The Charlotte News

Tuesday, January 31, 1956

THREE EDITORIALS

Site ed. Note: The front page reports from Washington that Secretary of State Dulles had resumed Western strategy discussions this date with visiting British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd. It was likely that critical questions regarding the Far East would be topics of discussion, as Hubert Graves, one of Britain's top Asiatic experts, had accompanied Mr. Lloyd into the conference room. Relations with Communist China, including Britain's reported desire to ease the existing Western trade restrictions, would likely be prominent among the topics to be discussed. The Middle East, twice discussed the previous day, would likely arise in discussions this date as well. The conference between the two foreign ministers was preliminary to another meeting between the President and Prime Minister Anthony Eden during lunch, both men having gotten off to a seemingly good start the previous day in their three days of scheduled talks on how to deal with the Russians in the Middle East and elsewhere, agreeing in their assessments of recent Soviet maneuvers on the diplomatic, economic and political fronts, with Mr. Eden pledging Britain's full support of the President's insistence on "deeds, not words" as evidence of Russia's genuine willingness to ease tensions. There had been diversions of opinion on the Middle East during the first day, according to some diplomatic officials, but it was indicated that the differences were minor and that they could be narrowed even further this date. The two leaders were expected to discuss the Far East after they had worked out a common policy regarding the Middle East. The British were said to be more reluctant than they had been with regard to continued support of U.S. opposition to seating of Communist China in the U.N. The British also wanted to ease the West's embargo on shipping of non-war goods to Communist China, arguing that despite strong opposition from segments of Congress, such goods were being shipped now to Russia but were banned from trade with the Chinese. They pointed out that the Korean fighting, which had led to the embargo, had been over for 2 1/2 years. Britain had recognized Communist China, while the U.S. had not. The Russian economic offensive in the Middle East was one of the principal issues which the two men would discuss.

The President this date had approved a plan to finance his highway construction program through pay-as-you-go taxation, having abandoned his earlier plan for financing it with bonds. House Republican Leader Joseph Martin, having just completed his weekly conference with the President, announced the President's decision, indicating that it had been made in reaction to the refusal of the Democratic leadership to accept the bond program, with the President wanting the highway construction program to move forward. Mr. Martin said that he believed the program had a good chance of being approved by Congress. He said that the new program would mean higher taxes to finance road-building, that it would be up to the House Ways & Means Committee to decide how to raise the money.

In Phoenix, it was reported that Adlai Stevenson would begin a speaking tour of California this date, ahead of Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, his chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, in Mr. Stevenson's first intensive campaigning. He would take an eight-day whistle-stop tour of the state, with an emphasis on the folksy approach, successfully used by Senator Kefauver in California and other primaries four years earlier, when Mr. Kefauver had more delegates than any other candidate going into the convention, but, nevertheless, had not been able to capture the nomination. Senator Kefauver planned to spend four days in California. The primary in that state was scheduled for June 5, with the largest bloc of convention delegates at stake in the country, 68, among the three primaries in which both candidates had declared that they would definitely enter to seek delegates, the other two, Florida and Minnesota, being mere beauty contests. Senator Kefauver had entered 16 primaries in 1952 and Governor Stevenson had entered none, having awaited a draft by the convention. The Senator had won the California primary easily in 1952, defeating favorite-son candidate, State Attorney General Pat Brown.

In New Delhi, evangelist Billy Graham's followers this date planned what they hoped would be a triumphant four-day visit for him, including a private meeting with Prime Minister Nehru. Rev. Graham was scheduled to address public meetings with attendance of 16,000 expected at each, nowhere near the numbers which had greeted his appearance in South India, the traditional stronghold of Indian Christianity. During the weekend, in Kottayam, Rev. Graham had addressed audiences totaling 300,000 in five meetings. Thus far, the Indian press had been giving the evangelist only scant attention, except in the larger cities and towns, but there had been considerable local interest in his activities. In one town, people gathered at a roadblock to halt his party and provide him with bananas. In a small village, he had stepped from his automobile to deliver a brief sermon to a group of 40 or so parading red-shirted Communist youths, telling them that Christ and Christianity were the best answer to world problems.

