The Charlotte News

Monday, July 22, 1957

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Knoxville, Tenn., that that the Government's attorney had closed his final argument in the Clinton segregation trial of the remaining eleven defendants this date with a powerful appeal to the all-white jury that law and order ought prevail in the country, stating: "Please keep in mind that an injunction had been issued by this court enjoining people not to interfere with integration of that high school." He had rapped the table with his fist, letting his booming voice rise to full volume, thundering: "Do you believe in law and order? An order is an order. When an order is issued by this court, it cannot be flouted." The eleven defendants, including John Kasper, segregationist from Baltimore, who was credited with stirring the pot with racist comments during the prior fall when the high school was being desegregated, eventually leading to violence and closure of the high school in early December, were charged with contempt of court for allegedly defying the injunction against interference with the integration of the high school. The Government attorney focused heavily on the actions of Mr. Kasper as the alleged instigator of the violence, stating: "John Kasper stated his purpose when he came to Clinton. He said he was going to get those Negroes out of the school." He then went through the evidence showing how Mr. Kasper, together with some of the other defendants, had formed the Tennessee White Citizens Council, which had met late at night in the back room of two cafés in Clinton, indicating that the real work had been done there, not in the formal meetings of the Council. In the early part of his 70-minute summation, he had spoken in a dry, matter-of-fact, almost droning voice, with the jurors nevertheless looking at him intently, whereas in the climax, he had addressed them in a booming voice, saying: "We bow our heads in invocation in this court as the crier says, 'God save the United States and this honorable court.'" Ross Barnett, future Governor of Mississippi, representing some of the defendants, began the defense summation by invoking the spirit of Andrew Jackson, Cordell Hull and other noted natives of Tennessee, declaring that they had "handed down to us a great tradition, a great heritage. They were men who believed in constitutional government and believed in perpetuating our beautiful American and Southern way of life." In a highly emotional presentation, he said: "Our forefathers who bled and died for freedom would turn over in their graves if they knew what was going on here." Well, he was probably correct, though not exactly in the way he intended, starting with the spirit of Crispus Attucks.

Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas predicted this date that the Senate would not pass the Administration civil rights bill unless it was limited only to the protection of voting rights.

The President told Congress this date that the Government had scheduled overseas shipment of 575.2 million dollars worth of surplus farm products during the first six months of the year, bringing the total amount contracted under the program to 5.23 billion dollars.

A House Government Operations Committee report had criticized Civil Defense officials this date for not putting more emphasis on shelters, as opposed to evacuation, in case of an enemy nuclear attack.

At the Atomic Test Site in Nevada, detonation of the ninth shot of the summer test series was postponed again this date because of unfavorable weather conditions, postponement having occurred the previous day for the same reason.

Government auditors reported this date that General Motors had "overstated" or "misstated" cost figures on a 375 million dollar Air Force contract, indicating that it had resulted in "unreasonably high prices being paid by the Government."

In Columbus, O., Governor C. William O'Neill said this date that Dr. Sam Sheppard would not be given a lie detector test until the "confession" of a Florida prisoner that he had in fact killed the doctor's wife in 1954 was determined to be true, the Governor having announced his position after a telegram from the unofficial "Court of Last Resort" in Hollywood, headed by mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner, had cast doubt upon the validity of the recent confession by young Donald Wedler, who said that he had bludgeoned a woman during a burglary on the night of July 3-4, when Marilyn Sheppard had been killed in the couple's Cleveland suburban home. Dr. Sheppard had been found guilty of second-degree murder in the slaying in December, 1954 and subsequently was sentenced to life imprisonment. Governor O'Neill had given permission for a lie detector test for the doctor the previous week, but changed his position after receiving a telegram from the Hollywood organization, devoted to proof of innocence of those wrongly convicted. The telegram stated: "We are still not prepared to take as true the confession of Donald Wedler. But following our examination of him in Florida we admit to a growing conviction that he may well have committed the murder of Marilyn Sheppard. However, no one should form any final opinion on this man until after there has been a lot more investigative work done and until there has been a psychiatric investigation. There are some important major conflicts between his story and existing fact. These conflicts may have been the result of drug reactions and attempts to rationalize his acts or just plain deception." The Governor said that earlier telegrams from the Hollywood organization said that there was not the slightest evidence of deception in Mr. Wedler's statement, but that the latest telegram had used that language. He said that he had discussed with the warden of the Ohio Penitentiary the matter and that it was the latter's opinion as well as his own that until the truthfulness of the confession was determined, there should be no lie detector test given to Dr. Sheppard.

In Alderson, W. Va., a British-born woman had stepped from a prison medical laboratory to freedom this date, smiling as she did so, beside her soldier husband. She had served nearly three years of a life sentence imposed for the death of three of her four children, convicted by an Army court-martial in 1954 after it had found that she had dropped the three children on their heads during a 13-month period between November, 1952 and December 7, 1953. Pentagon officials had reviewed the case following a recent Supreme Court decision that military courts had no jurisdiction over civilians who accompanied servicemen abroad. The deaths had occurred while the family in question had been stationed in Eritrea, presently part of Ethiopia, and the British Embassy, in consequence, had requested about a year earlier that the case be reviewed. The couple made it clear that they planned to remain together and the released woman said she did not believe the past would be brought up, that it remained to be seen whether they would have other children. She said that she had no bitterness toward anyone and had been treated very well at the prison during her stay. She said she wanted to forget the past, wanted to visit stores to see what she had missed.

