The Charlotte News
Friday, March 23, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana had said this date that he believed that the South would not accept Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee as the Democratic presidential nominee. Senator Kefauver, now considered the front-runner for the nomination since his victory over Adlai Stevenson in the Minnesota primary the previous Tuesday, would test his strength in the Florida primary on May 29, where he would also meet head to head Mr. Stevenson, the 1952 nominee. Senator Ellender said that he would be "100 percent" for Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson for the nomination, and that from the present on out, Mr. Stevenson would lose popularity, making it necessary to nominate someone other than Senator Kefauver, as, according to Senator Ellender, the South would not accept his views on civil rights. Senator Kefauver, along with Senators Johnson and Albert Gore of Tennessee, had not signed the "Southern manifesto" read before the Senate and the House on March 12, vowing by every legal means possible to seek to reverse or circumvent Brown v. Board of Education. Senator Ellender said that his first choice for the nomination would be Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, but that he did not appear to want it. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who had defeated Senator Kefauver in the Florida primary in 1952, said that he would support Senator Johnson for the nomination, as had indicated Senator George Smathers of Florida.
In Montgomery, Ala., Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 27, became the first of 90 black citizens indicted, to be convicted the previous day for his role in leading the boycott of the municipal buses for their segregated seating by local ordinance, but vowed the previous night at a mass meeting to continue his fight against segregation "no matter how many times" he was convicted of violating the state anti-boycott law, which effectively outlawed boycotts against private businesses. The judge who found him guilty in the non-jury proceeding, Dr. King having waived his right to a jury, fined him $500 and court costs, suspended pending the outcome of the appeal, which his attorneys indicated that they would take all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. The fine was converted into a 386-day sentence because the defendant chose to appeal rather than pay it. Dr. King, pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, said that he would continue fighting for "justice and equality" and continue his leading role in the protest movement against the segregated city buses, that "freedom doesn't come on a silver platter. Some of the things we have to go through are a necessary part of our campaign. There could never be growth without growing pains." He received an ovation from the gathered audience. The black community was expected to continue the 17-week boycott notwithstanding the conviction of Dr. King and the pending cases of the other 89 leaders and participants. The State agreed to postpone the trials of the other defendants pending the outcome of Dr. King's appeal.
In Atlanta, minors under 18 had been barred from public dances unless accompanied by their parents or guardians, as part of a new move to diminish juvenile delinquency in the city. The announcement had been made while a dance for blacks, attended by an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 persons, was in progress the previous night at the City Auditorium, but the dance was not interrupted. Earlier, the City had imposed a midnight curfew for everyone under age 18, and to remove any barrier to its enforcement, the City school superintendent announced the previous day that high school graduation exercises, night football games and other school activities would be moved up an hour to enable all to be home by midnight. The chief of police said that about 20 places, including private clubs holding dance hall licenses, would be impacted by the ban against public dances for those under age 18 with such events at the City Auditorium to be completely eliminated. The chief explained that an ordinance enacted several years earlier had provided authority to keep juveniles away from public dances. He added that properly chaperoned private or semi-public dances were not covered by the ordinance. That was probably why they held the concert by the Animals and Herman's Hermits in July, 1966 in the afternoon at the Auditorium, so that all of the teenagers, stimulated by the music, would not spill onto the streets afterward, sheltered by the darkness, and engage in rapine and plunder.
In London, the Foreign Office said this date that Britain had received secret reports that "a considerable number" of Egyptians were under military training in Poland, a spokesman for the Office telling reporters that the British Government placed reliance on the reports, but the spokesman would not disclose the source, indicating that the matter would be taken into account in determination of Britain's Middle Eastern policies. British informants estimated that about 200 Egyptian officers and noncommissioned officers were being trained in land, sea and air operations, and in the use of armaments, at a Soviet base near Poland's Baltic Sea port of Gdynia, with their instruction reportedly including the use of radar, submarines and all forms of artillery. The training facilities were understood to be an extension of the 1955 deal under which Communist Czechoslovakia had sold arms to Egypt for Egyptian cotton and rice, as well as money. The Foreign Office spokesman said that the British Government also was aware that Czech Army officers were training Egyptian Air Force personnel in the use of Soviet aircraft near the Egyptian port of Alexandria.