In Karuizawa, Japan, eight feet of snow on the roof of a miners' sleeping shack had collapsed, killing 14 and seriously injuring five others, with 11 having been pulled from the wreckage unharmed.

In Nome, Alaska, Brig. General John Noyes, commander of the Alaska National Guard, had died in the hospital the previous night, a few hours after his dramatic rescue from the wreckage of a crashed plane, in which he had suffered "severe and extensive freezing and multiple injuries" since the prior Friday, while he and three others had spent four days and three nights within the wreckage, awaiting their rescue, which had been effected late the previous day.

In Philadelphia, a judge determined that the mother of the 22-year old victim of an illegal abortion, arranged by her mother, had suffered enough punishment, after two psychiatrists appeared in court, indicating that an active sentence could cause recurrence of her mental blackout state, the court therefore finding that "further punishment would be classified as legal revenge", that the memory of the tragedy would reside in the mother's memory and continue to be a deterrent to any future crimes of the type, thus not providing an active sentence, pursuant to her plea the previous day of nolo contendere to the charge of being an accessory before the fact of the abortion. The couple who had actually performed the abortion, a male bartender and his beautician wife, were sentenced to prison, the woman receiving an indeterminate sentence, with the judge to consider the request of her attorney to make the sentence between 11 and 23 months, and the man sentenced to between three and ten years. Both had also entered pleas of no contest the previous day. The judge condemned the practice of abortion strongly, as both contrary to the laws of Pennsylvania and to the moral laws of the world. Each of the defendants could have faced up to ten years in prison and a $6,000 fine. The victim's father was the vice-president of Food Fair stores, one of the largest grocery chains in the country. The deceased had eloped the prior spring with a Miami Beach motorcycle policeman.

In Charlotte, the man who had been convicted of second-degree murder for killing his wife's suspected lover, emerging from the trunk of her car with a combination rifle and shotgun as she and the man sat in the front seat making kissing sounds, according to the defendant's testimony, then shooting the man to death, claiming that it had occurred during the course of a struggle for the weapon, had filed a motion for new trial through his counsel, set for hearing the following day, the basis for the motion being newly discovered evidence of two eyewitnesses who claimed that they had seen the two men struggle, the defense attorney claiming that he had not been made aware of the existence of the two witnesses until after the close of the case, after final arguments and just before the court's jury instructions, that it would have been too late at that point to try to introduce the testimony. The investigating officer in the case had told the police chief the previous week that at the time of the incident on January 3, the two women had told him they had not seen anything.

In Shelby, N.C., Ralph Webb Gardner, 44, a Shelby and Washington attorney, had announced this date that he would enter the 11th District House race for the Democratic nomination, set for a primary on May 26. He was the third candidate to announce for the vacancy, created when incumbent Representative Woodrow Jones had decided two weeks earlier not to run again. Attorney Hugh Wells of Shelby and solicitor Basil Whitener of Gastonia had both already announced for the race.

In Pittsburgh, Pa., a divorced grandmother, 39, who already had 11 children, had given birth to triplets the previous day, after having given birth to twins on February 1, 1954. The woman had been divorced the previous November 24, and now had 11 boys and three girls, with another child having died 13 years earlier. Only three of her 11 older children were currently living with her.

In Houston, a postman made two special deliveries on his mail route the previous day, after observing a burning duplex. He entered the flaming building and carried a three-year old girl and her two-year old sister to safety. Meanwhile, a 40-year old bus mechanic rescued their five-year old brother. The cause of the fire is not indicated, perhaps another one caused by the notorious firebug of Charlotte, Missy, the strutting wonderdog, eager only for the Big H.

