The Charlotte News
Monday, March 25, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that an attorney for Teamsters president Dave Beck had said this date that he would, "without question or qualification", show up the following day for a hearing before the Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime influence within the Teamsters. His attorney, former Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania, had told newsmen that any report that he would not be present was "just plain bunk". The Committee wanted to ask Mr. Beck about his turning over $270,000 to the union, recorded as repayment of loans, when the Senators had determined that there was no record of the money having been loaned to him in the first place. Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, chairman of the Committee, said that they knew that Mr. Beck had taken from union treasuries some $270,000 and that there was no evidence of a loan or a gift. Mr. Beck had canceled an airline reservation the previous night he had made for a flight from Seattle to Washington for this date, but his attorney would not discuss the matter further, saying there was no chance that access to Mr. Beck would be given to the press, and Mr. Beck's secretary likewise declined to discuss his whereabouts. Mr. Beck had publicly acknowledged obtaining large sums from the union which he described as loans, indicating that he had borrowed between $300,000 and $400,000 in Teamsters funds. The hearings would resume the following day, with the anticipated appearance of Mr. Beck.
The worst spring blizzard in 30 years continued to rage in the Midwest this date, paralyzing transportation and crippling communications in many sections of eight states. One major train, westbound from St. Louis to Los Angeles, carrying 400 passengers, plus an estimated 7,500 highway travelers, had been reported stranded in snowdrifts ranging up to 18 feet deep near Winona, Kans., about 50 miles from the Colorado line, but none of the people were believed in danger. Four deaths had been attributed to the storm. Another train, the Rock Island eastbound Golden State Limited, carrying 92 passengers, had been reached by rescue parties early this date and all aboard had been taken to Meade, Kans., after the train had been snowbound by drifts up to 15 feet deep between Meade and Plains since Sunday, with six coaches of the train reported to be covered completely by snow. The Weather Bureau at Kansas City had reported that the storm was causing high winds and heavy snows during the morning in northern Missouri and southern Iowa as it moved toward Illinois and Indiana, with snows still falling in parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, while conditions had eased somewhat in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Forecasts for more heavy snow were in effect from northeastern Kansas and neighboring sections of Nebraska eastward into parts of lower Michigan and Indiana, with accumulations of between eight and ten inches predicted for parts of Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri, with generally lesser amounts expected over the affected portions of Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and lower Michigan. North central Indiana had freezing rain and snow.
In London, it was reported that in the trial of the doctor accused of murdering his elderly patient by inducing her to take drugs, in an effort to benefit from her will, a lawyer, who had handled financial affairs for the deceased woman, testified that the defendant had called on him and said that the 81-year old patient had promised him gifts but had forgotten to include those bequests in her will, the gifts including her Rolls-Royce and "the contents of a case in a locked box at the bank". The lawyer testified that the doctor told him that although the woman was very ill, her mind was clear and he had no doubt that she was in a sufficient state of mind to make a codicil or a new will, that the doctor had first approached him in March, 1950 and that a new will had been executed in August, three months before the woman's death. The prosecution claimed that the doctor had killed her with an overdose of drugs at a point when she threatened to change the will again, cutting him out. Under her final will, the defendant had been bequeathed a chest of silver, but the Rolls-Royce had been left to her son, who nevertheless gave it to the doctor when his mother died. The lawyer indicated that the woman had made at least six wills and that she wanted everything completed without delay in each case.
In Herbeuval, France, a 72-year old great-grandmother from Marshalltown, Iowa, had married a 73-year old man this date in the tiny village where their romance had begun a half century earlier. All 169 inhabitants of the village gathered outside the stone church for the religious service, which was preceded by a brief civil ceremony required by French law. The bride had emigrated from Luxembourg in 1906 and now had seven children, 25 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren in the United States. The couple had planned to marry in the same church 51 years earlier, but the prospective groom had been drafted into the French Army and the prospective bride had gone to the United States, each of whom having later married. Her husband, a Kansas farmer, had died in 1941, and his wife had died in 1946. The previous year, the new bride had returned on a visit, saw her former betrothed and returned to the U.S. with her mind made up to marry him. She had returned the previous month with the blessing of all of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to marry him. She provided a written statement to the press saying: "This brings to a close a fairy tale story… We wish to thank all in France and the United States for the many cards and letters of good wishes… God bless all of you." The couple were planning to leave for the U.S. as soon as possible, and she wanted to settle in Denver.