In Treviso, Italy, police made their way slowly down the rocky side of Mount Pra this date with the bodies of eight American airmen killed the previous day when their U.S. Navy plane had crashed in flames.

In Block Island, R.I., four men, who were close friends and business associates of one another, had died in an early morning crash of their flaming plane, a few seconds after it had taken off from the airport.

In Asheville, N.C., a bandit, about 6 feet, 4 inches tall and wearing a forest ranger's uniform, had held up a branch bank of Wachovia Bank & Trust Co. this date with a sawed-off shotgun, the amount of money taken not being immediately available.

John Kilgo of The News reports that two Charlotte teenagers had gone to the rescue of a police officer under attack by two men early this date and had possibly saved the officer's life. The two teenagers, ages 17 and 19, had gone to the assistance of a sergeant at 8th and Graham Streets, succeeding in fending off two men who were beating the officer. The two had later confessed to breaking into the First Methodist Church the previous night and robbing the safe, according to police, and were in jail this date, while the sergeant, suffering from a bump behind his right ear, had returned to duty. The sergeant said that if it had not been for the two boys helping him, he might have been killed, as the attackers would have obtained his gun, indicating that whether they would have used it or not, he did not know. He said that he had been patrolling his beat in the wee hours of the morning when he saw the two men who fit the description of the two persons who had beaten a police officer the previous week, and pulled up beside them in his patrol car, got out and asked for their names, one of them then approaching him, throwing him against the car door, while the other grabbed his feet and pulled him out into the street. He had pulled his gun but one of them held the cylinder and the gun would not fire. At that point, the two teenage boys had come to his rescue, one of them stating that they were sitting in front of their house talking when they saw the police officer stop the two men, initially not paying any attention to it until they noticed that the officer and the other two men were fighting on the ground, at which point they ran over to offer assistance. One of them had taken the officer's flashlight and hit one of the attackers over the head, at which point the sergeant and the two boys had been able to seize one of the two attackers, while the other had run away, picked up by police officers two hours later. Police Chief Frank Littlejohn had praised the two boys, adding that it was one reason why he could not hire good, qualified men for the force, as people would not work in such hazardous service for what they were paying them, stating that the sergeant could be dead if it had not been for the help of the two boys.

John Jamison of The News reports that Thomasboro water supply, propped up by the County since June 1 at taxpayer expense, would be shut off on July 31, according to a member of the County Commission, that unless the City Council could act in the meantime to beat that deadline, about 85 "apathetic" Thomasboro families would be without water, the member of the Commission stating that they did not seem to want to help themselves and that the County could not stay in the water business forever, and so would cut them off at Monday's meeting.

The Eastern Seaboard was hot and humid again this date, with the Weather Bureau predicting in Charlotte a high of 95, to reach 96 the following day. It had been 103 in Baltimore the previous day and 101 in Washington, with New York recording 97 degrees and Wilmington, Del., 102. Charlotte had recorded a high of 91 the previous day. It had been 89 in Asheville, 92 in Columbia, S.C., 90 in Greensboro, 93 in Greenville, 89 in Wilmington and 88 at Myrtle Beach. The weather was so hot in the East during the weekend that millions had gone to the beaches and lakes, where 39 persons had drowned, 21 in Michigan. A golfer had died on a course near Chicago, and in New York a man had collapsed following a tennis match. Two men had died in Kansas City after suffering heat exhaustion. There was little chance of rain in the Carolinas. Nights would be comparatively cool, with the temperature dropping to 67 during the current morning and predicted to be 69 the following morning. It was the 16th day of the month in which the temperature had exceeded 90 in Charlotte, and on the days that it had not reached that mark, the high was no lower than 87. Rainfall for the month was a mere .51-inch, 2.56 inches less than normal.

In Lake Charles, La., it was reported that the number of dead and missing from Hurricane Audrey of June 27 had now reached 534, with property damage assessed at over 40 million dollars.

We hope that life will return to normal as soon as possible for the areas ravaged by Hurricane Helene in 2024 in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, as well as points south, and that everyone may stay safe and on high ground in the presently threatened areas by the coming Hurricane Milton.