In Asheville, N.C., North Carolina school teachers this date were seeking to determine how much of a pay increase they wanted, with the classroom teachers division of the North Carolina Education Association convention discussing a proposed salary schedule ranging from $3,000 to $4,500 per year, with the top end being $400 more than that proposed by the NCEA's resolutions committee, and the low end being exactly that which the Canton unit had sought when it proposed asking for a 25 percent pay increase. The question was expected to dominate the floor of the convention during the current afternoon, with a minimum salary schedule of from $2,600 to $4,100 for certified teachers being contained in the report of the convention's resolutions committee. The Canton delegation was expected to introduce its proposal during the afternoon. We recommend that they pass a resolution first, recommending that the city government pass an ordinance requiring the paper plant there to clean up its act and get rid of the sulphuric odor pervading the community, as it definitely harms the tourist trade and probably serves to interfere with effective learning by students.
In Raleigh, it was reported that barring any further damage from the weather, the peach crop in the Sandhills area ought be in good shape, according to the superintendent of the Sandhills Research Station at Candor, indicating that the recent frosts and freezing weather had killed some blooms, but that there were far too many blooms to start with and the killing by the weather had only reduced the thinning of the crop, such that they were still in good shape. The coastal plain area, however, where some of the growers reported that their crops had been hard hit by the weather, was in a different status. One grower, who had 5,000 trees three miles from La Grange, estimated that 97 percent of his crop had been a total loss and that the remaining 3 percent were in "bad shape", while another grower near that town said that his crop of 300 trees was all gone.
Ann Sawyer and Harry Shuford of The News report that more than 100 Mecklenburg County drivers who had taken advantage of a "loophole" in the state's Financial Responsibility Act were being examined by the State Attorney General's office. The drivers who had been involved in accidents continued to possess their licenses without having to show financial responsibility as required by law, having done so by filing a petition in the Superior Court as allowed by the 1953 act, permitting a person to file such a petition for review of the suspension order, thus retaining the driver's license until the court acted on the petition. During the week, an assistant Attorney General requested information from the clerk of court on the status of the petitions filed in Charlotte since January, 1954, when the law had gone into effect. The clerk had replied that 132 such petitions had been filed in that period, that 17 of those petitions were non-suited during a calendar cleanup and that the others were still pending. The clerk said that a petition hearing had never yet been held in Charlotte. The law said that anyone involved in an accident in which there was death or injury or property damage to either party in excess of $100, had to show evidence of financial responsibility in the amount of $11,000, capable of being done by posting bond or cash collateral for that amount, or through proof of insurance coverage to that amount. If financial responsibility could not be shown, the law required that the Department of Motor Vehicles suspend the driver's license for a year. Many of the courts in the state did hear such petitions and disposed of them, while some counties held calendar cleanups, such as Guilford had done in December and January, and Forsyth was planning in the current month.
Charles Kuralt of The News indicates that time was running out on the dream of Sung Nak Pil, and that the only man who cared was a former G.I. from Charlotte, Jack Pentes, a commercial artist assigned to a troop information outfit in Pusan, Korea, the previous year, where Sung, 19, had become his translator and chief assistant. Mr. Pentes said that he could tell right away that Sung was different, for one thing, being unwilling to accept any clothing or food as he earned his own, and did not steal things from the compound, or deal in the black market. Every time he turned around, he had his nose in a book written in English, such as Paradise Lost and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, which shook up Mr. Pentes, as some of the books he had not read. The two had become friends and took long strolls around Pusan and the neighboring countryside, during which Sung spoke proudly of his country and its history and hopes. His father was a rice paddy farmer as were his mother, four brothers and two sisters. But Sung had attended school at night and learned English, supported himself. The only things that Mr. Pentes could give him were books, and he reported that Sung had finished first in his class in high school every year. Mr. Pentes was now back in Charlotte running his new commercial art shop and had received a letter from his old friend three weeks earlier, saying that he was happy and very proud but mostly worried, that after he had graduated high school at the top of his class and was considering attending college at Pusan National University, he found that there were 6,000 applicants for 1,300 positions and that he also had no money with which to pay the tuition. Mr. Pentes sent him a reply, urging him to take the entrance examination and that something might work out. He had received a reply during the current week, indicating that Sung had been accepted and was also one of 30 students from among 130 applicants to be accepted in the English Literature class, which he regarded as a chance of a lifetime. But he had added that it could not come true, for his family had no money and he had none, explaining that he had been evicted from his tiny room and that the waiting list at the University was very long, that he had talked University officials into delaying the deadline for paying the $100 entrance fee until April 1, but that he had no hope of paying it unless the "fortune" could come from Mr. Pentes. He apologized for suggesting such a thing, but added that with the money he could become a University student, concluding that he could not sleep at night. Mr. Pentes said that he could not sleep either as he was trying to support his new business, that there were kids like Sung all over the world, but that others did not demonstrate the promise that Sung did. He said that there were plenty of people who could have helped him, by bringing him to the U.S. where he could get a quality education. In the meantime, he sketched a picture of Sung, mindful that April 1 was only eight days away.
