The Charlotte News
Wednesday, June 20, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that White House press secretary James Hagerty had stated this date that the President had provided no member of the White House staff any hint as to whether he would remain in the race for re-election, and that he had no plans to send any message to a Republican group who would meet in Washington the following Friday to make arrangements for the nominating convention, set to open in San Francisco on August 20, there having been some speculation that the President might disclose his future plans to that group. Mr. Hagerty said that politics had not been discussed in recent private conferences with chief of staff Sherman Adams, confirming what Vice-President Nixon had stated regarding his conference with the President the prior Monday.
In the vicinity of New York, a Venezuelan airliner had burst into flames early this date and fallen nearly two miles into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 74 persons aboard, the worst disaster in regular commercial airline service to date. The crash had taken place some 32 miles east of Asbury Park, N.J. A rescue ship dispatched to the area had found much debris and two bodies, finding no survivors and not expecting to find any. The four-engine Super Constellation had reported engine trouble and a Coast Guard plane had been dispatched to try to guide it to New York's Idlewild Airport, but saw the plane crash into the ocean as a "big ball of flame" which had happened very fast. The plane had begun to jettison fuel and five seconds later had burst into the ball of flame, after which it spiraled into the water, falling at a rate of 4,000 feet per minute, bursting into flame when it hit the water with a tremendous impact. The accident occurred at 1:32 a.m. The last word from the plane was that the gas had caught fire.
Two separate automobile accidents, one near Parris Island, S.C., and the other near Camp Lejeune, N.C., had taken the lives of five Marines early this date.
In Raleigh, Governor Luther Hodges told a press conference the previous day that he was convinced that Southern Democrats ought remain in the national party, and planned a personal talk with South Carolina Governor George Bell Timmerman, Jr., regarding the latter's proposals for a Southern front at the mid-August Democratic convention. Governor Hodges said that he believed it was all right to have a sharing of opinion among the Southern delegates but that there was no need for a formal meeting prior to the convention, as called for by Governor Timmerman, Governor Hodges stating that he did believe in the basic concept advanced by Governor Timmerman of making an effort to enable the Southern voter to remain within the national Democratic Party.
Dick Young of The News reports of a proposal for the merger of Charlotte and Carver Community Colleges into a single institution being advanced this date by black leaders appearing before the City School Board, inquiring as to when desegregation in the City schools would commence. Kelly Alexander, state NAACP president and a member of the local eight-member delegation headed by Johnson C. Smith University professor James Law, had stated that merging the two colleges would be evidence of good faith. The Board chairman, Reverend Herbert Spaugh, said that the proposal would be received as a suggestion for further study. He said that the Charlotte schools were part of the State school system and had to be governed by State action, pointing out that Governor Hodges had called a special session of the Legislature for July to consider the issue of school desegregation.
Jim Scotton of The News reports that the general manager of Dixie News Co., after being informed that a new Soviet publication, titled USSR, would be potentially distributed in Charlotte in English starting in early July, an exchange program with the magazine Amerika being distributed in Russian in Russia, an exchange being supervised by the U.S. Information Agency, stated that he had no particular objection to distributing the publication. The operators of local newsstands made similar comments, one stating that he was in business to make a capitalistic profit and if he made it off Red magazines, it was okay with him. The exchange agreement had been the lone specific result of the Geneva foreign ministers conference of the previous October regarding ways to ease East-West barriers to the exchange of information. Under the agreement, both magazines would be limited to 52,000 copies per issue. The assistant director of the Mecklenburg County Library did not know if any copies would go to it, but stated that if they were offered, the library would take them. Both magazines were to avoid politics and would be approximately the same size. Amerika would sell at $1.25 per copy, the price for which it had sold prior to its suspension in 1952, at a time when both countries had charged that the magazines were being used for political purposes. The old magazine had sold out in Russia immediately and used copies were often worth more than the cover price. The Russians had bicycle helmets long before Americans did, and so have to be considered far more safety conscious—never minding, of course, a few snafus in their early space program.
