The Charlotte News
Tuesday, March 27, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., that the President, Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and Mexican President Adolfo Ruiz Cortez met this date at the Greenbrier Hotel to discuss a wide-ranging survey of world problems and U.S. foreign policies, including moves in the Middle East crisis. U.S. officials stated that the President and Secretary of State Dulles were prepared to cover the entire world situation during the one scheduled business meeting of the session this date, with other meetings revolving around meals. A crowd of about 200 hotel guests and townspeople broke into applause as the three leaders posed for pictures on the lawn in front of the hotel. The meeting had begun the previous night with dinner table exchanges.
The President joked about the question of whether anyone had poisoned the ginger ale aboard a private railway car he later used to travel to the conference, saying he had not drunk "pop" in years. Secret Service agents and railroad investigators were inquiring into the illnesses of three persons who had drunk the ginger ale the prior Thursday evening, with the chief of the Secret Service saying that it might take three or four days to find out what had occurred. The President's reaction had been provided to reporters by the president of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, who had breakfast with the President and said that he had laughed about the episode, suggesting that they must be trying to get the president of the railroad as he was the "pop" drinker, the railroad car where the ginger ale was dispensed having normally been used by the railroad president, who consumed no alcoholic beverages. The incident had occurred while the private car was en route from Huntington, W. Va., to Washington the previous Thursday. A statement issued by the railroad public relations director said that the soft drinks believed to be the cause of the illnesses had not been aboard the car when the President had ridden it from Washington to White Sulphur Springs for the summit conference.
The Senate rejected by voice vote this date the first of a series of proposed Constitutional amendments regarding the electoral college system. The first such amendment rejected was one put forward by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, whereby each state would retain two electoral votes to be decided by the popular vote of the state, and that the remaining 435 electoral votes would be allocated nationally on a proportional basis according to the nationwide popular vote for the candidates. There had been no argument for or against the amendment, and Senator Humphrey was absent, on a West Coast speaking tour, at the time of the vote. There were no audible "ayes" heard for the amendment. The second proposed amendment was offered by Senator William Langer of North Dakota, whereby there would be direct election by popular vote of the President and Vice-President, plus a nationwide primary for the nomination of candidates for those offices. The principal amendment to be offered was a two-part compromise which originally had 54 Senate sponsors, some of whom had since withdrawn their support, that compromise providing that states would be allowed either to elect electors on a proportional basis to their popular vote for the top three candidates in the race or on the basis of assigning two electors based on the statewide popular vote and the remainder of the electors based on each Congressional district vote in each state. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a leading opponent of the latter version of the amendment, predicted that it would be defeated along with any of the variations which were being offered. Each house had to approve by a two-thirds majority a proposed amendment to the Constitution, and then it had to be ratified by three-fourths of the states. Under the current system since the Founding, the state legislatures determined the manner of the selection of electors, with all the states at the time in 1956 following a formula that the popular vote winner in each state received all of that state's electoral votes.
The Senate-House confreres on the farm bill called two sessions this date in a drive to send a compromise version to the President during the current week. Following a three-hour session of the ten confreres the previous day, Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, reported that there had been "good progress" and that he was confident a compromise bill could be produced by the following night. Representative Harold Cooley of North Carolina, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, also expressed the belief that there would be a compromise reached which could be voted on by Thursday, though less optimistic about finishing the conference work by the following day. Mr. Cooley predicted that the compromise would include a one-year program of price supports at a mandatory 90% of parity level for wheat, cotton, corn, rice and peanuts.
In Montgomery, Ala., the pro-white Montgomery County Citizens Council had undertaken an extensive postcard and letter-writing campaign aimed at recruiting support for segregation in the Northern and Eastern states. The legal adviser for the Council said that each of the "at least 13,000" members had been asked to send five or more pieces of mail to friends, relatives and others "telling people about segregation and why we think it's necessary to maintain it in the South." Council officers had been urged in the letters to contact the President, Chief Justice Earl Warren and members of Congress, plus Northern newspaper editors. The legal adviser said that some of the letters and postcards would be sent to some people in the South, including the president and members of the Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama, where Autherine Lucy had, in February, been the first black person admitted to the University, before being shortly thereafter barred from the campus on February 6 following mob violence, for the purported reason of her own safety, before being finally expelled after being ordered by a Federal District Court judge readmitted, the expulsion being based on the claim that she and her counsel had presented unproved charges against University authorities that they had conspired to cause the mob action to prevent her attendance of classes, charges which were withdrawn from the petition to the court for a contempt citation against those officials and some of the members of the mob, four of whom then sued Ms. Lucy and the NAACP for libel, those plaintiffs including "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, later charged and convicted in 1977 for his part in the September, 1963 bombing of the Birmingham church, killing four young black girls preparing for Sunday school. The Board had also expelled a pro-segregation student from Selma for his activity during the campus demonstrations and for remarks he had made before a white citizens council against University officials.