In Orofino, Ida., squad cars, paddy wagons, police launches and sheriff's horses were not of any use when the government decided to arrest a man living in the remote North Fork area of Idaho's Clearwater County, the 55-year old hermit having to be picked up and flown in by helicopter. He was charged with illegal entry to a government building, and stealing food supplies stored in the woods for use by rangers and snow surveyors. He was jailed in lieu of posting a $1,000 bond and his trial date had not yet been set.
Not on the front page, the finals of the NCAA basketball tournament took place this night in Evanston, Ill., with the Dons of San Francisco repeating as national champions, remaining undefeated for 55 straight games extending from the previous season, 29 of which had come during the current season, beating Iowa, ranked fourth in the final Associated Press poll of the season, 83 to 71. Parenthetically, a member of the squad, as a sophomore, though not one of those introduced in the above-linked film, was future San Francisco Municipal Court Judge Bill Mallen, who served from 1982 until his death on the bench from a heart attack in 1992. As with future UNC coach Dean Smith on the 1952 national champion Kansas Jayhawks, he did not see much playing time that year. Hang in there... It was the third time that a school had won back to back national championships since the advent of the NCAA Tournament in 1939, the feat having been accomplished in 1945 and 1946 by Oklahoma A&M and in 1948 and 1949 by Kentucky. Since that time, it has been done by Cincinnati, in 1961 and 1962, UCLA in 1964 and 1965, and for seven straight times between 1967 and 1973 by UCLA, winning 10 of 12 between 1964 and 1975, by Duke in 1991 and 1992, and by Florida in 2006 and 2007.
On the editorial page, "Bad Carpentry on Electoral College" finds that when judged against a scheme presently being debated in Congress, the antiquated electoral college appeared to be an institution worth preserving, that while it needed repairs, the carpenters in Congress "bid fair to replace fault with error."
It points out that the half-million votes in North Carolina for General Eisenhower in 1952 had gone for naught in the electoral college because of the winner-take-all formula utilized as the manner in which electoral votes were recorded in the state, as determined by the Legislature, per the Constitution. Similarly, Adlai Stevenson had received no electoral recognition for his 443,000 votes in Tennessee, which had adopted the same formula.
Moreover, the electoral college had permitted the election of three Presidents, John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888, by dint of the electoral college, even though without a plurality of popular votes. And although only five of 12,463 electoral votes cast between 1820 and 1952 had been by "faithless electors" who cast votes contrary to their state law's instruction, electors remained not legally bound to vote for any particular candidate, as there were no penalties for violating the state law. In the case of an election thrown into the House for want of a majority of electoral votes, the result would be contrary to the principle of popular choice. It thus finds that the electoral college was a poor instrument for the operation of popular government.
It finds worthy the proposed amendment originally offered by Senators Price Daniel of Texas and Estes Kefauver, similar to that which had been offered in 1950 by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Representative Ed Gossett of Texas, whereby a proportional electoral vote would be awarded, based on the percentage of the popular vote won by one of the top three candidates in the race, with elections where there was no electoral vote majority achieved by any one candidate, to be decided by a majority vote of Senators and Representatives casting their ballots as individuals, rather than the current system whereby the House under such circumstances would decide the matter by state delegations, with each delegation receiving only one vote based on its majority.
