The Charlotte News

Tuesday, November 27, 1956

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from the U.N. in New York that Egypt this date had called on the organization to conduct a stern crackdown against Britain, France and Israel unless the three nations provided definite information as to when they expected to withdraw their forces from Egypt. The Egyptian Foreign Minister, Mahmoud Fawzi, told the 79-nation General Assembly that there was mounting evidence that Britain and France were building up their forces in the Suez Canal area while pretending to withdraw them. He quoted press dispatches reporting the arrival of French tanks and said that he, himself, had information that the invading forces were continuing alleged atrocities in the Port Said area. As punitive measures, unless the three nations would definitively state when they would withdraw, he had proposed breaking off diplomatic and economic relations and the expulsion of the three nations from the U.N. He spoke as there was a move afoot, led by Russia, to serve notice that there was no reason for bystander nations to foot part of the bill for clearing the canal of destroyed ships and bridges sunk by the three invaders to Egypt or by the defending Egyptians. Some delegates believed that Britain, France and Israel ought pay the entire bill, while others asserted that it should be covered by the owners and users of the 103-mile waterway. The General Assembly had approved, over the objections of the Soviet bloc, a ten million dollar grant to pay initial costs of the emergency U.N. police force in Egypt, with Russia having insisted that Britain, France and Israel pay the costs of both the canal salvage and the emergency force. The vote had been 52 to 9, with 13 abstentions, authorizing Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold to draw up to ten million dollars from the U.N. working capital fund for the expenses of the police force. The Assembly had to decide later how the money would be repaid to the fund, with the Secretary-General having proposed first that the cost would be shared by all members on the same percentage basis as the annual budget, later revising that proposal to leave the apportionment to the Assembly's financial committees. Egypt had rejected an offer by Britain and France to help in the clearance of the canal, and demanded that work not commence until all British and French troops had been withdrawn. The British had proceeded in the clean-up, however, announcing during the week that they had cleared a channel 140 feet wide for the northern 27 miles of the canal which they held. They said that they would have it widened to 180 feet within a week, sufficient to permit passage of large ships. Latin American and Asian delegates had comprised the bulk of the opposition to payment of any percentage of the canal salvage costs, estimated to be around 40 million dollars. The canal was clogged with 47 wrecked ships and two bridges. The Assembly thus far had only authorized Secretary-General Hammarskjold to work out the preliminary phases of the salvage job, and he would have to submit an estimate of the cost to the Assembly.

In Vienna, it was reported by the Austrian Press Agency this date that Hungarians escaping to Austria had seen the bodies of 20 refugees who had been shot in the woods near the border. The Austrian Cabinet had been informed that 2,562 additional refugees had escaped into Austria the previous night, bringing the total to close to 90,000 since Hungary's freedom revolt had begun on October 23. Austrian newspapers had predicted that the total would eventually reach 100,000, more than one of every 100 of Hungary's population. The Austrian Press Agency quoted refugees as saying that the Russians had refused to permit the burial of the 20 bodies, as the Russians apparently had hoped that the site would frighten other refugees and cause them to turn back from the border. The refugees said that the area was near Bozsok, across the frontier from the Austrian town of Rechnitz, where Austrian frontier guards had shot and killed a Russian soldier and captured another when they pursued refugees onto Austrian soil. The Government had announced that it had granted special permission to American military transport planes to land at Vienna to fly the Hungarian refugees to West Germany for dispersal. An independent Vienna newspaper appealed to President Eisenhower in an open letter to set up an airlift to speed the supply of medicine, food and clothing to the refugees. It said that Austria was virtually alone in upholding the traditions of Western humanitarianism by granting immediate asylum to the refugees and that an airlift was as urgent as in the days of the Berlin blockade in 1948-49.

In San Diego, forestry officials reported their hope that by the following day, they could bring under full control a fire which had claimed 11 lives and burned about 40,000 acres of timber and brush in the Cleveland National Forest. The fire prevention coordinating officer for the U.S. Forestry Service said that fire crews had succeeded in controlling 80 percent of the 75-mile perimeter of the blaze, which had begun on Sunday from a trash fire on an Indian reservation. The two most dangerous points of the fire were listed as the headwaters of the San Diego River and Boulder Creek on the northeast front, an area comprising 20 percent of the perimeter remaining out of control. The 11 persons who had died were among 17 trapped when a sudden change of winds had blown flames into the canyon where they were cutting a firebreak, the six survivors having said that the victims had been trapped against a cliff. The survivors, all of whom were honor-camp jail inmates, said that they clawed their way up the canyon seconds before it had erupted in flames, one of them having said that he had seen one of the trapped men "throw up his arms in front of his face and fall to the ground", at which point the flames had blown over him and it was the last he had seen of him.

In Caracas, a Venezuelan airliner on a nonstop flight from New York had crashed into a cloud-shrouded mountain less than two miles from the Caracas Airport this date, killing all 25 persons aboard in the burning wreckage, including 16 adults, two infants and a seven-member crew. The previous June 20, another Venezuelan airliner had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the New Jersey coast, with all 74 aboard having been killed, the world's worst airline disaster to that point on a regularly scheduled airline flight.

In Raymondville, Tex., initial reports stated that two airplanes had collided and crashed about ten miles north of the town during the morning this date, with unconfirmed reports having been that the planes were a military aircraft and a passenger plane.

