The Charlotte News

Friday, February 17, 1956

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the State Department this date had canceled a shipment of 18 U.S. light tanks which had been destined for Saudi Arabia, it not being yet clear whether it would quiet the clamor caused by an announcement just nine hours earlier that the tanks were to be shipped from New York later this date. The reversal had the effect of blocking the dispatch of the tanks to the Middle East, where their arrival might have stirred new excitement and perhaps trouble in the Israeli-Arab tinderbox. The announcement late the previous day that the tanks were to be shipped had brought denunciation from a number of Democrats in the Senate and from the Israeli Embassy, the latter complaining, "Utterly beyond our comprehension." The State Department had already stalled Israel's request to purchase 50 million dollars worth of American arms for the previous several months, saying that it wanted to avoid an arms race in the Middle East, making the surprise announcement about the sale of the tanks to the Saudis that much more startling. It had also said that the sale of Communist arms to Egypt had tended to upset the power balance in the region. A shipment of U.S. weapons to an Arab country would have given Russia an argument that it was all right for the Communists to supply arms to the Arabs, as the U.S. was doing the same thing. Thus, the State Department had decided to halt the shipment temporarily, "pending further examination." It was not yet known how the Arab nations would react. The U.S. was about to enter negotiations with Saudi Arabia for renewal of an agreement under which the U.S. maintained an Air Force base at Dahran, the original agreement for which having been made in 1951 and would expire in four months, with a provision for a five-year renewal.

In Berlin, it was reported that a U.S. Army private had been released from four years of Russian captivity this date and turned over to Army authorities in East Berlin. He had escaped with two other privates on December 4, 1951 from a West Berlin guardhouse and was now being held to face charges of being AWOL, stealing money and assaulting a German cabdriver three days after the escape. East German Communist authorities had said that the three had sought political asylum, but Austrian prisoners returning from Russian labor camps the previous June had said that they had seen the released private in a Soviet camp and said that he had told them that the Soviets had arrested him in Berlin in 1951. The Austrians said that he had asked them with tears in his eyes to inform U.S. authorities that he was being held at a particular camp in Eastern European Russia and was ill at the time but had been forced to work in the woods by the Russians. One of the men who had escaped with him had returned from East Germany in June, 1952, and had been court-martialed, given a dishonorable discharge and sentenced to five years in prison, while the other private had not been heard from since his flight. The man who had earlier returned and been court-martialed said that the prisoners had been confined, accused of being spies and threatened with being sent to Siberia, after they had signed defection statements on the promise of a Soviet officer that they would be released.

In London, the House of Commons ordered Prime Minister Anthony Eden's Government the previous night to draft a bill abolishing the death penalty in Britain, with the Prime Minister having indicated that he hoped the deputies would change their minds when voting time came. The House had voted 293 to 262 to direct the Government to introduce the legislation to remove capital punishment from the statutes either permanently or for some specified period of trial to allow reconsideration. Cheers erupted in the chamber when the vote was announced, and women in the public galleries excitedly waved their arms. Prime Minister Eden had urged retention of the death penalty, but assured the House that there would be "no undue delay" in introduction of the voted legislation, adding, however, that the Government would "make a considered statement of the consequences" of abolition. Three young condemned killers were awaiting hanging, the only form of capital punishment in Britain, and it was understood that no death penalties would be carried out before the abolition legislation would be introduced, with the sentences of those three men presumably to be commuted to life imprisonment. The pro-Labor Daily Mirror and the Laborite Daily Herald approved of the move, while the Conservative Daily Telegraph disapproved. The Government had expected to win the vote by a small margin, but 37 members of the Conservative majority and four Liberals had joined the nearly solid Labor opposition to comprise the final tally. It could be many months before the death penalty was officially abolished, as the present parliamentary program was so heavy that the Cabinet might not draft a bill for several months, and the House of Lords could delay action for additional months, even after a vote in Commons. There had been efforts for 150 years to abolish the death penalty in Britain. Early in the 19th Century, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the "bloody code" provided hanging for 220 offenses, many of which were relatively trivial, and mass public hangings had been occasions for general merriment, drunkenness and licentiousness. The criminal code had been revised through the years and public hangings had ceased about the middle of the 19th Century. (To avoid confusion, the above-linked BBC documentary suggests inchoately that the U.S. Supreme Court first temporarily suspended the death penalty in 1972, and then reinstated it in 1976, without bothering to explain that the Court did not reverse itself in the interim, as simplistically implied, but found in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, that the Georgia Legislature had, since the 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, enacted statutes to provide for "special circumstances" to circumscribe the jury's ability to implement the death penalty, eliminating the arbitrariness which the Court had found as the basis for its ruling in Furman that the death penalty, as then being implemented, violated due process and the Eighth Amendment proscription against cruel and unusual punishment. The Court thus did not reverse itself but carefully distinguished the two cases based on the intervening legislation, designed to eliminate the arbitrary imposition of the penalty. It should also be noted that under the American system, unlike the British system, the Federal government could not abolish the death penalty except for Federal offenses, the Congress having no power over state-enacted crime and punishment, as at the Federal level, only the courts have authority to assess the constitutionality of the death penalty or of its particular manner of implementation among the states.)

