The Charlotte News
Saturday, May 11, 1957
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime influence within unions and management had said this date that they planned hearings the following week on alleged "demands" by Teamsters Union president Dave Beck of an employer Mr. Beck had aided with loans from Union funds. Counsel for the Committee, Robert F. Kennedy, said that Roy Fruehauf, the president of the Fruehauf Trailer Co. of Detroit, and later Mr. Beck, himself, would be brought in as witnesses regarding Mr. Beck's demands on the company in the wake of the loan. The Committee had previously developed testimony that Mr. Beck had loaned 1.5 million dollars in Teamsters funds to Mr. Fruehauf when he had faced loss of control of his company unless he received more capital. The Committee had been informed that the loans had been repaid, and later, when Mr. Beck needed money, that the Fruehauf firm had caused a trucking company, the Brown Equipment Co., to lend to Mr. Beck $200,000. Mr. Kennedy had said that there were other demands on Mr. Fruehauf by Mr. Beck, and that he intended to try to develop the evidence along that line. The Committee had obtained a growing mass of evidence alleging that Mr. Beck had diverted large sums of his union's money for his personal use and had profited from investing union money. Donald Hedlund, a Seattle mortgage banker associated with Mr. Beck in a series of complicated transactions involving the purchase and sale of mortgages, had testified the previous day that he and Mr. Beck had shared in $11,585 profits from investing trust funds raised by unions for the widow of Mr. Beck's "best and closest friend", Ray Leheney, who had been an official of the old independent AFL labels union. Both Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, chairman of the Committee, and Mr. Kennedy, had said that the profiting by Mr. Beck from funds, over which he was charged with a fiduciary duty as a trustee, had been "unethical" and "abuse of a trust". (This time, the reporter got the figure correct, though still leaving out the fact that there were two such transactions, with Mr. Beck also profiting from a one-third split of $20,425, with the other two-thirds going to Mr. Hedlund and the attorney for the Teamsters, Simon Wampold.)
In Bogotá, Colombia, the new military junta placed in charge of the country, after El Presidente Gustavo Rojas Pinilla had stepped down from his four-year dictatorship and entered exile in Jamaica, had promised the previous night to bring order to the country, restore political and press freedoms and step aside the following year in favor of a freely elected civilian government. An holiday atmosphere prevailed in Bogotá as participants celebrated the collapse of the dictatorship. Leaders of the Liberals and Conservatives, the country's two traditional political parties, whose opposition had bolstered strikes and demonstrations which had brought down the dictator, announced that they supported the interim rule by the junta, appealing by radio the previous night for prudence, calmness and return to normalcy. Relaxation of censorship had permitted a count of the number killed during the previous week of unrest in the country, amounting to at least 141 persons, including 30 who had been caught in a stampede the previous day when troops had sought to clear the joyous crowds from Bogotá's Plaza Bolivar. A local newspaper said that police had fired on another crowd celebrating the fall of the dictator at Medellín, killing nine persons. An estimated 100 persons had been killed during the week in Cali, the country's fourth largest city, many of whom had been killed by police bullets. Teargas police, who had been used to quell the anti-Rojas demonstrators, had killed two youths in Bogotá the previous Sunday.
