The Charlotte News
Wednesday, May 30, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General Nathan Twining, Air Force chief of staff, had this date accepted, with the blessing of the President, an invitation to attend Russia's air show on June 24. Secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles said that in addition to authorization from the President, General Twining's visit to the Soviet Union had been approved by Secretary of State Dulles and Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson. General Twining would be accompanied by several Air Force officers. There was no word in the announcement regarding whether any of the other four members of the Joint Chiefs would join him on the trip. A cautiously extended invitation to General Twining had been made by the air attaché of the Soviet Embassy in Washington on May 21, presented to an Air Force intelligence colonel, who was told that superiors in Moscow wanted to invite the General to the air show. General Twining had reported the matter to Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and to the State Department.
Adlai Stevenson had won a nip-and-tuck battle over Senator Estes Kefauver in the Florida Democratic presidential primary the previous day, with returns from 1,713 of the state's 1,778 precincts indicating unofficially that Mr. Stevenson had received 215,945 votes to 203,091 votes for Senator Kefauver, meaning that Mr. Stevenson would receive 22 votes from the Florida delegation at the convention to only six for Senator Kefauver. The vote had been light and the results were closer than expected, with neither candidate able to claim a decisive victory. Both candidates had already departed for California, the last primary of the season, to take place on June 5, to determine who would obtain all 68 of the convention delegate votes from that state. Senator Kefauver had stated that the Florida results had been "a great moral victory" for him.
In Kansas City, the Southern Baptist Convention was urged this date to keep quiet on the racial segregation issue. Dr. Casper C. Warren of Charlotte, in a prepared presidential address opening the four-day convention, reminded that two years earlier, the convention had approved Brown v. Board of Education, and warned that open defiance of the Constitutional principle would endanger the Baptists' foreign mission work throughout 35 areas of the world and play right into the hands of the Communists, who would, in such event, ridicule not only the democratic form of government but the type of Christianity which sought to win the world. He urged that if the delegates would "show courage, prudence, patience and understanding called for by the President of the United States," they would find the solution of the question on the local level and would demonstrate to the world that "men of every race can live together in peace." His appeal was part of a message stressing the desire for harmony and unity in a denomination which had grown from a regional organization into a nationwide union of 30,000 churches with more than eight million members. He said that because of the size of the convention, its unity could be threatened by a dispute. He stated that divergent viewpoints in such a large group were inevitable but urged differing as Christians. Evangelist Billy Graham arrived at the convention to speak this night. Also present was a delegation of five Russian Baptist leaders who were enrolled as "fraternal messengers" to the convention.
In Charlotte, a crackdown on willful violators of the city's building and zoning requirements loomed this date, with a new policy in the enforcement of the zoning and building permit laws having been approved by the City Council, providing full enforcement authority to City Manager Henry Yancey. The Council had also promised a general tightening of rules requiring building permits before the start of construction and observance of all zoning regulations both in the city and in the 90-square mile perimeter area.
Charles Kuralt of The News reports of A. G. Brown angrily declaring this date, "Somebody's going to die" before his personal war with the City of Charlotte was over, stating that unless the City's building inspectors got permission by telephone, he was going to run them off of his property with a shotgun henceforth. A restraining order had been served on Mr. Brown the previous day, directing him to cease construction of a building, which he refused to do, saying he would fight the City "'til hell freezes over and then I'll skate around on the ice with them 'til it drops through." He said he would build the building and that nobody from the mayor on down was going to stop him. The restraining order directed him to appear the following Monday to show cause why it should not be made permanent, and Mr. Brown said that he would be present with his lawyers. In the meantime, he assured, he would proceed with the construction despite the order. He declared that the Supreme Court of the United States would decide who was right, himself or Mayor Philip Van Every. A building inspector who visited the site of the construction during the morning said that he found things as they had been prior to the restraining order being signed. The City Attorney said this date that if Mr. Brown did continue work on the building, he would be liable for contempt. Mr. Brown had missed election to the State House by about 3,000 votes in the previous Saturday's Democratic primary, polling nearly 8,000 votes after campaigning on the single issue of perimeter zoning. His two-story garage apartment building had a "penthouse" atop it with "Vote For Brown" painted on it in large letters. The City Attorney had charged that Mr. Brown had violated zoning laws by failing to obtain a building permit and failing to have sufficient yard. The zoning law had gone into effect at the beginning of the year and Mr. Brown stated that he had already started construction significantly prior to that time. The building was at the front of his lot and had been roofless for several weeks, while the garage apartment was nearly finished at the rear. He also planned to build a service station across the road from the two buildings, and declared that he would build that, too, and that, "It may be over somebody's dead body, but I'll build it."
