The Charlotte News
Monday, June 3, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Christmas Island that Britain's second hydrogen bomb detonation the prior Friday had generated heat nearly 2,000 times that of the sun's surface and had set Malden atoll ablaze. The chief scientist for the British nuclear tests in the Pacific, William Cook, said that the explosion had been a complete success, with the heat generated having been rated at 10 million degrees Centigrade, more than 16.7 million degrees Fahrenheit, with the average heat of the sun's surface being estimated at 10,000 degrees F. The bomb, reportedly equal to five million tons of TNT, had been dropped by a Valiant jet bomber and had exploded about two miles above the surface, near Malden atoll, 400 miles south of Christmas Island. The bomb was believed to be about the size of the hydrogen bomb tested by the U.S. at Bikini Atoll the prior year. Mr. Cook reported that the blast had set timber afire on Malden and four hours later, the fires were still raging. He also said that based on scientific instruments placed on the atoll, there was no radiation contamination, leading to speculation that the British might have perfected a "clean" bomb which could be used for land or sea warfare. Pilots flying over Malden after the blast saw no sign of Percy, a wild pig, the only living thing left on Malden among the complex of barometers and radiation measurement apparati. Percy had apparently survived the first blast which had occurred on May 15. Let us have a moment of silence for poor Percy. He would've made a good ham had he not been nuked to a crisp, now not even good for bacon.
In Pasadena, Calif., 2,000 American
scientists signed an appeal urging international agreement to stop
the testing of nuclear bombs. Dr. Linus Pauling
As indicated in the above-linked broadcast from early 1958, the following February, Dr. Edward Teller, considered to be the "father of the hydrogen bomb", would co-author with Dr. Albert Latter an article for Life arguing for continued nuclear tests for the sake of national defense, rebutting the claims of the scientists signing Dr. Pauling's statement.
On June 10, 1963, President Kennedy, in his commencement address to American University, announced the Administration's effort to negotiate a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets and the British. The following August, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty would be signed, banning atmospheric and underwater testing of nuclear weapons, an effort substantially aided by the near catastrophic nuclear confrontation of October, 1962.
In Goldsboro, N.C., the North Carolina Civil Defense director, General Edward Griffin, stated this date that Civil Defense and State Board of Health authorities were planning a statewide system to monitor radioactivity, as set forth to the Goldsboro News-Argus in a letter replying to questions from that newspaper. General Griffin said that they planned to establish radiological monitoring stations, both fixed and mobile, throughout the state, and that several state engineers and physicians had been sent to special schools to learn of all aspects of nuclear radiation, but that it would be between six and twelve months before the plans could be completed. He said that nuclear radiation could be lethal to more of the state's people than the initial blast from nuclear weapons. He also said that some colleges and industries which used atomic energy had safeguards, but that some spills of radioactive materials had occurred, not specifying the location of those spills, but adding that none of which he knew had taken place in North Carolina.
The President this date asked Congress for a supplemental appropriation of 149.5 million dollars for the Post Office Department, stating that it was needed to avert a substantial cutback in mail service on July 1. The money would be in addition to the nearly 3.2 billion dollars which Congress had already appropriated to run the Department during the coming fiscal year. In announcing the request, White House press secretary James Hagerty noted that the President had said on May 27, in signing a reduced money bill for the Post Office, that the 3.2 billion would be insufficient unless postal services were substantially reduced starting on July 1. Mr. Hagerty said that was still the position of the President and Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield. The prior January, the President had sought from Congress 3.25 billion dollars for the Department for the coming fiscal year. That amount had been cut by Congress by 57.4 million and the Post Office now found that it needed not only restoration of the amount cut but also the additional 92 million because of a higher workload increase than had been anticipated in January. He said that it was now estimated that the Post Office in the new fiscal year would have to handle 1.4 billion more pieces of mail than it had calculated at the time when the budget had been prepared.
