The Charlotte News
Monday, September 23, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Little Rock, Ark., that eight black students had walked quietly and without hurrying into Central High School this date while the attention of a crowd outside the school was diverted by another incident, until a group of snarling men and screaming women had sought to break through the police lines, at which point a handful of police officers fought them off, clubbing two men, and apparently pulling a gun on a third. No one got through the police lines. Students emerging from the high school said that three of the black male students who had entered the school had "blood on their clothing" and that fights had broken out inside the school. The students told reporters that the black students had been chased through the halls at change of classes and were attacked by other students. The initial violence outside the school had been a "frightening sight" and women had burst into tears while a man hoist onto a wooden barricade yelled: "Who's going through?" to which the crowd shouted, "We all are." But no one did. As the bell sounded in the morning to begin classes, on a street leading toward the school, the crowd spotted four black adults marching in pairs down the center of the street, prompting a man to yell, "Look, here come the niggers." But the group did not include any of the students and one appeared to be a member of the press, with a press card in his hat and carrying a camera. The unnamed reporter of the piece says that he had jammed into a glass-windowed telephone booth on the corner, from which he could see the scene, and observed that a crowd had surged toward the four black people, who then broke and ran, but were caught on the lawn of a home nearby, whereupon the whites jumped the man with the camera from behind, kicking and beating him, smashing to bits his camera. As related further on an inside page, that appeared to have been a diversionary move to draw the crowd's attention away from the school. While the reporter of the story was dictating, someone yelled that the black students were going into the school, referring to three boys and five girls crossing the yard to a side entrance, all carrying books. They were not walking fast but were inside before any of the crowd of 200 people on the street knew it. One man, who noticed them enter, said: "They've gone in. Oh, God, the niggers are in the school." A woman screamed: "Did they get in? Did you see them go in." Some other men yelled, "They're in now." The woman screamed, "Oh my God," bursting into tears and tearing at her hair. Other women then began weeping and screaming. Two men were arrested. Soon, order was restored by the State troopers who had arrived on the scene. But the weeping and screaming among the women continued. One man said that he was going inside the school to retrieve his child, but an officer remonstrated him, "You're not going anywhere."
In Washington, investigators for the Senate Select Committee looking at misconduct of unions and management, said this date that their new hearings would explore reports that Jimmy Hoffa had loaned a million dollars from Teamsters Union funds to a Minneapolis department store which had been struck by the Retail Clerks Union. The public hearings would resume the following day. A Committee spokesman said that Benjamin Drainow, chairman of the board of John W. Thomas & Co. of Minneapolis, had been subpoenaed for questioning about loans which his store reportedly received from Mr. Hoffa the previous year. The spokesman said that the money had come from funds of the Michigan Conference of Teamsters, and was made in two increments of $200,000 and $800,000. The strike had been called off and the Committee wanted to know why and what the story was behind the loan.
In New York, a U.S. District Court judge set October 15 for the wiretap conspiracy trial of Mr. Hoffa, indicted along with two other men scheduled for trial at the same time.
Emery Wister of The News tells of a giant new department store to be erected on Independence Boulevard about a half-mile east of the Charlotte Coliseum, to be known as Clark's Discount Department Store, expected to be open for business by Easter of 1958.
In late July, 1964, we would
purchase there "Beatles" on the Vee-Jay label, to
which you, not of the cognoscenti
It did not have this song
Oddly enough, in about 1961, we purchased a little red and white plastic car which very much resembled the cars in the drawing of the store on the page, and, if memory serves, that purchase also was transacted at Clark's, though it could have been at Belk's or Ivey's, but definitely in Charlotte on a Saturday afternoon. We dubbed the car the "Zoom-mobile", as it had a little friction motor in it which made a zooming sound when the car was moved. We even wrote its name on its trunk with a black magic marker, so that we would not forget it. The price of it was approximately 98 cents plus tax. And it was a pretty big car, bigger than the 1-25th scale model cars of AMT, and they cost $1.49 plus tax. Bet you wish you had one. It pays to shop at Clark's.
Subsequently, it became Cook's Discount Department Store, and was never the same thereafter. We stopped shopping there.
We never understood how they measured scale model cars, for if you put 25 of them together, they did not equal the size of the actual car. We think they were cheating the little children with deceptive labels, and should have been investigated by the FTC. What do you think?
The editorial page is here.
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