In St. Paul, Minn., an Air Force sergeant told deputies the previous day that he had disposed of the bodies of three premature infants to whom his daughter had given birth out of wedlock in California. He said that his wife and daughter had nothing to do with the deaths. He had written several letters to authorities in St. Paul and in Bakersfield, Calif., while stationed in Japan, accusing his wife and daughter of killing the three infants. One of the letters directed officers to a spot in the backyard of his former home at Edwards Air Force Base near Bakersfield, where they had found the body of an infant buried nearly three feet underground and wrapped in a 1955 issue of "Personal Romances" magazine. The letter had also referred officers to their files of 1952, when an infant had been found in a dump near Bakersfield. Bakersfield authorities were traveling to St. Paul, indicating that they would try to return all three, the sergeant, his wife and daughter, to California under arrest warrants for murder. The sergeant said that he would not resist extradition, but the two women said that they would. The daughter told officers that her father had sired two of the babies in question and that another serviceman had been the father of the third. The sergeant said that he might have been the father of two of the babies and that as far as he knew, the babies had been premature and born dead.

In Manila, Typhoon Olive, a late-season storm with 70 mph central winds, was centered 100 miles east of the southeastern tip of Luzon Island this date, with the Manila Weather Bureau reporting that it was moving west at 8 mph and expected to reach Luzon early the following day, with its present course bringing it just south of Manila.

Emery Wister of The News tells of the temperature on Sunday morning having dropped to 19 degrees, while during the current morning it had been 29, suggestive that late November belonged in winter, not fall. He finds that some of the coldest weather of the year came during November cold snaps right after Thanksgiving. In 1950, two days after Thanksgiving, the mercury had dropped to 14 on the 25th and the following day, had gone down to 11. In 1951, a north wind had swept in on the 20th and the temperature dropped to 18. It had also been cold in the Novembers of 1952, 1953 and 1954, though not so much as 1950 and 1951. The previous year, the temperature had dropped to 19 on the 29th. He indicates that usually the first part of November was mild, with 50 being the average for the month, whereas the average for December was 43. It had snowed some the previous day, typical of November snowfalls, amounting only to flurries, a recurrence every year thus far since 1950, except for 1953, when the temperature never got below 25 in November. Accumulation, however, of more than .01 of an inch had fallen in only four Novembers since records had been kept, in 1879, 1906, 1912 and 1922.

Subfreezing temperatures were predicted for the Carolinas this night, with lows of 25 to 30 in South Carolina and 20 in the North Carolina mountains, to near 32 on the coast.

In Erie, Pa., all schools had reopened this date in the wake of a two-foot Thanksgiving Day snowfall.

In New York, Salvador Dali, 51, had developed a new artistic technique, which he called "bulletism", saying that it was appropriate "now that everything is in bullets". He used a forerunner of the musket, a 16th Century device known as an arquebus, to produce the pictures, which he shot rather than painted. He had arrived for a six-month visit in the U.S. and told reporters the details of the new method, whereby he made holes in lead pellets and inserted pieces of lithographic pencils in the holes, then placed the pellets in the arquebus and fired them at a stone lithographic plate, "creating a violent, most explosive and tremendous force on the stone." He said that it created "lines of force or tension—in every direction—fast, violent and clean." He had gotten the idea the previous summer while shooting in his backyard at Port Lligat, Spain, resulting in his giving up pencils in favor of bullets. Bidding goodbye to the reporters, he said, "Everybody says Dali loves publicity, but publicity loves Dali."

In Jacksonville, Fla., a car pulled up near a downtown intersection the previous night and shots had rung out, with a pedestrian then having dropped to the sidewalk, whereupon two occupants of the car had leaped out, picked up the victim, placed him in the car and quickly drove away. Not long afterward, police had received a report of a similar incident from another section of town. Every police cruiser had been alerted and it was not long before a group of high school boys were rounded up and lectured on how far they could go with initiation stunts.

In Oklahoma City, a judge of the criminal court of appeals, who had left the court the prior January after 16 years, would speak at the judicial conference of the State Bar Association meeting in Tulsa the following Thursday, with the title of his talk being: "The Last Quack of a Lame Duck".

After our doggie once allegedly got into some quackers out on a pond near where we lived 21 years hence, we felt obligated to try to heal the pitifully lame lone survivor of the ambuscade, nevertheless keeping its head held high and quacking strongly with the best of them, administering dutifully to it antibiotics prescribed by the vet at the directed intervals, until it finally breathed its last mournful quack a couple or three days later. Though a Pard rather than any Mad Dog Earle, our doggie, to whose teeth the demise of the quacker was attributed by its owner, then suddenly disappeared one afternoon about six weeks afterward and, despite our search along every nearby road, nook and cranny, assisted by friends young and old, with eyes peeled to the underbrush and ears tuned to the constant singing of the railroad tracks, never was seen again, probably, we trow, from having been dognaped by some upset quackers—unless, that is, it had set out on its own to attempt to break out and return to its original home some 3,000 miles westward, somewhere beyond the high Sierras. As fate would have had it, as we finally had reluctantly to abandon the search, we then sojourned with an old friend to the site of the previous doggie crime of November 18, 1956, to show our childhood friend of 19 years from whence we had derived, unaware as we have persistently been through the years before and since, until recently, that the earlier doggie, one among several, obviously not primus inter pares, was ever even late.

On the editorial page, "Tar Heel Demos Need Better Record" indicates that in time of trouble, North Carolina Democrats tinkered. There had been trouble in 1928 when either Herbert Hoover had won the state or Governor Al Smith had lost it in the presidential race, resulting in the Democratic leaders installing district rallies as a means of rekindling interest in party politics. The campaign caravan was later added.