We also hope that it will be yet another vivid realization of what is undeniable about science and Mother Nature, that sooner or later the latter rebels against too much pressure exerted by man on its limits, that the more 4 x 4 trucks and large, carbon-spewing vehicles we have a tendency to drive around without purpose and oblivious to their impact on all of us, the more there will be increasingly strong hurricanoes and tornadoes, and flooding in areas where flooding of the type is quite rare, perhaps once per century. Climate change is quite real, and the more you hear from demagogic politicians, preying on the fantastic material dreams and desires of the short-sighted, who say otherwise and tell you it is not at all man-made, stressing cold weather days here and there as exceptions, not distinguishing singular weather events and seasons from climate trends over the decades, especially since around 1970, but even earlier, stretching back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-Nineteenth Century when climate-change actually gradually began, the more you can discredit those politicians as handing you a load of garbage right in your lap, not just figuratively any longer, but literally, in your front, back and side yards, where your house used to be before it floated down river with the flood that came to your gently trickling, peaceful stream for the first time since 1916, and even worse than on that occasion—occurring just two months before 15-year old Eugene Gant would matriculate at Pulpit Hill as a literally wet-behind-the-ears freshman—when the citizenry had their attention directed from the excessive gilt of Biltmore abroad, eventually reaching their back yards and into their homes, which would dwarf even temporal inundation. Next time you go to town in your carbon-spewing large vehicle, unnecessarily large for your needs to collect a few groceries from the market, please keep that in mind for all our sakes. We all pay for your insistence on having more than needed to do the job. Buy a Prius and strike a true blow for liberty from the foreign oil markets.

Also, it is best to be wary of anyone who tries to inject politics of the moment into the matter, seeking to criticize the current Administration or "evil FEMA" for supposedly capping payouts to stricken families, not actually taking place, with the $750 payouts only being for initial expenditures for lodging and food on an emergency basis, not the final allotments for aid, and also for supposedly taking funding from emergency management and providing it to refugees over the border or to foreign aid, also a Big Lie being perpetrated by Trump and his moronic minions on the ground. Such people are doing plain harm to efforts at recovery and should be told just to shut up and keep it to themselves, their lies and propaganda. The first step has to be access to areas where roads and bridges were washed away with the fury of the raging rivers, in the backwoods of North Carolina and Tennessee, which, as everyone knows who has ever trekked or trod there, is some of the roughest country in the nation, which is why people who go trekking and trodding there sometimes disappear and are never heard from again, even in relatively good weather. Of course, the local people in those areas have to be the first responders to help themselves, under those peculiar circumstances, and they are to be lauded for their efforts at self-help. But don't let outsiders, bent on debilitating your already depressed morale for purely political reasons, convince you that you are abandoned by your Government, as you obviously are not. The Government cannot overnight rebuild roads and bridges, requiring engineering and proper specifications to support regular vehicular traffic, after clearing the debris resulting from the flood, in areas where landslides and erosion have taken away the entire roadbeds and washed away concrete and steel supports which have been in place for decades. But, eventually, that will occur, as long as you do not lose faith or succumb to the rhetoric of the demagogues, out to steal the last crumbs from your mouths, while telling you it's that other guy up there in Washington, the Gov'ment and the Swamp. The guy telling you that is the same silver-tongued devil who gave you the pandemic and the resultant inflation and high gas prices coming out of it. Do not forget that basic historical truth, and you will keep it all straight in your head. If you can still get to the voting booth in four weeks or sooner, by all means do so, but think about it before you pull the lever or cast the ballot. Your life, this time, might literally depend on it.

In London, a member of Parliament had suggested this date that the Government advise Britons to quit smoking in the interest of their health, and to use snuff instead. R. Gresham Cooke, a Conservative, told Commons that many people would find it comforting if the Medical Research Council could say "that snuff taking is a safe alternative to smoking." The Council, in a report which had been made public by the Government recently, said that it had found a statistical connection between heavy cigarette smoking and lung cancer. J. K. Vaughan-Morgan, Health Ministry Parliamentary secretary, had, however, said: "I am advised that although no relationship has been demonstrated between the taking of snuff and the incidence of lung cancer, there is insufficient evidence on the effects of this practice to justify it being recommended as a safe alternative to smoking."

In Whitley Bay, England, the prayers of an 11-year old girl had been answered during the weekend, with her mother having come back from the "dead". The prior Friday night, the mother of the little girl had collapsed in her home, and the frightened child had watched as an ambulance had taken her to the hospital. A day later, a sad-faced policeman had knocked on the front door of the home, and the little girl's grandmother had answered, the officer reporting that the mother had died. Hearing the news, the little girl had fallen to her knees and prayed to God to make her mother live, saying the prayer repeatedly until she had fallen asleep. The previous morning, the little girl's uncle had gone to the hospital to make arrangements for the removal of his sister's body, then realizing that the police officer had confused the names of the deceased Mrs. Raper with the mother, Mrs. Draper, who was sleeping soundly in the hospital.

In keeping with the new NewsWords puzzle of the week in the newspaper, find on the page among the linked material Sam J. Ervin, and you win the prize.

On the editorial page, "Can Moslem Mice of Syria Survive Lengthy Visit of Kremlin Housecat?" a by-lined piece by News editor Cecil Prince, writing from Damascus, Syria, indicates that sooner or later in Syria, the question would arise as to how it felt to be behind the Iron Curtain, with officials responding with an ingratiating smile, without the slightest trace of bitterness or hostility in manner, only the polite amusement characterizing practically all social intercourse with the West, stating that Syria was not behind the Iron Curtain but that its ties with Russia and Egypt were firm enough to create an uncomfortable illusion of loneliness in an unfriendly land.