The Charlotte News
Thursday, July 5, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the 1.5 billion dollar school aid bill was called back before the House this date by Representative Graham Barden of North Carolina, who had then denounced it as "obnoxious and objectionable" and withdrew as floor manager for the measure, a position he held as chairman of the House Education Committee. The job of leading the bill to final consideration was taken over by Representative Augustine Kelley of Pennsylvania, its author and second-ranking Democrat on the Committee. The dramatic development came as the House had reconvened, with Mr. Barden having told newsmen before the session that he was washing his hands of the bill because of the House vote on Tuesday to include an amendment which would bar Federal funds from use by any area still practicing segregation in the public schools, an amendment introduced by Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York. Mr. Barden's stand had been applauded by other Southern members of the House. While Mr. Barden had intended to let the bill die in committee, he had been convinced by House leaders to allow it to come back to the floor for further consideration. A number of other proposed changes to the bill remained to be considered before a final House vote would occur.
The traffic death toll during the
Fourth of July single-day holiday had surpassed the estimate of the
National Safety Council, that 130 would die during the 30-hour
period, the traffic toll having reached 131, with scattered reports
of fatalities still coming in. There had also been 72 drowning deaths
and 39 deaths from miscellaneous accidents, for an overall total of
242. The president of the Council compared the total with the 128
deaths in the two-plane midair collision over the Grand
Canyon the prior Saturday—the same number who would die aboard, plus six more on the ground, in the midair collision involving the same two airlines, TWA and United, in mid-December, 1960
In Columbus, O., the 32-year old wife of an Air Force major told sheriff's deputies this date that she had stabbed her elderly landlord and his wife to death when her check forgery scheme had come to light, deputies indicating that the mother of three had spent three days trying to conceal the deaths of her "close" friends, and then had confessed to her husband who took her to the police, where she said she wanted to report a double murder. Her husband said that he doubted the story, but authorities checked and found the bodies of the couple in the bathroom of their home, stabbed several times each. She signed a statement saying that she had killed the couple when they learned that she had forged a check against the man's bank account, with the check and two others which she had also forged having totaled of $1,149. She lived next door to the deceased couple while her husband was stationed at nearby Lockbourne Air Force Base, and the husband described the murdered couple as "very close" friends. The woman sobbed intermittently as she told of cleaning up the blood-spattered home of the couple the day after the killings and dragging their bodies into the bathroom. She then tried to give neighbors the impression that the couple had left town, but when finally realizing she could not conceal the deaths, had told her husband about it. He was near collapse when police told him of the discovery of the bodies.
In Westbury, N.Y., a huge police effort was being staged this date in the heart of the Long Island suburban residential area to trap the kidnaper of a four-week old boy, son of a well-to-do wholesale druggist. The kidnaper had demanded $2,000 as a ransom, saying that he or she was in great need and hated to do it to the boy's parents, but threatened to kill the child if the ransom were not paid. Police had refused to comment, but it had been learned that a package made up to look as if it contained the money had been placed in an empty garage about a block from the parents' home, following the kidnaper's instructions. But the package did not contain $2,000, rather holding only a sheaf of paper slips cut to the size of bills, with real money only on the outside. The father had also placed a brown manila envelope at the base of a tree about 100 feet from the house, then walked around the block and returned to the house, entering via the back door. Thus far, the envelope had not been touched. Law enforcement officers were placed in and outside the house to maintain a watch. It had been reported earlier that the parents were prepared to comply with the ransom. With that kind of reporting, it will be miraculous if the child is returned or found unharmed. Anything to sell a couple of more newspapers…
In Starke, Fla., a gunman had robbed the Florida National Bank this date of $28,000, and the sheriff and the FBI immediately began an investigation, indicating that the robber appeared to be 21 years old, 5 feet, 11 inches in height, weighing 165 pounds, with dark brown wavy hair, a small mustache and hazel eyes. He had taken the money in bills from the vault and fled. Bank employees said that the man appeared to be a stranger in the town of about 6,000, some 40 miles west of Jacksonville. Sorry, but it does not indicate how he fled, whether or not he was driving a car or on foot or by bus or taxi, but if by car, we shall go ahead and lay odds that it was probably a black Ford or Chevy. So be on the lookout for one of those vehicles, and be sure to call the Highway Patrol should you encounter one. It is probably the robber, even if, upon asking the man to stand still so you can measure his height and weigh him, he turns out to be 170 and 5'10" and has brown eyes and hazel hair, states his age as 22. Eyewitnesses are notoriously inaccurate.