Dick Young of The News indicates that stock car races at Memorial Stadium were out for the time being, as the City Council had announced this date that the chairman of the Park & Recreation Commission had withdrawn the request for approval of a lease for stock car racing at the stadium, apparently convinced that the approval would not be forthcoming. The chairman of the Commission said that he was "fed up with newspaper editors sitting in their ivory towers trying to tell us what to do," indicating that the press was attempting to decide issues rightly left to the Board. He said that he and other members of the Board had been misquoted and that deliberate attempts had been made to block the proposed stock car racing at the stadium. He did not say that they would conduct the stock car races over someone's dead body if necessary.
In Gastonia, N.C., a married man, who had visited a Charlotte lawyer during the morning, had fled from the front of the County Courthouse when he spotted a young woman who had named him as father of her unborn child. Police had found a .38-caliber pistol in the expectant mother's automobile, but apparently no threats had been made by her. After talking with the 20-year old girl, police sent her back to Gastonia, but unloaded her pistol as a safety measure. The Gastonia man did not have to be escorted back, but probably, according to police, had set a new speed record getting out of town.
A series of five photographs shows members of the 12,272-person audience attending a rock 'n' roll show the previous night at the Charlotte Coliseum, hearing two orchestras and several vocal artists, none of whom are named. The attendance mark had set a new record for the United States for such a performance. Members of the troupe had remembered being picketed in Birmingham on May 19 and that just a few days earlier in Raleigh, over 50 youths in the audience had been arrested for disturbing the peace. They had also encountered a fight with a truck driver in Cleveland—giving away the performers in the troupe from an earlier front page news story. In Charlotte, however, everything had gone smoothly and the overflow crowd had filled every seat, spilling into the aisles. No one had been thrown out and no one had to be subdued. No one had even threatened anyone with a shotgun or made statements about hell freezing over, Adlai Stevenson or anything else of dramatic note.
On the editorial page , "State System of Technical Institutes Will Promote North Carolina Progress", labeled "editorial correspondence" with a dateline from Raleigh, indicates that the state, poised hopefully on the threshold of a new age of technology, had need for both the sense and the sentiment of that cry, needing trained men with the knowledge and ability to guide the state toward a promise of vast productivity and fruitfulness.
It tells of having watched the previous day more than 150 North Carolina leaders in industry, agriculture and the professions resolve firmly to find a way to meet that need swiftly and effectively. It indicates that given the opportunity, Charlotte could help in both the search and the solution, that the problem was simple, that to prosper in an era of increasing mechanization, the state had to have an army of trained technicians, workers in the highly important "middle field" between skilled trades and professional engineering. But neither high schools nor colleges could satisfactorily produce them. What was needed was a statewide system of technical institutes to prepare North Carolinians in their localities for specific duties in the specialized fields of engineering. It suggests that Charlotte should be the site of one such institute.
The meeting in Raleigh was called by the Development Council of North Carolina State College, and the outline of the urgency of the situation was made by Robert Hanes of Winston-Salem, retired banker and one of the state's most distinguished citizens, who said that machines were now the basis for the civilization and way of life and that the state faced the future unprepared to meet its demands. He urged that immediate steps be taken to establish a program of technical institutes "to promote the advance of technical efficiency and industrial development."
In 1947, N.C. State had pioneered technical institute training with the establishment of the Morehead City Technical Institute, and in 1952, that institute was moved to Gastonia and became the Gaston Technical Institute, which had been performing a significant educational service to the state. The program there could serve as a model for state-supported technical institutes in seven or eight other population centers, including Charlotte.
It urges that the problem could not wait, as the trained manpower was presently needed. It urges that firm plans for technical institutes in Charlotte and other strategically located areas ought be prepared immediately as part of the North Carolina basic educational program.
"Leadership: The Constant Challenge" finds that among cities, leadership was constantly challenged, with the need for ever-renewed forces for betterment in resources and determination to make the betterment known so that others could be enlisted in contributing to it.
