The Charlotte News
Friday, January 20, 1956
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the House Rules Committee's deadlock over the school construction bill, occurring in the previous session, had been reported broken this date, with the major debate on Federal aid to schools expected to reach the House floor the following week. Members of the Committee said that the bill would definitely emerge from the Committee the following Tuesday or Wednesday. There was no indication as to how long would be allotted for debate on the floor and what attempts, if any, might occur to restrict amendments to the bill. Debate was expected to focus on a proposal to bar Federal funds to areas with segregated schools. Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York said that he was ready to offer his segregation amendment, which he had been promising for the previous year. If House Republicans and Northern Democrats combined to vote for that amendment, its chances of passage in the Senate were regarded as uncertain. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn had been pushing for action on the bill, though there had been speculation that some veteran Southern members of the Rules Committee might block it. The House Education Committee had approved the plan of the Democrats to grant 1.6 billion dollars over a four-year period to states for aid in constructing new classrooms, with allocations based on school-age population. The President, in his special message to Congress the previous week, had recommended granting the states 1.25 billion over five years and basing allocations on need and ability.
The Government reported this date that the cost of living had fallen three-tenths of a percent from November to December, the first decline since August, with prices for food, transportation and housing having declined, while medical and personal care costs had increased slightly. The December index of the Bureau of Labor Statistics had been 114.7 percent of the figure for the 1947-49 base period, a fraction higher than in December, 1954. The Bureau reported that average gross weekly earnings, spendable pay and wage purchasing value of factory workers had risen to a new record in December, with spendable earnings rising to an average of $65.79 for a single worker and to $73.15 for a worker with three dependents. That was about $4.50 per week higher for each type of worker than at the end of 1954 and up 30 cents per week from the prior November. The average worker was able to purchase 6 percent more during 1955 than what the worker had been able to purchase in 1954, the largest annual increase since World War II in that regard.
In Boston, a ship had crashed into the Texas Tower, radar "island", 100 miles off Cape Cod this date and was seriously damaged, with the tripod radar structure unscathed. There had been no casualties. The ship was the Military Sea Transport Service's Sagitta, which had gone to the tower with fresh water and other supplies, and while servicing it, the starboard side had crashed into the structure, tearing a hole in the tanks of one hold, admitting water quickly and causing a severe list in the ship. Pumps soon expelled the water and the ship proceeded for Boston under its own power.
In Wadhurst, England, a plane had crashed this date into buildings on the main street, and a local reporter said that it was feared casualties were high. A hotel and two bungalows had burst into flames soon after the crash, and the local fire department had sent ten fire engines to the scene. An Air Ministry spokesman said that they understood that it was a Royal Air Force plane, but it had not yet been identified.
In San Francisco, it was reported that a Pan American World Airways Clipper had turned back from a flight to Honolulu this date after a passenger had given birth to a daughter, two months premature. The airplane, with 55 passengers aboard, had been about 200 miles out when the purser rapped on the captain's cabin door and announced that one of the passengers was going to have a baby. With the aid of another passenger, the woman, from Asheville, N.C., gave birth. The captain returned the plane to San Francisco, where it was met by a Pan Am physician, who said that both the mother and baby appeared to be in good condition, estimating the weight of the child at four pounds. The plane had then left again for Honolulu.