In Madison, Wisc., Governor Vernon Thompson said this date that he would call a special election to fill the Senate seat left vacant by the death of Senator McCarthy on May 2, and would set the date for the election later in the week, with both the primary and general election likely to be held within the ensuing 90 days.
In New York, evangelist Billy Graham said that his subject for this night in his Madison Square Garden sermon would be "somewhat delicate for a mixed audience", but that he would discuss it anyway, that being "The Seventh Commandment—The Moral Problem", relating to the Seventh Commandment forbidding adultery. The previous night, he had told an audience of 17,000, 1,500 short of the Garden's seating capacity, that they could not "run up to Jesus any time and say, 'Lord, here I am'" and expect to be saved. He said that no one would meet Christ who had not come by way of the cross, that one must receive Christ. His subject had been "The Second Coming of Christ", following the text of Acts 1:9-11, which says, "This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven." The second coming, he said, was mentioned 380 times in the New Testament and that the Old Testament was full of the prophecy that one day a messiah would come. He said the present was one of the most pessimistic periods of history, but for those who knew Jesus Christ the Savior, there was every reason to be optimistic. He did not look for permanent world peace until the Prince of Peace had come. He said that a lot of people would like to know the date of the coming so that the night before they could get ready, but that no one knew and that they might as well not speculate, but that "certainly, his coming is nearer." Among those attending the meeting, 464 had made their "decisions for Christ" the previous night, bringing the total such number to 1,635 during the 18 days thus far of his New York Crusade.
The Trendex television survey had reported this date that the shows of both Perry Como and Jackie Gleason had higher audience ratings on Saturday night than the televised sermon of the Reverend Graham. It reported that Mr. Como's program on NBC had a 20 percent share of the viewers watching at the time while Mr. Gleason's show had garnered 12.5 percent of the audience on CBS, compared to 8.1 percent of the viewers watching ABC, where Mr. Graham's sermon was nationally broadcast. The survey was conducted among 1,500 television viewers in 15 cities, each carrying the competitive programs of the three major networks.
Dick Young of The News reports that a longtime controversy over the administration of the County's job classification plan had reached a climax this date with the appointment by the County Commission of Walker Busby, a Charlotte accountant, as manager of the County auditor's office and director of the job classification plan.
In Worcester, Mass., three persons had been killed and eight others seriously injured early this date in a fire which had swept the five-story wood and brick hotel Pleasant, with at least a dozen others less seriously injured and released after treatment in a hospital. Five of the eight persons still in the hospital were reported in very critical condition. More than a dozen persons had been rescued from the flaming fourth and fifth floors by firefighters. The hotel catered to permanent guests rather than transients, many of whom were middle-aged or older. The origin and cause of the fire had not yet been determined.
In South St. Paul, Minn., an Air Force test pilot, sealed in a metal capsule attached to a huge plastic balloon, had ridden to a record-breaking 96,000 feet, equal to 18.2 miles, the previous day in a flight which he said was "inspiring … the proudest of my life." Captain J. W. Kittinger, Jr., 28, surpassed by nearly four miles the previous manned-balloon altitude record of 76,000 feet, set over Rapid City, S.D., by two Navy commanders the prior November. The flight was described as being completely successful. It was one in a series of tests which might prove valuable in rocket and possible manned satellite flights. Another manned balloon would be sent aloft to an altitude of more than 100,000 feet for 24 hours sometime during the summer. The captain had spent about 12 hours in the cramped three-foot by seven-foot pressurized capsule, and when asked whether he suffered any claustrophobia, said that he had spent six days in the capsule and it felt just like home. He said that the view was "most beautiful and inspiring" and that from his position just a few miles east of Minneapolis, he could see the eastern boundaries of Lake Michigan. He said he was not nervous during the flight and that the ascent had been made in 78 minutes, remaining at the maximum altitude for an hour and 50 minutes before being summoned back down when voice radio facilities in the gondola had failed. The original plan had been to sustain the balloon at its maximum height for several hours. The captain said that the temperature remained at a comfortable 55 degrees inside the gondola while it was 70 below outside. For lunch he had consumed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If that did not kill him, nothing would.