In New York, Hermann Field, a former Cleveland architect for Case Western Reserve University, who had spent five years as a Polish prisoner, returned unannounced on the Queen Mary this date after an absence of nearly seven years. He said that his brother, Noel, another principal in the long mystery of the disappearing family members, was a "pretty sick man" in Budapest. Mr. Field said he did not know whether his brother was still a prisoner, but wrote to him occasionally to keep the lines of communication open. Noel Field was a former State Department official who, along with his wife, had dropped from sight in May, 1949 in Communist Czechoslovakia. Hermann had been arrested three months later in Poland while searching for his brother, before being released in October, 1954 after having spent five years in a cellar as a prisoner of the Polish security police. Noel and his wife had been freed by the Hungarians a month later, but they had decided to stay in Hungary and had requested political asylum. Hermann had received $50,000 from the Polish Government as compensation for his imprisonment and $1,500 additional expense for medical treatment during convalescence following his release. He said that he had never been officially charged with anything, that the more the Polish officials had investigated, the less they had found.
Emery Wister of The News reports that the Wachovia Bank & Trust Co. this date had announced that it would construct a 15-story bank and office building at the southeast corner of West Trade and South Church Streets in the heart of downtown Charlotte, with the vice-president in charge of the bank's Charlotte operations having indicated that construction would begin the following May 1, and that the upper floors would be available for occupancy in approximately 18 months, with the bank expecting to have its operations in the building by January, 1958. Meanwhile, demolition of a two-story structure at the east end of Trade Street would begin the following week to make way for the construction. That sketch they have there of the building there looks space-age, just like a rocket ship gettin' ready to go to Mars. Can't wait to see that. You think they let you go up in 'ere?
Charles Kuralt of The News tells of a mile-long queue of cars lining up along the road which led from the Old Mount Holly Rd. to a private lake this date, where dragging operations for a baby had been conducted the previous day, after a 13-year old girl and her younger brother had reported to authorities that they had seen a woman on the previous Sunday afternoon go to the lake with a baby in her arms and then return to a truck and leave without the baby. Now, the County Police and the local volunteer fire department were draining the lake through a six-inch pipe, with a patrolman indicating that the water level was going down about an inch per hour, with the estimated depth being 30 feet. At dawn, the pump had broken down and the men had gone home, with other pumps expected to be brought in during the afternoon. While there was not much for the onlookers to see, some sat on the lake bank anyway, staring at the water, saying nothing, attracted by the bizarre aspects of the tragedy which might or might not have occurred, with one of them speculating, "It might have been a cat or a puppy." Mr. Kuralt concludes: "The water flowed through the open valve into Paw Creek at the lazy rate of an inch an hour." Gosh, with all that work, it would be ashamed if they don't find any baby. We hope the little thing did not suffer, if they do find it. And if they don't, those two brats ought to get a good tanning for providing a false report to the authorities. In fact, they ought to fill back up the lake and throw them in. Poor little thing…
In Mokane, Mo., for nearly 40 years people had been casually hooking onto a woman's private water line and now she had a public utility which did not want to pay for it but would not let her stop allowing others to use it. The line had belonged to her father, who, around 1919, had permitted some neighbors to hook onto the pipe which ran from his well to his house. Later, he had laid a pipe from the well to his office and people started connecting to that pipe. The woman who had inherited the line from her father now resided in Denver and she had been attempting to rent out the line via long distance, netting her about $50. She said she had never realized that anyone was connected to it until recently, when she found that even the high school was connected without her knowledge. Since finding out about it, the school and a locker plant had been placed on meters, but the woman said that no one read the meters, and that when she raised her rate from $2 to $2.50 per month, she received a lot of complaints. She tried to sell the line to the town but the town was not interested in the asking price of $8,000. She asked the Missouri Public Service Commission to allow her to quit use of the line, but 43 residents of the town filed a protest, and the Commission was to begin a hearing this date. The woman said she had only 39 people on her list of customers and that the other four would have to pay for the usage.