In Evansville, Ind., it was reported
that a police search had spread over a five-state area this date
looking for a man described as a "mad dog killer" who had
escaped from jail while under a death sentence for one of six
killings on which he had been indicted. Sightings had been made in
Ohio and Missouri, and authorities in those states had joined
Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky officers in the search. He had been
scheduled for transfer the following Monday to the Indiana State
Prison at Michigan City to await execution in the electric chair on
June 12. He had been held in jail at nearby Princeton during his
appellate process and was found missing at breakfast the previous
day, with four jail doors having either been unlocked or having their
locks picked, the sheriff commenting that there had to be help from
the outside because one man could not have opened the doors from the
inside by himself. The heaviest snowfall of the winter had quickly
covered the man's tracks. His picture is printed on the page if you
happen to see him. Maybe he knew this guy here
Ann Sawyer of The News reports further of the Charlotte trial in Superior Court of the defendant accused of first-degree murder of his wife's suspected lover, after he had emerged from the trunk of his wife's automobile while she sat with the other man in a drive-in restaurant parking lot on January 3, the defendant believing that he heard kissing sounds and came out of the trunk with his combination rifle and shotgun, eventually killing the other man, having told a detective that they had struggled with the weapon and it had accidentally discharged, while an eyewitness to the incident testified the previous day that there was no struggle and that the two men never got closer than about eight feet from one another. This date, the case went to the jury following final summations by the attorneys and instructions by the court. The solicitor argued to the jury that a verdict of guilty on first-degree murder was justified by the evidence and required death in the gas chamber. Defense counsel argued that the defendant had acted in self-defense and under the "unwritten" law of protecting his family, saying that the other man had gotten "what he deserved". The judge gave instructions on five possible verdicts, guilty of first-degree murder, guilty of first-degree murder with recommendation for life imprisonment, guilty of second-degree murder, guilty of manslaughter, or not guilty. First-degree murder was defined at the time as the unlawful killing of a human being with malice, and with premeditation and deliberation, while second-degree murder was defined as an unlawful killing with malice but without premeditation or deliberation, and manslaughter was defined as killing without malice and without premeditation or deliberation. In addition to the defendant's testimony the previous day, his wife had testified that she had a relationship with the other man for between three and four months prior to the killing. What would be your verdict?
A 1 1/2-year old infant girl had been sent home from Gastonia Memorial Hospital this date after treatment for exposure in near-freezing temperatures for more than three hours the previous evening, wearing only a tee-shirt and one shoe. The little girl had toddled more than a half-mile from her home in a neighborhood near Bessemer City late in the afternoon, after her mother, who had moved with her family from Charlotte the previous week, had left the house to obtain medicine for another child. When she returned, the little girl was missing and the mother ran to a neighbor's house to obtain help. A rescue crew, sheriff's deputies and more than 50 neighbors turned out to join the search, which lasted three hours until it became too dark to see, at which point flashlights were supplied to the searchers. The little girl was suddenly found blocks away from the house in another direction from which her footprints had led, lying in a plowed field, stiff and semi-conscious. Members of the rescue squad cleaned caked mud from her face, hands and feet and wrapped her in a hospital blanket, at which point she was rushed to the emergency room and revived. Her mother said that she had been cutting teeth and was running a fever, and that she thought she had become confused and frightened in the new surroundings and had gone in search of her mother. The little girl had walked through several backyards and at least two fields, and waded through a shallow stream.
Julian Scheer of The News indicates that the race for Congress in the district was shaping up to be between incumbent Representative Charles Jonas and Democrat Paul Ervin, a Charlotte attorney, with David Clark of Lincolnton not planning to enter the race. There had been concern among Democrats that Mr. Jonas might be re-elected without serious opposition.
Dr. Henry Jordan, who had bowed out of consideration for the gubernatorial race recently, said he knew nothing about a movement among Democrats to nominate him for lieutenant governor and had not given the matter serious consideration.
In Salta, Argentina, citizens had asked that the local police station be demolished, complaining that the structure, formerly a big house, looked like something out of the Middle Ages and had symbolized "repression and torture for many years."
In Moscow, it was reported by Izvestia that in Barnaul in the Altai territory near the Outer Mongolian border, there were not enough public bathhouses, which the report said was typical of the poor state of public services in scattered parts of the Soviet Union.
In Covington, Ky., a man was found sleeping beneath the judge's desk in the courtroom during a City Council meeting and was charged with drunkenness.
In Tampa, Fla., police found a motorist going the wrong way on the wrong street in the wrong city, after a patrol car had almost been hit by an automobile going the wrong way on one-way Florida Avenue, the motorist indicating that he thought he was on Highway No. 1 in Jacksonville.
The season's heaviest snowstorm in the Eastern half of the country moved to the Atlantic Coast this date, after leaving a blanket of snow across the parched farmlands of the southern plains and Midwest, with snow having fallen during the night and morning from the lower Great Lakes region eastward to the mid-Atlantic states and southward as far as West Virginia and Maryland. Early reports indicated that there were four inches in Baltimore and three inches in Philadelphia, with the storm headed to New York and New England. Snow had measured up to ten inches in some areas hit by the storm the previous day.