But as amended, the proposal had given the states a choice in dividing the electoral vote per its selection process of Senators and Representatives, providing one electoral vote to the leading candidate in each Congressional district and two additional votes to the popular vote winner of the state. It finds that if that option were adopted by a state, the discrimination against urban dwellers which existed across the country in state legislatures would be extended to presidential elections—actually meaning that the gerrymandered districts during each decennial redistricting would be carried over into the presidential elections. It finds that it would also encourage different systems of counting electoral votes, based, in the different states, on political opportunism. (It fails, however, to take into account that the Constitution, since the Founding, had provided in Article II, section 1, clause 2, that the state legislatures determine the manner of selection of electors for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency, and so all of the pitfalls which it cites under the current system, would remain without the amendment, and the Congressional district form of allotting electoral votes could be chosen by a state legislature without amendment to the Constitution, as could any other method.)
"The trouble with the electoral college is that it is cumbersome and unfair. The same terms apply equally to the 'reform' now being debated. The Senate should go back to the unamended plan or quit."
As indicated in our note of the previous day, the problem with the suggestion, as Senator Kefauver had pointed out during debate with Senator Hubert Humphrey on March 20, was that passage of the bill in the House would be stymied without the second option, as it had been in 1950 when the proposal had come up. The second option was put forward to try to achieve passage of the reform so that it could actually go to the states for potential ratification by three-fourths of them. The result, of course, was that eventually the bill did not pass both houses by the requisite two-thirds majorities and the effort died aborning. And since 1956, of course, we have had two elections, in 2000 and 2016, decided by the electoral college, despite the electoral college vote winner having lost decisively the popular vote, plus the election of 1960, in which the popular vote was decided by only a little more than 100,000 votes, while the electoral college provided a much greater proportionate majority for Senator John F. Kennedy over Vice-President Nixon. The electoral college should have been revised after the 1960 election, which forewarned of the possibilities which materialized in 2000 and 2016. As the following upset and turmoil in the country, which can be attributed to those two elections, demonstrated, it is not worth the candle for a party to achieve the White House only through the electoral college, as a "President" so elected cannot govern except by fiat, that is, executive order, unacceptable to the broad mass of American people, especially when both houses are closely divided and controlled by the opposing party. Even when one or both houses are controlled by the same party, the legitimacy of the legislative process is questioned when the decision to veto or not is in the hands of a President not popularly elected. (We now have such a person, who reached too far with such limited political power, under indictment for the first time in the nation's history, with other indictments, premised on that overreaching, possibly to follow.)
We note that some of the same right-wing forces behind the 2000 election debacle were also behind the 2016 election debacle, having studied very closely the demographics of key districts in "swing states" and made a science out of targeting those districts with particularly negative and usually quite false advertising regarding the opponent, to achieve narrow victories in those particular states, which created the imbalance of an electoral college victory without a popular vote victory. The electoral college was not constructed by the Founders to be a workshop for busybodies to cobble together victories through such electioneering practices, but rather the exact opposite, to prevent despots from coming to power, enabling a group of selectmen from each state potentially to trump a popular vote winner who had achieved that popular vote through demagogy, and in a quite different age, when there were no mass media to keep in check candidates and to inform the populace of variations from the truth and the record, and when there were no ready means of quick travel from one place to another in the nation, such that most people never got to see, let alone hear, the candidate other than in drawings presented in the local newspaper and excerpts printed from their speeches.
A very different age calls for abandonment of such anachronisms as the electoral college, as with the Second Amendment.
"Woodman, Spare That Dialectal Tree" tells of a linguistic battle ongoing in Maryland regarding what constituted pure "Baltimorese", finding it a tempest in a teapot, suggesting that students of language come to North Carolina to find a "real brain smasher", "pure, unadulterated Tar Heel Talk for posterity."
