The Charlotte News
Wednesday, December 17, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Bogota, Colombia, that panic from a fire in a crowded department store the previous night had sent scores of frightened men, women and children screaming to their deaths, as officials reported that 82 persons were killed and 50 injured, most of whom had made a fatal scramble for a rear stairway which led only to a mezzanine. Some died with toys in their arms and others knelt as if in prayer. The manager of the store said that the panic had spread very quickly. An explosion of Christmas lights had caused fire to catch on the clothing of salesgirls and caused a curtain of flame across the center of the long, narrow store, Vida on Avenida Septima Carrera, near the Capitol. The manager said that customers started bolting when they saw the salesgirls' clothing on fire. Those at the front of the store had easy access to the street. About half of the dead had been employees and the remainder had been primarily female shoppers. It was estimated that ten children had also died. The fire lasted for two hours before being brought under control. A 16-year old girl had been found alive beneath a mass of bodies on the stairway, but her condition was critical. A fireman told of finding an eight-year old boy lying in a pool of water, his face burned away, but still holding a wooden truck in his arms. He said that a dead woman knelt as if in prayer beside the boy's body.
In San Juan Capistrano, Calif., the four-day old brush fire still blazed over more than 50,000 acres of southern California hills and canyons, still out of control along nearly half of its 75-mile perimeter. While more than 2,000 men were fighting the flames, residents picked their way over the blackened earth to the ruins of their homes and summer cabins. Eighteen structures had been destroyed and more than 200 were still in peril from the fire. In picturesque San Juan Canyon, scenic beauty had been turned to rubble and ash. The canyon people who had returned shared the common sadness of loss. One man, who had first made his home in the canyon in 1942 and was now 77, had returned to the ruins of his cabin and the black skeleton of an oak tree under which he had spent many relaxing days. He said that he did not know what to do, that he felt like crying. He reached into the ashes and picked up half of a figurine, which he said was of St. Anthony, his wife's patron saint. A couple sifted through the charred remains of their cabin. The man said that all of the cabins in the area cost $8,000 or more to build and furnish and that mostly elderly people lived in them. He said that he would not be able to rebuild as it would take money for that and their money was gone. He wondered what the little animals would do for a drink, as he explained that they had three little foxes, Limpy, Eater and Bobtail, which they used to feed every day exactly at 4:30.
In Denham, England, a U.S. Air Force master sergeant, facing a court-martial on a charge of murdering his wife by arsenic poisoning, testified this date that he had never given his wife arsenic. The prosecution was charging that he had poisoned his wife, 43, because of his love for a 23-year old English woman. He had pleaded not guilty to the murder specification and to a specification of adultery with the young woman. Previous witnesses had testified that the sergeant had tried unsuccessfully to purchase arsenic at a drugstore, then had wandered into an Air Force laboratory where arsenic was available almost to anyone. Defense counsel had asked him whether he had at anytime purchased arsenic while stationed in the United Kingdom, to which he replied in the negative. He asked him whether at any time he had administered or attempted to administer arsenic to his wife, and again he answered in the negative. The defense questioning had been short and the sergeant had told the court-martial that he was prepared to provide evidence only on the murder charge. Wives of U.S. officers were in the crowded courtroom as the prosecutor began his cross-examination by asking the sergeant whether he was deeply in love with the young woman, to which he had replied that during the previous two years he had been in love with her. When asked whether he was deeply in love with her, he said, following a slight hesitation, that he would not say that, only that he was in love with her. He said he had met her in July, 1956. When asked, he admitted that he had a sexual relationship with her from prior to Christmas in 1956 through May, 1958.
