The Charlotte News
Saturday, April 6, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield had ordered the nation's 37,000 post offices to undergo drastic mail delivery reductions beginning the following Saturday, unless he received more funding from Congress for the remainder of the fiscal year. He had indicated the previous day that he would need an additional 47 million dollars to continue postal service at present levels for the ensuing three months. The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Clarence Cannon of Missouri, had told the House that the Postmaster General was pulling "an unadulterated bluff" in threatening to reduce service and that the post office would continue to deliver the mail. Earlier in the day, the Committee had voted to provide Mr. Summerfield with 17 million dollars and to consider the remaining 30 million the following Friday, but at a press conference, Mr. Summerfield described as "ridiculous" the Committee decision to defer action on the additional funding.
In Chicago, a lengthy wage dispute between the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen and the nation's railroads had ended, reportedly based on recommendations by a Presidential fact-finding board. The agreement provided for a 26.5-cent per hour wage increase over a three-year period.
In Los Angeles, four suspects had been arrested for the fatal fire resulting from an accelerant being poured onto the floor of a bar and then tossing a match to ignite it, in apparent retaliation for having been kicked out of the bar earlier on Thursday night. Two of the men had been arrested the previous day and two more were arrested this date, booked on suspicion of murder. A police lieutenant said that all four had been identified as the men who had started a ruckus resulting in their having been thrown out twice, but the lieutenant also said that they had not yet determined which of them had allegedly started the fire. The fire had resulted in six deaths of patrons of the bar.
In London, jurors in the murder trial of the doctor accused of killing his elderly patient with overdoses of drugs to obtain a benefit from her will, began a weekend in their homes as the time approached for them to begin their deliberations, with the prosecution expected to finish its summation on Monday and the case likely to go to the jury by Tuesday. English juries were not sequestered, even in capital cases. The ten men and two women on the jury, who had sat for 15 days during the trial, were warned by the court not to discuss the case with anyone outside court. The defense, in its summation on Friday, had told the jury it was not "necessary" for the doctor to take the stand to tell his story of the death of the elderly widow 6 1/2 years earlier.
Secretary of State Dulles, who thrived on air travel, had gotten some work done while aloft between Washington and Albany, N.Y., the previous day, and also had taken a walk in the rain at the Albany Airport. He had never reached New York City, where he was scheduled to address the Council on Foreign Relations and confer with U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. His two-engine plane had been diverted to Albany when bad weather had closed New York's airports, and after waiting almost two hours for the weather to clear, he returned to Washington.
The violent spring storms, which had dealt death and destruction as they rolled eastward from the Rockies to the Atlantic Seaboard during the week, appeared to be easing this date, but the danger of floods had increased in many parts of the storm-battered sections of the South, East and Midwest. The week-long stormy weather, including destructive winds, heavy rains and blizzards, had left a trail of widespread property damage, estimated in the millions of dollars, and at least 47 persons had lost their lives, with five of the deaths having been blamed on storms in the Eastern half of the nation the previous day. The Weather Bureau in Chicago said that the intense storm was now losing its punch. The areas most seriously threatened with flooding appeared to be in Missouri, Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Oklahoma. Three persons had drowned in flooding the previous day, one in Dayton, O., and two in streams in the bootheel area of southeast Missouri. Some 75,000 acres of bottomland in southeast Missouri and in nearby counties of Arkansas had been inundated. Tornadic winds had struck a half dozen towns in Georgia the previous day, killing two boys, injuring at least six others and flattening more than 100 buildings. A 620-foot Great Lakes freighter had been torn loose from its winter moorings in the Maumee River in Toledo, O., knocking down part of the Fassett Street Bridge, causing an estimated $250,000 in damage. The tornadoes which had hit Texas on Tuesday, with Dallas having been the hardest hit, had caused a reported death toll of 12. Colorado, struck by the worst spring blizzard in years, had counted eight deaths, and Oklahoma had suffered five, with three each in Indiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania, two each in Nebraska, Georgia, Missouri and Ohio, and one each in Illinois, Massachusetts and North Carolina.