It indicates that more than one dedicated philologist had already run screaming back to his academic cloisters after a bout with the North Carolina native tongue, finding that "chaotic" was the only descriptive term to describe it. There was no more a single North Carolina accent than there was a single Southern accent. Tar Heel talk was as varied as Tar Heel topography. A resident of the Outer Banks might speak of "hoigh toide in Hoyde County", while a resident of the Blue Ridge Mountains might say, "If I'd a-knowed it was you, I'd a-flang out my arm and wove to you."
The late William T. Polk of Greensboro, one of the nation's best interpreters of Southern culture, had difficulty finding the reasons for the differences, pointing out that the speech of people on the Outer Banks came from the first colonists and ship-wrecked sailors, most of whom had come from Devonshire and western England, that in the Piedmont, there was some Scotch-Irish and German influence, while many mountain sections still echoed the Scotch and English manner of speech.
It finds the most difficult to bear to be the visiting snobs who frowned upon the "illiteracy" reflected in some native North Carolina pronunciations, that Professor George P. Wilson had written in the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore that Shakespeare used "blowed" for "blown", that Francis Bacon had employed "mought" for "might" and that Queen Elizabeth I had used "hit" for "it". It finds that on that basis, historical justification could be found for "ast", representing "asked", "fitten" for "fitting", "cowcumber" for "cucumber", "ingern" for "onion", "git" for "get", "obleege" for "oblige", "jine" for "join", "bile" for "boil" and "pizen" for "poison".
It indicates that its strongest objection to mass communication, television, radio, motion pictures and phonograph records, was that they murdered localized speech, that what was generally heard was a kind of standardized Hollywood English, that while it worked in the media which employed it, it did not work for a resident of Burke County, who would sound ridiculous, positing that a sensible local accent, articulate and amiable, was by far preferable, as there was something neighborly about it.
"Hollywood's Old Shoe No Longer Fits" finds that the term "Hollywood-style movie" had become outmoded. It had described "unalloyed make-believe, gaudy commercialism and uninspired epics that packed more artifice than art."
It finds in the 1956 Academy Awards of two days earlier that the range and depth of American movies had been admirably illustrated in the nominees, as most had been mature, original offerings of unusual artistic merit. The major winner, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay, was Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty", which it views as a particularly fine choice, "far removed from the fluffy, technicolored clinker of Hollywood's tinted past." It finds the film notable for its "vivid, poignant realism—a characteristic once considered highly unmarketable in the provinces." Realism had also been a distinguishing characteristic of "The Rose Tattoo", adapted from a play by Tennessee Williams, starring Anna Magnani, who had won the award for Best Actress.
It adds that Hollywood films were not all first-rate at present and that there were plenty of potboilers around, but that the trend appeared toward fewer individual films but with more quality, and the public appeared to be responding positively. The concern in Hollywood over the advantage of television in the homes had passed, and a new cinematic golden age, with firmer artistic foundations, it suggests, might be in the offing.
Don't bet too hard, as the next few years will see the return of the blockbuster musical and Biblical epics as the marquee grabbers and the Oscar statuette winners, at least for the most part, until social relevance would return for awhile, starting in 1967, not that it had ever gone away, when looking at movies generally during the period, but in limiting the trend-setters to Academy Award nominees, the trend appeared toward the adapted Broadway musical and large-scale "Ben Hur"-type epics, the latter largely remakes of the earlier silent era, for the ensuing decade, even if the musical would finally bite the dust only grudgingly in the early Seventies, and the Biblical epics would become passe by the early Sixties, even if the Bible and the musical joined together with rock music in 1970-71 for a new revival, primarily on Broadway, as the gritty movies of the street grabbed the mass audience, though sans the social conscience which had been infused to major films, such as "On the Waterfront", beginning in the mid-Fifties and persisting through the early Seventies, until fading away into parody of itself—as audiences, like Narcissus, alas, grew tired of viewing their reflections in the water and began throwing popcorn at the screen in defiance, wanting a return to shoot-'em-ups even if set against a backdrop of gangsters, reminiscent of the Prohibition era films when talkies first hit the screen, by the Seventies and Eighties being remade with higher budgets and more realism associated with the violence.