Ann Sawyer of The News again reports on the efforts to get free lunches to schoolchildren in the community who could not afford it. A special committee to study the problem would hold its first meeting during the current afternoon. The committee chairman and former head of the Mecklenburg County Welfare Board, William K. Van Allen, said that it would be an organizational meeting at the American Commercial Bank. The director of the City School Attendance Department was to present the figures showing the need for additional free lunches in the City system. She had estimated that there were 250 children already certified as needy who could be receiving lunches immediately if funds were available. Those children were brothers and sisters of children already on the City's free lunch program. The Attendance Department had the policy of not giving more than two free lunches each day to any one family, but often the number of schoolchildren in a family would be five or six. The director of the Attendance Department planned to document those figures with records of the families, showing the number of children, the number of lunches provided, the number of free cartons of milk and the approximate weekly income. Members of the Social Planning Council study committee, appointed the previous week by the Council chairman, had been named after a News series by Ms. Sawyer on the children who had to stay in school without lunch because the parents could not afford it. The United Appeal had offered $1,000 to City and County schools for free lunches, and individuals had contributed $604.25 to the City Lunchroom Department.
Jerry Reece of The News reports that 37 mothers in Mecklenburg County would not see their children during Christmas as they were inmates at Woman's Prison in Raleigh. But prison officials and the Mecklenburg Department of Public Welfare would see that both mothers and children would have the best holiday possible. The superintendent of the prison told the newspaper that the inmates in Raleigh had a full schedule of events planned for the five-day holiday. On the local scene, most of the children of the inmates would spend Christmas in foster homes. When a mother went to prison, her children usually became wards of the Welfare Department, according to the head of the child welfare division. If the children had relatives who were able to take care of them, they placed them there. The children who stayed with relatives received money through the Aid to Dependent Children Fund if it was needed. They had between 28 and 30 children in foster care at present, whose mothers either had been or still were in prison. Some of the mothers were imprisoned for neglect of their children and the remainder for other crimes. Forty-five out of the approximately 400 inmates of the prison were from Mecklenburg County. All of the inmates would begin their holiday celebration with a pageant on Christmas Eve, followed by a visit from Santa Claus and the distribution of gifts purchased out of the prison recreation fund. On Christmas Day, the female inmates would see a movie in the morning. ("Meet John Doe", "Miracle on 34th Street", or that other Christmas perennial with Jimmy Stewart?) In the afternoon, they would listen to music and watch a film of Southern Bell's Christmas puppet show. On the day following Christmas, Friday, the inmates would play games in the morning and participate in dance and hula-hoop contests in the afternoon, and that night would be treated to another movie. ("Public Enemy No. 1"?) On Saturday, they would see a basketball game in the morning and watch yet another movie in the afternoon. ("Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter"?) The superintendent of the prison said that the schedule was planned to keep the inmates busy, that if they did not have something to do, they might start crying. She said that they were very brave though and she got teary sometimes just watching them. She had once been with the Family and Children's Service in Charlotte and said that the inmates had been helping the Raleigh Lions Club with their annual toy project by repairing dolls and stuffed animals, which had been good for them, she said, as they knew they could not do anything for their own children but could help other unfortunate youngsters. Meanwhile, their children would be spending the most normal Christmas possible under the circumstances in the foster homes. The Welfare Department paid foster parents $45 per month for the support of the children, but the agency's budget did not include any extra money for Christmas. The foster parents had to pay to furnish holiday treats for the children, and were also assisted by the Empty Stocking Fund. If the child's father was known, as many of the children had been born out of wedlock, the Welfare Department sought to get him to send the child something for Christmas, as it meant a lot to them to get anything from their own parents.
John Kilgo of The News reports of the operator of Pierre's Restaurant on Monroe Road having been closing for the day the previous night at around midnight and had his money box sitting on the counter with $350 in it. He looked around to see a tall black man pointing a gun at him, wearing a wool scarf over his face. The robber picked up the money. The proprietor said that he was "scared stiff", "really shook up" and said, "Man, where are you going?" The man went out the door and the proprietor went to the phone, at which point the man stuck the gun back in the door and so the proprietor hit the floor. He said that he was planning to buy Christmas presents this date, was going to purchase for his mother a television, but now was broke. He said he worked 18 hours per day and the robber had taken his profits in about five seconds. He went home and could not sleep, went bowling, and he and his father opened the restaurant early in the morning. At that point, he saw the cigarette machine on the floor, broken open, and then saw the jukebox on the floor, also ripped open. The back door was torn down, and again he was "really shook up". Someone had broken into the place during the night and had stolen the money out of the two machines, though he did not know how much they had taken. He said not to let anyone say that a person could be brave when a man was pointing a gun at him, that he knew better, that one did what the gunman said. He said the man who had robbed him did not say a word the whole time, had just pointed the gun, and he had just stood there not knowing what to do. "But all that money—and I'm not rich. And I was going to buy Christmas presents today. If you want to write a story about this thing, just call it a double-header. That's what it was—a double-header." It concludes that the proprietor had lost both ends of it.
