The Charlotte News

Saturday, June 1, 1957

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from aboard the H.M.S. Alert, in an article by Ronald Thomson, that Britain had detonated its second and most powerful hydrogen bomb in a series of tests. A four-engine jet bomber, flying thousands of feet above sea level, had dropped the four-ton bomb, estimated to have a destructive force equal to five megatons of TNT, near Malden atoll, 400 miles south of Christmas Island. The blast was believed to have been three times more powerful than the first detonation by the British in mid-May. Newsmen and other observers aboard the Alert, 35 miles from the point of the blast, had been cautioned to keep their backs turned to avoid risking their sight. After ten seconds, the press corps, clad in protective suits and goggles, had been given clearance to face the explosion. "A huge fireball, estimated at more than a mile wide, hovered in the sky, its center a writhing turmoil of bronze, scarlet and intense white. Within seconds the fireball expanded into a blinding rainbow. Then it appeared to retract and in moments the familiar puffy cloud of dazzling whiteness began forming." The test series was denominated "Operation Grapple". The task force scientific director, William Cook, predicted that there would be "no significant fallout activity from the high air burst." He said that the fireball would not touch the water and that the remains of the missile would condense into fine particles which would be swept into the stratosphere in the mushroom cloud, and that the particles would take between months and many years to fall back to ground level, with the fallout not being concentrated in any single area but rather would be deposited worldwide. He said the addition to the U.S. and Russian test fallout would be very small. You will only get a small amount of cancer as a result.

Traffic deaths from the Memorial Day weekend had reached 184 by mid-morning this date, with an additional 67 deaths reported from drowning and 49 from miscellaneous causes. California and Pennsylvania were tied at 14 traffic deaths each to lead the states in that category. During the previous four-day Memorial Day weekend of 1950, there had been 347 traffic deaths. Thus far, there had been fewer traffic deaths than predicted, with the count having begun at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, with 94 having been counted through midnight Thursday, compared to 120 by that point having been predicted by the National Safety Council in Chicago, with the Council having provided no estimate for the entire four-day holiday. The piece provides a state-by-state tally of the deaths since the start of the holiday, with North Carolina having suffered three traffic deaths and one miscellaneous death.

At West Point, N.Y., June commencement week activities began this date at the Military Academy, with festivities set to include athletic contests, presentation of athletic awards, receptions, a review, and the presentation of military and academic awards, with graduation exercises to be held the following Tuesday for the 546 cadets of the class of 1957.

In Dallas, Tex., it was reported that 11 inches of rain in three hours had caused flash floods the previous day between Uvalde and Lapryor. A lightning strike hitting between Fort Worth and Dallas had killed two 14-year old boys of Arlington while they were on a motor scooter near their home. Farmers waited impatiently for thousands of acres of land to dry as the violent weather continued in Texas after two months of it. The Midland Weather Bureau said that a tornado was sighted a few miles west of Big Spring in west Texas, but had caused no damage. In Big Spring, an inch of rain had fallen in just 20 minutes, flooding streets. Lubbock, Amarillo, Plainview and Sherman had also been hit by storms. The rains had prevented harvesting and were believed to have placed the south plains wheat crops in jeopardy. The Red Cross had said the previous day that 362,234 Texans had been directly impacted by tornadoes and floods during the months of April and May, not counting the victims of Thursday or Friday, with at least 745 homes and 384 farm buildings having been destroyed, along with 197 other buildings, and 52 deaths attributed to the weather.

