The Charlotte News

Saturday, March 10, 1956

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Nicosia, Cyprus, that thousands of Cypriots had walked off their jobs in a general strike this date in protest against Britain's deportation of Archbishop Makarios III as a dangerous rebel. British paratroopers patrolled the streets of Nicosia and other centers, already facing shotgun and bomb attacks during the night. Police, using tear gas, had broken up a demonstration at Limmasol. Minor demonstrations at Polis, Kyrenia and Famagusta were reported to have been dispersed without incident. The Government had warned that walkouts, except for those in a trade union dispute, violated emergency regulations and that the regulations would be enforced. It said that the strike had affected the entire island, and almost all shops and firms in Nicosia were closed. Laborers, clerks, printers and shopkeepers joined in the walkout and business was at a standstill. Official sources said that the British were jamming Athens radio, and the British Government had banned all telephone and cable communications with Athens, also barring long distance phone calls on Cyprus, itself. Greece had recalled its Ambassador to London and protested to the U.N. Reaction in Athens had been violent, with demonstrators slashing tires on scores of British-owned trolley buses and Athens University students had sprinkled gasoline on a British flag and burned it. They had then moved against the British Embassy and riot squads had halted the march. Newspapers carried such headlines as "British Gangsters Kidnap Makarios". In London, Labor opponents of Prime Minister Anthony Eden's Conservative Government denounced the deportation as "an act of folly … madness." British newspapers expressed apprehension but generally supported the move. Newspapers on Cyprus went to press under censorship and editors were ordered to withhold news of inflammatory, alarming or despairing stories or face fines and prison sentences of up to one year. With printers joining in the strike, it was doubtful that newspapers would be on the streets the following day. In the first violent reaction, terrorists had fired shotguns at one patrol and hurled bombs at two others, with three men having been wounded. The British refused to say immediately where Archbishop Makarios had been taken. He had been the leader of the Greek Cypriot drive for independence and eventual union with Greece. Nicosia appeared stunned during the first hours after the announcement by the British that they had taken their spiritual leader and three of his lieutenants in a giant Royal Air Force Hastings transport away from the island. Church bells tolled and shopkeepers rolled down their shutters. The British Governor of Cyprus, Field Marshal Sir John Harding, said that he had ordered the Archbishop into exile under emergency regulations "in the interest of promoting peace, order and good government."

In London, it was reported that the Archbishop was being sent into exile on the remote Seychelle Islands in the Indian Ocean, according to a well-informed source this date. The colonial office declined comment but other official British sources said that the Archbishop and the three Greek Cypriot aides deported with him would be held indefinitely on the islands. The Seychelles consisted of 92 tiny islands with a population of less than 40,000, which Britain had captured from the French in 1794, and where farming and fishing were the only industries.

In Athens, Greek military guards took up posts around the British and American Embassies this date, as crowds of angry demonstrators swarmed through the capital protesting the banishment of the Archbishop from Cyprus. The crowd set fire to a British flag, slashed the tires of the city's British-owned buses, and broke windows in hotels with English names. Riot squads turned back demonstrators who sought to march on the British Embassy. Greek Orthodox Church officials, meeting in emergency session, sent cables appealing to church organizations around the world for help for the exiled Archbishop, with one appeal having been sent to Moscow, seat of the Russian Orthodox Church, asking the "sister church of Russia to display its traditionally strong protection and use every power and influence" regarding the Archbishop's deportation. The Greek churchmen said that cables also had been sent to leaders of the Church of England and clergymen in Sweden, Norway and "all independent churches". The cable urged that Greek churchmen "vigorously protest against this nefarious act reminiscent of the dark days of serfdom."

In Paris, violence, spilling over from North Africa into the streets of Paris, had jolted French officials this date to enact stern new measures for protection of lives and property in seething Tunisia and Algeria. Heavily armed detachments of riot police and mobile guardsmen were standing ready to prevent further demonstrations in Paris. In Tunis, where a French mob had sacked the U.S. Consulate the previous day and attacked offices of two French-language newspapers, police took strong restrictive measures. In Algiers, terrorized by fresh attacks on French settlements, Government sources disclosed that a new division of French troops was being introduced. In the meantime, French Premier Guy Mollet sought emergency powers from the National Assembly.

In New York, a Swiss scientist, Dr. Johannes Hurzeler, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum in Basle, Switzerland, said at a press conference the previous day that a human-like jawbone, which had been found embedded in a chunk of shiny black coal, might mean that modern man was much more ancient than previously thought. Darwin's theory that man and the apes had descended from a comparatively recent common ancestor might also be upset. The scientist said that the jawbone and other fossil remains found in Tuscany, Italy, in 1872 were from ten-million-year old human-like creatures, until the present, considered the remains of mountain apes. If modern man had an ancestor similar to them living ten million years earlier, he may have existed in his present form much earlier than scientists previously had believed. Dr. Hurzeler said that the first known true humans, the Java and Peking Men, had existed several hundred thousand years earlier. They and the modern apes, according to Darwinian theory, descended from ape-like creatures found on earth about ten million years earlier. But Dr. Hurzeler contended that the 26 Tuscany fossil fragments indicated instead that man and the apes had branched apart 20 to 30 million years earlier from an ancestor which was neither man nor ape, that the fragments showed that the Tuscany man had the short face of a man instead of the ape's protruding jaw, nearly vertical front teeth instead of protruding ape teeth and the human rounded chin, plus other features more nearly human than ape. He said that he planned to return to Italy to look for more fossils similar to the older Tuscany discovery. He explained his find to a group of scholars in New York the previous Saturday, one of whom, Dr. Helmut De Terra of Columbia University, had said that the group had been impressed, that if human evolution, separate from the apes, was as far advanced ten million years earlier as the find indicated, it was necessary to take another look at "the meaning of evolution in the case of man."