Rainfall, which had arrived heavier
and sooner than anticipated, had virtually halted this date forest
fires which had beset the Northeastern section of the country for the
previous week, with all of the fires reported to be extinguished or
well under control in New England, New York and New Jersey. Boston
In Dallas, Tex., it was reported
that tornadoes and severe thunderstorms had skipped across Texas
again this date, already battered by hail and beset by flooding. The
twisters had been sighted northwest of Lubbock on the south plains,
near Big Spring in west Texas, and in the Andrews, Seminole and
Denver City areas near the New Mexico border. A cloudburst between
Del Rio, on the Mexican border, and Uvalde to the southeast, had
washed out 78 feet of right-of-way of the Southern Pacific Railroad,
disrupting schedules of passenger trains between Houston and
California. Hail, with diameter of two inches, had fallen in west
Texas the previous night, with an accumulation up to 12 inches deep
on highways, as almost four inches of rain caused flash-flooding in
some areas. Telephone lines had been struck by lightning and winds
reaching speeds of 80 mph, leaving many towns without communications
for hours. Between 80 percent and 90 percent of the grain crop in the Norton area
of west Texas had been ruined by hail, according to a resident of the
area. The sheriff of Del Rio, in southwest Texas along the
Texas-Mexico border, said that he had been forced to turn around
during his trip to Comstock and Langtry, north of Del Rio, when he
found hail piled between eight and ten inches deep
In Houston, Tex., a tavern operator who said that he had "family troubles", had picked up a .22-caliber rifle the previous day and shot three women to death and injured a man before he was captured by police. The 36-year old man had killed his wife, about 30, a 70-year old woman and a 40-year old woman, wounding the elderly woman's husband in the head and arm. He had been arrested on a street corner after the shooting, apparently on his way to his mother's home, still carrying his rifle which was loaded. (He probably just wanted to wish her a happy Mother's Day the following day.) Officers said that witnesses had told them that the man had shot his wife, then had gone out the back door of his home into the home of the elderly couple directly behind his home, shooting them, then went to a third home about three blocks away, where he shot the daughter of the elderly couple, her husband having indicated that the man had burst into their home and accused him of trying to break up his family.
In Pepperell, Ala., five men had been killed this date by fumes from dye at the Pepperell Mills, Inc., a bleaching plant, four of the dead men having succumbed in a vain attempt to save the life of their fellow worker. The police chief said that the deaths had been triggered by the first victim dropping his eyeglasses through a hole in the floor, about six feet below which was a trough carrying waste dye from the plant, with the fumes from it having accumulated in the space between the trough and the floor. The man had then crawled into the space to try to retrieve his eyeglasses, whereupon he was overcome and the other men sought to rescue him, with police estimating that all five of the men had been killed within five or six minutes, the bodies having been recovered by firemen wearing masks.
In Philadelphia, three children, two brothers and their sister, ages eight, five and four, had been killed by smoke this date as flames had swept through their North Philadelphia home. Their father had returned to the home from work at the beginning of the early morning blaze, and had been cut on his hand in seeking to smash his way into the flaming home to reach his family. The mother of the children, along with four other children, had been rescued.
In Chicago, about 75 occupants of a tavern had been held the previous night at gunpoint while a man, who had been thrown out earlier, had set fire to the building after splashing the floor with gasoline, the building being located across an alley from a police station. No injuries were reported from the fire, which had swept the bar and several apartments in the three-story structure above it, causing damage estimated at $6,000. The man had been arrested while fleeing and police said that he had admitted setting the fire out of revenge for his wallet having been stolen from him in the tavern. Police said he had been drinking at the tavern and noticed that his wallet was missing, asking a bartender if he had seen it, at which point he was ejected. Witnesses told police that he returned with a five-gallon can of gasoline and waved a gun, holding off bartenders and patrons as he poured the gas on the floor, attempting to ignite it by firing three times into it, and after that had failed, setting a match to it. They knew he had lost control when he shot the gasoline full of holes.
In Shelby, N.C., a jury in Cleveland County Superior Court had found a defendant guilty of first-degree murder, but recommended life imprisonment to spare him the death penalty. He had been sentenced to death the prior November by another jury after also being found guilty of the same murder of a restaurant owner and service station operator, but the case had been reversed by the State Supreme Court for faulty instructions by the judge for failing to instruct on the consequence of a finding of guilt of first degree murder with a recommendation of life imprisonement, that being that the court would then be constrained to pronounce sentence of life imprisonment. Defense counsel had told the jury that the defendant had repented and hoped to teach the Bible to other prisoners at Central Prison in Raleigh, with one defense lawyer urging the jury to think of the Golden Rule as they deliberated. The defense had presented no witnesses and the lawyers admitted the defendant's guilt, arguing only that he should be spared the death penalty. The jury had deliberated for only 61 minutes before coming in with the verdict. The widow of the victim said after the verdict that she was glad the defendant had repented and was satisfied with the result, shaking hands with the members of the jury as they departed the courtroom. The defendant had placed his head in his hands and wept, telling the judge that he was the finest judge he had ever faced, the judge having replied that the defendant had committed a "horrible crime" and should never deserve parole.
