The Charlotte News
Friday, June 15, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President was reported to be making his best progress yet after a week of hospitalization following his surgery for ileitis the previous Saturday morning, this date handling quite a bit of White House business, including the signing of 21 documents. White House press secretary James Hagerty said that the President had given no member of his staff any hint regarding his political future. Regarding one columnist's report that the President intended to announce his political plans prior to leaving the hospital, probably at the end of the following week, Mr. Hagerty said that if the newsmen thought that he would comment on what every columnist said, they were nuts. Physicians to the President had said that he had a very good night with almost eight hours of continuous sleep, the longest unbroken rest since he had entered the hospital the previous Friday.
In Tallahassee, Fla., the Cities Transit Co. had disclosed this date that it intended to go out of business in Tallahassee on July 1 unless a solution was found to the problems created by a boycott of buses by local blacks, who comprised about one-third of the city's 40,000 population and who had been refusing to ride the buses since May 29 in protest of segregation practices required by state and city laws. An estimated 70 percent of the bus company's business prior to the boycott came from black passengers. A full-page ad in the Tallahassee Democrat had reproduced a letter from the bus company to the City commission, announcing the bus line's intention to suspend service on July 1 "under existing circumstances". The letter conceded that the boycott had been effective and had cut revenues by 60 percent. The City during the week had granted the company authority to increase its fares from 10 to 15 cents to help make up for the loss of revenue. The boycott had been started after the arrest by City police of two black coeds from Florida A&M University for refusing to move to the rear of a bus after being requested to do so by the driver.
In New York, it was reported that the United Steelworkers union this date had rejected as inadequate the wage and contract proposals made by the Big Three steel companies, with David McDonald, union president, having commented to the press that "no mathematical juggling can obscure that the steelworkers have been offered an increase in take-home pay this year of five cents an hour," which he described as "too little, too late and too long," offering inadequate fringe benefits and becoming effective too late to have any significance, with a contract period which was too long. The Big Three, U.S. Steel, Bethlehem and Republic, wanted a five-year contract. Mr. McDonald said rejection of the offer had been supported unanimously by the union's 170-member wage policy committee. The rejection raised the possibility of a strike in the 650,000-employee industry, unless the differences could be reconciled prior to the expiration of the existing contract on June 30. Mr. McDonald said that he was hopeful that an agreement could still be reached, but that after a year of record profits and productivity, the industry had offered the steelworkers only a small hourly increase and a minor adjustment for skilled employees, equating to a two percent wage increase for each of the five years of the proposed contract.
Robert Kintner, president of ABC, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee this date that the only monopoly in the broadcasting business had been created by the Government through its failure to let enough stations compete, saying that the scarcity problem could be solved without the need of additional governmental intervention or regulation. Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio believed that ABC's larger competitors, NBC and CBS, had established an "economic stranglehold" on the industry, and proposed Government regulation of the networks. But Mr. Kintner said that ABC, despite its smaller size, could compete effectively with NBC and CBS without such regulation, provided the Government would license more television stations.
In New York, subways were operating as usual this date following a nine-hour walkout by motormen, unprecedented in the history of the city transit system. The City's Transit Authority announced that 27 motormen, including 25 officials, among whom was the president, of the Motormen's Benevolent Association, their new union, had been suspended in consequence of the walkout. When the walkout began, the temperature in the city was 96.1 in the shade. It had begun as a wildcat strike of three motormen on the BMT line, gradually spreading to all three subway lines, producing confusion and congestion during the afternoon rush hour. After the end of the walkout, it had taken several hours to restore the system to full operation. The City had threatened to use the Condon-Wadlin Act, an antistrike state law requiring automatic dismissal of striking public employees, but had refrained from enforcing it. On a normal day, about 4.5 million people rode the 228-mile subway system, some 800,000 of whom did so during the morning and evening rush hours. Thousands of people had queued up in an orderly fashion for buses and trolleys during the walkout and many had walked the Williamsburg and Queensborough Bridges rather than get into line for the buses, while hundreds resorted to hitchhiking. The new union in which the walkout had occurred had split from Michael Quill's AFL-CIO Transport Workers Union and had been suspended for refusing to take supervisory personnel on a BMT run.
In St. Louis, attorneys for former appointments secretary to former President Truman, Matthew Connelly, and former head of the Justice Department's tax division during the Truman Administration, Lamar Caudle, having been convicted the previous day of conspiring to help a tax evader in his criminal prosecution after accepting a bribe in the form of an oil royalties contract arranged by the attorney for the tax evader, who eventually pleaded guilty but avoided jail for health reasons, were planning to seek a new trial in motions to be heard at the date of sentencing, July 19. They faced a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $100,000 fine.
