to be returned to him this date. He expected to remain in Key West until about Sunday. He and First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, and her mother, had taken an automobile ride about 30 miles up the Florida Keys the previous day.
Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota predicted this date that a dispute over new legislation designed to increase farm income would cause the hottest battle in the Senate during the coming session. A member of the Agriculture Committee, the Senator opposed the flexible price supports which were being strongly backed by the President and Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had said the previous day to reporters that Secretary Benson would be asked by the Senate to act early in the year on a cure for "three years of Bensonizing the farmers." He said that farm income was the major problem in the nation's economy and that it was generally admitted, even by Republican leaders, that the Administration's farm program had been a failure and had to be revised. Senator Francis Case of South Dakota said in an interview that unrest in the farm belt could cause the retention of Democratic control of Congress in the 1956 elections, but stated that he did not believe that would occur, that conditions in farm areas by November would be much better than they had been during the previous fall.
A battle between Senators Walter George of Georgia and Harry F. Byrd of Virginia regarding reduction of individual income taxes appeared to be the probable highlight of a showdown fight in Congress over the issue, with the Senate possibly being the house in which the tax battle would take place, even though all tax bills originated in the House. Sharp fights were also shaping up for the session on farm policy, Federal aid for schools, highway construction and other matters. The session would begin the following day.
In France, voters had gone to the polls this date to elect a new National Assembly, with an unusually large turnout of women. There was a record 5,300 candidates running for 544 seats, and a record number of eligible voters, nearly 27 million. Meanwhile, violence continued in Algeria, a French spokesman there charging that a diary found on a captured Algerian rebel had shown that the insurgents were using both Egypt and Libya as bases for their uprising. Elections in Algeria were indefinitely postponed because of the terrorist campaign by nationalist extremists.
On Cyprus, the British Governor, Sir John Harding, said that the days of the island's anti-British guerrillas were numbered, that the rebels were seeking union with Greece.
Britain's high commissioner for the Federation of Malaya, Sir Donald MacGillivray, urged in a New Year's broadcast that "Communist terrorism" would be crushed there by the end of the year.
The nation's highway death toll for the New Year's weekend was well below estimates made by the National Safety Council, entering the last 24 hours of the 78-hour period. With 16 hours left before the midnight end of the period, there had been 259 recorded traffic fatalities across the nation, according to the Associated Press, whereas there had been 457 by that juncture a week earlier during the record-breaking Christmas holiday period of the same duration. The Council, however, said that the toll had begun to climb at a faster rate late the previous night than during the first 48 hours. Fires during the weekend had claimed at least 47 lives, with 39 deaths having occurred in miscellaneous accidents, such that the overall toll had reached 341. The president of the Council said that they now hoped that the death toll would be at least 100 below their previous estimate of 420.
In Iselin, N.J., a German war bride arrived in New York with her two-week old baby the previous day, only to learn that her husband had died earlier after being injured in an explosion at a plant in South Plainfield, where he was employed. He had died the day before his wife had given birth to their daughter in Germany. She appeared composed while photographers took her picture, but later, apparently suspecting that something had happened to her husband, became hysterical. Her husband had left Germany in 1955 after a three-year tour of duty with the Army, but his wife's visa had been held up because X-ray pictures showed a dormant tuberculosis condition.
In Little America Five, the ship's company of the icebreaker Glacier had welcomed the new year while being accompanied by bagpipes, on the ice of Kainan Bay, 800 miles from the South Pole. The approximately 300 guests toasted the new year with cold beer, as the temperature stood at 18 degrees. The only dinner jackets visible had been those of penguins. With upraised, half-frozen cans of beer, the celebrants had sung "Auld Lang Syne" at midnight, 12,000 miles from home.
In Murphy, N.C., the birth of a pair of twin girls during the first minutes of 1956 had made them potentially eligible for the annual prize of $500 presented by a Chicago cosmetics manufacturer to the first newborns of the year. The girls would receive cribs with attached music boxes, innerspring mattresses, dresses, a year's supply of baby food, baby carriages, assorted toys and infant wear. Dozens of contests across the state had earned prizes for the firstborn of the year in given locales. It lists several of the winners. Guess that means if you were not born in the first few minutes or hours of the new year, you're probably just a loser, worth nothing and so you get nothing. Those born December 31 just before midnight are the worst of all, hopeless miscreants condemned to mendicancy.
In London, there had been a gay New
Year's Eve party at the swank Berkeley Hotel, when in had walked
actress Anita Ekberg, wearing an expensive, tight-fitting velvet
gown. All eyes had turned to her as she walked across the foyer, and
then the stitches had given way and her gown had started to fall
away. She grabbed the falling gown and then raced to an anteroom. A
female eyewitness said that under the gown was just Anita, and that
she had reclined nearly naked for some 15 minutes while helpers
buzzed around her making repairs. Ms. Ekberg said that she liked
tight dresses
She will appear in a certain
magazine in 1956, sans a tight gown. So she may have been telling a
slight fib
On the editorial page, "The Minutes of the Last Meeting" tells of some of the bloopers appearing in the column, such as when it had mixed up its hurricanes, speaking of Connie when it meant Diane, mislabeling a colonial picture as being of Thomas Jefferson, having misprinted the name of Mark Twain as "Train".