In New York, evangelist Billy Graham spoke again the previous night, to 18,300 people at Madison Square Garden. He said: "You laugh at the idea of being saved by Christ. You said they are rationalizing, cynically, smirking. Your hearts are cold as ice. Your hearts are like stone." He said that the smug modern generation defied God's plan of redemption through Christ because they could not see how it worked. "You shake your fist in God's face, and say, 'Sure, I'm going to heaven, but I'm going my own way. I can't understand how Christ's death on the cross will save me, so I'll use my own system.'" He said that it was the road to doom because God had set the rules and the only release God offered to men from their inevitable sin was through accepting Christ, who had died to reconcile the world to God. "There is not a person in America, and all the world, who understands all about salvation. But who are we, with our finite minds, put down here to live 60 or 70 years, to say we understand all about the infinite God, who fills all space, who has no beginning and no end, who is from everlasting to everlasting?" At the end of the sermon, 749 people had come forward at the evangelist's beckoning to "accept Christ", bringing the total number of such decisions to 10,739 over the 17 nights thus far of the Crusade, which was the largest response the evangelist had yet achieved. His text had been from Exodus 20:13, which states, "Thou shalt not kill." He said that the "greatest murder of all" which men committed was "injuring another man's soul" and that thousands were guilty of destroying souls. This night, the service would be televised nationwide on ABC, between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m., the first time one of his meetings had ever been televised live.

In Los Angeles, a Polish-born woman had been booked on suspicion of murder in the bludgeoning death of her wealthy employer. The maid cried that she would not have done it, but police said that they had "a good circumstantial case" against her, for beating to death the 42-year old society matron, utilizing a vacuum cleaner. Police the previous day had freed a freelance photographer whom the accused 34-year old woman, who had survived being a wartime prisoner of the Nazis, said she had admitted to the Studio City home of her employer a few minutes before the latter was beaten to death in her bedroom. The freelance photographer had voluntarily surrendered to police and had admitted stopping at the home on May 22 to photograph a white ceramic cat door ornament, but denied being there on the day of the slaying. A police chemist said that the vacuum cleaner was "loaded with blood" and had been damaged on its bottom as if by a blow, and that there was blood also on the maid's shoes and clothing. The victim had been found unconscious and dying beside her blazing bed by the 28-year old husband of the victim's mother, 65. Detectives said that the bed had been set on fire to hide the murder. Detectives quoted the maid as saying that if there was blood on her clothing and shoes and in the vacuum cleaner, it had been acquired when she sought to aid the victim, indicating that she had run the vacuum cleaner over the bloodied spot in an effort to clean it. She said that she was happy in her employer's household, had earned $30 per week and was allowed to keep her 11-year old son. She still bore a tattoo on her left arm of a number provided her by the Nazis in a Polish concentration camp. She had been in the country five years and said that her husband had died in the camp.

Also in Los Angeles, a 20-year old housewife had set fire to her home as an act of rebellion against housework and diaper washing, but did not recommend the remedy to others, as she said it had made things worse. The woman appeared in Superior Court the previous day, facing an arson charge, indicating that she did not have the money to hire a lawyer and so a public defender was appointed to represent her. Her arraignment was continued until June 10 and she was released in the meantime on a $500 bond. As she left the courtroom, she said that she was worried about what was going to happen to her, indicating that her husband and her two daughters were staying with her sister in Pomona. She said she was still doing diapers and housework but did not feel as nervous as she had before the fire. On May 8, she had set fire to seven stacks of diapers in various parts of their home in suburban Norwalk, had then gotten in her car with the two daughters, ages four months and two years, and drove away, with a neighbor shouting that the house was on fire, to which the woman had replied: "That's good. Call the fire department." When arrested, she told police that she had been doing housework and baby diapers for so long that she "just got fed up" and blew her stack. After court, she said that she quit high school to be married on her 16th birthday and after having her two daughters, things had become too much for her, that the baby had been in the hospital and she was lonely because her husband was gone between the early morning until the nighttime on his construction job. The fire damage to the house was estimated at $3,000. She said that they wanted to keep the house and fix it up, but that they did not have the money, as the whole interior had to be repainted and the floors had to be repaired. She said that she believed her husband paid more attention to her and the children now, but she would not recommend that any other woman do what she had done.