Elizabeth Prince of The News reports of a movement having come out of Rockingham, near Mr. Caudle's hometown of Wadesboro, dubbed "A Dollar for Caudle", designed to "fight the evils of a big business administration". The man who had begun the fund said that he thus far had collected $101 and that the Register of Deeds in Wadesboro had agreed to collect the fund, the latter stating that the people of Wadesboro were "distressed to death, completely shocked" regarding the conviction of Mr. Caudle and would be behind any movement to help him. The man who started the fund said that the fund would not be restricted to helping Mr. Caudle in his appeal and that the people would prosecute the appeal whether Mr. Caudle wanted to do so or not, that 14 North Carolina counties, including Mecklenburg, had been contacted to support the fund. He said that the Republican Party had made a scapegoat of Mr. Caudle, "sacrificing a good man, a good Democrat", to further their aim of "trying to divide the South, to keep down progress and industry of the South." He said that they would work it out with all 100 counties of the state, to see that the Democratic Party survived in the South, "regardless of Brownell's tactics", referring to the Justice Department.
Near Spruce Pine, N.C., a middle-aged farmer and his wife had been found shot to death at their home early this date and authorities said that they were holding a man for questioning in connection with the case, that the couple had been dead for about a week when their bodies were discovered, having been shot by heavy shotgun charges. The bodies had been found outside the home by their son-in-law who came to visit the previous night, with a deputy sheriff indicating that robbery had been the apparent motive. The story indicates that the murders called to mind a similar case out of Madison County in 1950, wherein a couple had been killed by two vengeful moonshiners and five years later, two men had been convicted and sentenced to 25 to 30 years in prison.
Charles Kuralt of The News tells of the president of a local real estate company having offered this date to allow industrial firms along Pineville Road to tie into his private sewage line to clear up smelly Little Hope Creek, about which Mr. Kuralt had written a story earlier in the week. The man had built many of the houses in the sections affected by the odor from the creek, created by industrial firms dumping waste in it, and said that he had offered his sewer line to the industrial firms long earlier but that they had declined the offer, instead choosing to dump their waste into a ditch which eventually connected with Little Hope Creek. One plant manager had said this date that he understood that the City did not want the firms to dump their waste into its sewage system. But City Manager Henry Yancey said that the firms would only need obtain a tapping permit and pay for treatment of the waste, the same requirement made of anyone tapping into the City's sewage system. The plant manager had said that the companies involved had moved into the county from the city to avoid such situations, giving no indication of whether they would accept the real estate company president's offer. The latter had challenged the statement of the plant owner who said that the Pineville Road companies had been built before the houses, saying that he had begun construction of the houses in 1949, before there was any plant present. He said that it would cost little for the firms to reroute their industrial waste into his sewage line, that 800 feet of line, costing $1.50 to $2 per foot, would be enough to do the job. He said that he customarily charged for the privilege of tapping into the sewage line but that he would allow the industrial plants to tap into it for free. He added that when the first houses had been built in the area, the stream had been so pure that children could wade in it, but that now it was discolored and odorous. He said that if the industrial plants did not take advantage of the offer, it might be possible to prosecute them under state law, making it a misdemeanor to dump trash within 100 feet of a public highway, indicating that industrial waste constituted liquid trash, and that his attorneys were studying the situation with a view toward legal action should the plants persist in dumping waste into the roadside ditch.
Dick Young of The News reports that by the fall, long freight trains which blocked traffic on the east side of midtown Charlotte would no longer be doing so, with a target date set of September 15 for completion of Southern Railway's crossline south of the city, with the laying of the tracks scheduled to begin the following week.
One of the Navy's aircraft carriers was to be named "Kitty Hawk" in honor of the site in North Carolina at Kill Devil Hills, where the Wright brothers had made their first manned flight of an aircraft in December, 1903, also from a carrier sled of a sort, though on sand rather than sea. The carrier was patterned after the U.S.S. Forrestal and would be one of the largest, most modern of its type in the U.S. Navy.
United Airlines this date opened employment to younger and taller stewardesses, enabling them to be as tall as 5'8", instead of the current limit of 5'7", and to be as young as 20, instead of 21, indicating that higher ceilings in modern planes allowed for the height change and that shortage of stewardesses had produced the lowering of the age limit. What about bad altitudes, especially of ground personnel, who are obviously getting small out by the grass during teatime breaks?
In Wilmington, N.C., a female employee of a hotel had been bitten on her right leg the previous day by a jungle cat, according to police, the cat having been the pet of a Swiss U.N. employee, who had accompanied a cargo of wild animals to Wilmington, explaining that her housekeeper must have stepped on the cat or gotten close enough to it to scare it. The type of jungle cat was not identified by the story.
In Durango, Colo., a man from Bakersfield, Calif., had taken first place in a fishing contest, having caught a 5 pound, 21.5 inch trout in the Pine River, utilizing a marshmallow as his bait.