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that until two weeks earlier, the biggest gripe which most citizens had against the Charlotte Park & Recreation Commission had usually been when they could not get a tennis court at Freedom Park, when picnic tables were jammed at Bryant Park or when the water was too warm in Revolution Park's swimming pool. But when the surplus fund had arisen out of the blue and no one on the Commission seemed to know of its existence, seven years of isolated complaints were stirred, during which time the Commission had been in and out of trouble in the fields of dramatics, arts, recreation and athletics, even while the Commission's work had been used as an example of a good parks system by recreation experts throughout the South. Mr. Scheer suggests that it might reach a climax the following Wednesday when the City Council would consider the matter. The controversy had interrupted two weeks earlier when the Council had met to discuss budgets for the coming year, and considered a $476,000 requested budget for the Park Commission. A fund of $999,000 from a bond levy in 1949 had been devoted to park improvements until there was a balance left of $89,000. A reporter digging into the audits had found a surplus estimated to be between $250,000 and $350,000, not included in the budget for the coming fiscal year. Irritated Council members quickly struck the proposed tax levy from the board's request, meaning a reduction in Commission funds of about $76,000. The park board was accused of squirreling away the "plush" fund while claiming a "poor mouth" to the Council. But the accusers had neglected to point out that the board had the authority under a new state law to hold back as much of its surplus as it wanted in figuring the budget for the coming year. That law, however, had not applied to prior years when the surplus had been accumulating. The chairman of the board, its other members and the superintendent, who exercised administrative direction of the park program, denied that they knew about the surplus. But a check of the audit showed that if the superintendent and the chairman did not know of it, they had not only not dug into the audit reports, but had not even read the auditor's cover letter accompanying those reports, which had indicated in a letter of August, 1955 that there was a surplus of nearly $243,000 at the end of fiscal 1955.
Dick Young of The News indicates that public defense of the Park Commission had been made this date by Mayor Philip Van Every, decrying, in a prepared statement, the "excessive criticism" of the Commission and pointing out that such unjust criticism made it difficult to get good people to serve in public office. It was the first supportive statement of the park board members since the recent controversy over their financial operations had erupted. Other members of the City Council had advocated probes, explanations from the park board and even abolition of the board as an autonomous agency. The Mayor emphasized that there had been no loss involved but rather a surplus, which was good in business and government, indicating that Charlotte had an excellent park system which was the envy of the surrounding states, frequently sending representatives to Charlotte to study their system.
John Borchert of The News reports of a surplus Army bomber which had been sold to a Boy Scout group in 1947 for $300 and later sold and resold until it brought $50,000, having prompted a civil action by the Government in U.S. District Court in Charlotte against the Piedmont Council of the Boy Scouts of America and eight other defendants, seeking $90,000, plus interest and costs, claiming that it had a contract with the Scout group whereby the plane could only be sold as junk. The Piedmont Council, headquartered in Gastonia, had, according to the Government, sold the plane in 1951 after they had finished using it for its original purpose, as a ground trainer in their air-sea rescue training program. The executive of the Council said that the plane had been sold as junk and cleared with the War Assets Administration, the General Services Administration and the Civil Aeronautics Administration. But the Government suit claimed that the plane was sold in violation of the 1951 contract to two men, one of Winston-Salem and another of High Point, for $3,000, with title to the plane winding up in the name of a tool company owned by the man from High Point, also claiming that at the time of the sale, the plane had not been made unfit and useless and thus was not sold as scrap. The tool company and the man from High Point then sold the plane to a man from Roanoke, Va., in March, 1951 for $3,300, with a new bill of sale obtained from the Council the following month. The man to whom the plane was sold at that time said that the GSA controlled the sale of the plane. The rest of the story is on an inside page.
Charles Kuralt of The News tells of a sparrow in a man's maple tree, proud of its nest or at least satisfied, having discovered a nylon thread and utilized skill and care to wind it into its nest, something shiny and extra, distinguishing the nest from that of other sparrows in the area. The bird had taken turns with its mate sitting on the eggs, and when the three young sparrows had hatched, it spent hours in search of food for them, keeping so busy that it did not notice when the thread began working itself loose, returning to the perch the previous day to find the nylon thread caught around the neck of one of the young, strangling it to death. A piece of straw or grass would have snapped amid the struggle of the young sparrow, but the thread had only tightened. The mother sparrow had fluttered about in the tree the previous day, flying to the nest occasionally and then back to another limb, while its mate stopped feeding the other two birds, as did she, and this date, was gone. The bird box was empty, except for the three dead birds and the long, fine thread that made the nest different. The story is accompanied by a photograph. Relating of this sad misadventure was, no doubt, one of the reasons which eventually drove Mr. Kuralt to the road…
On the editorial page, "State Should Follow Charlotte's Lead" tells of Charlotte Mayor Van Every, and Welfare Department superintendent Wallace Kuralt, plus other officials, deserving commendation for the diligence with which they were attacking the problem of providing adequate detention facilities for juvenile offenders who could not be accommodated at State training schools. The Mayor had personally supplied the civic leadership when shocking inadequacies had first been disclosed, and Mr. Kuralt headed the Mayor's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, which listed the detention home as one of several major goals for the community. A five-person committee led by Mr. Kuralt would survey the existing juvenile detention facilities in the two Carolinas in preparation for planning the local facility.