In Fairview, Ky., the Old South had lived again as hundreds of persons this date gathered in a daylong observance of Confederate Memorial Day.
On the editorial page, "Omnibus Resolutions: Hold the Phone" tells of an omnibus resolution before the Legislature which would have petitioned Congress to enact the Bricker amendment, limiting the President's treaty-making power, plus four other controversial measures, now tabled by a vote of 32 to 12, thanks to Mecklenburg State Senator J. Spencer Bell, who argued that the body should not be asked to consider in 15 minutes schemes which would "revolutionize national and international affairs."
It finds it a necessary and proper indictment of an old legislative custom which had been sorely abused recently, that being to railroad any resolution through the General Assembly in the final days of the session.
The measure had been introduced at the request of Senator Sam J. Ervin's secretary, with the understanding that the Senator favored the amendments contained in it, which turned out to be a mistake, as the Senator did not favor the whole package. Nevertheless, the bill's sponsors were willing to re-refer it to the committee, where it was killed.
It would have also called for endorsement of a 25 percent limitation on income tax burdens except in emergencies, a prohibition against Federal deficit spending, a change in the method of naming presidential electors, which some believed would reduce the influence of minority groups in national elections, and a new method of amending the Constitution by actions of the states without action by Congress, all of which had the backing of the far right.
It indicates that there might have been some merit in some of the proposals but that they would require cautious scrutiny for changing certain major aspects of the nation's political system, and thus were too important for such last-minute action by the Legislature. It hopes that a valuable lesson had been learned.
"Don't Tell Us a Tornado Has No Uplift" finds that the mission of man on earth was obviously to mind somebody else's business, generally the business of someone who felt capable of minding his own.
Thus, the Legislature had spent a shameful amount of time considering a proposal to sterilize morally errant women who had more than two illegitimate children, but had been shocked by a counter-proposal legislatively to treat likewise morally errant men.
The South Carolina Legislature had been giving attention to a bill declaring that the undulations of majorettes were necessary to the quality of college bands.
Michigan residents recently had censored Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz from the Detroit Public Library because it had "no uplift", obviously not referring to anything as concrete as a tornadic uplift as portrayed in the story. "Uplift", it divines, meant what the censor wanted it to mean, and could therefore be applied to the practice of mudpie-making, which had to cease forthwith.
The Michigan Legislature, meanwhile, fearing the stimulating qualities of alcohol on the state's youth, passed a bill which could make it a crime to sell soda pop to minors, until a lobbyist had explained that vanilla syrup, citrus flavoring and almost any other flavoring contained a trace of alcohol, at which point the Legislature decided to reconsider the bill.
The piece hopes that they would, as it was only June 3 and the official silly season was still two months away.
"The Art of Scrubbing Minds & Faces" quotes from the deputy director of party propaganda of Communist China, as quoted in a Reuters dispatch from David Chipp in Peking, that people needed "to wash their brains as well as their faces in this changing world."
Reverend Fulgence Gross, an American Catholic priest who had recently been released after six years of imprisonment in Communist China, had been quoted by the Associated Press from San Francisco as saying: "After three days and nights of beatings with sticks, straps and fists, and with a sword being held at my neck and being told I would die, I said, 'Sure, I am a spy'… I don't know all the circumstances, but I haven't got much use for these people in this country who condemned the American prisoners in Korea for their confessions. I would say, let those who condemn go to China and experience just three months of interrogation."
The piece concludes that the moral was that one should never jump to the conclusion that a mind had been laundered with soft-soap when a hard lick worked twice as fast.
A piece from the Greenville Piedmont, titled "Night Is for the Owls", says that it was kindly disposed to all types of birds, even buzzards, as birds gobbled up a lot of insects and their flight was poetry in motion, their songs gladdening the heart of many a bard. They were also exemplars of good parenting, preparing a warm nest for their young, tenderly rearing them and teaching them the precepts required to grow up in a predatory world.