We are trying to figure what was meant by the recondite caption below the photograph of the empty subway platform, which reads: "Bare Platform At 34th St. Shows Eff ectivenesss Of Subway Walkout". What is this "Eff ectiveness"? Is it to do with ectoplasm and then the Eff ectoplasm? Maybe, false ectoplasm, or are we supposed to be haunted by the empty platform, as in the ineffable ectoplasm. But there is no "in" before "Eff". Is 34 important? C D Street. See D Street. Is there a ghost at D Street and at F Street also? Maybe, there's a bear coming. We're troubled. You'd, too, if you were three. Can you explain it? The photograph does provide a nice example of the vanishing point phenomenon though, perhaps intended by the photographer to suggest a symbolic "V" for the victory by the union, or that there was also a ghost
On the editorial page, "South Should Spurn Road to Isolation" indicates that there was no doubt what Senator Kerr Scott of North Carolina had said to Governor George Bell Timmerman, Jr., that the Senator wanted no part of the Southern strategy suggesting formation of a third party. Governor Timmerman denied that intent, but a suggestion of such was inherent in his proposal to hold Southern state conventions in recess past the national convention to start in mid-August.
It finds Senator Scott's reply needlessly harsh but clearly realistic, that the Southern solidarity sought by Governor Timmerman, representing a means of stamping a Southern trademark on the national party platform, did not exist, having been swept away in a tide of social and economic change. The South now had nowhere to go but forward within the established political parties.
Senator Scott had stated truth when he said that he was aware of the fact that there would be those at the convention who did not understand some of the problems of the South, but that he held the deep conviction that more constructive work could be done toward winning friends for the South and its problems by sticking within the framework of the party than through threatening to fight under a futile banner.
Governor Timmerman had said that the South had to be concerned with means to win national consideration of regional views, but the piece finds it hard to see what more effective instruments than compromise and conciliation could be employed to that effect, that a walkout and formation of a splinter party were avenues to "impotent isolation". The South might not win all it hoped for at the Democratic convention, but by adopting an all-or-nothing approach would diminish the considerable power it had in the Congressional chairmanships, and it finds that what Senator Scott had said to Governor Timmerman therefore made sense.
"Do-Goodism vs. Enlightened Self-Interest" indicates that a resident of Charlotte who had been traveling abroad during the spring had written a letter to the newspaper bristling with indignation about "European ingratitude", which the piece finds illustrative of a widespread misconception about the U.S. foreign aid program, presently in limbo before Congress.
The writer had stated that those foreign countries did not appear grateful for what the U.S. had done for them out of the goodness of its heart and appeared to hate Americans for it. It finds the attitude incongruous, as Europe's response to America was an attitude of intellectual hauteur, antipathy and envy, while America, in the mind of the letter writer, was full of boundless idealism and do-good generosity. While there were those opposed to America abroad, it does not know how extensive the attitude was or how important it was, and suggests that the U.S. could do something about it by being more realistic in foreign policy objectives, by taking sides and aggressively championing the rights of people everywhere seeking to break the chains of colonialism and feudal landlordism.
But Americans should never fool themselves into believing that foreign aid was offered purely out of the goodness of their hearts, a notion which was "tommyrot", as the country had an enlightened interest in the welfare of free men everywhere while the foreign aid program was desperately needed based largely on self-interest of the country.
It finds it proper to question the type of foreign aid legislation proposed by the Administration and thinks it ought be scrutinized closely as to whether it represented realistic objectives and methods, then adjusted accordingly, while not being completely eliminated or mangled beyond recognition.
Raymond Cartier, executive director of the French magazine Paris Match, had recently written: "There would be less anti-Americanism in the world if America abandoned its philanthropic aspirations, its vocation of Santa Claus, its transcendental morality, all its missionary trappings, all its boy scout gear, and if, at last, it followed openly and intelligently the policy of its own interest." It finds it to have summed up an analysis of anti-Americanism reprinted as an ad in the New York Times during the current week.
A policy of the country's own interest could and should include foreign aid, that by binding the nation to the interests and aspirations of other nations, it helped itself in a struggle for survival against the forces of tyranny. "But let's not fool ourselves or our friends about the reasons for our efforts."
"The System Demands Decency, Too" indicates that now that public indignation had subsided regarding the drowning deaths of six Marines at Parris Island the prior April during a nighttime forced march by an inebriated drill sergeant into a tidal stream adjoining the base, the Marine Corps had announced that recruit training methods, which had served so well in the past, would be retained in their essential features, with hazing "as a relief for anger and frustrations" being eliminated. Maj. General David Shoup, inspector general of recruit training, had stated that the training and indoctrination program had always been rugged, as the tough and vital mission of the Corps had demanded it.