On the editorial page, "After the Sideshow, Back to Business" regards General Matthew Ridgway's contention of political skulduggery in the shaping of the Administration's defense policy, finding that it had been welcomed joyfully by Democrats but represented little more than a noisy diversion, contributing nothing to a particularly serious problem.
General Ridgway had protested manpower cuts in the Army privately and semi-publicly for quite some time before his recent article in the Saturday Evening Post, and his objections had not been very secret, as he had testified before a Congressional committee, albeit in executive session, that the newly reduced strengths of the armed forces fixed by the President had never been submitted to the Joint Chiefs for approval, information published in a Washington newspaper the prior February.
Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had confirmed at a press conference the prior Tuesday that General Ridgway had continually advocated higher strength for the Army than did the other chiefs, but had been unable to convince his colleagues of the necessity.
It suggests that the Administration and Congress get down to the business of planning future defense policy with as much objectivity and realism as possible, meeting the changing conditions in the world, the mutability making it a difficult task and demanding of the best thinking the nation could muster, to keep the nation from being nibbled to death on the periphery by brush-fire wars, not excluding a continuing need for infantry and sea forces, while at the same time having the means to trigger a full-scale atomic counterattack if and when it was needed, including an adequate missile program. It posits that if that kind of versatile defense sounded expensive, it would be, but that in such years of crisis, it was a necessary expense.
"A Happy Return on the Investment" commends the new Coliseum for having earned a profit of more than $28,000 during its first 3 1/2 months of operation through the end of 1955, but cautions that only one attraction, the week-long Ice Capades, had been responsible for more than half of the total rental fees, and that there remained to be factored into the balance the interest on the bonded indebtedness and depreciation, and that it still remained to be seen whether the facility would pay for itself in the long-run. But it indicates that the recent report had undermined arguments that the "elephantorium can't even make expenses." It also urges that homegrown talent was still in need of extra consideration for shows at the new complex.
Get that young, new guy to come in 'ere. He'll draw 'em plenty—Melvin Pervis, or sumpun like 'at.
"Adage: The Lost Wander in Circles" tells of City traffic engineer Herman Hoose having said that parking impeded traffic movement and had put up "no parking" signs, but a merchant claimed that the signs hurt his business and had placed a mask over the "no" in front of his place and then tacked on a sign which said: "Free Parking. Guaranteed OK." The City Council had agreed with the merchant and then the State Highway Commission said it was tired of providing parking places for Charlotte in the form of superhighways, at which point the Council decided that the "no parking" signs represented a good idea, after all.
It indicates that the Council desired to please and the Highway Commission now made it imperative that the City adopt a policy, the Commission presenting one designed to move rather than to impede vehicles on streets and highways built for that purpose.
The piece concludes that it might be painful, as all growth was, but it was sensible, logical and economical, and it believes all residents would be comfortable with it.
"Safety Education—Before and After" tells of police Capt. Lloyd Henkel's proposal to send Charlotte traffic violators to a safety school, which it finds good, provided the classes would be conducted by people of genuine ability and dedication, utilizing teaching aids, with compulsory attendance. It suggests that if one or more of those elements had been missing in other cities where such schools had been organized, results had been far from good.
It urges also an equal amount of enthusiasm for expansion of driver and safety education in the public schools, which could reach whole new generations of motor vehicle operators before they had an opportunity to break the law.
"Neatest Political Trick of the Week" tells of having read in the Raleigh News & Observer's "Under the Dome" column the previous day that former State Senator Thomas Sawyer might ask Tenth District Democrats to nominate him to run against Representative Charles Jonas for Congress. Mr. Sawyer, a radio executive, worked in the district but lived in Belmont, which was in the Eleventh District. It thus advises the News & Observer to wipe the smog from its crystal ball.
A piece from the Indianapolis Star, titled "Our Sprouting Language", tells of the language growing, as exampled by the 284-page Dictionary of Words, published by the Philosophical Library. It cites the example of "operation", which once meant only a surgical procedure, but now had become a key word in military parlance, with many new connotations, referencing many "Operations" under various names in the military.
