The Charlotte News
Saturday, December 22, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Jakarta that according to Indonesian Government officials, a clique of Army officers had seized control of central Sumatra, the second largest island in the Indonesian republic. A broadcast over the Sumatra radio said that the Army group had staged the coup the previous night and would return power to the Indonesian Government "when the people's demand for economic improvements are met." The 37-year old Army commander in north and central Sumatra this date proclaimed himself head of both the civilian and military authority in that area, saying that he had taken the step in the interest of the Indonesian people, declaring that he no longer recognized the central Government's Cabinet, and intended to set up a new state. The central Government announced that it would send a delegation to Sumatra to contact the people there, offering no other comment on the coup. There were no reports that the coup was spreading to other parts of Indonesia. There were 500 Americans on Sumatra, but there were no indications that any had been affected by the change in power. Communications between Sumatra and Jakarta, the country's capital on Java, and the outside world had been severely restricted, with the cable and wireless company indicating that the Army had delayed all out-bound cables from Jakarta under strict censorship. There were no reports of clashes and one report said that the formal takeover of power had been accomplished without incident, attended by a large crowd which reportedly listened in silence to the transfer proclamation. The deposed civilian governor, a Javanese whose presence was said to be resented by the people, had been described as tense and nervous, but had signed the proclamation without emotion, according to the radio broadcast.
In Salzburg, Austria, it was reported that Vice-President Nixon had arrived in the city this date in a snowstorm to complete his survey of the Hungarian refugee problem, preparing to fly home via Iceland, where the large U.S. Air Force Base had become a recent political issue. The Vice-President had arrived in Salzburg from Vienna by special train, first shaking hands with Austrian officials gathered to greet him and then hurrying over to talk with the groups of private citizens on hand for his arrival. He would visit several refugee camps in the Salzburg area this date and across the border in West Germany, completing his tour of the camps. He said that the U.S. must do more than it had done to help solve the refugee problem. He was expected to recommend to the President that the U.S. take in more than 21,500 refugees already approved. He pledged this date American help for refugees who had fled East European Communist countries prior to the Hungarian revolt. He was slated to go from Salzburg by train to Munich, where he would confer with West German finance minister Fritz Schaeffer on the problem of Hungarian refugees in that country. The Bonn Government had promised to take one refugee for every ten who had escaped from Hungary. The Vice-President also was scheduled to watch the departure from Germany of the U.S. military airlift for refugees and would greet the American colony in Munich early this night, then attend a dinner to be given in his honor by the Bavarian Minister President Wilhelm Hoegner. He was expected to return to Washington on Monday morning.
In Montgomery, Ala., the newly desegregated city buses resumed their schedules this date without incident, as they were less used than usual because of inclement weather. The first buses pulling into the downtown area were almost empty, but later buses carried heavier loads going to work. Black riders had returned to the buses for the first time in over a year the previous day, after a Federal court order had been formally received by City officials and implemented. For the most part, members of both races who had ridden the city buses the previous day appeared unwilling to provoke arguments over the new "first come, first served" seating policy. The police chief said that there were no reports of violence made to his department and no additional officers had been pressed into service, that it had just been another Friday before Christmas for them. The only disturbance had been reported by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., but the nature of it is not included in the piece.
In Cincinnati, a fatal shooting of a prominent businessman in the city and his daughter had taken place the previous day, said to be the result of a cooled romance between the 17-year old daughter and a 19-year old boy, also from a prominent family. The boy had also died this date, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, without regaining consciousness. The girl and her father had been killed instantly in their home and her mother had been critically wounded, not yet having regained consciousness. The boy's body was found in the girl's room. An unmailed letter had been found by authorities in the boy's car addressed to the girlfriend, indicating that the boy had been "through hell" ever since she had taken his ring off and that each day it had gotten worse, that he had lost 25 pounds from being "nervous and broken". He said that if she did not come back to him, he would "release all the hell back on" her, that she had made those choices and must choose one or the other. Both had been students at Miami University of Ohio and friends of the couple speculated that the boy had become angry because the girl had quit going steady with him. They had dated each other regularly while attending high school but after entering college, the girl had returned the boy's high school ring and began dating others. The sheriff said that his investigators had theorized that the shooting of the parents had been the result of their forbidding their daughter from going steady with the boy. The dean of men said that the boy was not one of the better-known freshmen on campus but that there had never been any previous difficulty with him of which they knew.