But it makes exception for the mockingbird and possibly the rooster, as mockingbirds sang at night, even after midnight, and encouraged roosters to crow when they ought be sleeping. It finds that just as a weary householder was about to drop off to sleep, the mockingbird in the tree outside would run up and down the scales, "about as noisy as a fat man lumbering up and down stairs. Off in the distance, the bird gets an answer. For the next hour they discuss their wives, their ailments, their neighbors in tones necessary to carry several hundred yards."
After they had exhausted all topics of conversation, they were joined by a rooster, and then another and another, all adding up to another member for the Birdwatchers' Club. "So as to be able to identify a mockingbird, find his nest, stand under it until HE goes to sleep, then see how he likes to be shaken out of his slumber with all the din a garbage can struck by a frying pan can induce."
Drew Pearson indicates that near Joliet, Ill., there was a backstop for a baseball diamond which had once been a monument to those who had died for freedom, a monument which had been dedicated by 1940 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie. Millions of Americans had acclaimed it and newsreels and newspapers had featured it. It had memorialized 173 Czechs murdered by Adolph Hitler's forces in the little town of Lidice on June 30, 1942, in the wake of the killing of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, head of the Gestapo for Czechoslovakia and the author of the "final solution" developed at Wannsee in January, 1942, by an explosive thrown at his open convertible at a curve on May 27. In revenge for the killing, and on the pretext that they were seeking the killers, every man in the village had been rounded up by the SS Elite Corps and gunned down against a wall, while the women and children were placed in trucks and taken to concentration camps, which were called by the Nazis "educational institutions". The village had thus been wiped out, and the free world was revolted by the massacre.
In America, the late Gael Sullivan proposed naming a new housing development near Joliet "Lidice", and Mr. Willkie had come to dedicate it, stating that it was "a symbol of freedom we have sworn to remember." FDR had telegraphed from the White House: "On June 30, the Nazi Government announced the murder of a word—Lidice... In the United States we have adopted that word. The name and town Lidice now becomes an everlasting reminder … of human freedom."
But recently, a Czech refugee who had survived Nazi Germany and had escaped also the Communists, had gone to Lidice, Ill., only to find the memorial serving as a baseball backstop and around its base, rather than wreaths, scattered cigarette butts and wastepaper. The youngsters who were taking turns at bat had no idea that a few feet away had stood a monument to the 173 heroes who had been shot so that those same youngsters, far away in another country, could play baseball in freedom.
Robert C. Ruark, in Chapel Hill, says that having covered the South recently like the dew, he had come to the conclusion that Bermuda slacks as formal attire for females had to go. He says that he was basically a "leg man", although he had been "known to gaze upstairs with gratitude."
"There may be nothing more architecturally rewarding to the eye than a female leg, whether it is viewed in most of its entirety or hinted at by camouflage. To truncate it with tight shorts that go to the knee is little short of criminal. To abet the crime with long socks and tennis shoes, leaving nothing but naked knee to the gaze, is eventually going to shorten the birthrate. You might as well go marry a basketball player."
"Little girls are designed differently from little boys, and a ladylike rear is not exactly delicate in any kind of pants. There may be some dolls who can wear bikinis to advantage, but the average lass would do well to cover more than she shows. At least, she should go nearly naked if she has the shape for it, or go decently covered up so her bigger bumps don't show."
We note from visual experience that such may have been the case in the mid to late 1950's, but by the mid-1960's, enough was being shown regularly that the younger girls were quite usually exercising a good deal so that they could appear showing more in less. But that is just our observation from within our environment at the time, and we do not seek to impose it on others, as your visual and vicarious experience may have been quite different, depending on where you were and around whom you might have been.