It suggests that the city should not attempt to build and operate a training school, as Charlotte needed a fairly small, minimum security detention home, not a juvenile penal colony.
The problem had come about because the State had failed in its responsibility to provide correctional institutions of the size and type needed to meet the present urgent demand, an omission which had to be met by the 1957 General Assembly if anything resembling an adequate correctional program would be maintained in the state. It concludes that Charlotte had done its duty for itself and the State had to follow suit.
"Disarm the Paddle-Packing Pedagogue" finds that paddling students was inappropriate, a chore for parents rather than teachers. Nevertheless, educators still favored corporal punishment as a means of control, with 72 percent of school superintendents questioned in a nationwide survey by The Nation's Schools magazine supporting the practice.
It suggests that if the teacher gave vent to anger by paddling the child, the teacher admitted inadequacy and defeat as an educator. The student might learn not to misbehave in class from the administration of the punishment, but also might learn to loathe the subject, the teacher and the school at the same time, with some experts stating that spanking was bad as an educational device because the child could not always link the logic of the situation with the sudden assault.
It likes the wording of an anti-spanking decree delivered by the New York State Education Department, which had stated: "Such punishment is the expression of an unchanging authoritarian system and is peculiarly distasteful to our modern democratic approach to education."
It suggests that those superintendents who wanted to use paddles, sticks and switches should forthwith be disarmed, closing the piece with some clever doggerel in continuation of that which had begun it, suggesting that the method of punishment used 100 years earlier in the schools now would only result in lawsuits.
"When Was That Good Old Summertime?" tells of the Raleigh News & Observer going out in the noonday sun, like mad dogs and Englishmen. "In the Good Old Summer Time", written by Ren Shields and Honeybear Evans, had not been an effort to glorify summer but merely to warm themselves by auto-suggestion, as was the case with the listening public who liked the tune in the 1890's.
It finds that the News & Observer was shockingly buying into that old song, suggesting that there was nothing hot about summer except everybody, as the season was accompanied by mosquitoes, snakes, chiggers, biting dogs and small children, while the fish refrained. The watermelon was good but not so good unless pushing one's face into it, and it was quite sticky.
"Good old summertime? People steal and abscond in the winter, but they hack each other up in the summer. Farmers beat mules in the summer, and mules run away early in the morning. Chickens do nothing but sit in nests of dust. Cows eat bitter weed. You hear a pretty little humming noise, and know you will have to shout TIMBER! before the termites are through. If there's something very special about the good old summertime let the N&O bring it forward. This here and now summer is strictly for the boll weevils who, we expect, are making the most of it."
A piece from the Goldsboro News-Argus, titled "Hogs Learn Quickly", tells of having listened on a tranquil coastal day on the green lawn of the Inn at Manteo to an engaging Englishman who talked of having roamed the world as a ship's captain, and now in his later years, finding his element among the seafaring people of Dare, still roaming the world in the course of his tales he told of some of his experiences.
He said that monkeys had more sense than men and told of a story to prove it, that he had once been captain of a ship which carried monkeys from the African jungle to the U.S., putting in at port close to the natural habitat of the monkeys, whereupon the monkey runners would seek to capture enough monkeys to fill the ship's hold and supply the zoo markets of the country. The runners would transport portable troughs to the jungles where the animals dwelled and would set the troughs up and fill them with a potent rum, which the monkeys would then drink until they chattered with elation, summoning other monkeys by the hundreds from out of the jungle, and when they could drink no more and could no longer move, they fell helplessly to the ground, at which point the runners picked them up and bore them away to captivity. The captain said that if one monkey who drank to oblivion was overlooked, he never again would drink to excess as he had learned his lesson, with one bout with alcohol having engraved it on the monkey's mind.