In San Francisco, Frank Ahern, who would become the new police chief the following day, had, the previous day, led a raid against what police called a big-time shoplifting and burglary ring, with five suspects having been arrested. He announced that he would transfer every captain on the force, sending two captains on a raid of a peep-show, where they arrested two operators. Mr. Ahern had been a police inspector, appointed by newly elected Mayor George Christopher to replace the acting chief, John Engler. Remember: A man has got to know his limitations.

In San Dimas, Calif., a sign at the California State Polytechnic College read: "No sheep raising class today. No sheep." The superintendent of farm animals reported to the sheriff's deputies that a sheep worth $25 was missing from its stall in a barn. Well, you know what happened there.

In Charlotte, the first ice hockey game had occurred at the new Coliseum the previous night, as the New Haven Blades had faced off against the Baltimore Clippers, who were playing their last six home games of the season in Charlotte because their arena had burned down the previous week in Baltimore—probably another one caused by Missy, secretly an ice hockey fan who wanted to attract the sport to Charlotte, in an effort to ally the South and North again in the spirit of harmony and cooperation against the Commie onslaught to come. A sellout crowd of 10,363 had attended the game and some 3,000 persons who were standing outside awaiting tickets were told that they could not get in. Thousands of those who attended knew nothing of ice hockey—probably wondering when the roller-skating part would start. The crowd cheered at the playing of "Dixie", to commemorate the introduction to Charlotte of the sport most popular in the North, with most of the players being from Canada, the players having beaten their sticks in rhythmic accompaniment to the music. The crowd cheered the Clippers and booed the New Haven team—you bunch of slovenly attired, outside agitating, supercilious Yalie flunkouts—, who nevertheless won the match handily. Between 75 and 100 traffic tickets were handed out by the Charlotte police at the event, most of which were for fines of three dollars each, for parking on a nearby street after the Coliseum parking lot became full. Hell, where's we s'posed to park?

On the editorial page, "The Eden Visit: Cornerstones Confer" tells of the conference in Washington between Prime Minister Anthony Eden and the President coming at a good time, as a number of world events requiring such consultation had piled up rapidly, producing an urgency for the confreres which had not been explained in the press.

For several weeks, Washington and the rest of the nation had been engaged by several types of "brinks", the romance of actress Grace Kelly with Prince Rainier III of Monaco, several magazine articles, and political grandstanding during the opening session of Congress, obscuring serious international problems arising from the post-Geneva policies of the Soviet Union since the Big Four summit conference of the prior July, complicated by traditional differences in the policies of the U.S. and Britain, problems about to be overshadowed and perhaps further complicated by partisan verbiage in an election year.

In the Middle East, there was the dilemma of keeping the peace without producing major offense to either the Israelis or the Arabs, while also blunting the economic foray of the Soviets into that region. The British had tended to support the Arabs, while the U.S. had remained neutral. In the Far East, there was a question of trade with and recognition of Communist China, which had divided U.S. and British policy for several years, as had the issue of what islands off the China mainland were worth defending for the sake of the Nationalist Chinese Government on Formosa.

There was the question of what to do about Russia's economic offers in the Middle and Far East and in Latin America, and its intransigence on settlement of European issues, such as German reunification.

It indicates that there would be inevitable differences because of economic and geographical factors between U.S. and British policy, but that conferences between the heads of state could remove minor irritations and assure the survival of the basic trust and understanding between the two countries, on which was based all of the alliances and agreements which constituted the bulwark against the inroads of Communism.

"The Disturber of the Peace Is Dead" tells of the death two days earlier of writer and social critic H. L. Mencken, indicating that if he had been unloved by his contemporaries, it was because he was unlovable, as it finds that no American writer, save possibly Ezra Pound, had worked so hard at being an irritant.