In Denver, a wife was granted a divorce from her husband, after she testified that he had come home the previous Christmas Eve with a piano which she said they could not afford and so she had sent it back, and she had not seen her husband since that time.
In North Brunswick, N.J., a patrolman stopped a motorist and helped the latter tighten a loose license plate with wire, but both were embarrassed when they found out that a few days earlier, another motorist had been fined for using wire to attach a plate.
In Somerville, Mass., it was discovered that after every storm, walls along a high school stairway were soaked, but the leak could not be discovered until firemen had sprayed water on the walls, the leak having finally been found inside, with mortar disintegration 40 feet up having been the cause.
On the editorial page, "Teacher Needs More Than a Raise" indicates that North Carolina school teachers had promised a spirited jihad for better pay in 1956, with determined resoluteness shown by the delegates attending the previous week's convention of the North Carolina Education Association in Asheville.
It finds that North Carolina teachers were underpaid without question, and that it was shameful that such vital members of society were so poorly reimbursed for their services. The state had done what it could to correct the situation, but was a relatively poor state and had to devote funds to diminish other educational inequities. By 1952, only six other states spent a higher proportion of their income on public schools than did North Carolina, with almost two-thirds of general fund appropriations recommended for the present biennium through early 1957 having gone to the public school budget.
It finds it doubtful that the addition of a few dollars on each level of the scale of pay for teachers would solve much of anything, with the scale itself, according to the Fund for the Advancement of Education following a nationwide survey of the educational dilemma, being found to be too rigid and narrow from bottom to top, too unrelated to ability and performance and too prone to treat all teachers and all teaching assignments as if they were identical.
The rate of advancement was also too slow and differences in ability between teachers were often ignored, with nowhere for truly outstanding teachers to go unless they were to enter school administration. Thus the system not only discouraged prospective recruits to teaching but reflected an inefficient use of existing manpower, with teachers being bogged down with non-professional duties, requiring a redeployment of skilled personnel necessary for any significant revision of the salary structure.
It remarks that Charlotte, with its study of the use of aides for teachers, was reaching out boldly in that direction at present. But if a proper job was to be done, the General Assembly would not have an easy task, as the necessary changes would require much thoughtful consideration, consideration which was necessary by the people at present.
"It's Those Red Notes That Get You" finds that perhaps knowledge of the phenomenon that New Orleans jazzmen could elicit tears from strong men and send women to the brink of unbearable grief by the blue notes coming from their horns, had caused certain Democratic members of Congress to be disturbed about potential subversive influence within New York's Symphony of the Air. "If blue notes can raise such hob, what about Red notes?"
Even though not proven, the State Department had canceled that orchestra's forthcoming tour of the Middle East, because of suspected presence of Communist musicians. According to the Washington Post & Times-Herald, it was alleged that four violinists among the 101-member orchestra "had at some time, past or present, Communist or Communist-front affiliations or sympathies."
It finds that it was difficult to conceive what military secrets a fiddler would be able to have in America and also how his extracurricular activities would impact his ability to be a musician, making the country appear ridiculous in the eyes of friends and foes alike, conjuring up images of the Nazis having thrown out members of musical organizations for supposed disloyalty and old-line Bolsheviks who had maintained that certain Westerns symphonies smacked of "lascivious nationalism". Such matters only bolstered the Kremlin propaganda regarding Americans being "cultural barbarians".
It quotes from a foreign service dispatch to the State Department of the previous July 6, highly commending the work of the Symphony of the Air, having had an impressive impact on Japanese cultural relations with the West.
It was reported that certain Democrats hoped to be able to use the matter to show the voters that the Administration had been "soft on Communism", but the piece finds that such would not be tolerated by thinking citizens and that the Administration ought not dignify the charge by abandoning completely an effective program of cultural diplomacy.