In Gastonia, N.C., a man and a woman had been killed when a Southern Railway passenger train had smashed into their car at a crossing during the morning. A police captain said that the train's engineer, 75, said that the train had been traveling between 65 and 75 mph when it hit the car at the crossing, causing, according to police, both bodies to be hurled 243 feet and parts of their 1947 car to be strewn along the tracks for about 683 feet. Witnesses told police that the driver of the car apparently had not seen the approaching train and drove directly onto the tracks, the police captain indicating that there were no red warning lights or gates at the crossing, only a railroad cross-buck sign. Other witnesses said that they thought the car had stopped for a moment and then pulled directly in front of the train. The engineer said that he had never seen the car until it was pulling onto the track and that he had no time to apply the brakes. The tracks, according to the captain, rounded a curve just before reaching the crossing, and an approaching driver might not see a train if not looking carefully upon reaching the tracks.
Julian Scheer of The News tells of the Congressional delegation being sent by the state to Washington in the new 85th Congress running the gamut of committees from appropriations to atomic energy, with members from North Carolina on all of the key committees. New assignments would be made for freshmen Congressmen Alton Lennon, formerly an appointed Senator following the death of Senator Willis Smith in 1953, A. P. Kitchin, Basil Whitener and Ralph Scott, the latter of whom, Mr. Scheer indicates, was probably the state's quietest Congressman in its history. Four of the state's 12 members of the House would chair committees, with Representative Herbert Bonner heading the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, Representative Carl Durham heading the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Representative Harold Cooley heading the Agriculture Committee, and Representative Graham Barden heading the Committee on Education and Labor.
A story for the Empty Stocking Fund, annually sponsored by The News for needy families, tells of bad things having happened to a nine-year old girl in quick succession. Shortly after the first of the year, her father had disappeared. About three months earlier, her mother had died. Then, a couple of weeks earlier, one of the aunts with whom she made her home had entered the hospital with tuberculosis. The girl now had one relative in Charlotte, her other aunt. When her father had left, she and her mother had moved in with the mother's two sisters, both childless widows. The story indicates that thus far, the Fund had collected $10,678 and lists some of the recent contributions, starting with $110 from the News printers.
A widespread blanket of low fog and rain across much of the Eastern half of the nation combined this date to disrupt heavy pre-Christmas air and highway travel, cutting visibility in some areas to zero and creating hazardous driving conditions. In Chicago, two of the city's three major airports had been closed and operations at Midway, the world's busiest commercial field, had been about one-tenth of normal. At least 63 persons had been killed in automobile accidents since the official beginning of the holiday weekend the previous day at 6:00 p.m. Safety experts were estimating that a record toll of 660 persons would die in accidents by the end of the holiday period at midnight on Tuesday.
With one or two shopping days left
before Christmas, depending on how one is counting, the count having
become hopelessly confused by a day, it still did not feel much like
Christmas in Charlotte, with the high this date of 70, the high the
previous day of 68 and the expected high the following day of 72. It
appears you will have to get by without any snow this Christmas
The observant reader will note that the captions for the photographs are reversed this date.
On the editorial page, "State Highway and Prison Reforms Needed To Oil Wheels of Progress" finds that the reforms laid forth by the Governor the previous day, separating the Highway Department from the prisons and reorganizing the Highway Commission had been welcome, ridding State Government of obsolete bureaucracy in two vital fields.
Some prisoners would still be used for road work even under the new plan and the State Highway Commission would supervise their employment. But the study group which had made the recommendations had also investigated other fields of employment for prison labor, including farms, prison industries, forestry work, and flood and erosion control. Operation of the prison system generally would be made more efficient as a separate agency and would probably cost the taxpayers less money in the long run.
It finds the recommended changes deserving of the support and approval of all people in the state and represented the state's high capacity for vigorous achievement in the science of government.
"Hollywood Divorces Art from Life" tells of the Motion Picture Association of America having established a new production code which was only slightly less Victorian than Hollywood's earlier approach to self-censorship, with the new code eliminating some of the more ridiculous taboos, while still illustrating the industry's feeling that it had to divorce art from life.
It finds some of the revisions contradictory. For instance, Hollywood was willing to admit that dope addiction existed, but the tiniest hint that there was a dope problem among some school children was strictly verboten. The code still frowned on other racy subjects, such as kidnaping, but allowed them to be handled within bounds. There remained an explicit prohibition on any scene suggesting that houses of prostitution might still exist. (What about the scenes in "East of Eden" last year?)
