The Charlotte News

Thursday, October 9, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The late--or early, depending on perspective--blooming of the Japanese cherry trees in Washington, though not giving up any cherries; a continuing shortage of oil, despite the prospect of return of the loaned oil tankers from the British which had precipitated the shortage for want of a means of transportation of the oil to Eastern ports from the Gulf, because now the tankers were needed for molasses from which to produce ethyl for the making of munitions; Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch hunting down with determination at some disputed barricade the traveling mountain man named Kutland, who appeared as Kilroy, having carped that Virginians had thrown sticks and stones and hurled boos, not the dapple-appled notes claimed by Mr. Dabney, at the convoy of soldiers passing through Virginia on their way to the October-November Carolina maneuvers; and Stuart Rabb's second by-lined piece since replacing Cash in late May as associate editor of The News, this one on the brazen, if misdirected and callow, temerity of the soldiers invading Charlotte during the aforementioned maneuvers, asking the coppers for directions to the nonexistent Redlight District, it being sufficiently dispersed among the dime taxis as to be non-directionable, even by the coppers: all these things populate at once the page today.

Somewhere in that bit of ostensibly disconnected editorialization there is, we assert, nevertheless an interconnection of some fashion, whether conscious or unconscious we can't say. We leave it to you to figure it out. We are behind and are lazy also.

Also, if you are sufficiently suffused with that which is au courant and have been attentive to the debates of late, you will note that Raymond Clapper and Hugh Johnson all at once on the page today speak to issues with currency, the one being the implied difference between strategy and tactics, the other mentioning Harold Ickes's indecision over the proposed oil exploration sought by Corky in Alaska--we assume, most likely, on the North Slope.

All things change; all things remain the same.

As to the little piece from Billy Arthur, former UNC head cheerleader, over in Onslow County, we have to say that, as a youth, we ourselves had occasion a couple of times to lose our place on the mental landscape when attempting to provide, without notes, oral recitation--wethinks one possibly having been Mark Antony's oration, though perhaps we got through that one without the palpables precipitating our stumble over the edge of the precipitant cliff into the centrifugal, fulgorous void, attempting bootlessly to remain faithful to the vulgate, eschewing any attempt at a bridge across the Channel. For we, at the time, hadn't the presence of mind or pluck or rhythmic zeal or relentless ingenuity or even wistful complacency with which to spark it off anyway in the adroit mode with which the piece suggests of the inimitable little Tom Clinch named Robert Reese, but we did, as with a fid, holding forth in the tid the schooner on the troubled sea, with a good gid, nevertheless--well, we forgot what we were going to say. It seems it must rhyme though with "skid".

Anyway, as to who Aunt Jerusy might have been, we don't know. But the little old ladies who, to befog Jerusy's petticoated moonlight still inside her melon, she helped partake of the spiking, might have been forerunners of the Beatles with Tony Sheridan. That's just speculation though.

It had a green cover with black print and no photograph, at least the one we bought--in Charlotte actually, at Clark's, Independence Boulevard, July '64, in the Twentieth Century.