It finds that the mission of the Corps also demanded that every man preserve his self-respect, essential in a civilized society. The public would watch closely to determine if there was any conflict between the promises, including the elimination of acts of personal humiliation, so much a part of that system.
"They Suspect That Ike Won't Run" indicates that recent mailings to the newspaper had brought no word from those favoring Massachusetts Governor Christian Herter for president if President Eisenhower did not run, with the former's supporters apparently content that the President would run again.
But in California, suspicion persisted among the MacArthur-McCarthy-Knowland supporters that the President might decline the nomination at the San Francisco convention in August, while the internationalist wing of the Republican Party suspected the same thing, ready to nominate either Harold Stassen, former Governor Thomas Dewey, Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, or the President's brother Milton.
It finds that the situation explained the emergence of the nation's newest political committee, the Knowland-for-President … If ... Committee, suggesting that the name provided commentary on the withering of the Republican right wing, as not long earlier, such a club would have been named the "Knowland-for-President-Notwithstanding Committee" or the "Knowland-for-President-Nevertheless Committee".
A piece from the Raleigh Times,
titled "Yes, but How Is He at Croquet?" tells of becoming
tired of the amazing exploits of Duke University sophomore, Dave
Sime
It was properly in awe of his
achievements in track
It did not believe the claims of his baseball prowess and bets that he could not play croquet "for beans."
Drew Pearson indicates that most American journalists, along with himself, had been remiss in not reporting the actual health of President Roosevelt when he had run for re-election for the fourth term in 1944, with his death having come the following April 12. He indicates that there were some legitimate reasons for not reporting FDR's health, among them wartime censorship, the fact that the press did not see him much during the war, plus a natural hesitancy to report the unpleasant possibility that he could die in office. But when the presidency influenced the peace and prosperity of the world, it was essential that U.S. voters be aware of the actual facts, beyond the medical bulletins, before they nominated or elected any man to the most important office in the world.
President Eisenhower had expressed grave doubt about his own health, even while the politicians, as in the case of FDR, had been determined to make him run again. Prior to the President's surgery of the prior Saturday, it had been necessary to administer vitamin K intravenously to thicken his blood in preparation for it, because he had been provided an anticoagulant since his heart attack the prior September 24, making his blood so thin that if care was not taken, there would be a danger that he could bleed through his body tissues, with serious, even fatal, bleeding during surgery. The anticoagulant was considered to be one of the most important factors in recovery from the heart attack.
Col. Thomas Mattingly, the heart specialist at Walter Reed Army Hospital, had been studying recently under Cornell Medical School Drs. W. T. Foley and Irving S. Wright, two of the leading experts on anticoagulants, with Dr. Foley having worked in a Japanese prison camp during the war, where he had discovered that the non-fatty prison diet almost completely had eliminated heart disease. Dr. Wright, a past president of the American Heart Association and in charge of the Vascular Research Section of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, had recently given significant testimony regarding anticoagulants before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. Though the testimony had been ignored by the press, it gave some disturbing insight into the President's health regarding the possibility of recurrent attacks and the connection between the heart and the brain, indicating that there was a frequent relationship between a heart attack and hardening of the arteries in the brain, diminishing the patient's mental powers.
Mr. Pearson concludes that while the nation prayed that the anticoagulants would reduce the complications, the public also had to realize that the chance of complications existed and that any doctor who stated otherwise was mixing politics with medicine.
Query, Republicans, what do you do with a presidential front-runner in your party, presently 77 years old, who is either semi-senile enough or just plain stupid enough to undertake actions, both in the lead-up to the 2016 election and following his substantial loss, both in the electoral college and in the popular vote, in 2020, to get himself indicted under four separate indictments, in two different states and in two Federal jurisdictions, all while some of you and your party organs, such as Fox "News" and the functional equivalent, obsess over President Biden's occasional stumble of words, when it is known and quite openly admitted by him that since his youth, he suffered from a speech impediment, criticism of which comes off therefore as absurdly mocking of someone who has overcome mild infirmities, just like your head nut once mocked a reporter for a physical infirmity, rather than giving praise to a man who, approaching 81, retains remarkable physical energy and remarkable command of law, facts and, most importantly, essential application of same to the legal principles on which he was trained, such that his Administration has been remarkably scandal-free during his first 2 1/2 years in office. Yet, the naysayers serve the interests of foreign enemies who would mock the nation, all while defending a man under four separate indictments, accused in two of them of attempting to subvert democracy, in a third, to retain possession after his term in office of classified secret documents to which he had no right and which were retained and hidden corruptly despite efforts by the National Archives to work with him for an extended period to get them back, and in the fourth, seeking to hide with false record-keeping entries, in violation of state law and Federal campaign finance reporting laws, a reported affair with a porn star on the belief that revelation of the story might have hurt his chances of election in the 2016 cycle, which everyone knows, but for the long outdated electoral college, an 18th Century invention, that he substantially lost also, having managed to win the electoral college by a total of 78,000 votes in three states.