Julian Scheer of The News tells of the County attorney having pulled a pretty good trick recently on County Schools superintendent J. W. Wilson, with the attorney having found a copy of a Rockingham newspaper with the headline reading, "County School Supplement Fails by 19 Votes", rushing then into Mr. Wilson's office and tossing the newspaper onto his desk, causing Mr. Wilson, who was already worried about the outcome of Tuesday's election in Mecklenburg County, to blanch at the apparent result, eventually realizing that it was still Tuesday and the votes could not have been counted before sundown and that the newspaper did not appear to be The News. State Representative Jack Love appeared not to intend to run again for the State House, instead set to seek a spot in the State Senate, whether or not incumbent Senator Spencer Bell would choose to run for re-election. Mr. Scheer goes on to report of other tidbits having to do with the Legislature.
It was reported this date that Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were scheduled to visit the U.S. for about ten days the following early October, according to plans worked out between Washington and London, with the Queen's formal acceptance of an invitation from the President to visit Washington probably to be communicated within two or three weeks, having been pending for several months while officials had worked out details. The royal couple were expected to visit other places as well, but diplomats said they did not know what towns and cities would be on the itinerary, except that it appeared certain that Jamestown, Va., site of the first permanent English settlement in the colonies, established in 1607, would be included, as Jamestown was celebrating its 350th anniversary.
On the editorial page, "Ike Is Asking a Vote of Confidence" distinguishes the French form of parliamentary government in which a vote of confidence was taken on a particular program being advanced by the leadership, from the American form, in which no such vote of confidence was necessary directly, with the President remaining in office even when Congress disapproved of proposed programs.
Nevertheless, events did raise informally questions of confidence, and the current battle over the budget, which had stalled even the non-fiscal parts of the President's program, had raised a question of confidence in him, compelling the President to take his message directly to the people to try to garner support for it. The public's response to the coming television talks by the President would, in effect, constitute a vote of confidence or no confidence regarding his assessment of the extent of the nation's obligations to the militarily weak and economically underdeveloped nations of the world.
That question centered ultimately on foreign aid because the Congress was unwilling to make substantial reductions in domestic spending and was unwilling to implement all of the Hoover Commission's recommendations to promote efficiency in the Government. The President had said that foreign aid was the only major spending program without a pressure group to defend it, and so he would have to provide support for it or see it cut drastically by Congress, the President viewing it as more essential to the nation's welfare than many of the domestic programs which Congress intended to continue intact.
Six months earlier, questions of confidence in the President's judgment would have seemed laughable, following his landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson in 1956, second in size only to FDR's victory over Governor Alf Landon in 1936. The President had been talking confidently at that point of completing his conversion of the party to "modern Republicanism". It finds, however, that he had failed to take advantage of his popular mandate to translate it into power with Congress. Far from having rebuilt the Republican Party, he appeared unable to command its support for his program, and it was doubtful that he had tried to command it.
He appeared to believe that if he asked for the support, it would be given, but the Democrats, long fearful of attacking President Eisenhower directly, now found plenty of precedent for such attacks from within the Republican Party, with "modern Republicans" being in such short supply that the President had not been able to find enough of them for his own Cabinet.