In Thomasville, Ga., the President played golf this date for the first time since his September 24 heart attack and shot a one over par six on the first hole. He said on the first tee, despite a misting rain, that he had been looking forward to returning to the game. He had played golf just a day prior to his heart attack in Denver, and since the heart attack, his doctors had restricted him to putting and some off-course practice with his iron shots. He hit three balls off the first tee, two down the middle of the fairway about 200 yards and the third about the same distance, but off to the left of the fairway. He was presently vacationing for about a week on the plantation of Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey. He played this date with press secretary James Hagerty, the president of the Glen Arven Club where he was playing, a Thomasville automobile supply dealer, and the club pro. He used an electric golf cart to get around, as he had frequently done prior to his attack. There was no indication of how many holes he would play. Just before beginning, he had turned to the club pro and said with a grin that they ought to provide a handicap according to whether members of the foursome had suffered a coronary and asked the pro whether he had ever had one, to which he replied that he had not—then inexplicably pulled out a knife and ordered the President to kneel or face sudden death on the 18th hole.

In Tracy, Calif., it was reported that one of the Strategic Air Command's swept-wing intercontinental B-52 jet bombers had exploded during flight the previous day, with three of its eight crewmen killed and one missing, the other four having parachuted to safety. It was the first crash of a B-52, able to carry nuclear weapons. The plane had been on a training mission and one of the four survivors said that there had been an explosion aboard when they were over Sacramento, knocking out their intercom system, followed a few minutes later by a second explosion, at which point he had bailed out at 32,000 feet. The Air Force said that it had caught fire and exploded in flight, offering no explanation.

In Asheville, N.C., it was reported that the Buncombe County sheriff's department this date was investigating the possibility of a burglary in connection with the deaths of two persons in the Oakley section, one of those persons having died from wounds from two bullets fired by a .38-caliber revolver, and the other found dead in a partially-filled bathtub, with an autopsy being performed to determine the cause of death in the latter case. The woman's husband was quoted by officers as saying he found the man who had died of the gunshot wounds in his wife's bedroom when he arrived home around midnight and had shot him in self-defense, when the man approached him with a club in his hand. He was being questioned in the Buncombe County jail during the morning and no charge had been filed against him. The sheriff said he was investigating the possibility of burglary on the part of the man who had been killed, as silverware and other valuables had been wrapped and deposited on the front porch of the house and the deceased had been in his stocking feet, with shoes being found near the kitchen door, which was ajar, without evidence of forcible entry. The husband said that he had not seen his wife in their bed after shooting the man, had then gone across the street to the home of a neighbor to awaken him, telling him what had happened and expressing the fear that something had happened to his wife, the neighbor then having accompanied the man back to the house where the neighbor first discovered the wife's body in the bathtub, with the coroner noting shortly after arriving on the scene that the water in the bathtub was cool. The sheriff was trying to ascertain whether the wife had died before the shooting or whether the appearance of an intruder or the sound of shots might have frightened her and caused a fatal heart attack, as well as whether the deceased man had been aware that the woman was in the bathtub. The 88-year old mother of the husband was at home but had slept through the entire incident.

Charles Kuralt of The News reports of Charlotte businessman Keith Beaty slated to be paroled on June 10, having been granted parole by the U.S. Parole Board in Washington this date, to be released after serving half of his two-year sentence for a $200,000 tax evasion conviction. He had first been indicted with his brother and a third individual in 1953 for evading tax payments on their taxi, gas and beer businesses. His brother had served 15 months of a three-year sentence and was paroled, while the indictment against the third man had been dismissed recently after never being brought to trial. Mr. Beaty became eligible for parole after serving one-third of his sentence, which had been completed the previous week. He had also paid $20,000 in fines and more than $6,700 in court costs, but still faced the Government's claim for unpaid taxes, pending in Tax Court.