How do we make sense of your absurdity other than to ascribe it either to your own insanity, your own unremitting and insatiable, purblind economic or political greed, or your plain desire for a totalitarian dictatorship, in which all the little underlings will be brainwashed to believe that The Leader is the person in whom all great goodness is enshrined by the gods of will, probably somewhere in the Teutonic mill of ideas, while all of the minions are entrusted with preserving His Highness and should not bother their wee little heads with thought or contemplation on any of his glaring human frailties, that such would be tantamount to a sacrilege? What are we to think? You tell us, because we do not know, but believe that the answer has to be one or more of those alternatives.
We subscribe to the school of thought that suggests that your party front-runner for the nomination has engaged in such blatantly illegal and outrageous activity that, for his own good, he should plead not guilty by reason of insanity to all or at least some of the indictments, which entry would, of course, not displease any of his dedicated followers, as they would find it to be the will of the gods of the Teutonic order and so Their will be done, that the Answer to it all will become manifest in due course, just as with the End of Times Prophecy, ending with them casting their ballot for him anyway, just as he predicted, when he said in 2016 that he could go out and shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still not lose voters. Perhaps such a comment explains why he brazenly engaged in some of the conduct he did, recording his "perfect phone calls".
Note that we have not even mentioned the absurdity of continued support of him despite the two impeachments by the House.
It is appropriate to be disturbed by the largest part of a political party which has totally divorced itself from reality, and embraced the lowest common denominator of opinion in the country, to give that unenlightened, uneducated voice not only a stake in the democracy, but clearly seeking to have that voice as the dictator of will in the country, not dissimilar to that movement and its demagogic leader which overtook Germany in 1932 and onward through the end of World War II. Are we comparing those Republicans who still support renomination of him, and his proven track record for seeking autocratic rule by a minority of the country, to Nazis? Perhaps...
Incidentally, we are still also wondering about one of his co-defendants in the case in Atlanta, a co-defendant who graduated from the UNC School of Law in 1978 after supposedly somehow having apparently graduated from UNC as an undergraduate at the age of 19 or 20 in 1975. How did she do that?
We posed the question herein two and a half years ago when she was prominent in the news, after becoming curious about her familiar accent and found her to be a native of the Raleigh area and listed in our yearbook from 1974 among the freshman class that year, and then found that she had graduated from the UNC Law School in 1978. (She was not listed in the 1975 yearbook, but, unlike previous yearbooks, there was no index to that yearbook and so if not appearing in any organization or honorary society listing or among the regular student photos, her name would not have been listed even though perhaps still a student.) What a wunderkind, we thought, to have managed to go from being presumably no more than a sophomore to graduation from law school in the space of three short years, or from being a freshman to law school graduation in four years, seemingly an impossible academic feat, given the imposed curriculum constraints of law school, with every entering student required first year to take yearlong courses in five particular subjects, requiring entry therefore only in the fall of a given school year, and, furthermore, given the constraints of the undergraduate requirements extant at the time at UNC, that to graduate, a student had to have 120 course hours of work, with most courses providing 3 course hours of credit, and summer school limited to two courses per five-week session for each of two sessions. Most students, given the requirement at the time of two hours of physical education and one lab hour in conjunction with a pure science course, would have graduated from UNC with at least 123 hours. It has to be borne in mind, too, that to try to take 18 hours of coursework per semester, or six courses, would be a back-breaker for even the very best students, as we saw some try it and crumble under the load at the time, not impossible but also not likely accomplished on a regular basis beyond one semester. Even so, in four semesters, that would have added not even one extra semester to the transcript by the end of sophomore year. Add to that twelve hours of summer school after the freshman year and one is still left a couple of courses short of finishing the junior year. A student could have entered the University at the time with up to six hours of college credit achieved in advanced placement courses in high school. But with all of that figured in to the maximum course load, there is still no way that a person who was a sophomore, even if about to break into junior status during summer school that year, could wind up graduating at the end of the summer and then enter law school that fall of 1975, which she had to have done for all of those facts to remain consistent.