One of the major forces in Charlotte was the Chamber of Commerce, with the seven new manufacturing firms having located in the city during the previous year, spending seven million dollars annually in payrolls alone, providing ample evidence of the Chamber's activities. The new firms meant $840,000 annually in new receipts for local grocery stores, $540,000 for department and dry goods stores, $600,000 for automobile dealers, $324,000 for clothing and shoes stores, $360,000 for restaurants, $240,000 for service stations, $180,000 for building materials dealers and 1.26 million dollars for firms in other categories. It also meant new diversification in the economy and commensurate safeguards against recession, with expansion inviting other expansion and thus keeping leadership in Charlotte's hands.
The Chamber was the prime force in that progress, but it needed renewal in terms of dollars, ideas and cooperative effort. The annual membership drive for the Chamber was presently in progress. Other cities, including Greensboro and Raleigh, were already investing more per capita than Charlotte in attracting new industry and commerce, which was not to say that they were investing more effectively but were competing earnestly with Charlotte for attraction of new business.
It urges that the choice for Charlotte was simple, either compete or lose, and that the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, on its record and potential, deserved the broader support that it sought.
"Puerile Chapter in Pentagon Debate" tells of Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson possibly having to serve a cease-fire ultimatum on the warring brass in the Pentagon after having first sought to downgrade the importance of leaking documents, failing which, he had spoken firmly of the necessity of keeping the services within limits dictated by earnest debate on high strategy.
The Army had pushed the "disunification" of the services into the realm of puerility by leaking an Air Force document and adding its own marginal notes to it so that the debate between the two services was presented as the Air Force indicating that air power maintained the free world's safety, while the Army responded, "What guff!" The Air Force said it was air power which gave the nation and its allies the best chance for staying safe in the future, with the Army responding, "Says who?" To the Air Force assertion that it had to continue to be the mightiest air force in the world, the Army had said sarcastically, "Don't stop the dollars." The Army believed that the Air Force statement that it helped make friends for the U.S. through its mercy missions to be scaring the pants off some allies.
If Secretary Wilson's lectures on constructive debate, it concludes, were heeded no better than those examples, he ought march the combatants into public for a spitball battle at 20 paces.
They should consult future Georgia Gov'na Zell Milla on the spitballs, as he was a self-proclaimed expert at it by 2004.
A piece from the Providence Journal, titled "'Off to Bolshoi'", quotes Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin as having said recently, "An appropriate Russian saying is that Moscow wasn't built in a day." It suggests that the Romans had good reason to be upset with the Premier for claiming that it took longer to build Moscow than Rome
It finds the alarming thing about the statement to be that it could spread, as Mr. Khrushchev, for instance, with 15 martinis or so under his belt, might suggest, "Off to Bolshoi." Then there could be "Like hauling coals to Yakutsk" or "Byelorussian Baked Beans" or "Tiflis Scrapple" or the "Main Line of Magnitorsk", with no end of the possibilities.
"A man who swipes a cliché just can't be trusted with anything."
Drew Pearson tells of the House Government Operations Committee having been probing the operations of General Joseph Swing, the President's classmate at West Point, who, as immigration commissioner, received a modest-salaried Mexican maid sent from the border to Washington and also kept his daughter on the Federal payroll at an annual salary of $4,500. His plan for the defense of the Mexican border, a job which fell within the ambit of the Defense Department, with the advice of the State Department, was being probed, as it did not fall within the purview of the Immigration & Naturalization Service.
General Swing had two generals working for him, General Frank Partridge and General Edwin Howard. At about the time the President was meeting with the President of Mexico at White Sulfur Springs, W. Va., to congratulate each other on the peaceful amity between the two countries, the generals under General Swing were formulating a plan for the defense of the peaceful Mexican border, which none of the immigration generals would discuss. But it provided for an elaborate system of roadblocks constructed from telephone poles and railroad ties, demolition squads, high pits in highways, machine-gun emplacements and a volunteer militia of 8,000 men recruited by the border patrol. When General Swing's office was asked by the House Government Operations Committee about the plan, the response had been that it was classified.
Mr. Pearson notes that the U.S. had long boasted that it had the longest peaceful, undefended borders in the world. (But not now, ever since the "Make America Great Again" crowd got in and started trashing everything American as unfit.)
Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, chairman of the Commerce Committee, was about to gavel to order the Committee in executive session when he noticed that one of the members had stepped into the next room and, while waiting on the member to rejoin them, read a resolution from the Duck Hunters' Association of Stuttgart, O., inviting the Committee to send a delegate to a duck-calling contest. At that point, Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio, who had become upset after several of his Ohio hunting friends had been nabbed by the Fish & Wildlife Service for luring wild ducks with corn, stated, "Don't nominate me to go or Drew Pearson will be after me for duck-baiting!"
Robert C. Ruark, writing from Palamos, Spain, in what must have been an earlier written piece as he had stated more recently his return to the U.S., tells of outraged correspondence over Grace Kelly having attended a bullfight having suggested to him that "summer is a-comin' in", sing cuckoo.
He indicates that he would be in Spain for some of the summer, says he would do the bullfight piece again as it usually saved him a lot of loud defense, patient explanation and other time-killing exposition. There was no law in Spain or Mexico forcing a tourist to attend a bullfight and good seats sold at premium prices, especially around times of festival, such as Holy Week, Ysidro or San Fermin. The fights went on all week and people did not go to bed at all, having five-day hangovers based on dry sherry and cigarette smoke.
He tells of there being a lot of blood in bullfights because the bull was there to be killed or to kill the matador. A bullfighter was called "torero" or "bullman", whether he was a banderillero, a picador, or a man with the gold suit and sword. The star of the show was called "matador" or "killer", never "toreador", which was an Italian corruption for opera.
The bullfight was divided into roughly four parts, the first, with the big cape, to determine whether the bull hooked left or right, high or low, whether he could see well and to afford the matador a chance to display some fancy cape-work. The next part involved horses, which most Americans and Britons found unpalatable, as the picador sat on a "crowbait of a padded horse" with a long lance, while the bull charged toward the horse and the picador leaned on the iron, plunged it supposedly into the bull's hooking crest of muscle. That caused it to get tired, making it carry its head low, or otherwise the bull could not be fought with the little cape. He indicates that unfortunately, most picadors abused the bull by planting the lance too deep and too far back, seriously wounding the bull and robbing it of fight. Thus, the picador was the man to boo and hiss.
The prettiest part of the fight to most newcomers was the next portion in which the banderillas, which were lightly barbed wands with decorative frills of colored paper, were planted three times, in sets of two's, in the bull's shoulders. It could be quite beautiful, graceful and was very dangerous. It did not punish the bull but riled it and prepared it for the final phase, the work with the little red cape and the killing.
The latter stage was what the spectators came to see, the bull's best chance to kill the matador. He finds that a good man with a good bull could be a miracle of grace and danger, while a bad man with a good bull was a scandal, but that often a good man could make a bad bull put up a passable, if not inspired, performance. When the bull and the man were tired, the bull's head was low, its feet planted, while the killer sighted along his blade and then supposedly straight over the horn, crossing with the cape in his left hand to keep the bull's head low. If the bull lifted its head as the man crossed the horn, the man would receive 18 inches of horn in the groin or chest cavity.
The bull was a wild animal which had spent four years eating its head off in preparation for the "moment of truth". It had never seen a man on foot before, at close range, and from the second it bolted out of the toril, it wanted to kill anything it could catch.
A letter writer comments on an editorial appearing April 9, "Tar Heel Taxes Should Be Withheld", which had praised the mode of collecting Federal income taxes from wage and salaried workers, while severely criticizing the last General Assembly because it had not enacted the necessary legislation to provide for such a mode of collecting state income taxes from wage and salaried workers on a pay-as-you-go basis. He states that he was inclined to believe that the editors had never looked beyond the misleading title to examine carefully and consider its operating effect. He then goes on at great length, venturing into the Constitution and the Bible, to contest the editorial.
A letter writer commends the newspaper for its series of articles on the dilapidated plight of the Mint Museum and hopes that the words would not fall on deaf ears.
A letter from the campaign chairman for Superior Court Judge Hugh Campbell thanks the newspaper for providing biographical sketches of the candidates running in the Saturday primary. He indicates that when the people were given the facts they would come up with the right answer and the previous Saturday they had done so.
A letter writer compliments the newspaper on the series of articles by Ann Sawyer regarding the County and City budgets and the schools, finding the pieces factual and interesting, containing the type of information which the people of the community needed.
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