In Evansville, Ind., police this date blamed a three-month series of safe-crackings on two former convicts and a 16-year old midget they had used to gain access to buildings by having the latter slip through small holes. Officers said statements admitting the safe-crackings had been signed the previous night by a 43-pound, 3-foot, 9-inch tall Poseyville farm youth, and two Evansville men. Two detective sergeants said that the teenage midget had participated in 25 of the 40 break-ins and safe-crackings which the two men had admitted committing. The teenager had slipped through small openings cut into ceilings and then opened the door for his partners, who were to be charged this date with one of the safe-crackings, while the boy was to be turned over to juvenile authorities. The safe-cracking mystery had begun to unravel when a sheriff of a neighboring county had reported that the teenager had spent about $800 there the previous week, with one of his purchases having been a jeep for his father, a farmer. He had been arrested on Saturday and implicated the older men, who had been picked up the previous day. Police reported recovery of only $300 of an estimated $18,000 taken in the series of safe-crackings which had begun the previous December. The burglaries had become so common that the mayor had canceled leaves and days off for all city policemen.
In Charlotte, a gas explosion had destroyed a one-story brick structure shortly after noon this date, with no one apparently inside the building at the time. An eyewitness to the explosion said that he was stopped at a stoplight nearby and could smell a heavy odor of gas. Firemen said that the building was apparently used for storage by a company.
An 83-year-old Charlotte business and civic leader, J. Luther Snyder, who had become manager of the first Coca-Cola bottling plant in the Carolinas in 1902, had died in Charlotte this date following a long illness. He had been president of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce during the Depression.
Veteran Charlotte City Council member Claude Albea this date officially announced his candidacy for re-election in May, having served 12 two-year terms, first elected in 1931, having served continuously until 1945, when he did not run, running again each biennium since 1947. He had been a linotype operator for The News for 35 years and had been active in the labor movement in Charlotte during that same period of time. He was a past president of the Charlotte Central Labor Union.
Howard Whitman, "one of America's leading writers on human affairs," as part of a series offering his current theories on mental health, having served on the Commission for Mental Health Education of the International Congress on Mental Health in 1948 and having won the Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association in 1956 for his television reports on medicine and health, this date, in the first in the series, titled "We Shouldn't Let Neurotics Run Our Lives", advises that the neurotic had had it all his own way long enough, defining a neurotic as "a person who is hard to get along with", with nearly every family and most offices having such a person. He says that up to the present time, society had been letting them make life miserable for everyone else, while the rest took the attitude that they were "poor mixed up souls" and that people had to be nice to them no matter how many pins they stuck into people around them. He indicates that the neurotic was mixed up, was a person unable to get along with him or herself and so was unable to get along with others, was not a person to be hated, was to be pitied and helped, but not by encouraging the neurosis. He says that at a mental hospital in Kansas, he had watched modern psychiatry tackle the problem in an unusual way, that a female patient had come to the hospital in a severe emotional tangle, that at home, her whole family had worried about her moroseness as she complained and lamented endlessly, never seeming to be able to pull herself together, making her sister, her husband, her mother sit with her for hours going over her woes, real and imaginary, having ruined a dinner party on one occasion by saying suddenly that she "couldn't face it" and withdrew to her room, seeming oblivious to the fact that other people also had problems. The family had sought to be nice to her, despite acknowledging among themselves that it was taking a lot out of them to listen patiently to her miseries and play along with her moods. He indicates that the neurotic was able subtly to plant the idea in everyone else around them that they were to blame for the problem, eliciting sympathy, with the woman's unconscious goal having been to punish herself for some real or imagined sin, some guilt, as an attending doctor had explained, who said that they had to help her come to terms with herself, at which point she would be easier on herself and consequently much easier on others. A nurse at the hospital had been quickly drawn into the sympathy trap after seeing the woman