Maybe Bat will hear of his plight and come to the rescue
In the seventh article in a series by prominent Charlotte residents on "The Christmas I Remember Best", Alan Newcomb, a WBT radio and WBTV personality, who had been a B-17 pilot during World War II, had been shot down twice and was a prisoner at Stalag Luft I, north of Berlin on the Baltic Sea during the war, relates of that Christmas, 1944. He indicates that Thanksgiving had been miserable, that their room of 20 men had drawn its daily ration of rutabaga, a stale cabbage and a few frost-bitten potatoes. They only received one meal, sitting hunched in their worn, greasy clothing and eyeing the division of the food. Since their camp was on the shores of the Baltic, snow-laden winds came through every crevice in the ramshackle barracks walls. The only people in the camp who were less comfortable were the German guards, high in their boxes, with a spotlight and machine gun for company. Somewhere far to the west had been the fighting. It was a week before Christmas in 1944, when things had begun to change. The Battle of the Bulge had given Germany new confidence and their guards had been even more arrogant than usual. When the yell came down the hall for all room leaders to fall out, they left with an air of resignation. But once outside, they had met detachments of blue-clad soldiers marching into the prison compound with their arms piled high with fir branches. With rare, shy smiles and a gruff greeting, the guards had passed out the branches, one per room. "Fur Weihnachts Baum!" They set up the trees on tabletops and hung them with improvised decorations consisting of bits of tin cut into stars, potatoes wrapped with tinfoil, strings of felt cut from the hems of G.I. coats, and it had begun to feel like Christmas. Four days later, the big news had come, called across the barbed wire fence from the central compound: "Christmas packages! Red Cross Christmas packages are here!" It seemed too good to be true until the horse-drawn carts had come rumbling into their compound loaded with square boxes. Inside had been little cans of turkey, plum pudding, jam, honey, sausage, ham, cheese, real butter, nuts, candy, chewing gum, pipes and tobacco, cigarettes, cherries, and dates, all in a ten-pound parcel. The eyes of their amateur cooks, whose only experience had been in the potato-cabbage-rutabaga family, lighted up like the brightest star in the sky. Their hearts had also lighted up and they drew names and began making little presents for each other, a woolly lamb for one fellow prisoner who talked about his farm, a toupee made of felt scraps for a bald-headed individual, a mustache cup for another who had one, a pair of earmuffs for yet another who had come from the South. While they worked, lying on their beds with backs turned to keep the secrets, the cooks had gone to work. All of the food was eaten in a single day, date-nut cake, jam tarts, cookies, turkey, ham, cheese, and plum pudding. They ate and laughed, laughed and ate, then exchanged their gifts around the rude little tree. Their tough German guards were not done. Having tramped through the snow to cut their trees, having stopped a little part of the war to bring the Red Cross parcels from the border, they announced in the late afternoon that their doors would not be locked at sunset, that their lights would remain on until midnight for that one night. They roamed between barracks, singing carols and visiting. Finally, the doors had been locked, the lights had gone out and the big dogs were again loosed to police the camp through the night. The next day it had snowed and they had run out of coal three weeks later. The tower guard had shot a prisoner in the leg when he accidentally stepped over the warning-wire. "The rutabaga war was on again."
In Chapel Hill, it was reported that
the UNC Choral Club had scheduled J. S. Bach's "Christmas
Oratorio"
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes on the front page or editorial page of this date, with the comments to be sporadic until we catch up.
Framed Edition
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