The Charlotte News
Wednesday, January 25, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, at his second press conference since his September 24 heart attack, had said this date that he planned to have another full-scale medical examination prior to mid-February, but declined to say whether it would accelerate his decision on seeking a second term. He cited as the reason for the checkup that he was planning a trip to the South, not elaborating. When asked whether he might determine at that point whether he would run again, he had laughed heartily and said that he could not say what his impulses might be, indicating in response to another question that no member of his family was against his seeking re-election, contrary to pior published reports that Mrs. Eisenhower and son John had been opposed to it. He was also asked whether, if he did decide to seek re-election, the Vice-President would be his running mate again, to which he replied that he had never talked to the Vice-President about that matter and that until he had a chance to do so, preferred not to discuss it publicly. He spoke warmly of the Vice-President, as in the past, saying that he planned to discuss the political situation with him, sounding out Mr. Nixon's own future plans.
On other topics, the President said that he believed that his request for authority to make long-term foreign aid commitments to be in the best interests of the country, that there had been some misunderstanding regarding his request from Congress in that regard, where such influential members as Senator Walter George of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senate Minority Leader William Knowland had voiced opposition. Regarding taxes, he said that he was anxious to reduce them, but repeated that he saw no prospect for reduction at the current time because of the small surplus which the Government anticipated in the budgets for both the current fiscal year and the next one. He also called again for some payment against the large national debt of 280 billion dollars prior to any tax reduction. He also said that he would prefer that Congress not add an anti-segregation amendment to the school construction bill, though indicating he understood why such a rider would be added, but expressing preference that bills be handled on their own merits. The bill had been considered the previous day by the House Rules Committee, chaired by Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, with Mr. Smith indicating that it would probably come up again the following day. Representative Graham Barden of North Carolina had told the Committee the previous day that the bill, as written, would permit the Federal Government to "nose in" on public education matters traditionally handled by the states. Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York continued to insist that he would attach on the floor a rider prohibiting use of the money for non-integrated school systems. There was concern by the Administration that such a rider would provoke a Southern filibuster of the bill in the Senate.
The President had received a "friendly letter" from Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin, setting forth what the White House called "certain ideas" respecting world peace, having been read the letter, written in Russian, by Soviet Ambassador Georgi Zarubin, with Secretary of State Dulles also present. White House press secretary James Hagerty told newsmen that, intermittently since the Geneva conference of the Big Four heads of state the prior July, Premier Bulganin had been exchanging correspondence with the President, describing the letter as "friendly", regarding the Soviet Premier's interest in promoting world peace.
In La Crosse, Wisc., Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee said the previous night that the Administration was "leading the American farmer to the brink of bankruptcy" and that the only immediate relief would be the reinstatement of the 90 percent fixed price supports for agricultural products. The Senator was beginning his campaign for the state's 28 delegates with an address to about 300 Democrats. He had received the support of the entire Wisconsin delegation at the 1952 Democratic convention.
In Nashville, a Federal District Court judge ruled this date that blacks should be permitted to use municipally operated golf courses in the city. A previous judge had filed a written opinion on November 21, 1952, calling for separate but equal facilities for whites and blacks, a decision which had been amended in 1954 to permit blacks exclusive use of one golf course on specified days until completion of a municipal course specifically for black citizens. The judge who issued the decision this date said that ordinarily one judge would not set aside questions of law already decided by a prior judge of the same court in the same case "except under proper and unusual circumstances", citing the fact that the prior judgment had been issued before the Supreme Court had decided the desegregation cases, saying that it would be "an idle ceremony" to stand on the law of the case, only to have an appeal which would provide for immediate reversal.
In New York, a torrent of water had broken through a wall of the new tube of the Lincoln Tunnel being constructed to link New York City and New Jersey below the Hudson River. No one had been hurt, but frantic efforts were being undertaken by workmen to stem the flow and prevent it from filling the shaft and lapping over into the two tunnel tubes presently in use. A diver was preparing to go down during the late morning to see if he could close the steel bulkhead door of the flooding tube. The previous tubes had been constructed in 1934 and 1937.