languishing in her room, not eating, refusing to walk in the garden, telling her that everyone liked her because she was "such a lovely, wonderful person." The doctor had corrected the nurse, saying that the woman was trying to punish herself, that in her depression, she made herself seem hateful and awful, and that when the nurse gave her sympathy, telling her how wonderful she was, the nurse was thwarting her desire for punishment, causing her depression to become worse by failing to give her the punishment she craved. Thus, instead of being coddled, the woman had been given "punishment" by being assigned two menial jobs, cleaning silverware and scraping pans, easier to take than the torture of depression. After a few months of psychotherapy, she did not need the punishment anymore, having made a peace treaty with herself, making it possible to live with her again. He indicates that society was still coddling neurotics, letting them buffalo everyone around them, that it did not do any good to coddle them. At the Hamilton County Youth Center in Cincinnati, a young girl had come in recently with a pattern of neurotic behavior which included flagrant sexual conduct. She was taciturn and bitter, and a supervisor at the center appeared to be coddling her when she invited her to take a walk and have a Coke and a cigarette, but returning, the girl had opened up for the first time, saying that she would now talk to her, telling the supervisor that two boys had been sexually aggressive toward her, which had begun a tangle of emotions which led her into a pattern of sexual excesses, and, unconsciously, she had been hoping to get into trouble so that society or her family would punish her, not understanding that by her own behavior, she was punishing society and her family. In counseling, the supervisor had driven home the point that everyone had been the subject of aggression at some point, in one way or another, and that it not did not give the individual the right to be aggressive toward others. He concludes that the neurotic was constantly putting two wrongs together to try to make a right, and that it was bad moral arithmetic.
On the sports page, News
sports editor Bob Quincy continues his coverage of the NCAA final
the prior Saturday night from Kansas City, which UNC had finally won
after three overtimes against Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain, 54 to 53,
to complete the season undefeated, 32-0, a record for one season
which still stands, tied only in 1976 by Indiana University. The game
had been tied at the end of regulation 46 to 46, after UNC guard
Tommy Kearns had made the first of two free throws, missing, however,
the second, with only nine seconds left, UNC then getting the ball
in-bounds with an opportunity to score, on which they failed. During
the first overtime, each team scored only one field goal apiece, and
did not score in the second overtime, though both teams had plentiful
opportunities to win the game. North Carolina obtained a four-point
lead, 52 to 48 in the third overtime, but Kansas came back with five
straight points, including a three-point play by Wilt Chamberlain, to
take the lead 53 to 52, with less than a minute to play. With six
seconds left, UNC center Joe Quigg was fouled while shooting, and
icily sunk both free throws to put UNC ahead by a point. At the other
end, the center also had the game-saving block of an attempted pass
inside to Wilt Chamberlain for what could have been the game-winning
bucket with the seconds ticking away, the block being intercepted at
around midcourt by guard Tommy Kearns
In any event, UNC thus finished the season in the same slot it had been in the Associated Press poll since mid-January, number one, the second team in NCAA history to finish a season undefeated, the first having been the San Francisco Dons the prior season, and the first ACC team to win a national championship. The only other teams to that point from the South which had won the NCAA championship had been Kentucky, in 1948, 1949 and 1951, and, arguably, Oklahoma A&M in 1945 and again in 1946, then beating North Carolina, though possibly classified as a Southwestern or Midwestern school more than strictly Southern. Most of the teams to that point who had won the national championship since the inception of the tournament in 1939 had come from either the Far West, in the early tournaments and the previous two, the Midwest or the Northeastern corridor. UNC had won a mythical championship in 1924, when they were also undefeated at 26-0, by virtue of the anointing by the Helms Foundation in 1936, before the advent of the NCAA or the wire service rankings by either sportswriters or coaches.
UNC's All-American Lennie Rosenbluth had appeared the previous night, along with All-American Wilt Chamberlain of Kansas, and eight other All-Americans chosen by Look Magazine, on the "Ed Sullivan Show". Mr. Sullivan, it might be noted, unless the segment was taped beforehand, did not mention the weekend results of the NCAA Tournament, perhaps out of diplomacy.