One needed only to look over a list of words and phrases that his public had used to describe him to appreciate the dimensions of his success at the effort to annoy. William Manchester, in his biography, originally titled, Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H. L. Mencken, had collected some of them, such as "mangy ape", "dog", "weasel", "maggot", "ghoul", "jackal", "buzzard", "tadpole", "toad", "tiger", "howling hyena", "bilious buffoon", "British toady", "super-Boche of German Kultur", "cankerworm", and "radical Red". Usually he had been called some kind of animal, reptile or insect. St. Clair McKelway had referred to him as a "centipede" because, in his heyday, he would "pinch Anglo-Saxons in tender places with one hand, smacking the plutocracy with the other hand, and with other hands walloping the American businessman, the American woman, the politician, the yokel, and the boob." But in the meantime, if he sensed that his readers had become self-satisfied, he was able "to reach over and give the toe a bang with a tack hammer he carries in still another hand for that purpose."

It finds that if he had been an irritant, he had also been a tonic, that his imprint on American life and letters had been powerful, with a whole generation having cut their literary teeth on him, finding in his attacks an intellectual audacity which was strangely invigorating. He was interested in almost everything, but more vehemently than most, attacking everything as well, but saving his strongest attacks for "nincompoops, windbags, stuffed shirts, do-gooders, hypocrites, four-flushers, quacks and solemn asses."

It finds that he had been at the peak of his form during the 1920's but that by the mid-30's, his grip on the imaginations of the young had slackened. J. Donald Adams had opined that it was because many of the battles he had fought had been won, but the piece disagrees, as the real battles against important foes were never really won.

It indicates that society needed Mr. Mencken during the Roaring Twenties and that it still needed him. "The boobs and frauds have not departed. The drape of their clothes is different, their cars are faster and their houses flatter, but behind the bland façade of respectability is the same old booberies and the same old sham—full and ripe and ready to be juiced." It suggests that, as with an aging boxer, Mr. Mencken had weakened, always impudent but no longer omnipotent, and that when his literary reputation had begun to decline, he had also suffered a physical decline and lapsed into silence, spending his latter years buttressing his considerable contribution to the study of American language.

In 1948, when doctors had placed him under an oxygen tent at Johns Hopkins after he had suffered a stroke, he had said, "Bring on the angels." Earlier he had written: "One of the crying needs of the time in this incomparable republic is for a suitable burial service for the admittedly damned… What is needed, and what I bawl for politely, is a service that is free from the pious but unsupported asseverations that revolt so many of our best minds, and yet remains happily graceful and consoling… A suitable funeral for doubters, full of lovely poetry, but devoid of any specific pronouncement on the subject of a future life… Such a libretto for the inescapable last act would be humane and valuable. I renew my suggestion that the poets spit upon their hands and confect it at once."

It provides what it supposes to have been his own fitting epitaph: "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thoughts to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." It finds it, in many ways, a reasonable enough request from "the irritant, the tonic, the unlovable".

As noted many times herein, it was Mr. Mencken, during his time as editor of the American Mercury, then published by Alfred A. Knopf, who had given W. J. Cash his start at reaching a national audience with his writing, with Cash publishing eight articles for the literary magazine between July, 1929 and May, 1935, the second of which, "The Mind of the South", published in October, 1929, attracting the attention of Alfred and Blanche Knopf, who proposed that he expand the topic into a book, as he eventually did, published in February, 1941.

"Progress and a Short Yardstick" tells of the newspaper presenting a "Progress Edition" this date, which it hoped would be a source of information and pride for the citizenry. It indicates that there was much about a city's progress which could not be reduced to type, that they could provide statistics on births and deaths but could not tell readers about the people behind those births or deaths. They could tell about bank clearings, but since banks did not keep books on good and bad usage of all the money which they handled, it could not report on that. It could also not report on the unwanted children who had received a home from adoptive parents in time for Christmas in 1947 or the 2x4 which had been fixed in place in 1950 by a carpenter who liked his job, or the blade of grass which had sprouted in April, 1955.