The inability to get his party to follow was attributed by Walter Lippmann primarily to the President's unwillingness to "break the eggs that are needed for the omelette." He had said that the President had hoped that the Republicans who did not share his views would have a change of heart and that his own sincerity and gentility would win them over, never having been one to do what practical political leaders had to do, filling posts of command with persons who shared their own views, defending and rewarding their supporters and putting out and putting down their opponents. Mr. Lippmann said that the President had thought of himself as accomplishing his hopes for the Republican Party by standing above it, thereby changing the course of American political history. While holding that image of the Presidency had done much to increase his personal popularity by keeping him above the fray which aroused opposition and created unpopularity, the stance had diminished his influence, as people did not follow leaders who did not lead and did not care to be shot at while their commanders were appeasing their foes.
The piece suggests that the confidence issue could not be separated from the President's appeals to the people and would have to be decided by them as to whether they wanted the President to lead the Government, as events had forced him into a leadership role regarding the budget, which he could not fulfill without the support of the people who elected him.
It concludes that if the U.S. was to maintain its position in world leadership in its efforts to combat international Communism, the foreign aid program could not be sacrificed, that while the budget ought be cut somewhat, it should not be axed, and so the decision of the President to fight for it was commendable.
"Toward a New Era of Safety" indicates that the State Senate had come through with a workable driver training bill during the week, which it regards as the most important contribution to the cause of traffic safety during the previous decade. Concurrence of the State House was virtually assured the following week. It would be one of the major accomplishments of the 1957 General Assembly.
By the same time the following year, a new generation of safer drivers would be in the making throughout the state, whereas at present, only about a quarter of the high schools offered driving instruction to 19 percent of the eligible students. The method of financing the program had come under sharp attack in the Senate two days earlier, but the one-dollar charge to be added to the cost of motor vehicle license plates, beginning in 1959, had been a bargain price for the good it would accomplish in improving North Carolina drivers.
It indicates that it was not just a matter of teaching a youngster how to shift gears, steer and use the brake pedal. A good driver training program would make students want to drive safely and would provide them the information needed to make wiser driving decisions, teaching them the inherent dangers of misuse of the motor vehicle and the social responsibilities which went along with the privilege of its operation on the roads.
Governor Luther Hodges, the superintendent of State Public Instruction, Charles Carroll, and the Governor's Traffic Safety Council had worked hard to get the legislation passed, and it finds that their victory had been well worth the time and effort.
Bob Mason, writing in the Sanford Herald, in a piece titled "Fact vs. Fiction", indicates that author Doris Betts had told the Rotary Club recently that on her first day in Robie Macauley's writing class at Woman's College in Greensboro, the lesson had addressed the subject of fact versus fiction, with Mr. Macauley warning that the two seldom blended. Mrs. Betts had related a story which Mr. Macauley had told the class, regarding a family from the North who had moved into an old house in South Carolina, and while cleaning a closet, their teenage daughter had found on a shelf a photograph of a boy, who was extremely handsome, and so the daughter retained the picture, but did not forward it to the boy as there was no name attached to it and they did not know the name of the former occupants. Often, the girl had looked at the photograph and came increasingly to admire it, soon developing a love for the boy through her imagination, with the love deepening as time passed.
After several years, the girl and her family had moved again, this time to a large city in the Midwest. Their new home was an apartment in a duplex. They did not have occasion to meet their neighbors or even the people on the other side of the duplex. During the family's second winter there, a fault had developed in their chimney and workmen had been called into tear away the bricks and put in new ones. As the double fireplace was shared by the two apartments, an opening between them was created, such that the members of both families had come to the open area to observe the progress of the work.
The daughter, standing one day at the dismantled chimney, suddenly looked into the face of the boy whose picture she had retained and whom she had vicariously loved for nearly five years. Her feelings were transmitted to the boy in reality and he went immediately to her, with it not being long before they were married.
Mrs. Betts had said that the story had been told to Mr. Macauley by someone suggesting that in it he would find material for a book, the wonderful thing about it having been that it was completely true. Mr. Macauley had said that he felt a little stunned, but after a moment, had replied: "Well, it may be wonderful as fact but it sure makes lousy fiction."