It had also predicted that the General Assembly in 1955 would pass more stringent rules regarding secret hearings than it actually had. It regards the Assembly as having been long on pageantry and short on accomplishment, yielding to pressures in shaping the new tax program and avoiding some of the more logical sources of new revenue. The state's financial plight, however, had not turned out as bad as it appeared it might earlier in the year. The Assembly had again refused to obey the State Constitution regarding reapportionment. It had not passed a state minimum wage law or reformed the much-abused absentee ballot law. It had not granted more home rule to cities and counties, improved the justice of the peace system, created an adequate urban redevelopment law or provided an automobile inspection law.
But there had been substantial progress in judicial redistricting, the state's corporation laws, a state water policy, and regarding the prisons, while not yet finally separated from the Highway Department, some move in that direction had been made.
It next reviews some of the highlights of the year for Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.
On the national scene, Senator McCarthy had virtually disappeared, a pleasant development, but there had been much about which the column was concerned regarding the handling of the internal security program. The column had supported universal military training, had fought against the Bricker amendment to limit the treaty-making powers of the President, and continued to support elimination of the injustices under the McCarran Immigration Act. It had supported the U.N., urged an increase in the Federal minimum wage, favored a more enlightened foreign policy, and was pleased at the cancellation of the Dixon-Yates contract. It urged the continuance of foreign aid, liked the President's showing at the Big Four summit conference the previous July, but lamented the subsequent collapse of the "Geneva spirit".
It predicts that the problems of 1956 would again be big and says it was anxious to get at them and hopes that the reader was, too.
"Revelations of a Tired Divining Rod" says that its only prediction for the year would be that man would continue to regard himself as the "be-all of the universe, without fully recognizing that he may be the end-all, too".
It says that its divining rod passed
over a calendar received from a fertilizer company, too twisted from
wrong turns of previous years to venture any significant revelations.
It tells of a few sundry revelations it had made, such as that a
Sunday stroller would break the flower which would grow in a secret
place from April until June, and in October, would deposit its seeds
beside the briar roots and they would grow together
A piece from the Jackson (Miss.) State Times, titled "Stop, Thief!" tells of the magazine Challenge reporting on a new gadget which would catch automobile thieves, that as the thieves pulled away from the curb in any car equipped with the device, the taillight would begin blinking the word "STOLEN" in three-inch red letters.
It suggests also having a mechanical hand which would tap the thief on the shoulder, while a tough voice said, "Say, bud, where do you think you're going in my car?"
Another possibility would be an automatic windshield fogger which would not let the thief see where he was going. (That is not a very good idea for the safety of other motorists and pedestrians.)
It suggests as another alternative a loudspeaker which blared Tennessee Ernie Ford's rendition of "Sixteen Tons", which it ventures would assure that someone would stop the driver, if only to tell him to turn it off.
Drew Pearson offers his predictions for the new year. He says that Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany would step down in favor of Fritz Schaeffer, and that the latter would begin talks with the East German Government and Russia to unite Germany.
Prime Minister Anthony Eden, whose health was worse than the public realized, would take a less active part in the Government, with chief duties being performed by Chancellor of the Exchequer R. A. Butler, and that by late during the year or in early 1957, Mr. Eden would resign—that one being accurate.
Communist China would not be admitted to the U.N. during the year, as U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., had secured the backing from enough friendly nations within the body to make sure that it would not, at least until after the November elections, protecting the President and Secretary Dulles from attacks by Senator William Knowland and right-wing Republicans, but that after November, Communist China would be admitted, probably in early 1957.
The following spring and summer, Communist China would begin an attack on Quemoy and Matsu, unless Secretary Dulles agreed to meet with Premier Chou En-lai, an unlikely prospect. The U.S. Seventh Fleet would not intervene in such an attack and the Matsus would be captured by the Chinese, bringing demands for war, but the President would not respond.
Business would boom during the first part of 1956, but toward the middle of the year, automobile sales would slacken and home building would slump, as fewer babies had been born during the Depression, now reaching ages 23 and 24 and getting married, buying fewer homes.
Congress would vote a modest tax relief for low-income groups only. There would be a modest amendment to the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, and some Federal relief for coal and textile areas, a civil rights compromise abolishing the poll tax but with no fair employment practices commission, big increases for health, particularly heart and cancer research, and more public housing and slum clearance.
The President would announce in midwinter that he would not run again, touching off a mad scramble for the Republican nomination and a vigorous attempt to draft Chief Justice Earl Warren, who would refuse, and, in the end, a dark horse would emerge.
Adlai Stevenson would be nominated again by the Democrats, but former President Truman, who had once bitterly opposed Senator Estes Kefauver, would throw his weight behind him for the vice-presidential nomination and a Stevenson-Kefauver ticket would represent the Democrats in November. (He finally gets another one right.)
Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and Premier Nikolai Bulganin would continue their travels, visiting England, France and Italy in the coming year, winning a certain number of new friends. U.S. relations with Russia would settle down to a long drawn-out competition of trade, technical aid, political ideas, and propaganda. Some progress would be made toward banning atomic and hydrogen weaponry, along the lines suggested by Pope Pius XII, and there would be no war in the coming year.