Donald MacDonald of The News tells of a mother, who was observing her child board a Pineville school bus, saving at least four children from serious injury early this date when a truck knocked an automobile into a line of youngsters standing at a bus stop, with no one being seriously injured, although the mother had suffered a wrenched back. County Police praised the woman for her efforts in jerking and pushing the children out of the path of the car. She had been unable to talk with a reporter during the morning as she was still suffering from shock. Officers reconstructed the accident for the newspaper.

Dick Young of The News tells of Park Road residents this date girding for a battle against too much widening of their street, prepared to attend a City Council meeting on February 29 where they would make their case.

In Dallas, Tex., a judge was deliberating whether or not to grant an injunction sought by a fur company against a hamburger establishment next door, based on the claim that mink and other furs would absorb onion odors and be hard to sell. A witness for the plaintiffs, the credit manager for a jewelry firm, had testified the previous day that when the hamburger establishment was next door to his firm, the jewelry store took on a definite onion odor. Another witness, a fur expert and vice-president of Neiman-Marcus Co., testified that furs were sensitive to odors and that it would be hard to sell a fur with an odor. The judge said that the court would take judicial notice of the fact that onions had odors, and the case was continued for further furry testimony this date. Parenthetically, the judge in the case was the brother of Dallas Mayor Robert L. Thornton, who served from 1953 to 1961, and for whom the R. L. Thornton Freeway was named, a sign for an entrance to which was in Dealey Plaza for decades, as it was in November, 1963, just ahead of the Stemmons Freeway sign. Mayor Thornton was praised by both President Kennedy and NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins in 1961, even if the latter found excessive gradualism, for encouraging and achieving peaceful desegregation of the Dallas public schools, which had taken place that year, albeit actually occurring four months after his mayoralty, while Earle Cabell was Mayor. Apparently, Mr. Thornton was later confused by some with his brother, who reportedly had been a prominent member of the Klan in Dallas in the 1920's, with no evidence that Mayor Thornton ever had any association with the bedsheet Bonzos—though Klan membership by people active in politics in the early to mid 1920's was not always that which it appeared by reference to night-riding violence, as in the well-known case of later Alabama Senator and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, one of the firmest and most consistent civil libertarians ever to serve on the Court. That is not to say that Mayor Thornton was necessarily a bastion of liberalism, but, in those times, if you were alive and conscious of your environs in the South and favored equal rights for all citizens, you took what you could get and ran with it. (It might be noted ironically—or, perhaps, not so, given the power of media presentations to viewers of all stripes within a community, sometimes producing a reactionary effect—, the elderly gentleman speaking insistently against violence and for obedience to the law in Dallas, at the 15:40 mark of the above-linked "Dallas at the Crossroads" from mid-1961, is sitting either on or somewhere above, even if that position is difficult by perspective to visualize, the triple overpass in Dealey Plaza, with R. L. Thornton-Stemmons Freeway visible in the background, as confirmed by the presence, slightly below the speaker's immediate background, of the distinctive art-deco bridge accouterments adorning the railroad overpass, two distinctive concrete posts, still extant, on either side of the highway below, the raised freeway appearing to his immediate rear having obviously since been widened by a lane, chopping off the top portions of the outer supports, and, further back, a sign for Earl Hayes Chevrolet Company Trucks, the location of which was at Commerce Street and Industrial Blvd. Was he sitting on a ledge atop the old Dallas County Criminal Courts Building at Main and Houston Streets, or perhaps the castle-like, cone-topped "Old Red" on the other side of Main, with the angle of the never-blinking camera obscuring the intervening Plaza below?)

In Ashland, Ky., thieves and "cheaters" had prompted city officials to abandon "courtesy fine-o-meters" for overtime parking, removing the red boxes from 62 locations where they had been installed eight months earlier as a convenience to drivers, permitting them to place a quarter in an envelope to be dropped into the box within an hour after being cited with a parking ticket, with the fine increasing to a dollar after an hour. City officials said that many of the boxes had been robbed and some motorists had parked all day for one 25-cent fine.

Beginning the following Monday, the News would present a six-part series titled "Teen-Age Rebels", to appear on the editorial page, written by Joseph Whitney, author of the "Mirror of Your Mind" column, which appeared daily in the newspaper. The series would deal with problems facing teenagers from puberty to adulthood, and their parents, with the first article examining "The Beginnings of Rebellion", at the beginning of manhood and womanhood, the last in the series to treat of the "young adult" period when "Teen-Agers Face the Future".

On the editorial page, "Civic Progress: Delay Can Be Costly" finds that delay had become the expected and predictable complication wherever new policies were concerned in the city, the most glaring recent example of it being the endless postponements in the adoption of the subdivision control ordinance.