It finds the appellate mechanism of the code to be equally unrealistic, permitting members of the board of the Association, most of whom were company presidents, to pass final judgment on the moral and social acceptability of a competitor's film, offering the temptation in a highly competitive industry to nix it.
It suggests that a more enlightened reworking of the code and its administrative machinery might have been established. It indicates that mere lewdness should never be tolerated and that there were laws against pornography, that taste had to be considered, but it urges that it should not be automatic treason to hold the mirror up to nature.
"It is apparently still all right, in Hollywood's trite happily-ever-after primer, for Americans to observe that nature imitates art—but never that art imitates nature."
"Live It Up Merrily—But Prudently" urges caution during the holiday season against various types of accidents, including seeing of stars by trying to hang the star on the top of the Christmas tree.
According to the National Safety
Council, there had been 14,000 deaths the previous year from falls
within the home. There was also the ever-present danger of fire,
especially from Christmas trees. It counsels that the best safeguard
against fire was to obtain a fresh tree and maintain it in a holder
with water, locating it away from fireplaces, television sets,
powerful electric lights and other electrical devices
At the end, it urges, "Live it
up—but live
A piece from the Washington Post & Times-Herald, titled "Back to the Castle", tells of a boom in the sale of European castles being reported paradoxically at a time when everyone's "castle in Spain" had seemed to be a ranch house with a two-car garage, a picture window and the labor-saving gadgets of the modern age. The castle buyers, mostly from North and South America, had much more to invest than did ranch house purchasers.
It speculates that the allure of such stone fortresses, without central heating or air conditioning, equipped with crude plumbing, if any, with small, jail-like windows set in three-foot walls, primitive kitchens and front doors with one-pound keys, was perhaps the grandeur of hilltop views, the privacy afforded by castles or the sense of feudal grandeur provided the occupants. Another possibility was that it was good business, as nobility increasingly found it impossible to support ancestral mansions, and Europe had a hotel shortage in many places, particularly in Spain.
"What could be more simple than to offer somewhat modernized 'castle accommodations' to the visitor from Main Street?"
Drew Pearson, writing from Goose Bay, Labrador, tells of his Christmas tour through the Far Northern bases to help bring holiday cheer to American troops in the Arctic, having taken with him a troupe of Broadway entertainers. He provides in detail his itinerary and tells of some of the entertainers who had accompanied him, Ella Logan, star of "Finian's Rainbow", whom Mr. Pearson called "the pixie of Broadway", having been with him also the previous winter in the Arctic, plus the comedy team of Clara Cedrone and Damian Mitchell, Adolph Green, who had just written "Bells Are Ringing", so popular that it was impossible to obtain tickets, John Modenos, Siri and Lisa Ferraday, and their orchestra, the Jumping Jacks. He says that they were all wonderful sports and that they had eventually taken off from Goose Bay and flown north, crossing the tip of Labrador, the Davis Strait, to southern Greenland.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop indicate that the word was that the President's State of the Union message in January would be grave in tone and have peace as its theme, without any of the boast regarding "peace in our time" which had been the refrain in Republican campaign speeches in the fall. The President was reported to intend to underline the dangers of the world situation and that peace was not usually attained only through good intentions and firmly worded resolutions, that sacrifice in the cause of peace would have to occur. Thus far, the President had only informed his staff of his broad intentions, as his speeches usually evolved considerably during the course of preparation, such that no one could yet tell how strong the speech would be.
But it appeared clear that the budget for the coming year would involve a compromise in terms of defense and foreign aid, the compromise to be between Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, the most forceful and courageous member of the Eisenhower team, and the reality of the current international situation, with simultaneous crises in the Middle East, in Western Europe and in the Soviet satellites, plus strong hints that the Kremlin was returning to a more belligerent policy.
When Secretary Humphrey made his annual drive to balance the budget at all costs, no leading figures in the State Department, Defense Department or any other department really fought hard against him, but in the present situation, events had necessarily tempered his budget-cutting desires.