It finds the most fascinating new word in the dictionary, according to the man who had written its introduction, to be cybernetics. It favors its deletion. It was defined as a branch of science which studied "the human brain as compared to the electronic computing machines and others which perform certain functions similar to those of the human brain." It supposes that one day cybernetics would find that the human brain no longer paid and would declare it obsolete, which the editorial suggests it would not like.
Drew Pearson tells of Ebasco Services, the firm which had engineered the Dixon-Yates deal, which had since been abandoned by the Government, being about to obtain benefits from the Government's foreign aid program, which some Government officials regarded as indirect payoff for the failure of the Dixon-Yates deal. Although the International Cooperation Administration, headed by John Hollister, was doing its best to maintain complete secrecy on the matter, Mr. Pearson was able to reveal that the ICA planned to award Ebasco a foreign aid contract so lucrative that eight other companies wanted it. Ebasco had been chosen without competitive bidding by the director of ICA's industrial resources office, who was a former vice-president of Commercial Solvents Corp. The contract called for a massive review of the economic development program planned by President Syngman Rhee of South Korea. As part of the survey, Ebasco would review foreign aid projects requested by the Korean Government and then would help Mr. Hollister and the ICA solicit bids and award the construction contracts. Ebasco was demanding a one percent commission on all construction contracts awarded under the survey, which could run into the millions. In the background, ICA's experts were angry because it would tempt Ebasco to approve all types of aid projects desired by the Korean Government, to increase its profits.
The Korean Government was not convinced yet that Ebasco should handle the survey, even though the contract now only needed the approval of Mr. Hollister. ICA was therefore sending four Ebasco representatives to Seoul to win over President Rhee, with each collecting a $25 per day expense account from ICA. Despite such contracts usually being awarded by ICA's office of contract relations, this particular project was being handled by the director of ICA's industrial resources office. The details were so secret that they had even been kept from his boss, and when his office was asked about the proposed contract, he refused to talk.
The Congressional Quarterly questions whether the presidential nomination of either party could be won in the primaries—in a time when there were only a handful and they did not determine the binding delegate count for the conventions as they do today in most states. Primaries were "eyewash" in those times, as President Truman had described them in 1952, and, as the piece indicates, the experience of Senator Estes Kefauver that year appeared to confirm that assessment, as he won most of the primaries but lost the nomination to Governor Adlai Stevenson. Yet, in the same year, General Eisenhower, with a string of primary victories, won the nomination over Senator Robert Taft, acknowledged leader of the Republican Party.
Professor V. O. Key of Harvard said that before 1952, there had only been three instances since the first party primaries of 1906 in which the convention nominee had been the candidate who fared best in the primaries. Those had been President Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Governor Alfred Smith in 1928 and Governor Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. He said that even in those cases, however, it was not clear that the nomination had been gained because of primary victories.
The piece indicates that past experience had, however, shown that primaries could be effective in stopping candidacies, as shown by Republican Wendell Willkie, the 1940 nominee, who dropped his notion of a comeback in 1944 after running fifth in the Wisconsin primary, and in 1948, when New York Governor Thomas Dewey had blocked the nomination attempt of former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen by challenging and defeating him in the Oregon primary.
A Quarterly study had indicated that candidates could win about two-thirds of the convention delegates needed for nomination during the primaries, as well as winning prestige which could form a bandwagon effect at the convention, but that a single defeat in a primary could also more than offset the advantages derived from them.
It was also possible for delegates to ignore the wishes of the voters once they reached the convention. In 1952, Senator Kefauver had received 84 percent of the popular vote in Illinois but only three of the 64 delegates from that state had voted for him at the convention. He had received 99 percent of the vote in the New Jersey primary, but only three of the state's 36 delegates supported him.
Because of those factors, strategists for Adlai Stevenson in 1956 had concluded that prudence was the best policy and that since he was the front-runner, he had the most to lose and least to gain by entering primaries, thus was choosing to enter only five of them, in each of which he had an organization, minimizing the risk of an upset defeat. Senator Kefauver, an underdog, was planning a bolder strategy, looking to the primaries as the main source of his support from delegates, entering five primaries thus far and likely to enter others. He had challenged Mr. Stevenson directly in California and Florida and a victory in either of those primaries would boost him and be a great blow to Mr. Stevenson's candidacy.