Near Bridgeton, N.J., six children had perished in a fire which had destroyed their home on a rural road early this date, the fire believed to have been started by a defective oil stove. The father of the children had managed to save a four-month old infant and had sought to re-enter the home to save the others, but, suffering severe burns on his hands, had been forced to stand by helplessly, hearing the screams of his other children.
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that Solicitor Basil Whitener had decided to enter the Democratic race for Congress in the 11th District, this date, after he had been told that incumbent Representative Woodrow Jones had decided not to run again. Mr. Whitener also said that he had no plans on resigning as solicitor. Another lawyer, Hugh Wells of Shelby, said that he would also enter the May 26 primary. Mr. Jones, who was completing his third term representing the seven-county district, cited personal and business reasons for his decision not to run again.
Donald MacDonald of The News urges watching one's language, as profanity could be expensive, as two defendants in Mecklenburg County Recorder's Court had found out this date, having to pay about $100 between them in fines and court costs, after they had been charged with using profane language. One had been charged by a neighbor, after being overheard on an eight-party line cursing his wife and ordering her to get off the line. (He probably only said that he was going to send her to the moon if she did not surrender the line.) The judge had sentenced the man to 30 days in jail, suspended on condition that he remain of good behavior and violate no laws for a year, fining him $50 and costs of eight dollars. In the other case, a woman was charged with being a public nuisance when neighbors complained that she continually used loud, profane and indecent language at her home, the neighbors testifying that she had called her husband vile names which could be heard a block and a half away. Police said that the defendant's husband did not live in the house but slept in a truck outside, parked in the backyard, with the police indicating that neighbors said she cussed at him whenever she would see him in the backyard. The neighbors had sworn out the warrant. The woman was sentenced to 90 days in jail, suspended for two years, also on condition of good behavior and that she not use loud or profane language within the hearing of anyone else, plus a fine of $37.50 and court costs, the judge remarking that the woman's husband was "really in the doghouse." The attorney representing the complainants had said that she would call her husband to the back door of the home for his meals "and feed him like he was a beagle hound." Both defendants ought appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary, to vindicate their rights to free speech, as well, in the case of the overheard party-line, a reasonable expectation of privacy, the evidence being subject to suppression as violative of the Fourth Amendment by dint of the privately "seized" evidence without a warrant being used to prosecute the defendant, thus involving State action.
In Kansas City, a special election regarding a bond issue for city and state improvements had been held, and in one precinct, only one vote was cast among 530 persons registered, the sparse turnout having been attributed to bad weather. It was estimated that the lone vote had cost $58 in precinct election expenses.
In Dallas, a 20-year old bank messenger had won a 48-foot streetcar in a drawing held by the Dallas Transit Co., after it had converted to buses during the month. The new owner had ten days to move the trolley from the transit company's property, which the company had said would cost at least $100, more than the worth of the streetcar. The messenger said that he had no place to put it.
Also in Dallas, a detective
lieutenant had gone into a restaurant the previous night to dine
during his first day of duty with the burglary and theft bureau of
the department, and while he was dining, had his hat stolen. (To save the reader time and effort, incidentally, we have already looked up the detective's name regarding the events of November 22-24, 1963 and found nothing out of the ordinary, only that he had been involved in an investigation of the whereabouts of a witness to an assault on a Federal officer in April, 1953, that suspected assailant apparently in some manner relating to a person, one Jack Caesar Grossi, who was later, under an alias, a fellow employee of Lee Harvey Oswald at a photographic and printing firm in Dallas during late 1962 through April, 1963, and also, at least under an alias, may have ridden with him to Mexico City on a bus on September 26-27, 1963, the detective therefore not exactly having any direct connection to the investigation of the assassination of the President.) He simply lost his hat
In London, insurance company representatives were willing to offer 100 to 5 odds that actress Grace Kelly would produce an heir or heiress to the throne of Monaco after her marriage to Prince Rainier III. Several Monaco businessmen had approached Lloyd's of London for insurance against the risk that Ms. Kelly would not produce a successor. Monaco would become part of France, provided the ruling family died out without an heir, resulting in higher French taxes. A representative of Lloyd's said that they would be happy to arrange for the indemnity policy, provided they could have a medical report on the Prince, adding that the premium would be hard to assess, but that a one-time payment of about five pounds per cent would cover it.