In Charlotte, a young woman from Chicago had died this date as a result of an early-morning automobile accident in which two Air Force men, each of whom denied driving the car, had escaped serious injury. County Police had rushed the woman to Memorial Hospital with a fractured skull. A coroner's inquest into the accident tentatively had been set for Friday, April 12, and bond had been assessed at $2,500 each for the two airmen, pending the inquest. Police had estimated that the car was traveling at 85 mph south on Sardis Road when it left the road, traveled 300 feet and overturned after striking an embankment. The two airmen, one from Davidson and the other from Winston-Salem, were being held on four separate offenses each. The automobile was registered to one of them. The owner of the vehicle was charged with speeding, reckless driving, operating an automobile under the influence of alcohol and assault with a deadly weapon, while the other airman was charged with speeding, reckless driving, assault with a deadly weapon and driving with no operator's license. The young woman had been listed in critical condition during the morning until she died at around 11:00 a.m., the sixth traffic fatality of the year in the county. The woman had been thrown from the car upon impact and both of the airmen were found inside the car. Investigating officers said that the victim had stayed at a local hotel for about three days and had met the men in a local café. The police said that they could not obtain an accurate description of the cause of the accident from the two airmen, but they had said that the car had left the road on a curve.
Charles Kuralt of The News, in the last of a series of articles on the community parks, reports that the Parks superintendent had stated that they could not build another park without a bond issue, a point echoed by the Park & Recreation Commission chairman, who said that they needed to expand to keep pace with the growth of the city, but could not go any further at present without more money. The books showed that they had just enough left from the 1956 surplus to finish parks in Biddleville and Oakhurst, and to build new ones, long on the drawing board, behind the Mint Museum and beside Bryant Park. After that, the Commission would have to get along on $475,000 per year, barely enough to keep the grass mowed and the swings repaired in the extant 44 park facilities. In addition to money, according to the Allen Report, the second need was to establish a Metropolitan Recreation Commission, with authority to plan and build parks everywhere in the county, rather than just within the city limits, and to have closer cooperation between school and park officials, leading to development of "school-parks" as the focal point of both education and recreation in every neighborhood. Steps had been taken during the week toward accomplishing those latter two goals, as members of a special Social Planning Council recreation committee had urged legislation before the current General Assembly to establish a countywide Park Board. The City School Board had told City School superintendent Dr. E. H. Garinger to arrange a meeting on "school-parks" with recreation officials. A Metropolitan Park Board would be able to build parks in the perimeter and rural areas, and would have the authority to acquire land for "forest parks", cooperating with neighborhood recreation councils to bring the citizens of the community into the inner sanctum of recreational planning. The neighborhood parks would not be intended to replace the large parks, which drew patrons from all parts of the city, but would serve as small centers for family recreation in each neighborhood. A major argument for the school-parks was that they would take a smaller amount of taxpayer money by providing one site for two major community activities, recreation and education.
Julian Scheer of The News tells of Democratic Party members in Mecklenburg County soliciting help in organizing a "third faction", with one Democrat stating that they were not on the inside of the "drugstore group" or the "Love group", that they were just Democrats. The "drugstore group" represented the old pros of the party and its current leaders, including some of the city's biggest names and most active civic leaders, while the "Love group" was the splinter group headed by State Representative Jack Love, a group which had been against everything as far as the old-liners were concerned. The chairman of the party, W. M. Nicholson, belonged to the latter group. But the new group represented neither, wanting to work and to win, but also wanting direction from no clique, seeking leadership from a person acceptable to both groups and envisioning a coalition which would bring both factions together. They would seek candidates without a prior political tag and hoped to promote the candidates of both groups.
In Little Rock, Ark., employees in a downtown office had placed 44 buckets to catch water dripping into a basement vault where records were stored, the office being that of the Little Rock Waterworks Commission. Perhaps Trumpy-Dumpy-Do should have taken that leaf rather than do as he apparently did in his earnest and continuing effort to drain the swamp, maybe directing his staff to knock some holes in the roof so as to allow rain water to come streaming in.
In Norwich, Conn., a woman received a divorce in Superior Court because, according to her, her husband "prayed too much". She asked for the decree on the grounds of intolerable cruelty, telling the judge the previous day that her husband was a religious fanatic who forced her and her two children to "pray all the time". The judge said it was the first time he had ever heard of praying as a ground for cruelty, but granted the divorce decree after asking the woman's lawyer if he thought it constituted cruelty, to which he responded in the affirmative.
In Philadelphia, the ponytail and
dripping sideburns set had turned out in a leather-lunged mass the
previous night, paying between two dollars and $3.50 to see Elvis
Presley
On the editorial page, "Tackle Park Problem with New Tool" indicates that present recreation programs had to be expanded to keep pace with the swift growth of the metropolitan community, in which thousands of new homes were being built across the suburbs, most on small lots, leaving far too little space for restless children to play. Even within the city limits, recreational needs were going unmet.