Then, following her recent indictment in Atlanta, we ran across this early 2020 piece from Politico, in which she was quoted as having explained that she had graduated college at age 19 because her family could not afford the tuition costs, that she was receiving a student loan, and there was no reason "in stringing it out". But being from Raleigh, she could have easily commuted the 30 miles each day to classes while living at home if housing costs were truly a problem, unlikely since housing costs were quite cheap in those days, equating to about $40 to $50 or less per month for a student either to live in a dorm room or to share a nice apartment close to campus. Tuition was about $225 per semester, believe it or not. And the cost of books would have been a constant regardless of how fast one completed the coursework associated with them. Food in Chapel Hill was also cheap, as restaurants had to cater to the student population, all on limited finances, with the dratted meal plan of Lenoir Hall equating, if memory serves, to about a buck or less per meal, though we never had the stomach for it and chose to pay the normal Franklin Street and nearby prices of around $2 to $3 per meal at dinner, with maybe $1.50 for lunch, the latter usually consumed at desks or on the fly, always skipping breakfast for lack of time or inclination, with an occasional splurge for a steak at Jordan's, well before the time of Michael, at perhaps $6 to $7 on a Sunday night once per month or so, obviously an option which could have been forgone. So expenses of attendance of college in those days at UNC were not that much, ditto for the immediately ensuing time in law school, except that the books, thanks to West Publishing Co. being highway robbers, were significantly more expensive than during undergraduate days, averaging about $50 per book compared to about $15 or less per undergraduate book.
Moreover, her weak explanation for the anomaly fails to include how she graduated from UNC as a sophomore, plus, theoretically, two summer school sessions thereafter that ensuing summer of 1975. Many students have in the past, as did Thomas Wolfe and Robert C. Ruark, for instance, entered the University at a younger age than 17 or 18, apparently far more common in the time prior to the glut of students entering after World War II, but she does not claim to have done so and that would not explain how she advanced from being in the sophomore class in 1975, (or from the freshman class in 1974), to entry to law school the following fall, enabling graduation from law school in 1978. Nor does she claim to have compressed her time in law school to less than three years, which would be hard to do given the complexity of the coursework and the required curriculum of the first year, not susceptible to alteration, though 85 hours, not the 90 hours normally associated with a full course load for six semesters, was required for graduation at that time. Thus, what she says she did appears quite impossible to accomplish, requiring two years of undergraduate work to have been crammed into two five-week summer school sessions, and would be so even if, as indicated, she had been about to turn the corner in spring, 1975 into becoming a junior with one or two more courses to her credit or even if she had technically earned the status of a junior during that spring and was erroneously listed among the freshmen in 1974, a listing which was self-designated by each student on a card when submitting pictures for the yearbook in late January of the year in question.
As we indicated two years ago, there were cases at the time, when computer punch cards were run through a machine to keep track of grades and credits achieved as an undergraduate, involving falsification of undergraduate transcripts to get into law schools or other professional schools in other areas of the country, even relatively nearby in at least one instance...
There is one other glaring discrepancy in the statement attributed to her by Politico, that being that she claims apparently to have been admitted to the Law School in 1974 at age 19. But that was not possible unless she was admitted in the winter or spring of 1974, when still a freshman at the University, as she appeared in the 1974 Yackety Yack, for the simple reason that the Law School at the time admitted applicants on early admission in February, 1975, or during the regular admission period in around April, or from the consequent waiting list for those not qualifying for the first rounds of admission but, pending others not accepting their spots, subject to being admitted during the course of the summer. Thus, the earliest she could have been admitted to the Law School would have been February, 1975, contingent on her finishing her undergraduate coursework by the start of orientation for law school the ensuing latter August. She could not have been admitted in the fall of 1974, or, obviously, as a freshman the prior school year. That is a minor flaw in her purported statement, perhaps the result of inaccurate memory of the time, though, typically, one would not forget the month and year when one received in the mail the notice of admission to law school, highly competitive for places at the UNC Law School at the time. So it is, in combination with the primary improbability regarding the lack of time for the necessary coursework for graduation, another issue which appears to contest her proper credentials at the time for entry to law school.
Perhaps, again, there is some plausible explanation for this seemingly impossible feat, but we would like to hear it delineated by her in verifiable detail and not simply glossed over as she did in the Politico article, as it may say something either highly positive or quite negative about her general character from a relatively early age, though, for remoteness in time, probably excludable for impeachment as potentially other acts of conduct involving fraud, should she eventually testify in her own behalf in the Atlanta case.
But it is rather disturbing to think that someone might have cheated their way into the Law School all those years ago, when many worthy candidates were striving to get into the Law School on their own merit achieved as undergraduates at various schools and many did not. We feel certain that such people who did not quite make it would like to know, far more even than we would like to know, just how this person managed to go from being a sophomore at UNC to being a first year law student at UNC in the course of a mere three short months in 1975, or, as documented, from being a freshman in 1974 to graduation from law school in the space of four years, supposedly, according to her early 2020 statement in Politico, having been admitted to the Law School in 1974, when she was still a freshman. Was it some cool magic trick worthy of Las Vegas? Maybe it is an inspiring story of grit and determination which will engender lasting admiration. Who knows?
Or did she know something, first-hand, anent ghosting from graveyards, or the functional equivalent, and not just regarding voting?