In Montréal, the Montréal Gazette had taken a look at a begrimed local statue of Scots poet Robert Burns, born 179 years before this date, and lamented: "I wandered by St. George's Kirk/ A'tween the gloamin' and the mirk,/ I wandered up alang the square./ An' saw puir Rabbie stannin' there./ An' then; abune the traffic din,/ I heard a voice, baith loud an' thin;/ 'Och, laddie, laddie, what is fame?/ The warld ow'r it's a' the same./ Jist look at me—a real disgrace./ Why disna someone wash ma face?'"
On the editorial page, "Knowland's Lean and Hungry Look" suggests that California Senator William Knowland having tossed his hat into the presidential ring for the Republican nomination during the week probably had evoked audible murmurs of discontent at the White House, with the President's brain trust never having been enamored of Senator Knowland, despite his having supported most of the President's program. He had, however, supported some of it quite reluctantly, only because he was the Senate Minority Leader, such that his true loyalty had been questioned. In other respects, he had placed himself in outright opposition to the President, embarrassing RNC chairman Leonard Hall "and other Republican Pollyannas". He did not appear as an Eisenhower Republican, more accurately described as a "kind of Chiang Kai-shek Republican", his activities as a China Firster having often been disturbing to the supporters of the President, as well as to certain isolationist allies of the Senator and the internationalists of both parties, never having been able to live down his cloakroom name, "the senator from Formosa".
It reminds that Senator Knowland, in 1948, prior to the takeover of the Chinese mainland by the Communists in 1949, had been a leader of a small but determined group of Senators and Representatives who had threatened to scuttle the first appropriation for the Marshall Plan unless the Chinese Nationalists received some of the money. Known as the China Lobby, the group had succeeded in getting 400 million dollars for use "in the general area of China."
Senator Knowland had almost pulled off a similar coup two years later when he sought to block a 38 million dollar relief grant to Yugoslavia unless a like amount were provided to Nationalist China.
He had also voted against the confirmation of General Marshall as Secretary of Defense, because of the General's efforts during a special mission to China as envoy for President Truman in 1947, recommending a coalition Communist and Nationalist government to save the mainland from the Communists and because he found the people generally more trustful of the Communists and their promised land reform program than the notoriously corrupt Nationalist regime.
During the Korean War, the Senator had been the Senate's strongest advocate for sending the Nationalist Army of 600,000 into Korea, despite Army chief of staff at the time, General Omar Bradley, having told a Congressional committee that he doubted that even half of the Nationalist Army had shoes or had fired as many as ten rounds of live ammunition apiece during the previous year.
The Senator's office estimated that during 1951, he had addressed the Senate at least 103 times on America's duty to Chiang Kai-shek. He criticized the Eisenhower Administration's Korean truce terms as "a Far Eastern Munich". He embarrassed the Administration with war talk during the previous year's crisis involving Quemoy and Matsu, and criticized the Administration's "willingness to negotiate with the Chinese Communists" and its failure in realistically appraising the shortcomings of the U.N. According to Congressional Quarterly, the Senator had split with the President on three issues the previous year, five the year before that and six during 1953, including several aspects of the foreign aid program, extension and revision of the Reciprocal Trade Act, the plan for financing Federal road-building and important elements of tax, farm and conservation legislation. He had also supported the proposed Bricker amendment to the Constitution to restrict the President's treaty-making powers.
He had often urged that there should not be an "heir apparent" in the event the President decided not to seek re-election, knowing that he would not be that person designated by the king-makers of the Eisenhower wing of the party and also disfavoring his arch-rival in California politics, Vice-President Nixon, as the "logical contender" for that position.