In the series of articles by Charles Kuralt during the week, he had examined the scattered pieces of the problem for readers, and now was the time for solutions. The Metropolitan Recreation Commission, as recommended by the Allen Report, to develop a comprehensive, coordinated recreation system for the whole of the county, was a valuable new tool to meet the countywide problem, and once the Commission would be established, the financing of large-scale projects could be discussed by park officials with the assurance that an overall perspective had been achieved, and until that time, talk of a large bond issue was more than a little ill-advised.
"Foreign Aid Is a Vital Investment" indicates that Senate Minority Leader William Knowland of California had never been reticent about expressing his opinion on any phase of foreign policy, and his indictment of the foreign aid program during the week had been delivered with characteristic bluntness.
While Congress was taking a hard look at the sensitive issue of U.S. aid to Poland, as well as the requests of nations which had previously been helped, Senator Knowland had stated that "we cannot buy international friendship any more than personal friendship can be purchased."
It finds it a fundamental misconception of the foreign aid program, that it was not a charitable contribution, but rather an investment, with the dividends being assurance that the recipient would not, through financial or military weakness, fall into the Russian sphere. That had been the aim of the 1946 Truman Doctrine regarding Greece and Turkey and it remained the purpose of foreign aid at present.
There was an element of risk that the U.S. aid might fail to achieve its purpose and that if the recipient nevertheless fell under Soviet domination, the aid money would be lost. But if Russian subjugation could be avoided by the aid, the investment was well worth it.
In the case of Poland, the risk involved in granting the 300 million dollars in aid, which Wladyslaw Gomulka's Government had sought, was large, but the returns were likely to be even greater. Poland had not renounced Communism as an economic system, but had rebelled against Russian domination. Mr. Gomulka had carefully nurtured the prospect of independence conceived in the Poznan riots of the previous fall, but it appeared clear that he could not keep that prospect alive and growing unless U.S. aid were forthcoming.
Poland could not be expected to cut all ties with Russia and join a Western alliance, as any attempt to do so would be met with the same kind of Soviet reprisal suffered by Hungary in the short-lived revolution of the previous fall. But the Poles had opened a hole in the Soviet empire's armor and if they could successfully make their own way without Russian intervention, the U.S. would benefit by having one less potential enemy about which to worry, while enabling encouragement of other satellite nations to follow the example of Poland.
It ventures that the risk in Poland might be too great for the U.S. to take, and after hearing expert testimony on the matter, Congress might decide that the U.S. could not afford to take the chance. But in deciding whether to help Poland or any nation requesting U.S. aid, the criterion which ought be employed by those who held the purse strings was whether a grant would "buy the friendship" of the recipient nation.
It regards the paramount consideration to be whether the aid would keep the recipient strong enough to prevent it from falling prey to Soviet imperialists, and suggests that if the aid could achieve that goal, the dividends received in terms of security would cause the money to be well spent.
The Greensboro Daily News had placed Charlotte on Friday in the "19th Congressional District" in an editorial, but since the state had only 12 such districts, it thinks it had grounds to suspect a conspiracy, and indicates that it would not move to the 19th Congressional District, but that Greensboro could go straight to the 20th.
A piece from the Richmond News Leader, titled "It Ain't the Fish, It's the Fishing", finds it nonsense when fishermen said that they did not care whether they caught anything but went fishing for relaxation, indicating that fishing without intent to catch fish was a ridiculous enterprise. What they really meant was that they did not have to catch fish every time they went fishing to enjoy it. But they at least had to have the possibility of a catch.
It cites the example of Chickahominy Lake, which during the previous weekend had been filled with fishermen who caught very few fish, but were nevertheless enjoying themselves on a perfect day for fishing. But had there been signs indicating that the lake had been drained and there were no fish left, there would have been no fishermen at all, as the chance to catch fish was what was important. That was why the fishermen had returned home after the weekend to report that they had a nice day and did not care if they caught anything, that it was the fun of relaxing which they had wanted.
It somehow perversely reminds of the recent efforts by the Gomer committee in Congress, except that the fishermen at Chickahominy Lake were not fishing at taxpayer expense while serving the propaganda interests of foreign adversaries and neglecting for six months, with malfeasance, more pressing matters of international import, such as passage of aid to Ukraine.