Favorite-son candidates could also influence the two front-runners, such as New York Governor Averell Harriman, who was planning to stay out of the primaries, and Ohio Governor Frank Lausche, also refraining from entry to the primaries. There might also be favorite-sons in Maryland and New Jersey.
Regarding the Republican nomination, the President was assured of it if he decided to run again, but his backers had nevertheless entered his name in New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and California, intending to keep potential rivals off the ballot and insure dominance of the Eisenhower supporters at the convention, should he decide not to run. Any challenge to that strategy was likely to come from Senator William Knowland of California, who might enter primaries if the President did not clarify his plans by the end of January. But the longer the President delayed his decision, the fewer primaries would be available to potential rivals, as five filing dates had already passed.
Robert C. Ruark, in Sydney, Australia, tells of a man who had walked in recently with a cast on his arm, saying that a dragon had bit him. He was a naturalist-explorer who had just returned from Komodo Island in Indonesia where he had been searching for the famed Komodo dragon, the largest lizard in the world, about 12 feet long and averaging about 250 pounds, consuming wild pigs for fun. One had bitten the naturalist. He tells of the man's exploits with respect to various forms of wildlife in the Congo and West Africa. A former Marine, he sold insurance between expeditions and had been working recently for the San Diego Zoo.
He had not had much trouble catching the Komodo dragon, having baited a simple trip-snare with a wild pig, and then checking the trap and finding the dragon in it. Trying to get it out of the trap, however, was when it had bitten the man's hand. He had fainted and a couple of boys assisting him cut the dragon loose. When the naturalist had regained consciousness, the dragon was gone.
Mr. Ruark says he understood such
people as the naturalist, who had been bitten by the exploration bug when
his father had given him a book when he was seven, and would not be
happy until something which disagreed with him ate him. He says that
such people were not happy unless they were "cold, wet, hot,
wet, miserable, tired, hungry, bashing about in some strange place
looking for some strange something
"It is wondrously satisfying then, when somebody asks what happened to the arm, to say, simply: 'A dragon bit me.' It makes the trip worthwhile."
A letter writer from Baltimore takes to task News sportswriter Bob Saunders, saying she had read his column with disgust because he seemed to believe that former University of Maryland football coach Jim Tatum, who had recently taken the job as football coach at UNC, had been responsible for the whole University from the time he had arrived there in 1947 and that the University would fold up without him. She says that Byrd Stadium had been planned before Mr. Tatum had arrived as coach and athletic director, and had been completed and opened in September, 1950, when football was just beginning to reach its national acclaim at the University, it having won its first national recognition by beating second-ranked Michigan State a month later. She says that the new Student Activities Building had been opened to the public the previous month, but was not financed by football receipts, rather by a self-liquidating bond of 3.25 million dollars, to be paid off from student activity fees assessed to each student. She proceeds down a list of buildings which had been constructed since the spring of 1947 when Mr. Tatum arrived, none of which had derived from the football program. She says they hated to see him leave and that he was a fine man, but they did not plan to close their campus because of his departure, that the University of Oklahoma had done all right since he had left and they intended to follow that example.
A letter writer from Lancaster, S.C., comments on the letters column of the prior Monday, saying that almost all of the letters had been from people sympathetic with or leaning toward integration, such that he wondered whether he had come into possession of an NAACP publication. He says people were seeing a definite pattern of defeat before them and were giving forth a cry of desperation, finding that the same pattern had preceded Virginia's recent vote to hold a constitutional convention to amend the State Constitution to permit public funding of private schools. "The NAACP, the integrationists, and abolitionists, together with some very highly respected and influential groups (who should know better) joined in one chorus of tremendous sound and fury against the separation of the races. The thinking people of Virginia were unimpressed by the integrationist propaganda which had been so widely circulated and when the returns were in, the will of the people was unmistakable." He says the traditions of Virginia and the South had been upheld by an overwhelming majority of the people, that the people of Virginia had taken the lead and that the people of the Carolinas and other Southern states would, in due time and with equal certitude, assert their position as well. "Perseverance, tempered with dignity, love and respect will assure that right shall prevail and in God's good time, our government shall be returned to the people from whom its powers are derived."
Having included the "abolitionists" on the other side, he must have in mind a return to slavery as well. He'll need to obtain repeal of both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Framed Edition
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