It concludes, however, that the Senator was jumping ahead of his own timetable, having earlier indicated that he would file in several state primaries should the President not reach his decision on whether to run again by February 15. It finds that he would have to be especially adept, given the crossfire he would face from both the Eisenhower wing and the pro-Nixon conservatives, if he hoped to obtain any convention support. "Mr. Knowland is not as generously endowed as some of the GOP's other artful dodgers. We frankly fear for his safety."
Senator Knowland would, in 1958, opt to run for governor of California rather than for re-election to the Senate, losing badly to State Attorney General Pat Brown. Fifteen years later, in 1974, less than six months before the resignation from the Presidency by Mr. Nixon, he would commit suicide, thought to have been the result of his precarious financial situation, complicated by gambling debts owed to underworld figures, shooting himself just two days after a banquet honoring the centennial of the Oakland Tribune, which his family had owned since 1915 and of which he had been editor and publisher after leaving politics.
Whether, in fact, his death was merely coincidental to the Watergate scandal, we leave to the reader to discern. He may have been one of the men who knew too much.
"UNC Should Answer the Question" finds that UNC student editors had mistaken the target in greeting new football coach Jim Tatum as a "parasitic monster of open professionalism", upon his return to the University, and that the coach had misstated the issue involved in a move to recall the editors as a result of their anti-Tatum stand. It finds that Mr. Tatum had properly spoken up for freedom of opinion, but that the question was whether or not the University traditions had become "so anemic that the student body would stifle opinions of the editors it elected", and thus framed, the question involved in the recall movement deserved to be answered.
It suggests that the coach had already done the University service by incisively defining the philosophy of UNC football, that "winning is everything". A student vote to oust the editors who rejected that philosophy would give University administrators, the students and the state the best possible means of defining "the inroads of the football business on the traditions, the intellectual atmosphere, and the democratic ideals of a great university."
It thus thinks that the question of whether the University valued more the functioning of the "football machine" or the right of student editors to question and criticize it, as had former UNC president Gordon Gray, considering it to be a threat to the University's academic advancement, had to be answered.
It finds that if the coach was a "parasitic monster", he was one of the most "genial dragons" of its acquaintance, but that the term "monster" might very well fit his business, and that the students deserved an opportunity to answer.
There will be another election for editor of the Daily Tar Heel in just three or four months, and so it hardly seems worth the effort. Nor should freedom of the press and freedom of speech ever be put to a vote, as, in most places, it would almost assuredly be destined to lose when at stake was anything being expressed which was the least bit controversial among the electorate being polled. In any event, the campus recall election would proceed in February, with the current DTH editors, Edwin Yoder and Louis Kraar, both going on to long and distinguished careers in journalism, holding their positions—with even some dirty tricks made manifest in the latter stages, despite no one who later would populate CREEP having, to our knowledge, ever even attended UNC, though Duke is not exempt from suspicion... It does, however, beg the question we have long held, as to whether the editor of a college newspaper should be an elective office in student government. Those elections at UNC through the years, have, however, produced a large number of distinguished career journalists, and so... We urge, though, not trying it outside the college environment, where the electorate tends to read, sometimes copiously, with nothing better to do between classes or over lunch at one's dorm desk, what is written in their newspaper, even comprehending most of it—even amid bleary-eyed reporters' renderings in after-hours, resulting in a fair number of typographical errors, such as the report on the February 15 page regarding the talk to be delivered by Senator Wayne Morse the following evening in "Hall Hall", not a play on words by the University, but merely a slip of the finger which students could have fairly inferred actually referred to Hill Hall, though perhaps Howell, Hill being the first choice unless one therein found an empty room, in which case... We might just go to that one, provided there are no tests or papers due February 17.