"Basketball and the Rural Psyche" tells of the Smithfield Herald having indicated that FDR's Rural Electrification Administration and former Governor Kerr Scott's paved rural road program had diminished but had not really cured the "inferiority complex that most of us in rural regions have had to fight." But the basketball teams of N.C. State, under coach Everett Case, had been able to do that with perpetual victory, such that now the farmer, according to the Herald, thought he was as good as anybody.
It indicates that it had abandoned plans to go shrub shopping some on Sunday, digging up a dogwood here and a red bud there, as some free and equal farmer might sprinkle buckshot among the saplings instead of standing hang dog while the writer thinned the woods. But if the Herald had changed the pastoral scene for the writer, it had shattered it for politicians and patent medicine makers. Points, not parity, were what the Tar Heel farmers appeared to be after. "Ezra Taft Benson? Must be a benchwarmer on one of those second-rate teams—Kentucky likely. Soil bank? You bank it off the backboard, man, not off the ground. Sure, we got a surplus, but we got to pile up the points in case the boys get tired in the last quarter."
"And if anybody comes around here whining about the 'farm problem', kick him in the south 40 and tell him to read the sports pages."
A piece from the Louisville Times, titled "Middle Age Calls to Middle Age", finds it intriguing to look at the annual poll of movie exhibitors to determine the Hollywood star with the greatest box office appeal, that person in the current year being James Stewart, with others in the top ten being Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, John Wayne and Gary Cooper, with only one person among them, Grace Kelly, being a virtual newcomer to film.
It wonders what attraction such middle-aged stars had to the average moviegoer in the country, confirmed by other polls in recent years. It suggests that it might be the inherent attractiveness of middle age but believes instead that the truth lay elsewhere, as the nation was becoming increasingly middle-aged, such that like attracted like, with moviegoers who were also middle-aged actually watching the James Stewart of 20 years earlier, when both the viewer and the viewed were young.
Drew Pearson provides more detail, begun the previous day, about the Brown & Root contracting firm and its relationship to Senator Lyndon Johnson and its contributions to him. They had contributed to his first Senatorial primary and then deducted the contributions from income taxes, a practice used by other companies. They also provided bonuses to vice-presidents of the company and then required that a percentage of it be contributed to certain pet candidates, making that candidate beholding to the company after election.
Brown & Root had been active during the debate on the gas deregulation bill, with George Brown having entertained Senator Johnson and others in leadership roles at his Virginia estate on weekends, and had come to Washington during the week. Senator Johnson had exerted his influence to sidetrack the original forthright probe of the gas lobby, as proposed by Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri, and was now exerting influence against the recording of political contributions in primary campaigns, despite those campaigns being the ones that actually elected Senators in about a third of the states, especially in the one-party South.
In the Senatorial primary in 1941, in which Senator Johnson had lost narrowly to Governor W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, IRB agents had discovered that Brown & Root had issued checks through their subsidiary, Victoria Gravel Co., to an attorney in Houston on three separate occasions in 1941, for a total of $12,500, the attorney then having used a complicated method of using that money, distributing $10,000 of it as a profit by him and his law partner, the latter having transferred the entire $10,000 back to the original attorney, who, in turn, had written a check to pay the expenses of the Johnson campaign. When Senator Johnson was given a chance by the column to explain that transaction, he contended that he had never heard of the attorney in question and had never received financial help from him, but the attorney's father was a former mayor of Houston and a well-known person. The IRB found that a bank in Houston had microfilm records of the checks, including those which the attorney had used to pay for radio time, printing handbills and paying for other Johnson campaign expenses. An IRB agent in charge for Texas and Louisiana had written from Dallas in May, 1944 that it was obvious that the attorney in question had aided and abetted Brown & Root and Victoria Gravel in showing that political contributions, for which the attorney was the conduit, were attorney's fees, making his income "tax fraudulent". In commenting on the attorney's refusal to testify, the agent said that he did not believe the attorney was concerned about incriminating himself in connection with his own tax liability but that he feared he might be involved in a conspiracy in connection with the evasion of taxes by Brown & Root and Victoria Gravel.
The IRB had also found on Brown & Root's records a list of bonuses paid to its vice-presidents and other officials at the exact time of the 1941 primary, and that there was no explanation for those bonuses, with the employees involved not being able to provide adequate explanation for them or being able to show that they had purchased anything substantial with the money despite the fact that they had cashed those bonuses on the same day they had received them.