Should you become confused with the two triple overtime games two nights in a row involving UNC and first, the Michigan State Spartans, before the final with the Jayhawks, just listen to this song from 1957, memorize its lyrics, more or less, and always recall the tag line: "Three overtimes two nights in a row, we'll never forget that TV show, huh..." We never forgot it, as it was among the stacks of wax possessed by our older brother, and, starting in 1967, when it made sense to listen to it again, we committed it to memory, and can still pretty much recite it, as we do in our mind every swell season, including this one past in 2024, though ending with some disappointment, just as most seasons do for all schools save one.
As indicated, however, unfortunately, we slept through the 1957 final in real time, which did not end until sometime around 12:14 a.m. Eastern time. We made up for it though in December, 1967, when, during the Far West Classic, UNC trailed by 17 points with 14 minutes to go against the University of Utah, and with our papa sound asleep nearby, we began pulling assiduously for the Tar Heels to pull it out, which, eventually, however improbable, they did at around 2:00 a.m., with us figuring that we might have been about the only person still listening to the radio at that hour, given the unlikely result in an era before the shot clock or the three-point shot, when it was virtually unheard of for a team to come back in the second half from a 17-point deficit. In any event, we try not to sleep through games anymore, though we did once at the end of 2016, when UNC played Georgia Tech on a Saturday, New Year's Eve, and we got our time zones mixed up, woke up in time to find that UNC had been upset, though eventually that team won the national championship, through which we did not sleep. Try not to schedule games which begin at noon, Eastern time, as it places West Coast residents at a solid disadvantage, especially on Saturday or Sunday mornings. You will learn more about this problem in reverse, we trow, given that Stanford and Cal will join the ACC next season.
In any event, the Tar Heels did precisely what Governor Luther Hodges had urged them to do. They brought home the bacon.
During the Tournament, Frank McGuire met Kansas alumnus Dean Smith, took a liking to him, and, eventually, a year later, offered the Air Force assistant coach a job as assistant coach at UNC, which Mr. Smith took, eventually succeeding coach McGuire as head coach in 1961, when coach McGuire took a job as coach of the Philadelphia Warriors, coaching Wilt Chamberlain for a season, before quitting that job when the Warriors moved to San Francisco. The Kansas-UNC connection would remain strong throughout the tenure of coach Smith, with his former player from 1962-1963, Larry Brown, having first played the last season of coach McGuire's tenure, and then becoming assistant coach from 1965-1967, eventually becoming head coach at Kansas in 1983, leading them to the national championship in 1988, their first since 1952, then quitting to return to coaching in the NBA, replaced by UNC assistant coach Roy Williams in his first head coaching job, quickly establishing himself as one of the premier coaches in the land before becoming head coach at UNC in 2003, leading UNC eventually to three national championships, in 2005, 2009 and 2017, their fourth through sixth championships, after coach Smith had led teams to two, in 1982 and 1993, plus nine other semifinals, including four of his last seven seasons, inclusive of his last season in 1997, of which three teams made the finals only to lose, in 1968, 1977 and 1981, rendering him two and three in the finals, most coaches, however, never having reached the finals that many times, especially spanning 31 seasons between his first and last final four. Coach Smith had played for coach Phog Allen on the 1952 Kansas national championship team, though player Smith primarily warmed the bench. Coach Allen had learned the game as a player from its inventor, Dr. James Naismith, who also coached Kansas. The Kansas head coach in 1957, Dick Harp, who had succeeded coach Allen, would later become an assistant coach for coach Smith at UNC between 1986 and 1989. And 30-year assistant coach Bill Guthridge, who succeeded coach Smith in 1997 and took UNC to two Final Fours in three seasons, was from Kansas, albeit having attended Kansas State, playing for the Wildcats starting the following season, in 1957-58.
It all started, therefore, in this crucible of time, during the 1957 NCAA semifinals and final, arguably the beginning of modern college basketball. Do not let any of the "experts", most of whom were not even alive in 1957, tell you anything different, either about college basketball "blue bloods" or, certainly, regarding politics and the law in 2024. Such self-anointed "experts" in everything, we advise, probably should retreat from their grandly exalted omniscience to a simpler occupation for which they are far more qualified, memorizing the names on the headstones in Old Salem Cemetery.