We recall a controversy of a more serious nature having arisen, not per se involving the Tar Heel, in the fall of 1971 in the wake of the death of football player Billy Arnold from heat prostration, suffered during pre-season drills, when he collapsed on a particularly hot day and was nevertheless allegedly prodded by a member of the coaching staff to continue the drills, there being howls in the aftermath for the hide of coach Bill Dooley, with a host of the then-current players supporting him while an organization of former players had been formed in favor of his ouster and substantial changes in the regimen followed by the staff in practice. The controversy became so hot on campus, spreading to the national media, that coach Dooley and some of his current players had shown up at a meeting of the organization of former players in the Student Union, dressed, somewhat menacingly, in full uniform. Though, according to the report in the DTH, tension was palpable, nothing out of the ordinary, such as someone being tackled and thrown through a window, took place. The incident was, however, considered by most thinking students to have been in poor taste, given the gravity of the situation. ("Patton", it should be noted, had been the most popular movie of the previous year, albeit with "M.A.S.H." not far behind, sometimes among the same audience subset, torn in allegiance between two powerful forces.)
In the end, coach Dooley stayed and had his most successful season to date that fall, continuing thereafter his largely successful coaching tenure at the University until resigning after the 1977 season to take the head coaching job at Virginia Tech.
Whether a business or not, the health of the players should always be uppermost, even above academics, which in college should also supersede sports, obviously, but there was no fallout from the incident, at least insofar as it impacted the program or the coaching staff, though there was some informal agreement reached in the end, if we recall correctly, between the organization of former players and the coaching staff, prodded by concerned members of the student body, administration and faculty, to provide for a system of basic rules to govern practices.
There is no cause on the football field or in any other sporting event worth compromise of a student-athlete's health, long-term or immediate.
Many complain today about the changes in rules designed to protect football players, and basketball players, from serious injuries, but such rules changes, while sometimes interrupting play with controversial calls which have to be reviewed on the monitors, are designed to prevent tragedy, which can occur in the heat of play quite by inadvertence and which no one in their right mind wants to see on either side of a sporting match, no matter how hotly contested or what, in the sporting world, might be at stake from the outcome. We are not ancient Romans. The convenient sideline idea of "play on" and "play through it", while thought commendable in a time when players might become soldiers the next season in a quite hot war, is no longer an acceptable mode of thinking in peacetime when an individual's health is at stake, any more than police beatings after a traffic stop. The attitude thus conveyed in either case to the broader society, especially to its younger members, suggests systemic callous disregard for human life, the last thing any society needs.
Long live the memory of Billy Arnold...
"Quick Stuff" says simply: "There is a nice balance about snow. It comes quickly. It goes quickly. We like it, coming and going."
Were the latter two pieces in juxtaposition today, we would have to add, anent the Al Stump piece on the above-linked January 10 DTH page, that even the sport of volleyball can now become corrupted, albeit through no fault of its own, by snow-jobbers, who apparently don't recognize the distinction between a snow-job and a snow-blower
A piece from the Hartford Courant, titled "Brave Bird Watchers", tells of birdwatchers going forward to make their notes for the annual census, despite the frigid weather, and catalogues the effort around Hartford regarding pigeons, sparrows and starlings, which, it suggests, might not even be considered birds, as if there were a class society among birds, they would not even be among the proletariat.
"So if you see a fellow standing down by City Hall, or wandering over hill and dale with field glasses and other equipment, his business is strictly for the birds."
Drew Pearson tells of the lobby bent on passage of the bill to deregulate natural gas, operating with such clockwork precision as he had never witnessed in his years of covering Washington. The lobby had been organized two years earlier, beginning to operate quietly for the present Senate showdown, having only failed to predict the heart attack of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who had been helping to push the bill. Without his presence after July 4 in the previous session, the bill had failed to emerge for a floor vote, but Senator Johnson had now made it a priority in the new session.
The Senator had asked the President to appoint a Cabinet advisory committee to study energy, including natural gas and its exemption from Federal regulation, and had switched his colleague from Texas, Senator Price Daniel, from the Interior Committee, where he had helped to pass the tidelands oil bill, to the Judiciary Committee, where he could help pass the natural gas bill. Meanwhile, the President, taking advice from his Texas friends, had pretty well stacked the advisory committee with friends of the gas industry, and the committee had raised a total of 1.5 million dollars with which to pressure and propagandize Congress.
