The Charlotte News

Tuesday, December 2, 1958

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from London that some Western allied diplomats this date were reported to be in favor of challenging Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to a plebiscite in which West Berliners would accept or reject his proposal to make their city a demilitarized "free city". Qualified informants said that under the proposal being suggested, if the 2.2 million West Berliners rejected the "free city" status, Premier Khrushchev would be obliged to withdraw his scheme and continue to abide by the existing four-power occupation agreements formed immediately after World War II at the Potsdam Conference. If the West Berliners accepted Mr. Khrushchev's proposals, then the Americans, British and French would be bound to withdraw their 10,000 troops from their sectors of West Berlin. The informants had stressed that it was only one of several ideas being pondered. The Western diplomats who favored some proposal of the type to Moscow said that they were convinced that the Russians would not risk putting their proposals to the test of public opinion and that, regardless, in any such vote, West Berliners would resoundingly reject the Soviet proposals. There was no indication whether the idea of challenging the Russians in that manner had yet been considered by the Western governments at the top levels. It was known, however, that the Soviet move had started some fundamental rethinking among the Western allies regarding their position not only in Berlin but also within all of Germany. There was a recognition in several of the Western governments that, 13 years after the war, the time had come to examine new approaches and even take risks for the sake of another high-level East-West attempt at a German peace settlement.

In Havana, it was reported that about 54 American families on United Fruit Co. plantations in eastern Cuba were down to a one-day water supply this date because of rebel interference with their pipeline.

In Panama, a bill to extend that country's territorial waters to 12 miles offshore, following the lead of Communist China in the Formosa Strait, had been introduced in the National Assembly with wide support. The internationally recognized limit was three miles.

In London, privately informed diplomats reported this date that Russia had started supplying jet fighters, tanks and other arms to Iraq.

In Farnborough, England, a British scientist said this date that the rocket carrier of Russia's Sputnik III might fall from space the following day or Thursday, seven months after the satellite had been launched.

In Tokyo, it was reported that Communist North Korea and North Vietnam had demanded this date that the U.S. pull its troops from South Korea, Japan and the Formosa Strait, and "stop interference in South Vietnam."

In Chicago, it was reported that the third worst school fire in the previous hundred years and the worst in Chicago in 55 years had struck Our Lady of Angels School the previous day, taking 90 lives, including 87 children and three nuns. More than 85 children remained in hospitals. Firemen reported that a few of the children had still been at their desks, apparently stuck in fear and panic. Others had leaped from windows. The survivors suffered from burns, broken bones from falls and the shock of the horror which they had witnessed. The fire commissioner considered the possibility of arson because of the swift spread of the blaze and because the black smoke indicated an oil-type fire. Investigators had pinpointed the place of origin as being below the street level at one corner of the school. A 30-gallon can was found in a stairwell in that section of the structure and was taken to the police crime laboratory for careful examination. Another possibility was that the fire had originated in waste paper in the basement near the corner of the building. A 12-year old pupil, who had carried the waste paper to the basement a few minutes before the fire had started, had been questioned by police. The worst school disaster in the nation's history had occurred on March 18, 1937, when 294 persons had died in a school explosion and fire in New London, Tex., and the second worst school fire disaster had claimed 176 lives in the Collinwood School in Cleveland, O., on March 4, 1908. The worst fire in Chicago history had claimed 575 lives on December 30, 1903, when the Iroquois Theater had burned down, causing injuries to 1,900 others. Twelve years earlier, on June 5, 1946, 61 persons had died in a fire in the LaSalle Hotel, injuring nearly 230 others, 30 of them seriously. The worst of the more recent fires had been at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston on November 28, 1942, in which 498 persons had died. Other major fires in the previous 20 years had been at the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, claiming 119 lives on December 7, 1946; a Cleveland liquid gas explosion and fire which took 135 lives on October 20, 1944; a fire in the big top at the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Conn., on July 6, 1944, claiming 168 lives; and a dance hall fire in Natchez, Miss., on April 23, 1940, taking 198 lives.

In Los Angeles, it was reported that a citizens' group had launched its final drive this date to obtain cash pledges which it hoped would win Los Angeles as the site of the 1960 Democratic National Convention—as it would. The party had asked for a $350,000 guarantee to hold the convention there, and the citizens' group had counted on pledges the previous day to total $152,000.

In Rome, it was reported that striking Italian maritime unions had ordered their members back to work this date while negotiations continued on demands for higher pay and better working conditions.