Mr. Mason says that the story brought laughter from the Rotarians, and he had liked it also. That night, in consequence, he had related it to his own family. His daughter, a high school sophomore, had not laughed at all, but frowned, saying: "Heck, the reason the professor thought that was such lousy fiction is that he had heard it before. They have a story just like that on television every afternoon."
We have not seen that one. What channel?
Drew Pearson indicates that Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson had initially killed all Government nurseries, but now was urging Congress to appropriate more money for them, having been troubled primarily by his fellow Republicans. Shortly after he had become Secretary in 1953, he had ordered all Department nurseries terminated, claiming that it was not the job of the Government to grow trees, turning the nurseries over to the states. At Winona, Minn., Mr. Benson had given a thriving Government nursery to the State, and the State then proceeded to remove all trucks, tools, tractors, the overhead irrigation system and some of the choice nursery stock, then abandoned the site, which was now owned by the Winona Sand and Gravel Co., having purchased it at the bargain price of $3,000, including a Butler Building valued at $12,000, plus all of the irrigation equipment which could not be moved, including a pump, motor, etc., and other minor buildings. Thus, the once thriving Government nursery was now a gravel pit.
But three years later, in 1956, when Secretary Benson had begun his soil bank program, he discovered that he would need trees. Because, however, it was too late to start Federal nurseries and because he did not want to reverse himself so much, he was now seeking an appropriation of six million dollars in Federal funding to the state nurseries, whether the states wanted the money or not. The money was being supplied in direct grants to the states, without the necessity of matching funds, a policy directly contrary to the Administration policy of making the states match Federal aid.
The House Appropriations subcommittee, discovering what Mr. Benson was doing, had objected, finding the grants to have been made by the Secretary, himself, inquiring of him as to why he opposed such subsidies in 1955 but now had them in the budget. Another member of the subcommittee wanted to know why the Department had legal authority to subsidize state nurseries to sell trees at below cost to farmers. The plan for Federal funding of state nurseries was nevertheless going forward, with the expectation that farmers would plant five million acres of trees under the soil bank plan. But farmers had signed contracts only to plant 7 percent of that acreage in fiscal year 1956-57. Since 1940, farmers had planted only ten million acres of trees and their rate of planting prior to the soil bank program had reached about one million acres per year. Thus, they would have to do a lot of planting to meet the five million acre per year target any time in the near future.
The President was holding up a special labor message which he had intended to send to Congress until his advisers could make up their minds as to what to do about the Senate revelations on labor racketeering. The President was impatient to recommend strong legislation and had complained to his advisers that the Democrats were getting all of the credit for cleaning up the unions. But Secretary of Labor James Mitchell had warned him not to recommend legislation which might be too drastic. The President, nevertheless, wanted to send a strong labor message condemning corruption, and had ordered Attorney General Herbert Brownell to come up with some positive proposals.
Robert C. Ruark, in his hometown of Wilmington, N.C., thinks that his home state deserved credit for toughness in traffic control, as there were a lot of deaths in the state from traffic accidents, over a thousand in 1956 and 1,400 in another year, "because the broad highways are alluring, and the drag racers combined with tourists and shambling farmers in ancient heaps to compute a fantastic carnage on the weekends when the blended booze brought out the beast."
He offers some of the "reasons you don't push your Cadillac or Thunderbird to its fullest humming capacity", that the booby-traps worked in various ways in the absence of sufficient patrol personnel, parking a police car on the side of the road only as a decoy, or at the scene of a particularly gory wreck, placing a sign on it saying: "Death Hangs Just Around the Corner". It had a dramatic psychological effect on a person with a fancy two-tone car, seeing what a particularly violent collision could do to a brand-new pink Buick. The person slowed down.