They had then picked Congressman Percy Priest of Tennessee, chairman of the House Interstate Commerce Committee, to introduce their bill, timed to coincide with the report of the Cabinet advisory committee, certain to recommend, because of its membership, against Federal regulation, as it had.
The lobby had slipped up on one minor matter, that being that Congressman Oren Harris of Arkansas had been picked to be author of the gas bill, instead of Congressman Priest, Mr. Harris having long been close to the Arkansas public utilities and Pan American Airways. Mr. Harris had introduced the bill while Mr. Priest had pushed it, the latter doing a remarkably efficient job, not only maneuvering the bill through his Committee by a one-vote margin after the vote had first been tied, but voting for the bill both in Committee and on the House floor, the only member of the House from Tennessee to do so.
The final vote in the House had been 209 to 203, passing only because of the powerful support of Speaker Sam Rayburn and Republican leaders. The Speaker had called the House into session two hours early to get the bill passed and had pressured eight key members to change their votes. Mr. Pearson points out that the Speaker's support was quite predictable, as he was from Texas and the big oil people had long been able to redistrict his constituency and defeat him if he did not go along with the oil and gas industry's position.
But with Republican leaders, things had been different, with Republican House Leader Joseph Martin, from Massachusetts, having his constituents needing cheap gas, and Charles Halleck, the assistant Republican leader, from Indiana, also having the people back home in need of cheap gas. Nevertheless, the two had urged fellow Republicans to support the bill on the basis that there would be plenty of campaign funding available for any member who voted for it and that voting against it would result in gas money being put up to defeat them.
Mr. Pearson concludes that the high-pressure tactics to whip enough members into line had produced the six-vote margin in the House for the bill.
Doris Fleeson tells of the greatest "snow job" in history being perpetrated on the President by Republicans intent on him running for a second term. Madison Avenue advertising "geniuses" had presented the term "snow job" to the American vernacular and were unquestionably master-minding the present example of it. She indicates that the guiding spirits of the advertising world were Republican in their political sympathies or at least had deemed it expedient to be so. The DNC, meanwhile, had trouble getting a first-class advertising agency to handle its campaign.
She indicates that a "snow job" was a method of propaganda by which the person or persons to be sold a product or idea was deluged with an overwhelming mass of material designed to persuade the person that the world would stop in its tracks or the person's status would be irretrievably impaired unless a certain course of action were pursued. Such efforts were independent of reality, though always having to bear some semblance to truth or probability, and preferably a mixture of the two.
To the present time, the Government artists in the field had been the Pentagon, as ex-Secretaries and independent committees had often testified. But, she finds, the present effort put the Pentagon in the shade.
She suggests that President Eisenhower was not cynical as had been FDR, nor disillusioned by hard political knocks, as had been the less complex President Truman, who had learned a lot about life the hard way. President Eisenhower loved and admired the people who were the moving spirits of the present effort to get him to run again, and had repeatedly demonstrated that he believed they knew best about everything except the military.
A substantial part of the Republican Party, including the business community, the Eisenhower circle and the RNC, refused to admit that the President's age of 65 or his September 24 heart attack should be a bar to his re-election. Recently, they had given a "salute" to the President in the form of a series of dinners across the country to raise funds for the Republican campaigns at all levels, ostensibly to celebrate the third anniversary since his inauguration, which she finds as having been designed as part of that propaganda effort to convince him to run again.
No compassion, however, had been expressed, insofar as what had been reported or shown on television, for the President as a man. She recounts that it had been a memorable experience to sit just below the dais at the dinner in Washington, "as the waves of mass emotion beat about his lonely figure and in full view of the avid faces centered on him. It is perhaps too much to say the mob spirit lingered close below the surface, or a mass hysteria. But it would have taken a brave man to rise and suggest that perhaps things were being carried much too far."