In Detroit, the 100-foot tugboat Maude had been the scourge of the customs border patrol as it slipped across the Detroit River from Canada with its loads of illegal liquor. On one moonless night in 1923, it had suddenly foundered while bound from Wallaceburg, Ontario, with a cargo of choice Canadian beer. Cranemen, dredging for a new city dock, had found its unmarked grave during the week, the hull lying only 12 feet off the Michigan shore, apparently bottom up and buried deep in the mud. The vice-president of the firm doing the work on the dock said that they should be getting to the bottles soon and ventured the opinion that if the bottles had been tightly capped, it should still be pretty smooth beer.

In Raleigh, the State Bureau of Investigation had been called into the probe of the charges that liquor manufacturers had made deliveries of free liquor to hotel rooms of legislators staying at the Sir Walter Hotel during the legislative session. The local solicitor had asked the SBI to enter the case the previous day, following a conference with State Attorney General George Patton. The solicitor said that if the violations of the law were shown, the persons involved would be taken before a Wake County grand jury, and he promised that every angle would be investigated. The issue had come to light the prior Tuesday when reporters and photographers from the Raleigh News & Observer had caught a liquor salesman unloading nine cases marked with the names of liquor manufacturers, but later that day, the nine cases were found to contain only promotional literature for liquor. A minister, however, had reported that free liquor bottles were being distributed to the rooms of the legislators. The State ABC Board, in making a report the previous day to the Governor, had indicated that it would stop, effective this date, the practice of providing an allotment of samples from the State liquor warehouse to liquor salesmen.

Julian Scheer of The News indicates that if all went well, the session of the General Assembly would be winding up its business by the end of the following week, with the biggest disappointment having been the failure to enact any legislation regarding reapportionment, required by the State Constitution after every decennial census, not done since the 1950 census. He provides other snippets from the session of the Legislature.

Dick Bayer of The News reports that a Charlotte woman was trying to figure out how to get rid of an alligator in the family bathtub, which had been there for ten days. Her husband ran a truck stop in Miami, Fla., and had bought the alligator as a token of affection for her three-year old daughter. The little girl's 17-year old brother was assigned the chore of bringing the alligator back from Florida in a shoe box, but after ten days of putting it in a washtub every time someone wanted to take a bath, the mother had called the newspaper for help, asking if they could aid her in finding a home for it. The curator of the Children's Nature Museum did not want it and no other place she had called did either. While the alligator was now only 18 inches long, it would eventually grow to be seven feet in length and would weigh more than she wanted to estimate. She said that the alligator was quiet, well-mannered and slept most of the time, did not bother anyone, ate about three times per week, nibbling on a piece of chicken about as big as one's thumb. She said that it was just not the right kind of pet for a three-year old girl. They had named it "Spooky".

In Los Angeles, actress Sherree North, 25, was reported in good condition after undergoing surgery the previous day, described as not being serious. She was expected to be hospitalized for four or five days.

A photograph shows playwright Arthur Miller and wife Marilyn Monroe leaving their New York apartment following his conviction for contempt of Congress the previous day for having repeatedly refused to answer questions before HUAC the prior June 21 regarding the identity of those present at a meeting of Communist writers in 1947, though testifying freely as to his own activities and beliefs. He impliedly, though not expressly, based his refusal on the First Amendment right of free assembly and association, not the Fifth Amendment. He remained free on bond and said that the couple was going away for a little while. It would be 3 to 4 weeks before sentence would be passed.

Such people, both constituents and those they have elected to Congress, ought to view, with due reflection, a version of The Crucible by Mr. Miller and realize its very consciously intended latter-day analogs, which, unfortunately, albeit in different guises, have extended from the 1950's into present times, making America worse again, especially since 2016 when Magaville, U.S.A., was secretly chartered as a government inside the Government.

On the editorial page, "City Must Be Ready with the Water" indicates that the Mecklenburg County Commissioners had acted promptly and properly in coming to the rescue of Thomasboro after its private water company had gone out of business as of the previous day, leaving 85 families of the town without any other water source.