Incidentally, the continued part of the sports page relates that the game on Saturday had preempted locally on WBTV a favorite tv program normally starting at 10:00, "Gunsmoke", perhaps, in addition to the game being played about 300 miles from Dodge City, the inspiration for the song's lyric, "...to be the star of the Western show..." And, we had in our mind for a long time that instead of Hoke Simpson, the song had originated from Hoagy Carmichael—for obvious reasons. But it becomes rather interesting in light of the March 8 edition of the sports page, the date on which the magical run to the crown actually began, which edition we could never have seen previously, and even had it, for some reason, been in the home at the time in 1957, we were not yet blessed with the ability to read. Ah, but Stardust memories...
By the way, you say you want the printed play-by-play? Well, okay. You have to go to Smith Barrier of the Greensboro Daily News for the ultimate take-away. And, meanwhile, in Chapel Hill, some of the students, perhaps taking their cue from the Kansas coaching staff, got a little carried away, at least one on a stretcher. His mistake was probably getting aboard a '49 Ford
On the editorial page, "The Assembly's Conscience: A New Task" indicates that for a few minutes the following day, the political conscience of the state would be in the keeping of a handful of its legislators, as the 15 members of Senate Judiciary Committee No. 1 would decide whether the whole Senate would consider legislative reapportionment or whether it would continue "to rest in the naked grave of negation dug for representative government by previous Assemblies."
It finds that the duty of the Committee was clear, that it must bring the matter before the full Senate, with the Committee's integrity being at stake as much as the future of democratic representation within the state.
It posits that it might seem a useless objective given the past failures and the predictions that the current Assembly would merely "dig another grave for reapportionment." It chooses to believe that the Assembly's conscience was not dead, but only anesthetized by "carefully nurtured illusions of urban political power", and that there was still reason to hope that the conscience would finally come alive.
The State Constitution required reapportionment of the State Senate, the house, unlike the Federal system, which in North Carolina was supposed to have representation roughly proportional to the population of each county, every ten years after each decennial census, the duty, however, not having been followed by each of the successive Assemblies of 1951, 1953 or 1955.
"Creeping Secrecy in Court Proceedings" finds that legislation, which had been introduced in the General Assembly to establish a statewide system of family courts, had been noble in intent and fundamentally wholesome in design, but with a joker in the deck, as one section of it provided for the family court judge, in his discretion, to be able to conduct hearings in chambers or otherwise, excluding "persons having no interest in the case", and that information obtained and social records prepared in the discharge of official duty by any employee of the court would be privileged and not disclosed directly or indirectly to anyone other than the judge or others entitled under the proposed law to receive the information, unless otherwise ordered by the judge.
It finds that the latter provision would be a powerful new tool to close more judicial proceedings from public scrutiny, part of an alarming trend slowly to cut down the people's right to know about the administration of justice. It finds that if the proposed family courts would be dealing only with the very young, there would be some justification for secrecy, but that they were broader in jurisdiction, covering a multitude of domestic problems, including divorce.
It had been the custom for some time in the state to protect juveniles from public scrutiny, the theory being that tribunals dealing with minors were not really courts but rather social agencies dealing with the care and rehabilitation of the young, and that publicity would interfere with those rehabilitation and reform efforts.
But it finds that the principle was carried too far sometimes in practice, ignoring the deterrent effect of publicity, the education of the public to social problems, the protection of the accused, and the constructive interest of society in the welfare of youth. But at least it was based on an humanitarian instinct, however misguided it was at times.
It finds, however, the prospect of secrecy in handling cases involving adults to be disturbing, not able to see any social virtue in keeping secret divorce trials of adults charged with abandonment and nonsupport, bastardy, or cases where a husband or wife was charged with assault or battery on each other. "Adulterers, wife-beaters and runaway husbands do not deserve the protection of secret trials. Furthermore, secrecy in divorce actions would surely encourage this sort of litigation. It might even incline complainants to testimony that they would not dare to make public in the face a possible contradiction."
It concludes that the right to a public trial was not only a right of the accused but also a right of the public and that it was clearly in the public interest that justice be done without further retreat from the principle.