In Salem, Ore., Secretary of Interior Douglas McKay filed for the Republican nomination for the Senate race the previous day, taking state leaders of both major political parties by surprise. He would likely have opposition in the Republican primary in May, but there appeared little doubt that he would win the primary and then face Democratic incumbent Senator Wayne Morse in November. Democratic party leaders in the state cheered his entry to the race while some Republican leaders were unusually guarded in their comment.

Near Coopersville, Mich., six persons, four from one family, had been killed the previous night in a head-on two-car collision, and a seventh person was injured critically, both of the drivers having been killed, one of whom was riding with his family. The other driver was identified by police as a southern Michigan prison parolee, driving alone. The cars had collided on a curve after the latter driver had passed several cars and stayed in the left lane, before cutting back into the right lane just as the other driver had swung out to avoid him.

Near Salt Lake City, five persons were killed and four injured seriously this date in the flaming wreckage of two automobiles which had collided, then hurtled into a service station, shearing off the gasoline pump, the accident having occurred as a speeding station wagon smashed into the rear of another car traveling in the same direction. Rescuers had used acetylene torches to cut the charred steel frame of the station wagon to reach the bodies. The sheriff said that the station wagon apparently had been traveling at a high rate of speed and that the passenger car was hurtled 195 feet when the station wagon struck it. The station wagon had smashed into a fuel pump at the service station, breaking it off and causing gasoline to flow from the pump into the car, where it burst into flames.

North Carolina Republicans nominated two Congressional candidates, one, a political novice, and elected 12 delegates to the Republican national convention in district state conventions the previous day. Four of the state's six Congressional districts had left it to their executive committees to name candidates before the March 16 deadline. Representative Charles Jonas of Lincolnton, the state's only Republican Congressman, was nominated unanimously by the 10th District Republicans to seek a third term, and he had immediately accepted. In the 12th District, R. C. Clarke, a 41-year old Hendersonville real estate and insurance agent who had never before sought elective office, was also unanimously nominated and he also accepted immediately.

In Lincoln, Neb., it was the lack of beef which made the president of the Nebraska Beef Council beef, because Vice-President Nixon was going to be served chicken at the Republican Party Founders Day dinner in Lincoln on March 19. Nebraska's license plates carried the slogan "The Beef State", as a result of the heat the Beef Council had put on the State Legislature in their campaign to boost the state's reputation as a prime cattle area. For the president of the Council, the idea of no prime steaks at a top-grade banquet was a slur on that slogan and so when he got a look at the Republican banquet menu and saw chicken as the main course, he was upset and sent a letter to the state Republican treasurer, saying that Nebraska, the beef state, was "being honored by a visit of the Vice-President of the United States, so what do you feed him? Chicken!" He said he awaited their apologies for serving anything other than choice Nebraska beef. The Republican treasurer replied: "No apologies. A beef dinner would cost five dollars instead of three dollars. Last year's Founders Day established that the Sand Hills [center of the cattle country] boys wouldn't pay five bucks for a beef dinner!"

Perhaps, had the Beef Council head had proper foresight, he might have withheld his protest, realizing that it was apropos, after all, to serve chicken to the V.P., not beef.

Charles Kuralt of The News reports of the second annual Camellia Show opening this date at the American Trust Co. in Charlotte, "splashing shades of flaming red, subtle pink and white about the lobby." The show was sponsored by the Men's Camellia Club of Charlotte. Hundreds of varieties were exhibited by entrants from as far away as Atlanta and Birmingham, with flower lovers packing the lobby as the doors had opened at mid-afternoon, running to 10:00 p.m. The camellias, with names such as Frizzle White, Emperor of Russia and Tallahassee Girl, lined the bank lobby by the thousands. The star of the show was a pinkish bloom called "Mrs. D. W. Davis", a new variety exhibited in a place of honor at the front of the lobby. One bloom, called "Emily Wilson", had been exhibited by the lady for whom it was named. Her son, presently in the Army, had planted the seedling as a child. Guests included the Cultural Affairs Officer of the Japanese Embassy in Washington, the president of the American Camellia Society, from Wilmington, N.C., and a female Japanese student at Sacred Heart College in Belmont, Miss. The latter, garbed in Oriental costume, had stood inside a Japanese garden house and served tea to the crowd as it filed through. The judges had begun the task of giving ribbons to the entries early during the afternoon. The lobby was decorated with pine boughs, smilax and pear blossoms, with a Japanese shrine entrance dividing the lobby.

On the editorial page, "It's the Symphony Board's Move Now" tells of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra being in trouble, as a large number of its players had apparently lost faith in conductor James Christian Pfohl, while a financial deficit of $7,000 had also beset it.