Drew Pearson relates that early one recent morning, he had been faithfully following the advice of Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson to do what was right so that he could sleep well, when jubilant Texans had begun calling him to announce the sweeping victory of Ralph Yarborough for the open Senate seat, vacated when Senator Price Daniel resigned after winning the gubernatorial race. All of the newspapers of Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio were against Mr. Yarborough, according to the Texans, plus most of the other newspapers, and yet the liberal Democrat had won over a field of 19 candidates.
Bill Kittrell had indicated that the Republicans and the Shivers Democrats had all the newspapers in Texas behind them, all the money, all the publicity and all the advertising, but yet the people had not liked them.
While Congress was investigating conflicts of interest, some of its own members had been caught in conflicts which would have caused an Administration official to be fired, the latest example of which having been Arkansas Congressman Oren Harris, who had purchased a quarter interest in a television station at the same time he was passing on television legislation. He had paid only $5,000 for 25 percent of the station at El Dorado, Ark., probably the year's biggest television bargain. Mr. Harris was chairman of the powerful House Commerce Committee, which not only handled all television legislation, but also had power over the FCC. Mr. Harris personally presided over the communications subcommittee, which dealt directly with television matters. It meant that the FCC, which regulated television stations, had to come to Mr. Harris for legislative favors. Recently, he had formed a special subcommittee to investigate the FCC. He would thus be a major asset for any television station and the FCC would think twice about turning down a request from a station partly owned by him.
Mr. Pearson suggests that it might explain how he had been able to buy a 25 percent interest in a television station at a remarkably low price, when FCC records showed the station's net capitalization to be $150,000 and that the station had cost an estimated $110,000 to build.
Congressman Harris was presently pushing an application to increase the station's power from 24,000 to 316,000 watts, which would make the station worth over $350,000. It was the only station in south Arkansas and had its choice of network programs, could be received by 325,000 sets, which gave it an estimated audience of 800,000. But Mr. Harris had been able to purchase his quarter share for a mere $5,000.
The president of the station had explained to the column that the station was still in debt and so the Congressman's bargain was not as much as it appeared, indicating that he had offered Mr. Harris a quarter share because they were boyhood friends and because Mr. Harris had helped get the station started.
Marquis Childs discusses the upcoming court martial the following month in Huntsville, Ala., of Col. John Nickerson, Jr., relating that 180 reporters for newspapers and press associations had indicated they would cover the proceeding in which the Colonel was charged with 18 counts connected with the release of documents containing secret information. The networks had asked for facilities to televise and broadcast from the courtroom.
The interest in the case demonstrated that it was more than an issue between the military services, that it had political, economic and international aspects which would make Huntsville an extraordinarily important stage. The case was already being compared to that of Billy Mitchell in reverse, with Colonel Nickerson standing for the Army's right to develop guided missiles against the claim of the Air Force to take over the whole field.
The issue had been joined when Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had moved the previous year to put an end to further work on the Army's 1,500-mile Jupiter missile at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, with the Air Force ultimately to have full jurisdiction over missile development. The Colonel, in his zeal as coordinator of the project, had prepared a memorandum containing information which was classified as secret, making it available to members of Congress and to a newspaper columnist, the latter access being the basis for the charges against him.
Senator John Sparkman was from Huntsville and was taking a direct and active interest in the case. Robert Bell, a partner in Senator Sparkman's former law firm, was Colonel Nickerson's primary counsel. A fund had been raised to hire Ray Jenkins of Knoxville, who had gained prominence as one of the attorneys in the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954, to serve with Mr. Bell and the military counsel provided to the Colonel by the Army.
According to Senator Sparkman, 143 million dollars had gone into the Army's Ballistic Missile Agency in buildings and development of the Jupiter and other rockets and missiles, with another 25 million presently being spent. It was claimed that the Jupiter had reached a height of 640 miles on a flight of 3,400 miles in range, all of which had been monitored by electronic devices which science had developed for the military.
Apart from the money spent on the project, there was the human factor, as German rocket specialists who, during World War II, had worked on the island at Peenemunde in the Baltic developing the V1 and V2 rockets, which had caused havoc in Britain and Belgium, were now working at civil service salaries. Those men, of whom Werner von Braun was the best known, had settled down in Huntsville and become part of the community. They believed passionately in the Jupiter and indicated that they would not work for any other Government agency. A specialist like Dr. Von Braun, who talked about spaceships and trips to the moon as though reservations could be made the next day, would be worth a salary of at least $100,000 per year to any of the major aviation or electronics companies.