"It Is the Point of
View That Counts" indicates that a critic had mused that the
winners of the current year's National Book Awards were tolerably
good books but were not "national". The fiction award had
been presented to Wright Morris for The Field of Vision, a
novel set in Mexico, and the non-fiction prize had gone to George F.
Kennan for Russia Leaves the War, with the poetry prize having
been presented to Richard Wilbur
It indicates that those books took care of Mexico, Russia and the world, according to the critics' argument, but nothing had been said of America. But the winning books, it finds, were as American as grandma's apple pie, with each being a "superb reflection of the American consciousness circa the 20th century", each telling in its own way what it meant to be an American in the world of the present and what it meant to be human within eternity.
It finds the point of view of the novel by Mr. Morris to be richly symbolic and immediately recognizable, with the bullfight depicted in the story becoming a mirror of consciousness in which each character found reflected back to him only those things seen in his "field of vision".
Mr. Kennan had been the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union until four years earlier when the Kremlin began to feel that his insight into Russo-American affairs had been too keen and so declared him persona non grata, remaining probably the country's best authority on the ways of Soviet politics. His book was the first of three volumes which would explore relations between the U.S. and Russia from the early days through 1920.
It finds that the expression of
American ideals, reveries and conceits in Mr. Wilbur's poetry
It finds, as with all fine writing, that it was the individuality of expression which produced art, regardless of whether one was seeing Paris or bullfights through the eyes of Ernest Hemingway or Navajo dances and Etruscan places through the eyes of D. H. Lawrence, it being the point of view, the reflecting consciousness, which counted.
A piece from the Baltimore Evening Sun, titled "Change of Name", indicates that Chicago was no longer the "hog butcher for the world" as it had been described in the poetry of Carl Sandburg, or even for the nation, as Omaha had more impressive statistics on hog slaughtering, as well as cattle slaughtering, as did St. Paul and St. Louis. But Chicago now produced more steel than Pittsburgh, with its annual ingot capacity having surpassed the latter city, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It causes it to wonder whether the old stereotypes regarding cities needed reshuffling, whether Chicago perhaps was less windy than Wichita or Woonsocket, whether the sun shone more often in Spokane than in St. Petersburg, whether the fogs of San Francisco were still thicker than those of Baltimore. It had been many years since Baltimore had added any new statuary and so it also wonders whether it was still entitled to the name "Monumental City".
It suggests that Chicago might be just as glad were people to forget about its hogs and that the day might come when Baltimore would be famous as "the quickest city for driving through on the whole seaboard."
Drew Pearson indicates that Senator Frank Lausche of Ohio, who had been a much-publicized freshman Senator at the beginning of the present Congress, had not been obtaining many headlines of late, while doing some quiet and effective work. Recently, he had summoned the Security & Exchange Commission members to appear before his committee in executive session regarding why they had not policed the manipulations of Leopold Silberstein and his Penn-Texas Corp., which appeared to have violated SEC regulations on at least three occasions, wanting to know why the SEC had not referred Mr. Silberstein and the corporation to the Justice Department. J. Sinclair Armstrong, the SEC chairman, seeking to obtain the job as assistant secretary of the Navy before becoming involved in too many Wall Street squabbles, was upset, complaining that previous executive-session testimony before Senator Lausche had leaked. He had no plausible excuse for not referring the possible violations to the Justice Department and Senator Lausche polled the individual commissioners, finding a majority of them in agreement with Mr. Armstrong.
Mr. Silberstein, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was an astute, fast-moving financial wizard who, during his eight years in the U.S., had built up a corporation controlling Colt Arms; part of Pratt-Whitney; a machine tool company; a foundry; an aircraft products company and several other companies, now seeking to acquire Fairbanks, Morse, old-line makers of scales. The three possible violations of SEC regulations which the Senator had pointed out involved the failure to disclose promptly to the SEC and Penn-Texas stockholders various transactions in Fairbanks, Morse stock, the failure to disclose certain transactions with Swiss banks, and the failure to disclose promptly certain profits arranged by Mr. Silberstein with people he had induced to buy stock.
A big stock bubble which would burst on Wall Street might help spark a financial collapse. Mr. Pearson lists some of Mr. Silberstein's manipulations. He indicates that more than half of the 36 million dollars worth of stock which Mr. Silberstein had bought in his battle to take over Fairbanks, Morse, had passed through the hands of his son-in-law.