Some enterprising journalist might want to press the issue to find out, after performing due diligence to verify the accuracy of what we have stated from memory regarding graduation requirements and limitations on summer school hours in 1975. We know that the graduation requirement of 120 hours is accurate but because we never attended summer school, the recollection on that point relies on the experience of others at the time and a general passing memory of having read of the limitation of six hours of coursework per session for each of the two sessions available, that is twelve hours total, less than a full semester consisting of 15 hours. We are interested not for any petty reason and never had even a passing acquaintance with this person or heard of her while at UNC, had never heard of her until her notoriety achieved in the wake of the 2020 election. But it might provide some insight into this woman's past and possibly explain the glaring character flaw which inevitably led her into her present legal difficulties. We do not revel in anyone's legal difficulties, especially those which are criminal and carry the prospect of substantial jail time if convicted. It is life-altering and ruinous. But given her outrageous public claims in an official capacity as an attorney on behalf of the Trump campaign in 2020-2021, every voter has the right to know about any person making such fanciful and demonstrably false charges, undermining the confidence in the integrity of a presidential election, going far beyond mere exercise of freedom of speech and advocacy as a lawyer, allegedly helping to arrange a slate of fraudulent electors from Georgia to present themselves as alternate electors in contravention of the determined and certified result from that state, quite outside the legal processes in Georgia for contesting an election result.
To summarize, as Steve Martin sang in 1976 at the Boarding
House in San Francisco, it's impossible to put a Cadillac in your nose
Walter Lippmann finds the rate and character of the President's recovery from his surgery after an attack of ileitis the prior Friday to be the only subject of current public interest, with a period of uncertainty to follow the President's departure from the hospital. He indicates that had the President not been stricken, there would have been many subjects of great public interest, such as the conflict on neutrality between what the President had sought to say in his press conference of the prior week and what Secretary of State Dulles had said in his speech at Iowa State College the prior Saturday, a conflict all the more surprising given that the President had promised that Secretary Dulles would make the matter clear so that everyone could understand that the Administration was trying to wage peace. But what Mr. Dulles had made clear was that he and the President did not think alike regarding the nations which refused to join the Western military alliances.
For those who recalled U.S. history as a neutral in respect to alliances with Europe, it did not seem immoral or necessarily unwise for a nation to remain neutral, not indicating indifference as between right and wrong or decency and indecency. But for Mr. Dulles, neutrality vis-a-vis military alliances was "except under very exceptional circumstances … an immoral and shortsighted conception." Mr. Lippmann finds it a rather sweeping generalization in view of the fact that in Europe, neutrality embraced Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria and Finland, and in Asia, India, Burma, Ceylon and Indonesia, in the Middle East, all of the Arab states except Iraq, and also covering much of Latin America.
He finds that what had brought about the schism between the President and the Secretary was that apparently "uncontrollable itch in high quarters to utter resounding generalizations", asking why it was necessary for the President to discuss neutrality in general and abstract terms, and for the Secretary to speak on the subject as if from a mountaintop, wonders whether other heads of states and other foreign ministers felt the need to make moral judgments about the policies of other governments and why the U.S. had to suffer from that recurring affliction. He suggests that the essence of the problem of neutrality and alliances was that it was the problem of each sovereign state and that there was no general rule, that what was best for some states was not necessarily so for all states, that the vice of the position of Secretary Dulles was that it presumed to judge and condemn on general grounds the policy of many states with whom the U.S. had no quarrel and who had done the U.S. no injury, having as much right as the U.S. to join or refuse to join particular alliances. He finds that Mr. Dulles ought know that his sweeping moral judgments would gain him no allies but could alienate many friends.
The context of those untimely and dangerous utterances was that certain new military alliances, particularly SEATO and the Baghdad Pact, were causing so much trouble that a reappraisal had become necessary, with the President's friendly remarks on neutrality reflecting one aspect of that reappraisal and the harsh remarks by Secretary Dulles reflecting another, both reflecting the fear that if any concessions, like that of the President, were made to neutrality, the whole fragile structure of the alliances would crumble.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, states that it had been 22 years during the current week since he had graduated from UNC and made his way out into the world, having missed very few meals early afterward and for some time since had fed high on the hog. He says that the credit was due to two gentlemen who were formally retired from UNC the previous week after about 100 years of service between them, one being O. J. Coffin, head of the journalism school, and the other, Phillips Russell, who had supervised creative writing.
Mr. Coffin had been an old-time practical newspaperman who used to write a column titled "Shucks and Nubbins", and knew more about the prime principles of journalism than any city editor Mr. Ruark had ever met. Mr. Russell, who was a fine biographer, taught writing for the love of it, was in love with words and imparted the romance to his students. He suggests that possibly the new educators did not have what the old ones had, a sense of fellowship with their students, whereas Messrs. Coffin and Russell had a magnificent ability to bestow knowledge without patronage.