A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "Invitation to the Ladies", foresees trouble ahead for the Government's Housing & Home Financing Agency, whose administrator had invited the housewives of the country to write him regarding their complaints and yearnings for a dream home, thus enabling the agency to know how to design homes that would suit them, with the 100 best letter writers receiving a paid trip to Washington.
The administrator was concerned that the ten million homes built since World War II at a cost of around a hundred billion dollars were now being upgraded by dissatisfied housewives at an expenditure of several million dollars, appearing to be wasteful.
The piece says that it would not complain about the cost of the giveaway program but suggests that the nation's housewives would not agree on much of anything, as one housewife found it difficult to agree with herself. It imparts that the author and his wife had a perfectly good living room at home, but his wife was dissatisfied with it and thus sought a makeover, which inevitably led also to having to make over the entrance hall, the dining room and the kitchen. The piece suggests to the administrator to drop around the writer's home just at the moment the painter had his scaffolding on the second floor stairway, "and since that leads to the bedrooms…"
Drew Pearson tells of Civil Aeronautics Board chairman Ross Rizley insisting to Board member Joe Adams recently that CAB had capitulated to pressure from the big airlines, as Mr. Rizley testified before the House Anti-Monopoly subcommittee, explaining why CAB had permitted an increase of trans-Atlantic passenger rates by ten percent, saying, in response to Representative Emanuel Celler's inquiry as to whether it was tantamount to capitulation to the scheduled airlines, that it was instead capitulation to all of the airlines, at which point there was a hushed consultation between Messrs. Rizley and Adams, in which Mr. Adams could be heard protesting that there had been no such capitulation, with Mr. Rizley insisting that they had and so confirmed to the subcommittee.
Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia had joined Secretary of Health, Education & Welfare, Marion Folsom, to block more liberalization of social security laws, to afford aid to widows and disabled children, the elderly and white-collar workers, with Senator Byrd having called a private meeting of Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee to request that they meet with Secretary Folsom and provide him a pledge to hold the line on such reforms. Because it was an election year, the Administration had not taken a stand publicly on the reforms, with Mr. Folsom having ducked testimony before the Finance Committee four times, but was expected to appear this date, though probably not to oppose the legislation publicly. But the previous week, he had reported privately to the President that the Republicans, with the help of Senator Byrd, would be able to bottle up in the Committee the social security amendment. He was accompanied by Senator Ed Martin of Pennsylvania, ranking Republican on the Committee, who echoed the Secretary's assurances. Mr. Pearson remarks that some Republicans facing re-election might not vote with their colleagues publicly to block the amendments.
Congressman Usher Burdick of North Dakota, a Republican who had served in the House for 18 years, was considering becoming a Democrat because his son, Quentin, was going to run for the Senate from the state as a Democrat. Mr. Burdick, 77, had voted frequently with Democrats. The switch would also be made easy by the fact that the Nonpartisan League, influential in North Dakota politics, was going to back Democrats in 1956 to protest the Administration's farm program. It was also why Senator William Langer of that state was considering a switch to the Democrats, as his biggest support in the past had come from the League. But Mr. Burdick had decided, in the end, to remain a Republican.