He says that his old fraternity had pitched a Saturday party recently with three separate sororities, Chi Omega, Pi Phi and Delta Delta Delta, and that the latter sisters had shown up in sweatshirts, Bermuda shorts, long socks and tennis shoes. He says that 20-odd years earlier, they would not have allowed them in the door. They were just as pretty, perhaps prettier, than the earlier coeds, but all he could think of from a rear view as they danced was that "shorts give the the impression of two pigs fighting under a blanket. What inner beauty they may have owned was obscured by the sweatshirts and the knobby knees and the golfing socks and the more than casual footwear. Girls may be compounded of sugar and spice but the wrong sort of garb comes out strictly nails, snails, and puppy dog tails."
Another thing which had struck him about his tour through the Washington suburbs, Richmond, Wilmington and Charlotte was that women went out in public wearing "those horrible pin-curl things and looking like a wrath that God wouldn't want to be identified with. Heavens to Elizabeth, a girl must have hard enough a time snaring a sucker without getting herself up in a frightwig for public display."
He does not like the new look, "appearing socially as a gymnastic major or a fugitive from the Russian shot-put team", rather liking the time in his day when women made a slight fetish out of appearing as matronly as possible.
"All I can say in warning to the younger set is that the best dancer on the floor, with the prettiest face, would have been a delicious dream in a dress at that party the other night in the Phi Kap house, but got up in her sweat shirt, tennis shoes, and long shorts, she merely looked like a slightly active cow."
A letter writer from Hamlet wonders why the Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime influence within the Teamsters Union was singling out Dave Beck in particular as being dishonest, when it could have found plenty more just like him closer to home. He believes that the concern for the individual Teamsters was not what had motivated the Senate investigation, as the Government had never been truly concerned with the welfare of the workers until they had become organized, could exert political influence and deliver votes en masse. At that point, under FDR, the Congress had passed laws to protect the interests of labor and the farmer, keeping President Roosevelt in power much to the chagrin of the Republican capitalists "whose Machiavellian concept of the ideal state is based on the undeviating principle of wage slavery." Now, with a Republican President, reactionary members of both parties in Congress had been seeking to undo the work of President Roosevelt and were seeking to destroy the confidence of union members in their leaders by attacking their integrity and thus undermining the strength of organized labor in general, resulting in the investigation of Mr. Beck. He grants that the union leaders were all embezzlers, at least for the sake of argument, but that the unions had done much for their membership, far more than the amounts which their leaders had embezzled. "So, the Senate in its glass house, might as well stop throwing rocks at labor leaders and devote more of its time and taxpayers' money to ends more nearly designed to 'promote the general welfare.'"
A letter writer says that the State Legislature had killed two bills which should have been killed, one being that which would have established daylight savings time and the other, which would have required automobile inspections for mechanical defects. He thinks on the other hand that the Legislature should have passed the bill to provide for a statewide liquor referendum. He also praises City Council member Martha Evans for her courageous stand on the question of appointees to office, believing that it was time they had more opposition on the Council.
A letter writer from Great Falls, S.C., comments on a report that by July, the normal post office service would be discontinued, with mail deliveries reduced and the hours of operation shortened, with the cost of postage to be increased in most classifications by a penny. He opposes the proposed changes, saying it had not been long since postal rates had been increased by a penny, which had not solved the deficit problem, as the current proposals would not either.
A letter writer indicates that she
was the mother of a boy, who was now out of school for the summer
months, and like other parents, wondered what they would be doing
during the summer, with the swimming pool available each day and a
camp for two weeks, but then leaving much time left over. She finds
that young boys between ages 13 and 15 wanted to have a job which
would give them self-respect and their "own" money
A letter writer responds to a letter from the previous week about whiskey, church members and other things, finding that everything in it had been true, but when one talked to people who drank, it did not seem to do any good. She says that when she saw a man or woman drinking, she wondered why they had gotten so far away from God that they would rather go to the bottle, and that sooner or later they would suffer for it, as the Bible said one reaped what one sowed. She finds that there were many Sunday school teachers and officers of the church who drank, that they were fooling the world but not God.
Framed Edition
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