They had "whammies", warning drivers that speed was electrically timed by roadside signs, the whammy being a pair of cables stretched across the road which clocked the speed from one point to the next—the black snakes. Often, though, the whammy was a phony, with just a piece of rubber hose stretched across the road, causing the driver, nevertheless, to slow down, just as effective as the radar-checked speed signs, even though there may not be in fact a radar at work. The sign might say: "Don't Speed or You Might Help Grow Weeds—And Radar Lurks Just Around the Corner". (They could have used a new poet. Try: "If You Want To Be Moribund, Just Rush the Next Curve to Goryland", or "If Your Accelerator Is Down, Stuck, the Undertaker Wishes You Good Luck", or "If You Have a Wish o' Death, Drive Fast through This Road's Swishy Mess", or "If You Should Throttle Your Carb, You'll Be Bottled by Barbs".)
A gimmick which enabled police cars to photograph the speed of the motorist, replete with a photograph of the speeder's license plate, could then be used as evidence in court, making the matter quite a bit harder to contest. Mr. Ruark finds it a police-state technique, but one which had served to scare drivers in the area enough to become obedient to the limits. They also placed "packs", each consisting of 8 to 10 police cars operating in a town at once, stopping every car in sight in a show of force—clearly a Fourth Amendment issue without probable cause for each stop, though, for the mobility of the vehicle, not requiring a warrant, based on inherent exigent circumstances. Another was a periodic license check, whereby every motorist was halted before a roadblock.
There was also a bill pushed through the Legislature to allow the cops to use 20 percent of their motor pool as unmarked cars of various makes, perhaps a Studebaker or Chrysler rather than the usual Ford or Chevy. "No man's quite willing to bet that the driver of the fancied-up all-purpose Dodge is a civilian when the odds are 20 percent that he's a patrolman." (He might be Marshal Dillon.)
Every service station one stopped at, the operator informed the motorist that the roads were filled with cops, and every friend said to take it easy at the cocktail parties or they would haul your license on drunk driving if they even smelled "one sad Scotch on your breath." Every semi-stranger warned that it would cost the motorist $21.60 if they ran a stop sign.
He indicates that in North Carolina, people obeyed the traffic laws. He had asked a city father of Wilmington to justify the beneficent reign of terror, receiving the reply: "We just got tired of messin' up these nice highways with corpses. These highways cost a lot of tax money. And blood on the concrete is a bad advertisement for the state."
A letter writer finds that the opposition to annexation by State Representative Jack Love and perimeter area residents had been brought about by the "ruinous policies" of the City government, permitting developers and individuals to tap City water and sewer lines at their convenience, when the proper handling of the situation would be to permit them to tap into the City services only after annexation or by having to provide a large deposit for the connection, to be refunded once each individual consumer was incorporated into the city limits. He finds that one petition being circulated had indicated that since the residents in the areas to be annexed had access to City water and sewage disposal already, they saw no reason to pay City taxes only for having their garbage collected weekly. He thus concludes that the City had a lot to learn.
A letter from the chairman of the Social Planning Council thanks the newspaper for communicating the facts about the bond issue to expand Memorial Hospital, both in its news columns and editorials. The approval of the bond issue the previous Tuesday indicated that the people had been made aware of the need for the expansion, attributable, in no small part, to the excellent reporting and editorial support provided by the press. He indicates that the Council had conducted a survey in 1954 which had first pointed to the need of the expanded hospital facilities, which would also make possible the fulfillment of the recommendations of the Psychiatric Services survey conducted in 1956 in cooperation with the Eastern Lions Club, which, he says, also deserved recognition for their continuing interest in mental health and for the way they had contributed to the Social Planning Council by means of the speakers bureau and film presentations concerning the hospital situation.
A letter writer from McBee, S.C.,
indicates that most of the large nurseries were located in the North,
from which most of the Christmas trees were shipped, and yet trees
could be raised three times as fast and over twice as cheaply in the
South. He indicates that it was easy to raise dogwood, sycamore,
pine, deodar cedar
Can you grow cake also?
Framed Edition
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