Charles Kuralt of The News indicates that one of the men convicted earlier in the month of purveying by mail "hate literature" in the community had walked into the City Council meeting this date and called the City's license tax "typical of the Communist Manifesto", referring to the Council as "money grinding scoundrels" collecting money from overburdened citizens. He greeted the Council "as a lover of peace". The meeting had adjourned but had gone back into session when the man rose from the front row of the audience and sought to address Mayor Philip Van Every. The Mayor said that the man had called him on the telephone a few minutes earlier and charged him with being "in cahoots with Communists and the Anti-Defamation League." When he called the Council Communists, the Mayor stated: "Just a minute. You've just gone far enough." The man then stated that the power to tax was the power to destroy and that the best governed people were the least governed. He said he did not live inside the city, and one of the members of the Council said that they did not tax outside the city, and moved to adjourn.
In Levittown, Pa., an outspoken 78-year old woman said that many modern American husbands died too soon because their wives saddled them with endless household tasks, that young wives were killing their husbands by expecting them to do too much work when they got home from their jobs. All of it, she contended, was done in the name of cooperation. She had raised six children of her own and had a big hand in raising three stepchildren, for most of the 44 years of her married life, had taken care of a 15-room house with little outside help, and had thrived on it. Her husband was 91, and both appeared to be in very good health. She said that her husband deserved a chance to relax when he arrived home after working all day and believed wives were pushing their husbands into heart attacks by demanding too much of them. She contended that too many modern women were falling victim to self-pity, which led to general flabbiness of mind and spirit. She had managed fine even if they did not have the benefit of all of the automatic appliances and other labor-saving gadgets, plus synthetic fabrics and goods which did not even need ironing. "We mothers didn't have kaffee klatches as I believe the daily habit now is called. We didn't have time. But I did take about an hour each day to rest and to be alone just to think."
In Mooresville, N.C., three former
Federal narcotics hospital patients had crashed their speeding
automobile into a rural store prior to dawn this date, as they raced
from the scene of a drugstore burglary, all having been hospitalized
with severe injuries. The first report regarding the burglary had
stated that narcotics were missing, but the sheriff of Rowan County
said that statement was not true. Mecklenburg County police records
showed that all three men had been at the Federal hospital for drug
addicts at Lexington, Ky., and that all had criminal records in
Mecklenburg County and Charlotte. Before entering the store, the men
had let the air out of one of the tires on a State Highway Patrol car
parked nearby. The patrolman in the car, after hearing a report from
a nearby neighbor that somebody was in the store and having seen a
1951 car leaving the area, had notified the Highway Patrol station in
Salisbury, as he was unable to give chase. Mooresville police then
pursued the car as it traveled at speeds up to 100 mph before the
crash into the store at about 90 mph, when the driver lost control
around a curve. If banged up, they might have at least passed their
initiation rites
On the editorial page, "Horsepower Horseplay Must Be Curbed" wants a crackdown on drag racing in the community, as it finds few sports as "preposterously obnoxious" and none as dangerous to innocent non-participants.
One of the writer's acquaintances had miraculously survived a midnight encounter with racing hot rods on the roads, commenting that the only thing to do with the drag racer was "spit him and spin him over the fires of righteousness until recklessness drips out like gravy." It agrees if the friend was calling for strict enforcement and firm justice.
Racing on the public highways, which potentially could kill people, was more serious than most law enforcement officers and courts had viewed it in the past. It was more of a problem in other sections of the Piedmont, but in Mecklenburg County, drag racing had been reported on several roads and complaints had been received in Charlotte about racing on two streets. Drag racing invited a head-on collision because cars raced down the roadway side by side for a distance of a quarter mile. The participants undertook the danger voluntarily, but not the unsuspecting motorist.
It suggests that a drag strip should
be built if it would get the drag racers off the highways, provided
it would be supervised by a responsible group and basic safety rules
would be observed. The first order of business, however, was to get
them off the highways, and it finds the determination of the local
police to crack down on the practice to be commendable, urges the
courts to back up that diligence with appropriate justice. "Let
the cooking
"Fire Fighters Deserve a Fair Shake" tells of the City Council having to examine in the coming fiscal budget the requests of the firemen for a shorter work week, with the Council having initially brushed aside the notion that the present six-day, 72-hour week ought be changed. The Council had promised to think it over when the Fire Department representatives presented their case in the early part of the year.
It urges that the time appeared to be right for an adjustment, that of 50 U.S. cities of between 100,000 and 168,000 population, 24 had weekly work schedules of 50 hours or less the previous year, with the average being 62.46, while Charlotte firemen were requesting 60-hour weeks. It believes the firemen deserved decent pay and reasonable duty hours.