It suggests to readers that if they wanted to fill in those human details, they would have to search their own individual memories.

A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Tall Shooters and High Scorers", tells of having been troubled for some time by high-scoring basketball games, in which both teams scored in excess of 100 points, that after looking at coach Phog Allen's latest recruit at Kansas, Wilt Chamberlain, Tilghman R. Cloud of The Pleasant Hill Times, renowned as an editor in Missouri, had concluded that if present college basketball was a sport, then so was professional wrestling, stating: "Any young man six-feet-ten or taller who can dog-trot across the court without falling down is in imminent danger of becoming the player of the year."

Hank Luisetti, the former Stanford star, had complained that all the emphasis at present was on scoring, neglecting the finer points of the game, especially defensive tactics.

It indicates that the complaints touched the root of its worrying, that if baseball fans were less likely to walk out on a pitching duel than on a slugfest, and if hockey fans were pleased with three or four goals in a single game, why should basketball fans want their team to score a hundred points and more. It wonders whether there was a Gresham's law at work on scoring, such that there was a decline in attendance from the scoring of cheap baskets. It registers that there had been a decline in attendance reported by New York's Madison Square Garden and at Chicago Stadium.

It concludes by asking also whether anyone had given a thought to the distressing lot of the score-keepers.

It might be noted that despite the presence of Wilt Chamberlain—who, later, during his NBA career, would alone score 100 points in a single game, coached at the time, of course, by Frank McGuire—, the national championship game of 1957, running to three overtimes, would not task the score-keepers, and yet would prove one of the most interesting national championship games ever played. As that later 1962 score-fest by Mr. Chamberlain was transpiring, it might also be noted, back in Chapel Hill, a new coach was struggling to mount any success at all, in the wake of a scandal-ridden program left behind by coach McGuire, that subsequent coach, who must remain nameless, to be destined for obscurity in the annals of college basketball because of his insistence on both following all the rules and sharing the basketball among the players on the court, something he had picked up from his old coach at Kansas, Mr. Allen, who learned the game from Dr. Naismith, its inventor.

Drew Pearson tells of Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson having more worries than those of which the public knew, that after the President's farm message had been sent to Congress, it had been believed that everything would be calmer regarding farm problems. But it had been discovered in reading the fine print of the message that there were issues which had caused several Senators to become angry and Secretary Benson to tear out his hair.

The first problem had to do with the soil bank program, under which farmers would set aside part of their land for a long period of time and plant it in grass or trees, but that had run into the issue of there being insufficient grass seed to plant the soil bank. The President's plan would take 25 million acres out of production, but there was only enough seed within the country to plant 15 million acres in grass, and that was largely adaptable for the area east of the Mississippi, where water was more plentiful. The reason for the scarcity was that one of the first things which Secretary Benson had done was to remove the price supports on grass seed, in consequence of which many farmers had stopped producing it. And if a farmer planted trees instead of grass, it would take two years to obtain the trees because the Secretary had, in 1953, abolished all nurseries maintained by the Agriculture Department, then part of the soil conservation program, not foreseeing that the Federal Government would be raising trees, turning the matter over to the states where many states did not have the funding and would not accept the trees, while other states had accepted them but let the nurseries grow up in rambles. As a result, it would take some time to get enough young trees to make any dent in the soil bank.

The second problem with it pertained to the acreage reserve, the plan under which farmers would obtain money during the current year by setting aside surplus acreage, differing from the soil bank in that the latter provided for a long-term plan to set aside surplus land. The acreage reserve program was supposed to have been financed by selling surplus farm commodities on the domestic market.

Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, tireless champion of the farmer, had been up to the wee hours of the morning recently studying the fine print of the President's farm message, and the following day had pointed out to other Senators that the sale of the surplus crops would depress the entire farm commodity market, making things worse than no acreage reserve at all. At that point, Republican Senators from farm-belt states had descended on Secretary Benson, protesting that he could not dump the surpluses on the domestic market, and so he relented. Since that time, the Secretary and his staff had been seeking to determine how they could pay the cost of the acreage reserve, having to deal with the fact that Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey would not allot any more money for the program, as it would upset the plans for balancing the budget, leaving Secretary Benson to figure out how he was going to pay money to the farmers when he had no money to pay.

Meyer Kestnbaum, the head of Hart, Schaffner, Marx, the famed clothing manufacturer, was a Republican who had paid tribute to Democratic Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon at a testimonial dinner, at which the latter was given the Sidney Hillman Award. Mr. Kestnbaum had been appointed by the President as White House assistant on Government reorganization and was explaining what it was like, as a businessman, to be in Washington, saying that it reminded him of the logjam in the Northwest when spring came and the logs broke up and started tumbling down the river, with 10,000 ants on each log "and each thinks he's steering."

Joseph & Stewart Alsop explained that the theme and motive of the talks between the President and Prime Minister Anthony Eden at present was the danger of a final failure of Britain to maintain its standing as a major world power, the second partner in the Western alliance and chief ally of the U.S. The danger came from Britain's heavy dependence on a semi-colonial income, from the Middle and Far East, to a lesser degree from Africa. On average, the Middle and Far East together produced about 40 percent of Britain's annual hard currency income. Malaya's tin mines and rubber plantations, threatened by Communists, earned about 16 percent of Britain's annual dollar revenue. The Sheikh of Kuwait provided a substantial portion of all the new capital annually available to the sterling area by investing his 250 million dollars per year of oil revenues in London. The loss of the British oil investments in the Middle East would cause British industry to come to a halt, and the remainder of Western Europe would be equally hard hit.

The Communists in Malaya and the Soviet diplomats and agents in the Middle East were seeking Britain's jugular vein when they sought to expel British influence from those areas which had once been safely controlled by British imperial power.

Britain was currently facing a serious monetary crisis, in the midst of a business boom, and the loss of nearly any of the assets for which world Communism was vying would quickly cause Britain to lapse into virtually irrevocable bankruptcy. That would force all kinds of major changes, including political changes, forcing Britain to abandon its long and costly struggle to maintain its role as a world power. It would also impact greatly the U.S., as its world policy was based on the Western alliance, which would not be likely to survive the economic and strategic collapse of its second partner, Britain. U.S. policy in Europe, founded on the NATO alliance, would also experience great trouble, as well as the defense of the nation, itself, founded on strategic air command wings dependent for 80 percent of its striking power on overseas bases controlled by the Western allies. The most important SAC bases were located in East Anglia, which would remain so unless the Administration determined to develop long-range striking power for SAC.

Should Britain collapse economically, it could mean that Aneurin Bevan would come to power and with it could come the collapse of America's own national defense.

Thus, as Mr. Eden and the President met, Britain was facing serious economic difficulty and the U.S. was facing like difficulty, with the prospect of the consequent collapse of the Western power position of Britain. That was the context in which decisions would be made about the trouble in the Formosa Strait, the threat in Southeast Asia, and, above all, the dangerous situation in the Middle East.

Robert C. Ruark, still in Sydney, Australia, suggests that there was a worldwide madness afflicting teenagers, the same malady which had produced teenage hoodlums and Junior B-girls in the U.S., which made Teddy-boys in England and accounted for the duck-tailed banditos in California and Mexico, having produced the bodgie-boy in Australia, with his female counterpart, the widgie. Their uniform and hairdo were the same as in other places, long, greasy, carefully coiffed hair for the boys, Audrey Hepburn hairdos for the girls, dirty fingernails for both and pimples for all. Girls wore jeans and boys, stovepipe pants.