Marquis Childs tells of the defeat of Adlai Stevenson by Senator Estes Kefauver in the Minnesota presidential primary of the previous week having been in part the work of prominent Democrats who had decided that the front-runner, Mr. Stevenson, should be eliminated because he refused to advocate a radical solution for the farm problem. He allows that the upset might have occurred in any event because of Republicans crossing party lines to vote in the Democratic primary, but that the victory of Senator Kefauver could not have been so great without the help of Democratic leaders behind the scenes, deeply resentful of Mr. Stevenson's moderation on the farm issue.
Those same leaders were jubilant at the result and were predicting that Mr. Stevenson would do worse in the June 5 California primary. They were convinced that behind the tranquil surface of the Eisenhower prosperity, there were deep discontents in both farm and urban areas and believed that a Democratic candidate who exploited those discontents could win, even if several Southern states were to bolt the party over civil rights and integration of the public schools.
At a meeting in Denver in March, Democrats from 11 states had discussed the outline for a stop-Stevenson movement, with special emphasis on the Minnesota primary. Among those attending had been Frank McKinney, the former DNC chairman who had never forgiven Mr. Stevenson for supplanting him after the latter achieved the nomination in 1952, and Charles Brannan, former Secretary of Agriculture during the Truman Administration, responsible for the so-called Brannan Plan to pay farmers directly the difference between the parity price and market price of basic crops. At that meeting, Mr. Brannan, presently counsel for the Farmers Union, had said that Mr. Stevenson claimed to be for 90% of parity regarding farm prices but in fact, because of all of the reservations he stated, was actually favoring 60%. Most of those present at the meeting were not for Senator Kefauver per se but saw him as a useful stopgap candidate, while Governor Averell Harriman of New York, their favored candidate, waited in the wings. While all concerned would deny it, Harriman money was believed to be behind the stop-Stevenson movement.
For at least three years, Mr. Brannan had sought to get Mr. Stevenson to take a more drastic farm stand, two months earlier having called on the candidate in Chicago to go over with him Mr. Brannan's recently revised proposal for solution to the farm problem, which Mr. Stevenson promptly rejected, hurting the feelings of Mr. Brannan. After Senator Kefauver had announced in late January that he would challenge Mr. Stevenson in the Minnesota primary, word was passed among farmers that Senator Kefauver should be supported. The Farmers Union had 35,000 members in Minnesota and Mr. Brannan denied that it had any substantial impact on the outcome of the primary.
Mr. Childs suggests that there were several factors which resulted in the defeat of Mr. Stevenson, involving a combination of the extreme left and extreme right in towns and cities, that fellow-traveling elements purged from the Democratic-Farmer Labor organization under Senator Hubert Humphrey and Governor Orville Freeman were out for revenge, and the fact that rock-ribbed Republican towns were voting in favor of Senator Kefauver in the primary demonstrated the crossover effect, designed to stop the front-runner in the race.
But he indicates that it was important to realize that the stop-Stevenson Democrats could exploit an apparently deep-seated revolt, which they contended had long ago turned from Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson to the President as the real target for the blame in falling farm prices. Mr. Childs concludes that if that were true, then Republicans as well as Democrats had a serious object lesson to take from the Minnesota primary.
Stewart Alsop tells of a divided Democratic Party, with it having failed to develop winning issues outside the farm areas, and also being on the way to losing the only candidate, Mr. Stevenson, on whom the various factions of the party could agree. In addition, the party was flat broke financially.
Not even Democratic partisans in Congress claimed that the session had been a political success for the Democrats, with some Republicans already beginning to borrow former President Truman's 1948 slogan regarding the 80th Congress as "do-nothing", slightly modified to say "the good-for-nothing, do-nothing Democratic Congress." The Congress had passed only two major bills, the natural gas deregulation bill vetoed by the President, a bill which had divided the party and killed off the claim that the President and the Administration were giving away public resources to private ownership, also enabling the President to make an important political gain with his veto. The second bill was the farm bill, which might help the Democrats in November, should the President veto it, but would not afford any ground for pointing to it with pride as intelligent, responsible legislation.