A letter writer says that he was shocked by what the publicity had said surrounding the death the previous Saturday night of Fred Allen, but more by what it had not said, such that he wanted to present five truths about Mr. Allen which people should know and remember from someone who had known him personally. The first was that his sudden collapse from a heart attack had not been a case where a person who had been well all of their lives suddenly succumbed, as Mr. Allen had been quite ill with high blood pressure in 1942. He was also not the "clown" which some press photos made him appear, not a comedian but a humorist, and the top American humorist, in a class with Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, Bill Nye, Petroleum V. Nasby, and even Mark Twain. He says that he had written to Mr. Allen to tell him those things in 1942, knowing that he had been ill, and pleading in his letter that he put his humor into print for posterity. He presents verbatim his reply, written in lowercase type: "i made the trip to the mayo clinic and at the moment am starting a three month potassium treatment, suggested by the clinic specialist, in an effort to reduce my blood pressure and keep my essential hypertension from becoming chronic. am taking the potassium pills and reporting to the doctor in new york weekly to have my blood checked. i am supposed to relax, ignore mail and attempt to rest as much as possible for two or three months. if my pressure does not respond to treatment i am to report back to the clinic for an operation. it is impossible for me to become involved in any activity in the immediate future. i guess petroleum nasby, artemus ward and mark twain had more stamina than i boast, or perhaps they enjoyed longer artistic lives because they were able to go through life without attempting to cope with radio and men of the T. J. K. Lartye kidney." (The letter writer interjects that the latter was not the gentleman Mr. Allen had named in his letter, as he was joking, the man named having been a dear friend and perhaps his most valuable associate.) He had gone on: "if all the wind was let out of radio you would have a little industry that a few competent men could run by hand. … sorry i cannot carry out your instructions and talk to america as you suggest. I think too many people are talking to america. america may be a little confused. hoping this finds you the same, sir nicholas, [signed] fred allen…" The writer says it was the only time that he ever remembered him referring to him that way in writing, that in his radio scripts he had been referred to as "Colonel Carter", a person of not especially high repute, and that only in conversation was he called "Nick" or "Nicholas". He also indicates that it was not Broadway alone which mourned him, as one might assume from the stories of his death and funeral, that in many years of business association with him, advertisers, newspapermen and people one met anywhere, the writer had discovered only affection for this so-called "bitter satirist". He provides as example an ad lib by Mr. Allen on his radio show at one point, indicating: "A conference is a meeting of individuals who singly can do nothing but who, gathered together, can agree that nothing can be done." The statement had been blown up and placed on a large poster, and when the writer had last visited friends of the Bristol-Myers Co. in New York, the poster was hanging on the wall of their board room, to them, not a bitter statement, as they believed Mr. Allen had no bitterness or malice. Even company vice-presidents understood that. Thus, he concludes that there were many mourning Mr. Allen, not just Broadway. He also indicates that Mr. Allen had been one of the most religious men the writer had ever known anywhere, a devout Catholic who took his Christianity seriously, believed that Christ had meant what he said, that each was his brother's keeper. He relates that Mr. Allen maintained that principle throughout his life, that on one occasion there had been a vaudevillian who was down on his luck and who had gone haltingly to Mr. Allen to try to obtain a substantial loan, had no collateral except for a kangaroo, and Mr. Allen made the loan and took the kangaroo as the collateral. He says that he was also a true scholar who read constantly, with reporters having written that he read scores of newspapers so as to have the hooks on which to hang his humor and his radio shows. The writer corrects that he read copiously, not only newspapers, but good books, class magazines and other material, not for his radio shows, but to know what had been, and what probably would be. He concludes that Mr. Allen ought not be remembered as a stage, radio and television comedian, but as the greatest American humorist of the time, not as a bitter satirist of the American scene, but as "an always kindly friend, beloved of us all; not as a wisecracking Broadwayite, but a consecrated Christian every moment of every day; and lastly, he should be remembered as one who observed and listened and read widely—a true scholar bent on increasing his capacity for living in this world and in the other where there must be so much laughter now that we can almost hear it where we are—a long way off."
A letter from Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina indicates that an editorial in the newspaper concerning his resignation from the Senate had been called to his attention and that he wanted to express his appreciation for the editorial's comments, that the newspaper had almost predicted his resignation date in a speculative story which had run several weeks earlier, and finds that the editorial comments following that story had also been very generous.
A letter from Harry Golden, editor
of the Carolina Israelite, indicates that the thing most
important to bear in mind at the present "momentous hour in the
history of our community" was that Charlotte was where they
lived and where they hoped to continue to thrive and prosper. He
indicates that in the search for wisdom, they knew that the present
was not the time for either mass meetings or solicitation for
"outside" help, that the racial problem would be settled by
Southerners, particularly quiet Southerners, people of good will who
would discuss the problems arising from Brown v. Board of
Education. Shakespeare had said in one of the plays: "To
climb a steep hill requires slow pace at first", and had also
stated in another play: "Heat not a furnace for your foes, so
hot, that it singes yourself." He indicates that they had to
make certain also that there was no indifference because indifference
was an evil equal to anger. He says that from the beginning of time,
the only true answer to man's hope and future had been in the nature
of lines of communication
Framed Edition
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