The piece says that recently it had
heard a story of which it had not thought in years, told by the
driver of Savage Taxi, indicating that he had been raised on a farm
and lived there until a few years earlier, telling from personal
observation that hogs discovering beer made from thoroughly fermented meal could throw a great party, drinking until they staggered
about, and continuing to drink until they were so drunk
Drew Pearson tells of Vice-President Nixon liking to travel and having done a fine job of representing the U.S. abroad, but had been loath to go to Manila and Saigon as the President's personal representative, not wanting to leave home. Mr. Nixon had delayed so long that it had become embarrassing to the Philippine Embassy, which had invited him without answer. Finally Secretary of State Dulles had to become involved and personally prod the Vice-President, at which point he agreed to make the trip.
Mr. Pearson suggests that the reason for Mr. Nixon's reluctance had been that he believed that his enemies might conspire while he was gone to take him off the Republican ticket, which was in fact occurring, as the biggest political news in Washington was the undercover drive to replace him. Several anti-Nixonites were behind it, along with the belief that when the American people would vote in November, they would be voting not only for the President, but also for the Vice-President on the belief that the latter would eventually wind up in the White House, given the questionable state of the President's health.
Initial leaders of the anti-Nixon move had been such potent Republicans as Governors Goodwin Knight of California, William Stratton of Illinois and Fred Hall of Kansas, all liberal Republicans with labor support. It had been no accident that they had left Mr. Nixon's name off a petition they had signed in Atlantic City at the Governors Conference, urging the President to run again. Other backstage workers against the Vice-President were friends of former Governor Dan Thornton of Colorado, led by Clarence Tuttle, former Baltimore steel manufacturer, who had contributed $8,000 to Senator McCarthy in his campaign against re-election of Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland in 1950. Mr. Tuttle was presently raising the money for an intensive drive to put Mr. Thornton on the ticket to replace Mr. Nixon, and working with him was Mark Cramer of Continental Air Lines, former assistant to Governor Thornton.
Inside the White House, it had been admitted that if the President did not run again, he would urge his close friend, Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, to run in his stead, though Mr. Humphrey had repeatedly argued that he was too old. Now that the focus was on the number two spot on the ticket, talk had turned to Mr. Humphrey to become the vice-presidential nominee.
Others being talked about included Harold Stassen, presently a member of the Eisenhower team, whose former Student Stassen Club members had now grown up and become potent Citizens for Eisenhower. Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton was also being mentioned, as press reaction to his recent appointment had been quite favorable. Governor Knight, who established a good record as Governor since succeeding Earl Warren in 1953 as Lt. Governor, had potent labor support. And former Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, one of the most skilled men in public life, was also on the list, though bitterly disliked by the wing of the Republican Party which had formerly back the late Senator Robert Taft in 1952.
It might be noted that the editorial in the above-referenced July 16, 1956 issue of Life, which commented on the unusual gesture by Senator Hubert Humphrey, to be freighted with even greater irony 12 years hence, in commending Vice-President Nixon's June 7 Lafayette College commencement address regarding foreign policy, inserting a copy of it in the Congressional Record, albeit done three days earlier also, on June 11, by Senator Fred Payne of Maine—possibly involving in that case, however, the rain in Spain, as he was a Republican—, was not without some subsequent retracted praise by Senator Humphrey, criticism continued the following day in greater detail on July 13, commenting specifically on the Life editorial, for Mr. Nixon having, according to the Senator, repudiated parts of his own statements regarding neutral nations in an address in Karachi, Pakistan, during his world tour, prompting Senator Humphrey to express that during the latter half of the tour, the Vice-President had only sown the seeds of "confusion and uncertainty" regarding Administration foreign policy on such issues as "colonialism, disarmament and agonizing reappraisals", with apparent divergence between the views on those issues held by the President, the Secretary of State and the Vice-President—all of which no doubt comprised a fair portion of mysterious tourism, probably magical in its import. The Lafayette College address, incidentally, was delivered the day before the President's attack of ileitis which had hospitalized him and resulted in surgery, and so, perhaps, it might be conjectured that the Vice-President had decided, in response to being forced abroad when his position at home on the ticket, a position which might vault him into the Presidency, was being undermined, to go off on his own hook just in case...
Walter Lippmann tells of Secretary of State Dulles having taken over the psychological warfare, propaganda wing of the State Department, historically maintained as separate from the Department, under the supervision of the President and located within the White House, itself.
Mr. Lippmann regards it as a bad thing as the Secretary of State, acting as chief propagandist for the Government, could only succeed in undermining his own credit as a diplomat, meaning he could not escape responsibility and consequences for the propaganda. All governments used propaganda and all were aware that other governments did so. If all of the propaganda were to be considered genuine foreign policy, international diplomacy would wind up in a muddle. Tacitly and by common consent, governments had adopted a form of agreement under which they would take at face value the propaganda of the professional propagandists and not treat it as the serious intention and policy of the government. "They will regard Philip Sober as the genuine Philip, not Philip Drunk with his propaganda."