Mr. Alsop ventures that it was hard to see what else the Democrats would point to with pride unless Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson were able to pull some unexpected legislative rabbits from his hat. The President had blunted many of the issues on which the Democrats had been relying for the campaign, and on other issues, the Democratic majority had been paralyzed by its internal division, with the bitter North-South division having blocked any increase in the minimum wage, for example, or any revision of Taft-Hartley, and had probably blocked any important revision of the McCarran Immigration Act. There was no central party issue on foreign policy, partly because of the prestige of Senator Walter George of Georgia having acted as a shield for Secretary of State Dulles. Defense was not nearly the political issue it might otherwise have been because of the prestige of the President in that area.
Prior to the start of the current session, the Democratic leadership was counting heavily on aid to education as an issue in the election campaign, but that seemed highly unlikely to pass because it automatically invoked the issue of desegregation of the schools. That latter issue was the heart of the troubles for the Democrats, as dramatized by the "Southern manifesto" issued on March 12, signed by 19 Southern Senators and 83 Representatives, and as further dramatized by the appointment of Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the leading segregationist, to be chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, giving Republicans an opportunity to tell black voters that a vote for a Democrat was a vote for Senator Eastland. Republicans were planning to exploit the issue by asking for a committee with subpoena powers to study civil rights. For the first time, there were real signs that many blacks, who in the past had voted Democratic almost as a solid bloc, were turning back to the Republican Party.
The situation was compounded by the loss unexpectedly in Minnesota by Adlai Stevenson. Since he had been the nominee in 1952, there had been enthusiasm among Northern Democratic leaders for him, and he was at least acceptable to almost everybody else, regarded as a bridge between the different factions of the party, his great strength. But now that bridge had been severely weakened, if not washed away, without any other visible Democrat who could take his place as such a bridge.
Furthermore, the Democrats were broke, with the coming campaign certain to be the most expensive in history, while Republicans, thanks to the brilliant management of RNC chairman Leonard Hall, were flush with money, more so than possessed by their highly financed 1952 campaign at its height.
In addition, there was no sign that the President's remarkable personal popularity was slipping.
He adds, nevertheless, that it was too early to write off the Democrats, as the Minnesota primary provided only the latest evidence that the anti-Administration farm revolt was real, added to the fact that since 1952, Democrats had been "stubbornly and illogically winning elections."
Robert C. Ruark, in Zenag, New Guinea, tells of an Australian Irishman who had discovered the "promised land, a Shangri-La", no longer ago than when he was a junior in college in 1933 at UNC. The man had found the highlands and valleys "so soft and sweetly rich that Shangri-La is the only applicable name for them." He had also found people who were not supposed to exist, constituting half the population of New Guinea and Papua, half a million people.
In the course of two days he had met Mick Leahy, the aforementioned discoverer, and his brother Jim, and Jim Taylor, which he found akin to meeting Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Balboa. He had also met the first woman, Doris Booth, to walk all the way from Salamaua to Wau at the time the gold rush had started in 1924 at Edie Creek. She was a former nurse who now owned a gold mine.
He finds all of them proper pioneers of the current time, people whose reckless vision could change the world, as New Guinea was going to play an enormous part in the affairs of the Southern Hemisphere and the Eastern world generally.
The Japanese wanted New Guinea, as did the Indonesians, and the Chinese would love to have it as well. At present, it belonged to the U.N., Australia and The Netherlands.
He was staying with the former district commissioner who was so mighty in a township of about four years old that the natives believed Christmas was in honor of his birthday. He had built roads and administered stern justice, shown great sympathy and understanding, making a new world for the natives, "fresh from the Stone Age, in the Goroka area where a black man was a full man alongside the white man, to the mutual advantage of both."
He says that he would tell more about the Leahys, Mr. Taylor and the former district commissioner, but that the current piece was primarily about Mick Leahy, a former farm boy who was a railroad clerk, a gold prospector with great courage and a nervous foot. He had found no new gold in New Guinea, but had walked into a land where no white man had previously ventured, to find a people who wore plumes and pig tusks, used stone axes, practiced cannibalism, and decorated their footpaths with a formal flower arrangement. He had become deaf in one ear from a blow from a Stone-Age club and had once had to tell one of his brothers "in the middle of a spot of bother with the savage Kukukukus: 'We have to make up our minds whether we are subjects for autopsy or hanging. I'd rather risk hanging, because we're still alive 'til they hang us.'"
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