"Whaddya Make of His Broken Bones?" indicates that U.S. News & World Report had compiled health reports on ten top political figures, revealing that Senator Estes Kefauver had his tonsils out while sitting in his doctor's office, that both the President and former Governor Thomas Dewey had bursitis, that Vice-President Nixon got hay fever in the spring, and that Senator William Knowland of California had no disease record, or past surgeries or injuries, with the piece wondering how the average voter could sympathize with such a healthy specimen. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had been hospitalized as a result of a heart attack a year earlier on July 4, had bronchitis and kidney stones.
It finds that all of the medical information was useful to the voter, but it had suspended judgment regarding the fact that Senator Stuart Symington had broken several bones on the playing fields.
It awaits psychiatric reports on all possible candidates, suggesting that it was sure to be next in a year when it was silly to ask if there was a doctor in the house, as reports from Washington were making doctors of everyone.
"The Villains" indicates that there was an increasing tendency to cast "misguided liberals and leftists" as villains in the South's racial drama. The ill-defined group might be on the stage at present but it was well to remember what had gone on earlier when misguided conservatives and rightists had sown the seeds of oppression and insult, presently blossomed into a dilemma. "If the third act is to have a happy ending, moderates rightly guided by conscience and reality must be given bigger parts on the stage."
A piece from the Goldsboro News-Argus, titled "Was He Right?" tells of the killdee, a brownish bird with white markings, whose nervousness had given rise to the expression "run like a killdee". They were scattered over North Carolina, though Charlotte Hilton Green, in her bird book, had suggested that they were shore birds.
Recently, a farmer and his son were plowing a field and came upon a nest of a killdee containing four eggs laid end to end so that they would not roll and break easily. The father asked his son whether they should just plow through the nest and destroy it or go around it, and his son responded that because the bird had put a lot of work into the nest, they would not lose much time by plowing around it just a bit.
The piece asks what the reader would have done and whether the son made the right decision.
First, we have to agree on what it is at which we are looking, as in bird-lookers. Ms. Green, in her bird book, refers to "killdeers". So, are we looking to kill a deer or kill a dee? In the latter case, we might presume that killdee was a back formation from "Kill Devil", as in Kill Devil Hills, near which, as opposed to Norwich, manned flight first occurred, in which case, we might derive instructive lesson from that on the front page of this date...
For a compleat look at Ms. Green's work, one can also peruse her Trees of the South, which strangely omits all but scant reference to the larch, which surely must be pervasive in North Carolina, as much so as the pine, though she says it is neither native to the South nor does it grow wild there, which begs credulity in a land which is, in fact, the Sea of Verrazzano, that is, among those who are broad
Drew Pearson tells of there having been a heat wave in Washington but that despite it, the greatest snow job ever seen by newspapermen was taking place there, as the professional politicians were trying to convince the President to continue to run again, as he lay in great pain in the hospital recovering from his June 8 surgery for ileitis, following his heart attack of the prior September 24. He had not wanted to run in the first place in 1952 and did not wish to run again. Not only was it a snow job to convince him that he had to do so for the good of the party, but also a snow job to convince the American public that he would be able to get out of bed in a short time more fit than ever to run, and was making major decisions affecting the peace of the world despite a post-operation fever and the excruciatingly uncomfortable tube through his nose extending to the depths of his bowels. Mr. Pearson finds the ordeal through which a small group of his aides were putting him to be torture for the purpose of convincing him and the public that he had to run again.
Senator William Jenner of Indiana had crudely and brazenly stated to newspapermen recently, "We'll stuff him and run him anyway." Senator Jenner had earlier called the President's best military friend, General George Marshall, a traitor, and had opposed General Eisenhower's nomination in 1952, but then, facing re-election himself at the time and possible defeat, had held up the nominee's arm and smiled for the newsreels as if he was the closest friend General Eisenhower had. Senator Jenner wanted to remain in power and so wanted the President to run again.
Mr. Pearson indicates that the President, however, would not put political greed ahead of the country, provided he knew the facts. But the cabal around him had been conducting a careful psychological snow job as he lay helpless in bed, not only keeping the facts from him but also keeping them from the public. The pattern was the same as that which had followed the heart attack, convincing a reluctant President that he had to run again for the good of the country and the party.