Robert C. Rurk, in Palamos, Spain, says that a little more than a year earlier he had been flying in a plane next to Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay, who had just been killed the previous week in a plane crash. Mr. Ruark believes that next to President Eisenhower, President Magsaysay was the person the U.S. could least afford to lose as an advertisement for Western democracy, that there would be small problems in the Far East were there more of his type in leadership.
He found him to be the "most entire man" he had ever come across. "Apart from being the most charming, dynamic, and toughest man I ever met, he was one of the shrewdest—and a staunch friend of America, a bitter enemy of communism all the way. He was brave to the point of foolhardiness, and he held the bulk of the people in his palm."
During their hour-long flight a year earlier, he had told Mr. Ruark: "The mistake the world is making with simple peoples is to try to hurry them in political concepts they don't understand and aren't prepared to cope with. I know. I am a peasant myself. Gimme a cigarette.
"When my people can raise their produce and get it to town on decent roads, when they can be cured of their illnesses and buses can take pregnant women to hospitals in a hurry, when they have the necessary water to grow rice so they don't have to import it, then we will think more of their political education.
"I say spit on the big, fancy schemes. I want all the little things first. Then perhaps we can get on to the bigger things."
After they had landed, they had ridden in the rain on a bumpy road for miles, and in a tiny barrio some children had waved a sign asking for a school, at which point the President had directed his aides to make sure that they got started on one immediately.
Mr. Ruark found that when President Magsaysay spoke in the rain to the people he met, he radiated something which must have been that which Abraham Lincoln had, listening attentively to a child, and also being a man who had shot his own cousin for leading a gang of rapists, during his underground days in opposition to the Japanese occupation in World War II. Whereas former Philippine presidents had been men of protocol, conducting the government by crony and appointment, President Magsaysay opened the palace to barefoot peasants, seeing as many as a thousand per day, always flying in a plane to some obscure village in the outer islands to ensure the welfare of the inhabitants. He had been heavily criticized for that activity, with the critics indicating that someday he would be killed as a result, as he was a sitting duck for assassination, having scorned all security measures. If someone called him in the middle of the night with a problem, the President would arise from bed to cope with it.
Mr. Ruark indicates that if assassins had chosen to fit themselves into the crowds, President Magsaysay might have been killed a thousand times in the single day he had accompanied him.
He says that they had become friends in the short time he had been with him and there had been correspondence between them on a first name basis afterward. In consequence, Mr. Ruark grieved for the man personally, grieving "less for the man than for the Philippines, and less for the Philippines than for America and the Western world."
"If ever we had a good man on our side, at a time when a good man is hard to find, Ramon Magsaysay was that man."
A letter from J. A. Speight, chairman of the Committee on Expenditures of the House, wonders at some newspaper editors for continuing to write editorials without evidence of their reading what reporters had written, and without knowledge of the subject about which they were writing. "If there is no 'stink' raised by the Welfare in Mecklenburg that you can smell, I would advise you to examine your nose." He suggests that the editors must either be ignorant of what was happening around them or calloused to it, advises them to send a reporter to check welfare records and obtain a true picture of what was happening, at which point they would easily see that he was trying to give the children a chance, and that they might even agree with him that in their aid to dependent children, the "W" in "Welfare" had long ago been changed into an "H", resulting in quite a different kind of "fare". He indicates that he was sending a clipping sent to him by a Charlotte woman, and a letter from the same woman with her name and address omitted.
A letter writer says it does not make sense to have double sessions at Pinewood School, just outside the city limits, as the newspaper had indicated, while nearby Sedgefield, a city school, had room for more pupils. She also agrees that consolidation of the City and County school systems was an ultimate hope, but resents somewhat the way it was being presented. She says that many city children had been well acquainted with double sessions long before the necessity had arisen in the County system. She urges finding out first how many city children moving to the perimeter had to be tutored to catch up, urges comparing the results of the California Achievement Tests given to schools throughout the county, including Charlotte City schools, and thereby finding out, for instance, that the "poor kids" at Pinewood did markedly better than most. She finds it true that the County could learn from the City, but that it was also true that the County superintendent, J. W. Wilson, and his staff, were a fine, competent group of people and that consolidation would probably prove mutually beneficial.