He indicates that Australia had been undergoing a crime wave of large proportions from the "young creeps", that they had, while pursuing a technique called "bashing", embraced rape, robbery, vandalism, murder, simple and compound assault, all in a daily regimen of horror which would make one of the worst weeks in New York appear tame. One young woman had been severely chewed upon recently, when she came to the defense of her boyfriend against an attack by bodgie-boys. Mr. Ruark recounts that one of his friends, who had been drinking one evening, had been set upon by five strangers and beaten to a pulp for no particular reason.

The bodgies carried switchblade knives, pipes and brass knuckles, and almost every day was reported some atrocity, with a bruised and battered victim on the front pages. One newspaper, in response, had proposed a return to use of the whip as a deterrent to the criminal activity. Mr. Ruark thinks there is nothing wrong with that idea, as it might work to reduce youthful pique. He believes that it should have been employed by parents when the youth had been much younger, and that head-shaving for the bodgies who patronized the beauty shops to obtain the right wave in their duck-tales ought also be used as a deterrent, along with a significant reduction in publicity, tending to make heroes inside the gangs of the offenders.

He provides a sample of conversation from a "Big Man": "Sy, mytes, did you cop the front page of the Bladder yesterday. My oath, I didn't aft put the boots to that bloke. 'is fyce looked like a bloody pudding."

He believes that too much dignity was provided the bums by the publicity they received and urges not showing pictures of the victims, but only of the aggressors when they were being whipped and when they had their heads shaved "clean as an egg".

Wait about 30 years and you'll see that the head-shaving will be a fashion.

A letter writer from Pittsboro agrees with the newspaper's editorials appearing on January 24 and 25 regarding the football program at UNC, having called it an "on-campus enterprise", which the writer finds only remotely related to the purpose of developing a sound mind and a sound body. He agrees that coach Jim Tatum was to be commended for frankness when he had said that "winning is everything", which he finds understood among observers of football anyway. He indicates that he had graduated from UNC but did not approve of all which was done there at present and for the previous two or three decades. He says that he knew of no better way to protest than by withholding support from those activities of which he did not approve, saying that he had seen less than two quarters of the Virginia-UNC freshman game the previous fall, that he had not gone to see the game as much as he had to see the stadium, which he thought was the prettiest in the country. He says that he had not attended a basketball game since 1942. He had followed UNC slavishly as a student to the games in Richmond and Norfolk, even borrowing money to do so, but believed firmly that athletics belonged to the students and ought be subject to control by the faculty. He says that coach Tatum might be receiving only $15,000 as an annual salary for the job, but he feels certain there was additional compensation, that, nevertheless, his salary indicated an inordinate emphasis on football. He says that he might have to support integrated public schools, but did not have to support integrated churches and their schools, indicating that while it might be unconstitutional and un-Christian to have involuntary segregation, it was also thus to have involuntary integration, indicating he would accept "that portion of the enigma" which was voluntary.

If you think, incidentally, that we edited out some transitional material of the writer between football at UNC and integration of the schools and churches, we did not, except for his expression that he would also not support other activities of which he disapproved... He just seems to be unable to resist the opportunity to throw in some of his usual gibberish about integration. (Of course, as the case out of Greensboro the previous day, involving the alleged trespass of the white-only municipally-leased golf course by the six convicted black defendants, would ultimately show by 1960 when their convictions would finally be upheld by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court, if you can find enough local bumpkins to populate the juries, willing simply to sidestep the laws through nullification, you can transform, down the road, North Carolina pasture land into such high-cotton as that predominating in Mississippi in 1956.)

A letter writer says that as an individual member of the Oratorio Singers of Charlotte and the Charlotte Music Club, she wished to express her appreciation for the generous publicity given the two organizations during the season by the newspaper. She indicates that all cultural groups in the city had received more space in the paper than ever before and that all were quite grateful. She also expresses appreciation for the weekly "Fine Arts Calendar" prepared by Edwin Bergamini, that he and Helen Parks, in their cooperative work with their organizations, were great assets to the newspaper.

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