Robert McKee, writing in the Atlanta Journal, praises the Charlotte Coliseum, which had opened the previous September, finding it an excellent venue for basketball, ice shows, indoor tennis and the like, and also the adjacent Auditorium, designed primarily for plays and concerts, the former seating up to 13,000 and the latter, 2,500. He also mentions foam rubber padding in the Coliseum seats—apparently only for the floor seating, as the permanent seats were typical folding hardwood slats screwed to steel frames. Parking was available for 3,300 cars.
He tells of Georgia Tech having played UNC recently in basketball at the Coliseum, and the cheerleaders of Myers Park High School in Charlotte and those of Belmont Abbey College filling in for the absent cheerleaders of both schools, the high school girls cheering for Tech. (Some of the younger Belmont Abbey cheerleaders may have become justly confused, when, two years later, their head basketball coach would be Al McGuire, no relation to Frank McGuire, coach of UNC. Maybe during the game they developed a cheer, such as, "We're no liars, we like McGuire," and that later lured Al McGuire to the school.)
The Coliseum manager, Paul Buck, was interested in the new Alexander Memorial Center being built at Georgia Tech, just north of O'Keefe High School, to house a basketball arena, with an adjacent building for training and practice, costing 1.5 million dollars and seating 7,000, to be ready for the 1956-57 basketball season. (That will put Woollen Gymnasium in Chapel Hill to shame. They may never be able to catch up with something like that. Well, that's the big city, full of bacon and millionaires having eggs Benedict and oysters Rockefeller for breakfast.) He urged the provision of ample storage space, saying that the Charlotte facility lacked adequate space for storage.
Mayor Philip Van Every of Charlotte believed that the city was fixed for years to come with its new Coliseum—probably a century or more. Why would you want anything else? Space age... Dome... Nothing like that, even in New York.
The Mayor said that Charlotte and Atlanta were growing as nowhere else in the country.
Doris Fleeson tells of Democrats being likely to exert greater scrutiny, in the coming election year, of the administrative appointments of the President than in the first session, as there was a belief that he was appointing Eisenhower Democrats to take the place of regular Democrats on the regulatory agencies, the appointments to which required by law that a certain number of positions be filled by members of the opposition party to the President.
Their first target would be former Representative Wesley D'Ewart, appointed as Assistant Secretary of the Interior, who had been the author in 1953 of legislation which would have given a select group of ranchers perpetual grazing rights on public land, opposed by Western newspapers and by Secretary of the Interior Sinclair Weeks, eventually failing to pass. But when Mr. D'Ewart was appointed by the President from his hospital bed in October, Secretary Weeks gave the appointment high praise and said Mr. D'Ewart had "very, very good judgment". He would be the subject of Interior Committee hearings in the Senate, and the Democrats would likely use the opportunity to assail the "giveaway" nature of the Administration, as a means of attracting Western votes.
Two recent civil aviation appointments, one to the Civil Aeronautics Authority and the other to the Board, would also come under scrutiny. Frederick B. Lee, chairman of the CAA, had been asked to resign, and his deputy, Charles Lowen, was appointed to replace him. Senator Mike Monroney of Oklahoma contended that Mr. Lee was punished for urging expansion of aviation and better airports, while Secretary Weeks favored the railroads. Senator Monroney would use the hearing to explore the appointment and a controversial report issued by Secretary Weeks regarding transportation.
Former Democratic Senator Josh Lee, a member of the CAB, had not been renominated, replaced by G. Joseph Minetti, a Democrat who supported the President. Thus his appointment also would come under scrutiny, along with a long list of other such appointees.
A letter writer praises the city planners for the new crosstown boulevard, which he believes was one of the finest improvements ever made in the city. He indicates that he was a city salesman and traveled the streets daily, and that the new Independence Boulevard had been of infinite aid to him since its opening. He had reservations, however, about some of the markings on the road, which he specifies.
Fix those at once. Everyone cannot travel independently of one another.
A letter from a minister of Thomasboro Presbyterian Church approves of the plan sponsored by the Volunteer Fire Department to designate the first week in January as Bible Reading Week, indicating that his church had been challenged to read the Bible completely during 1956, and encourages the citizenry to do likewise.
A letter writer responds to a previous letter which had said that black people were not helping other black people to avoid starvation in the community, this writer, a black person, stating that black people might be starving because of the low pay they were provided by whites. He also says that there were more whites who did not work and were sick all the time, deriving from laziness. He asks why the previous writer should be worried about the NAACP, as it had not killed anyone, that he should worry and pray over the Klan. He says that no one should be ashamed of black people, that they should be ashamed of the "mean and silly things that the whites are doing to mar our race." He also wants a white person to explain the meaning of "pure race", says that there was no race superior to another. He also says that blacks did not want to associate with whites, but rather to receive the same opportunities that whites did. He concludes by saying that everyone should get down on their knees and pray, and then would not have to be ashamed or afraid of each other.
Ninth Day
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.