Site Ed. Note: For contrast in both style and manner of editorials populating the News column before Cash's stint as associate editor began on or about Nov. 1, 1937, we shall herewith provide you the full page, in Adobe Acrobat format, for the afternoons of October, 1937, with a few freebies from late September thrown in for good measure. In doing so, we do not suggest that the quality of the editorials was not up to it prior to Cash's daily contributions; it was. We merely suggest that both the style and format became probably somewhat freer wheeling, and broader in scope, to the world at large, rather than concentrating so much on state and local affairs, stressing new topics, new interests, from fresh blood off of a decade of reserve down in Boiling Springs and Shelby, daily typing away the thoughts and reflections on the South, and its relationship to the broader world.

But, as they say, all news is local. And that axiom has proved itself time and again true for our analysis of these Cash editorials from so long and yet not so long ago, as often, and all too often, we come across their analogues in the present prints.

Was it by coincidence, or by something else, that no sooner than we uploaded, a few weeks back, the April 30, 1940 pieces, which flowed chronologically to the May 1 pieces uploaded in 2002, we picked up the newsprint to find beneath the fold two stories in close proximity in time and space this past summer, one sad and tragic, the other whimsically fortuitous, yet in the end not untoward, both suggesting what we have long suggested, that a gun knows no target until it finds its stopping place, be it inanimate deadwood or human flesh--the first story being of a young boy fishing with his grandfather on a lake in Oklahoma while, nearby in the wood, police officers sought to kill a harmless black snake entangled in a tree, two bullets missing, one's trajectory finding water nearby the boat, the second, in quick succession, fatally marking down the boy's head; the second story, also from a small town in Oklahoma, where police officers were practicing on a gun range, a bullet skipping the protective berm, then ricocheting to find the hip of a man standing quite some distance afield, fortunately surviving to laugh about the incident, it being, this time, only a flesh wound.

So why the boy, why the man's hip? All for a snake and target practice on a day.

On balance, we would say that the lead's poison is the answer, just as with the toy manufacturer in China who hanged himself after the discovery that his toys made for an American manufacturer had been, apparently without his knowledge, painted with lead-laced paint from the paint supplier who supplied his factory, all to save a few pennies per toy, enabling someone thereby to afford Macanudos instead of cheap Phillies, maybe.

All news is local, or so it seems. All news is tragic, or so it seems. And we add further to the two maxims the obvious fact that all news is recurrent and timeless, as long as we humans continue to act and react both nobly and with compassion and sentiment, as well as ignobly and with hatred and contempt, or, as in the cases referenced from the recent prints, recklessly indifferent to the safety and well-being of those to whom we are charged with responsibility to protect and serve.

In any event, we don't know about you, but we find it a little passing strange, especially in light of that which we recently gleaned from the pieces in February and April, 1940, that, according to the Fayetteville Observer, the Northern Music's "rage" behind, up at Harper's Ferry, after its capture by the General, was all of a matter impotent, for "the bird had flown", and most nobly so, led in order, they reported, by Longstreet's, Hill's and Jackson's corps, across the ford of the Potomac, back into Virginia, as reported October 1, 1862.

All news is local; all news is recurrent and timeless.

Here, the pieces of the day.