A letter writer from Pittsboro says that an old Roman fable said that there once had appeared in the heart of Rome a great gulf which threatened the entire city, whereupon the oracles had been consulted and said that the most precious thing in the city had to be thrown into the gulf or the city would be destroyed, at which point the men had brought their most valuable property, the women had brought their jewels, and the priests, the sacred utensils from the altars, and then cast them all into the gulf, which only grew wider and more threatening, until finally, a young man asked himself whether the most valuable thing of the city was not the youth, then mounted his charger and rode headlong into the gulf which then closed over him, saving the city. He indicates that his old philosophy professor at UNC, Horace Williams, with whom he had many arguments, just after the turn of the century, had been interested in procuring a scholarship for him to attend Yale. But his father had virtually bankrupted himself trying to do something for his mother who was dying of cancer, and his younger brothers had been growing up "as wild as March hares" and with no prospect of obtaining a decent education, and so the letter writer concluded that he had to go to work and do something for his brothers. He applied for a teaching job at Oak Ridge Institute and was accepted. Upon showing the letter of acceptance to Professor Williams, he had asked whether he was not interested in his efforts to obtain for him a Yale scholarship, and he had replied that he had to go to work and make some money, to which Professor Williams said that if he wanted to make money, he should go out and preach, to which the letter writer had said he did not want to commit blasphemy, having "some sense of the eternal fitness of things." Professor Williams had said that if he believed himself not fit to preach, he was "infinitely unfit to teach. You will not do any damage, at least very little, in the pulpit, as much of your congregation will be asleep; at least their characters will have been formed and the children will not know what you are talking about if they are in the audience. On the other hand, you come into immediate touch with the young while character is malleable and plastic in the classroom and on the playground and there character is formed into a life of usefulness, not in the pulpit." He pays tribute to the faculty of Oak Ridge Institute in 1901 when he entered, naming three members who had been masters in the classrooms, plus three Wake Forest products, Edgar Timberlake, who taught law for 38 years at the Wake Forest Law School, having died the previous fall; George Foote, who had gone from Oak Ridge to Chicago University on a scholarship, and taught 30 years thereafter at Case Western Reserve; and Harry Trantham, the second Rhodes scholar from North Carolina, who had returned from Oxford and taught Greek and ancient history at Baylor University since that time. No young man, he says, in the area had ever been exposed to a higher type of teacher personnel than those, who, like himself, had been fortunate enough to matriculate at Oak Ridge just after the turn-of-the-century. He indicates that it was now 104 years old and the last of its type in the state, having survived without state or denominational support, and they were seeking to convert it into a four-year college with endowments to assure its future. He says that with that done, he believed he could depart "these borders without regrets."
He manages this time, unlike the prior letters he had written the previous Friday and Saturday, to get through the entire subject without once mentioning the "one-blood, one-race" conspiracy to produce "amalgamation" of the races. Hooray for him. We doubt that it insinuates his personal progress on the matter, but at least it is one example of his remaining on topic throughout one missive, without straying into race theory.
A letter writer comments on the March 18 "Worry Clinic" column by Dr. George Crane, in which he gave a "prescription for life", advising those over 40 to reduce weight to that at which one weighed at age 21, "avoid tobacco and hard liquor ... then team up with God by becoming active in a local church." She regards it as nothing more than "the obsolete and impotent 'hell fire' theological weapon, revamped into a health phobia for accomplishing the same ends, namely frightening people into going to church, the entire theme of which is as foolish as it is absurd." She suggests that there was no evidence that belief in God or church attendance rendered a person less susceptible to disease or extended life, that if the premise were true, the medical profession would have long earlier been out of business. She also indicates that if emotional disturbances stimulated blood pressure and heart strain, as Dr. Crane advised, it would be more logical to assume that religion, being highly emotional, would likely stimulate heart disease. Neither believer nor disbeliever was immune to mortality, and so she says that Dr. Crane would have to provide stronger proof than his word that church attendance and belief in theism would forestall the inevitable.
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