Mr. Coffin had been the clearinghouse for newspaper jobs in the Carolinas and Virginia while Mr. Russell had honed the raw material to the point where Mr. Coffin found it smooth enough to sell it. Mr. Coffin had evaluated his new students with an order to write their own version of certain biblical passages, just to see if the writer had any sense of the dramatic, with Mr. Ruark remembering a rough time with Abraham and Isaac as a news story. Mr. Coffin would then read aloud the product written, and the sarcasm he could inject into his rendition would have earned him an easy living on the stage. He had been rough when Mr. Russell was gentle, and both managed to achieve the same thing, sense of responsibility.
Mr. Coffin made the students cover the courts and crime, while Mr. Russell made them read before they wrote, and both had known what was wrong with what students had written and told them, with Mr. Coffin being tough, while Mr. Russell was soft. They had worked in tandem, "in a benevolent conspiracy against stupidity."
Mr. Coffin had gotten Mr. Ruark his first job his senior year, imparting of it over a jug of bootleg liquor at the final dance, telling him that it was located in Hamlet, that the job didn't pay any money to speak of and would be altogether impossible, but that Mr. Ruark was the only student he had who was stubborn enough to survive it, that it started the following Monday.
He found them a fantastic team, together with Wallace Caldwell, who could make ancient history breathtaking, and Spike Harland, an archaeology professor whose wit and lectures had been so brilliant that Mr. Ruark actually could not rest until he found a new pyramid, which he had done just to pay off the professor.
"They were education synthesized, in its best and truest sense. And I do hope the editors let this run longer. It is so seldom a man gets a chance to make public thank-you to men who provide the nation with the best product they can produce from really awful raw material.
"Happy pasture, gentlemen, with all thanks and much love."
A letter writer encloses a letter he had sent to the managing director of the Rock Hill, S.C., Chamber of Commerce regarding the latter's comment on the Mecklenburg County Commission's opposition to location of the Bowater Co. paper manufacturing plant near Charlotte, as had been quoted in The News, saying that the Commission's viewpoint did not represent that of the people of Charlotte. The writer finds that to ring true and agrees with a previous letter writer who thought that there was no threat to Charlotte posed by the plant, and that it should be left to the people of South Carolina and York County to deal with the situation. He indicates that when the wind blew eastward from Canton, where there was a paper manufacturing plant with a strong attendant odor, people in Asheville noticed the mild odor, that when the wind blew westward, Waynesville and other popular resort areas also noticed it, but they remained some of the most popular vacation areas of the country. He recommends to the Mecklenburg commissioners that they purchase and read Edward Wiggam's The Marks of a Clear Mind.
A letter writer expresses himself in somewhat broken English, regarding the Cow Palace in San Francisco being suitable for the Republican Party for its 1956 convention, while Charlotte had the eighth wonder of the world, the Horse Palace of America—apparently referring to some horse show at the Coliseum, but leaving it for us to guess 67 years on as to exactly what the hell he was talking about.
Always write not only for the present, but for posterity as well, when you are writing something for a newspaper, as you know not when it might be referenced in the future. Otherwise, it is suggestive of provincial drivel, time and place constrained and thus relegated to the garbage bin of history.
A letter writer thinks that County Police chief Joseph Whitley ought be congratulated for his effort to find an answer to the deplorable highway death toll by suggesting establishment of nighttime speed limits, but wonders whether the suggestion was the answer, as he finds that the current 55 mph speed limit was being exceeded in most of the highway accidents, that a reduction of the speed limit would only result in an increase of offenders. But after speeders were caught, they were fined a small amount and allowed to return to the highway to try it again. He thinks the courts were more interested in dollars than safety and wants jail sentences to be provided automatically, as in drunk driving cases. He also wonders whether some of the legal alcohol was not a factor in quite a few early morning accidents, adding cynically that legal alcohol had to be available to prevent bootlegging.
Well, we subscribe to the notion that the death penalty for parking violators would prevent anyone from moving their car back onto the highway when showing a propensity to break any law, and so… Indeed, just blow up the world and prevent all traffic accidents.
A letter writer says that she was thinking this date of her dear old dad who had passed on to his reward many years earlier but had left a sweet memory of a life well spent as a follower of Jesus, for whom he taught his children to live. As she thought of Father's Day, she thought of her father who had gone to meet God with nothing to regret over the life he had lived and the way he had trained his children. She wishes that God would bless every dad the following Sunday and every day, provided he was living a life which God wanted him to live and that he was training his children accordingly. She asked the children whether they had put their arms around their father's neck and thanked him for his loving kindness in sending them to school, as one day, they would not have a dad. She encourages them to love him while he was around.
Framed Edition
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