Joseph Alsop, in El Auja, Palestine, indicates that at Eli's place, where two roads out of Egypt met with the southern road into Israel, there was a good well amid the Negev Desert, making it an historical place of importance through time. At present, it was in the demilitarized zone between Israel and Egypt, with U.N. observers therefore housed in the headquarters built for Turkish generals during Jemal Pasha's drive on the Suez during the 1914 war. Saladin and the Marmelukes, the Romans and Byzantines, and Rameses the Great had all held and fortified the place.
Despite all the ghosts of the past, it was now Eli's place. Sometime earlier, the Egyptians had been the first to send troops into the demilitarized zone, but the Israelis had driven them out and had stayed at El Auja because of the crossroads and the well, despite the heavy U.N. pressure which had been recently renewed. Eli, or Eliahu by his full name, was a 28-year old Israeli colonel in command of the place, a soldier of a novel breed. Regarding his being Jewish, he said: "I once asked my father why he left comfort for hardship when he came to Israel from Germany more than 30 years ago. He told me that he came for reasons that I could never understand as a Jew born in Israel, and that it was for this he came on my behalf. But now I think I do understand, and I am grateful." Concerning the Israeli resistance movement, which he had joined at age 16, he had asked Mr. Alsop rhetorically whether he had ever joined a resistance underground, that it was too bad he had not or he could have learned much of men and war. Concerning the difficult agricultural development being attempted by the Israelis in the Negev, he had declared defiantly that there was land which had been farmed by men before their time, that all that was needed was water, and that in Israel, the forecasts of the cautious had always been wrong and the hopes of the youth, always right.
Eli had known much hardship and danger and this place was much like himself. Its center was the new Kibbutz Kziot, a rectangle of wooden shacks on a small mound which was entrenched, mined, guarded and dug about with traps for attackers. Presently, the farmers were also members of the Israeli Army. Their fields consisted of only a few acres of struggling sorghum, alfalfa and potatoes. Life would remain cruelly hard even when the Negev pipeline would bring more water for more fields. But the inhabitants said that they would remain there after their Army service as it was their Kibbutz.
Nothing except the shooting was wanting to make it the front line of a hard-fought war. Eli's young, tough-looking troops perhaps did not have quite the smartness of good peacetime soldiers, but that was because they lived as wartime soldiers, always manning their trenches and observation posts, carrying out their training routine as though the enemy might be upon them at any moment, while snatching rest in their foxholes and dugouts. The training routine did not end at nighttime, as nine patrols then assembled and, upon the signal from their leader, began marching along the Egyptian border, proceeding at the rate of about four miles per hour, all in silence without pause and with a steady step amid the darkness. Then they practiced a mock ambush on an Israeli vehicle on a side road. Afterward, Eli drove up and inspected a somewhat breathless amateur patroller for signs of damage, indicating that they had come through all right and that in their Army, they always had to expect to fight against odds, with one way to change those odds being to make the night their friend.
A letter writer from Rock Hill, S.C., indicates that the members of the Mecklenburg County Commission had missed the boat when they had raised a stink about the establishment of a paper mill in neighboring York County, initially petitioning Governor Hodges to do all he could to block building of the plant by the Bowater Co. of Britain. He indicates that the provincial Mecklenburg politicians were not aware of the current furor in Parliament, where the American-owned Texaco had offered to buy the British-owned Trinidad Oil Co. and to develop its oil fields in that British possession in the Caribbean. A Conservative MP had stated that a Canadian Cabinet minister had told him that the policy of the big oil interests in the U.S. was to achieve monopolistic control of the natural oil in the English-speaking world. The British Government had announced on June 14 that it was willing in principle to permit Texaco to purchase the company, but opposition to the sale both in Parliament and in the press had been unrelenting since the offer had been made by Texaco about two weeks earlier. He finds that like the short-sighted anti-American British politicians, the members of the Mecklenburg Commission had taken a narrow view of free British enterprise, urges that neither country retard progress.
A letter writer finds that most of the troubles of the current generation could be attributed to the fact that it had knowledge but lacked wisdom, that is, knowing how to use the facts which were known for the living of life, that having knowledge of facts alone was insufficient. He urges turning to the New Testament and learning of Jesus, "the most satisfactory answer man will ever find."
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