Redstone Arsenal was a Government agency and was, therefore, regarded with jealous suspicion by the big West Coast aviation companies which were doing much of the missile work under Government contracts. If the Army Ballistic Missile Agency could be liquidated or greatly curtailed, those companies would likely profit.
On the international side, the President had promised Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at the Bermuda conference to supply Britain with weapons developed by the U.S., including the Jupiter missile. A report, which was subsequently denied, had said that it would be five years before the missile could be delivered to Britain.
At the court-martial, an effort would be made to show that if the Redstone project was contained at its present pace, the British would obtain the 1,500-mile missile in 2 1/2 years, thus in half the time otherwise estimated. That was of vital importance vis-à-vis the balance of power with the Soviet Union. It was expected that the trial would open up the possibility that some years in the future, the military airplane and its pilot would become obsolete.
Mr. Childs concludes that there were occasions when in a single human drama, all of the conflicts of an era were concentrated, and that the Nickerson trial appeared likely to be one of those.
Doris Fleeson tells of the story of how the State Department had achieved full coverage for Vice-President Nixon's long African journey, with special attention to the Negro press, boiling down to the economic factor. The Department had ordered the journey, press included, stamped as an intergovernmental agency project, which could then be offered, via the tax-supported Military Air Transport Service, at fire sale prices, less than half the estimates furnished the State Department by commercial airlines.
The Department had also helped in other ways, cutting the per person cost plan by assigning six members of the U.S. Information Agency and a press officer to the press plane, in addition to Mr. Nixon's personal press spokesman, Bill Henry, who had taken leave from his Los Angeles Times column and radio work to make the trip. The Department had allowed two black publishers to include their wives on the trip at the bargain rate.
The Department, in its own announcement that the trip would be by MATS, had asserted that no commercial airline could enter part of the area which the Vice-President proposed to cover, a matter contradicted by TWA, which had wanted to charter the press plane and had provided the State Department estimates for it. In the end, 32 passengers, and at times, 34, occupied the press plane, with assurance from the State Department that they would be billed not more than $1,000 each for their 22-day, 18,000-mile trip. In addition to Government employees, the entourage had included nine black reporters accredited to black publications and 17 reporters and photographers from the press associations, major broadcasting and news chains, and news magazines. The 17 reporters comprised a typical national news story group and most of them, if not all, would have made the trip regardless of cost.
Department officials, in discussing how the party had been put together and who did the actual work, differed, with one indicating that they had trouble to the last minute getting people to go even at the cut-rate price, while another indicated that the plane had filled rapidly and had to be limited on a first-come, first-served basis. The Department denied that it solicited the Negro press, insisting that the large proportion of black reporters resulted from the fact that the Vice-President would visit the newly created free state of Ghana. Most of the group had come from out of town, and Department officials admitted that they had done some long-distance telephoning to reach them. At the same time, no general word had reached the press corps or its prominent members that the State Department had arranged such an attractive travel bargain.
The Defense Department's ready cooperation in the trip represented a reversal of the rules set by Secretary Wilson when he had first taken office, ordering that neither MATS nor the military services could take reporters overseas on routes covered by commercial airlines. The political dividends to the Vice-President from the coverage of his African trip, especially by the Negro press, would be helpful to his prospective presidential hopes for 1960, as he had been, for some time, aiming at the crucial minorities in the pivotal larger states where elections were won or lost.
A letter writer finds that two recent articles concerning the vituperations of baseball star Ted Williams were enough to turn one's stomach. He was reportedly upset because the late Senator Robert Taft of Ohio had not gotten him out of duty in the Korean War after he had already served in World War II, that it was a lousy Government, and third, that the income tax debt of heavyweight champion Joe Louis ought be erased from the books. The writer suggests that Mr. Williams must have stopped a pop fly with something other than his glove. She says that many other men had served in both World War II and Korea, and therefore he should not have expected to be let off the hook because he was a hotshot baseball player. She suggests that his most outstanding accomplishment was a record at long-distance spitting—it having been recounted by the sports interviewer that he had spat as he spouted off about Senator Taft's lack of fealty. She believes that it would be mutually beneficial for Mr. Williams and the U.S. Government if he would take a slow boat to China, at least serving the purpose of keeping him away from the many youngsters who believed that baseball players were examples to follow.
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