Despite the President not being a master of the English language, she finds that he was Lincolnesque in his plain statement that, in the final analysis, the decision had to be his own as to whether he would run again. At deliberate urging, the White House mail had been set in motion and, she predicts, would mount, as mass emotion was an easily communicable fever.
She concludes that Bernard Baruch had long commended to his friends, especially the younger ones who often found their education in human nature disillusioning, a reprinted edition of one of his favorite books, published originally in 1841, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Robert C. Ruark, in Sydney, Australia, says that he had wanted to go to Russia, but that he had seen "Porgy and Bess" so often that the trip did not seem worth it, especially in a temperature of ten below zero, that he had always been sore at the Russians for various things, including borscht, and felt betrayed personally by the open-door policy presently being followed by the Soviets, for he had been saving up for Russia as a journalistic scoop, as they had historically been so hostile to visitors.
"I mean to say, when you can't sell the pulps any more, and the movies sneer, and the next book turns to glue in the middle of Chapter One, that is the time to go to Russia. You wangle yourself a passport, after disclaiming any personal knowledge of the Republican Party, and you go winging off to the frozen-sinus country, and you write." (One has to wonder whether a 16-year old Lee Oswald, seemingly always of a venturesome spirit, might have read this piece and decided, therefore, following his stint in the Marines, which had not been one of exemplary performance, to renounce his citizenship in 1959, in the hope of becoming the next Hemingway, on Russia rather than Spain. But we digress…)
He says that one wrote in Russia about what one saw, as: "'Today I saw a cow. It seemed to be an ordinary enough cow. At least it didn't complain about the cominform's attitude toward milk production (six pages deleted by censor.)'" It would turn out that what the censor had cut out was the simple question, "'How now, Brown Cow?'" which then would put it on the bestseller list immediately, as all one had to do in the old days was to return home and tell all, though he had never read any revelation from an outsider about Russia which could compete with a child's diary, "telling all" about the "frostbitten reformatory" being enough.
He had never been a fan of Russian dress, of their "plotless movies", and ballet bored him unless Jeanmaire were in it, and she was not a "Russky". How the Russians liked their present Government left him "uncurious", as did how they felt about the U.S. or their tastes in art and literature. "To me, Russia has always been Short Overcoat, Nebraska, with droshies." He likewise had found their intellectuals a "better sedative than hot milk laced with goofballs," was "unsent" by their music.
Nevertheless, he was going to save it all for his old age and write it from inside Russia, but they had gone and robbed him of his last shot at solvency when they had let down the bars and allowed the "nightclub columnists and the jazzboos in for a visit." As a friend had recently said to him, "It just ain't worth the pain anymore if everybody outside knows it ain't worth the pain." He concludes by remarking to his wife that before long he was going to Tahiti, which was worth the pain.
A letter writer responds to a previous letter which had bemoaned the fact that Charlotte had only one television station thus far, WBTV, channel 3. He says that people in the city had television sets which needed repair and that they would probably buy a new one but for the fact that there was no point, with the same old station and the same old programs available, suggesting that it was good for Charlotte to have more stations and thanks the previous letter writer for bringing it to light.
Get one of those new antennas which is as tall as a rocket and looks like one of the satellites protruding from its nose cone, and then you're in business.
A letter writer responds to a previous letter writer of the same surname as this writer, suggesting that the previous writer had spoken very strongly but questions whether he had acted, as now was the time for action regarding segregation, recommending that everyone who believed in segregation ought go hear Senator James Eastland of Mississippi on February 3 at Ovens Auditorium in Charlotte, sponsored by the Patriots, Inc., of North Carolina. He wants everyone to unite "to fight the evil of integration." He says that many people deplored the violence which had taken place in Mississippi, Alabama and other Southern states, but that much more violence took place against blacks in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in one month's time than in the Southern states in a year, but that the newspaper editors, just as those in Charlotte, did not report on the violence out of the North. He says that he would join with other "right-thinking North Carolina people to fight integration, the NAACP, the Supreme Court, the Ford Foundation, the radical preachers, you, if necessary, and even the damnyankees."
Framed Edition
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