That discounting of propaganda was possible only as long as there were genuine channels of communication open through the foreign offices, which was why propaganda ought be conducted through separate agencies and why the Secretary of State and the foreign service should remain aloof and uncontaminated by propaganda.
In the Soviet Union recently, Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had launched a propaganda campaign against former Premier Joseph Stalin, as a result of which, the international Communist movement was passing through an agonizing reappraisal which might well have enormous significance. Mr. Lippmann asks whether the U.S. should call attention to itself by making the U.S. appear as prime movers in the upheaval ongoing in the Communist states, or whether the U.S. ought avoid the impression that it was somehow engineering the upheaval, that what was going on was not so much an upheaval from within the Communist world as it was a disturbance in reaction to Western intervention.
He suggests that by taking the center of the stage and putting the U.S. in the spotlight, Secretary of State Dulles had provided the most obvious pretext for repression of the upheaval as being the work of an anti-Communist underground backed by the U.S. Government. He suggests that it was time for an American psychological warrior to make himself invisible and a wise Secretary of State to hold himself aloof, not meddling with events which he could not control and direct.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, continues to yawn and sigh over the internal dispute within the American armed forces because he knew what would happen in the way of change, that being nothing, with the infighting merely going underground. He says that he sometimes believed that the worst thing that had ever occurred was to have created a separate Air Force, as it added another "unscrupulous kiddie with itchy fingers, fighting for the cookie jar." The Army and the Navy had earlier fought with each other to a standoff, but now that there were three branches, he considers it not a proper design.
He relates that in Guam during World War II, General Curtis LeMay and Admiral Chester Nimitz had become embroiled in a terrible fight over Japan, with General LeMay wanting it burned flat from above while Admiral Nimitz wanted to take it from the surface. The admirals had rebelled in the Pacific and Admiral Arthur Radford, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had come to power and, suggests Mr. Ruark, if it had happened to an enlisted man, he would have been shot for mutiny. But the mutineers had won and now everybody agreed it had been a noble revolution.
During the Korean War, General MacArthur had been fired by President Truman for trying to win a war, "this being a life-long habit of the general, but an ex-captain of infantry cried him down." He finds that it did not make any real sense but that practically nothing the military ever did made civilian sense.
At the end of World War II, the Navy was planning to sink the Army and the Air Force because it had its own air force and also its own infantry in the form of the Marines. Rear Admiral Min Miller was ordered from on high to organize a task force to take on the Pentagon, but at the time, the Navy failed to recall that it did not mention the sinking of the cruiser Indianapolis, wherein 880 men were lost after delivering the first atomic bomb to the island of Leyte, occurring because someone had neglected to wonder where a cruiser, carrying 1,196 men, might be when the journey between Guam and Leyte took only 72 hours and the ship was unreported for five days, during which time the crew was trying to survive in the water. The survivors had been discovered by a Marine plane, and the Japanese pilot who had sunk the Indianapolis was imported to testify at the court-martial a few months after the end of the war against the captain of the Indianapolis. He indicates that the Navy could not find the Indianapolis but was smart enough to announce the sinking, in small print, on V-J Day, eight days after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He says that had been the fact which called off the plot to sink the Army. The late James Forrestal and the Navy chiefs were in trouble enough, and stern word was handed down for the saboteurs to end their plotting.
He finds it all to be a family feud and no matter what the President said, the kids would keep on bruising each other's eyes. He supposes it happened to the Russians also because all military people he had ever met were basically childish in their jealousy of the other tots.
A letter writer from Clarkston, Ga., responds to a previous article and editorial urging judges to get tough with drag racers and hit and run drivers, indicating that as a police officer, he was acquainted with the problem but disagreed with the methods of the local courts in Charlotte, believing that justice had taken a holiday, that the sentence to jail of a 17-year old first offender appeared rash, without knowing the facts of the case, which were related at a minimum in the editorial he had read. It had omitted that the defendant had no witnesses in his behalf, despite there having supposedly been passengers in the vehicle, and he questions whether the accident had been reported at the scene or only later by the owner of the vehicle which had been damaged. It did not sound like justice to him to put a 17-year old in jail for six months just to make an example of him. He was acquainted with the boy in question and had been for several years, and it was his belief that a mistake had been made concerning the details of the case.
The case in question had actually arisen in Asheville, not Charlotte.
A letter writer congratulates the newspaper for its editorial on the manner in which the City Council was destroying the basic principle and intent of the local zoning ordinance, indicating that the application and administration of the law would be left to the commission which made its recommendations based on fact, community interest and the law, itself, rather than petty personal political expedience.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.