The defense structure had only been maintained during the previous four years by eliminating all available surpluses and deferring all maintenance on weaponry to the danger point, but with the surpluses now gone and the maintenance no longer deferable, a choice had to be made between increasing defense appropriations by at least 5 to 6 billion dollars or dismantling part of the existing defense structure to reduce the cost of upkeep. Had events not fought against Secretary Humphrey, the latter course would have been adopted. The original budget target of Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had been 38 billion, which would have meant increasing appropriations by a little more than a billion dollars while reducing sharply the numbers of the air groups, infantry combat units and naval forces in readiness. The compromise which had been worked out between Secretary Humphrey and emergent events instead provided for an increase in the defense budget of about 3 billion dollars, to just under 40 billion, necessitating no immediate and important cuts in the existing forces, merely condemning certain units of the Army, Navy and Air Force to eventual obsolescence, as no orders would be placed for the new equipment which the branches would need in the future.
A similar compromise between Secretary Humphrey and events had reportedly been reached on foreign aid. With Europe's oil problem being acute and other needs growing more pressing, it would be difficult to cut foreign aid, but no great new ventures would be attempted.
Meanwhile, the enormous increase in national income was expected to provide the tax revenue to pay the bill, with the Alsops concluding that perhaps the best way to describe the new trend in policy was "blood, sweat and dividends-as-usual".
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, says he wants a stern word with gentlemen who would be receiving do-it-yourself kits for Christmas, saying he could care less if they sawed off their hands while making cabinets which would not close or similar useless bric-a-brac.
He says that he had read recently that a couple of high school students on Long Island had progressed so far with do-it-yourself projects that they were running a cyclotron. (He neglects the report from Charlotte the previous summer of the local teenager who had built a rocket in his basement, set to have the Army test it at the Redstone facility in Alabama, before being called off at the last minute out of safety concerns.) He warns not to take things too far. He says that the tendency to repair a family faucet instead of calling in a professional appeared to be getting out of control, that ever since it had started to cost about $30 to say hello to a plumber, and carpenters figured their wages by integral calculus, the owner of the mortgaged ranch house had undertaken his own repairs.
He recounts some of his own travails in attempting to make repairs around the house, and urges other men to feign ineptness to help men like him stay off the hook.
"Play it this way and we all stay out of trouble. Be a wise guy, and you will shortly be called on by members of Chronic Helpless Husbands, Pty. Ltd. They will be carrying large bludgeons which they make in their spare time, which is ample because they are not slaves to domestic demands to fix the forsteris when it shorts out the abberglammis."
A letter writer from Pittsboro says that he was thoroughly convinced that the basketball officials at N.C. State had received what was coming to them from the NCAA and the ACC, but that UNC at Chapel Hill had received far less than they deserved. N.C. State had been placed on probation for improper recruitment of a freshman basketball player and UNC had been forced to forfeit nine games during the previous season, only two of which they had won and tied another, for having used a football player who had transferred from Temple University but who was not listed as a transfer and had played under an assumed name, close to his actual name. This writer indicates that the player in question had spent two previous years in college and two years in the military service. The writer says that he was an alumnus of UNC and wanted the new administration to succeed under Greater University president, William C. Friday. He says that he would do his best to help Mr. Friday succeed and urges that the latter ought ask the ACC to renew its investigation and find out what UNC official had participated in the fraud involving the football player and ensure that the person would be appropriately punished. He says if a wholesome atmosphere in college athletics could not be instilled, grants-in-aid to student athletes ought be abolished, as at Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago and the Ivy League schools. He says that they had not suffered as institutions of higher learning as a result and that the activities of the Greater University had to be placed in proper perspective through prioritizing things which deserved priority.
He appears to be misinformed, as the ACC had stated that no one at UNC had been aware of the situation with the football player. In addition, retiring UNC chancellor Robert House had urged to the annual meeting of the conference chancellors during December that they agree to implement a system of grants-in-aid to end or limit the temptation of under-the-table payments or other incentives to recruits, the conference as a whole having been unwilling to approve the move, leading to UNC, Duke, N.C. State, Wake Forest and Clemson, among the eight schools then in the league, forming their own "gentlemen's agreement" to have grants-in-aid.
A letter writer from Wrightsville
Beach indicates that Christ taught through the parable of the Good
Samaritan who neighbors
A letter writer questions whether the churches had started preaching damnation instead of salvation, indicating that a non-smoking friend had explained his latest tobacco acquisition recently by indicating that he had gone to a church supper where they had given out free cigarettes. He thinks that when such things occurred, it was time that laymen investigate the leadership, or the next thing would be serving of wine and cocktails. "Christians, arise."
Well, they already serve the wine at communion, don't they? Or is that grape juice?
Framed Edition
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