Court developments had taken the pressure off of two airlines involved in labor disputes this date, with two other airlines having been shut down by strikes, as negotiations continued. The strike moratorium provided breathing spells to Pan American World Airways and American Airlines, keeping their planes flying. The struck carriers were Eastern Air Lines and TWA. The transport workers union pledged the previous day in a state supreme court, the state not provided, not to interfere with Pan American operations, pending the outcome of mediation regarding union demands. The airline had accused the union of curtailing the amount of overtime which its members could work. About 8,000 Pan American employees, including 1,400 at the Cape Canaveral, Fla., missile base, were demanding fewer working hours with no pay cuts. The contract had expired at midnight the previous night. American Airlines, the nation's largest in terms of passenger miles flown each year, escaped a break in operations when a Federal District Court judge continued a ban on a strike by 1,500 members of the Airline Pilots Association, with court argument to resume this date. In Kansas City, negotiations in the 11-day old TWA strike had been recessed late the previous night still deadlocked regarding a seniority issue involving machinist foremen, with talks scheduled to resume this date. The chairman of the National Mediation Board said that the International Association of Machinists and the carrier were "three inches apart on wages", but that regarding the seniority problem, were "11,000 miles apart". Imminent settlement of the strike had been forecast on Sunday by a union official. TWA wanted foremen to continue accumulating seniority as machinists, a proposal which the union opposed. In Miami, Fla., Eastern officials and union leaders planned to meet again this date to try to resolve the strike which had been ongoing since November 24, as a total of 5,383 mechanics and 550 members of the Flight Engineers International Association were idle. An Eastern vice-president had met the previous day with an IAM official and they reported that talks were friendly. Officials of the Flight Engineers union said that they were willing to negotiate, but no meeting had yet been scheduled.

In Detroit, a wildcat strike of milktruck drivers in the metropolitan area of the city had ended this date, 24 hours after it had begun. The drivers had left their trucks in protest of cut-rate milk prices in retail stores. Supermarket prices had been between two cents and 7.5 cents per quart below those of home-delivered milk, on which drivers received a commission. Both sides agreed that the situation had resulted in a decline in home deliveries and cancellation of some milk routes. The work stoppage had ended when rebel drivers agreed to creation of a study committee to be made up of ten members from driver unions and ten from milk dealers. The work stoppage by some 3,000 milk-route drivers had been unauthorized and the strikers had ignored union appeals to return to work under a no-strike clause in their contracts. Deliveries had been cut to a mere trickle the previous day in the Detroit metropolitan area, which had a population of about 3.5 million. Home-delivered milk cost 24.5 cents per quart and many stores had been selling it at between 17 and 20 cents per quart. One of Detroit's larger processors, declining to be quoted by name, said that its drivers averaged approximately $118 weekly on a flat wage of $30 per week plus commissions. It added, however, that it knew of other companies with smaller routes and less frequent deliveries where drivers were paid as low as $90 per week. The listed price to supermarkets and other retail outlets normally was three cents less than home-delivered prices, but one processor spokesman explained that there was volume involved and it was a dog-eat-dog business "with side deals like a bigger discount for bigger purchases and such." Those wildcatters may have been watching "Naked City" a couple of weeks earlier and figured that their routes were far more hazardous than people realized.

In Mauston, Wisc., a finance company president and his wife had been shot to death in their home the previous night and the district attorney had said this date that their 17-year old daughter, who had been apprehended in the family car a few hours afterward, had admitted commission of the killings. The bodies of her parents, 46 and 43, respectively, had been found where they were shot by a pistol. They had two daughters, the other being 11. The district attorney said that the alleged assailant would be taken before a juvenile judge later this date on a delinquency petition, but declined to reveal any details from her statement. Under Wisconsin law, the names of juvenile offenders could not be published, but the district attorney said that he might ask the juvenile court to waive jurisdiction and permit her to face prosecution as an adult on a murder charge. The girl had been taken into custody the previous night while driving toward Wisconsin Dells. The coroner said that her father had been shot twice near the heart after he returned home from a Kiwanis Club meeting. His body had been found near that of his wife, who was lying at the bottom of a stairway in the living room, shot four times in the head and chest. Both had been killed by bullets from a .22-caliber automatic pistol. The other daughter had been with friends at the movie "Bambi" when the bodies of her parents had been discovered. We might note that there has been a rash across the country here in 1958 of matricides and patricides, along with the spate of murders generally by teenagers, only the most notorious of which had been the 11 murders committed in Nebraska and Wyoming by 19-year old Charles Starkweather the previous December 1, 1957, and in late January, 1958. Juvenile crime generally had been on the rise since World War II, attributed by sociologists to the fact that there were many single parents in the home, the result of fathers being sent overseas to the fight and mothers working sometimes in war factories, with those mothers continuing to work often after the war to enable the receipt of two paychecks in the home. Subsequent to the war, the high divorce rate in the country left many one-parent homes and otherwise broken homes with stepfathers or stepmothers. Yet, for every such teen-committed homicide, there were millions upon millions of teenagers in the country who never thought of killing anyone or taking up arms against anyone. The root cause of such youthful violence could be traced in individual cases only to so many variables as to become meaningless. Anyone who seeks to find the root cause, identify it and then try to eliminate it from the society, then or now, will only usually exacerbate some other variable unwittingly and wind up with a mess, violence competing to outwit authorities with more violence of a different type. For every homicide committed by a juvenile from a "bad home", one would find that there were homicides committed by plenty of juveniles from "good homes", homes where religion, morals and ethics were taught consistent with good Christian and citizenship principles. The root cause is as elusive as the genetic mix along the dual 46-chromosomal strands, with as much variation in environmental factors thrown in, all combining to be unique to each individual, even unique within the same family. There is no "bad seed" and searching for same could only drive a sane person insane and perhaps result in some untoward behavior, even if not homicide or anything quite approaching it. The best form of parenting, perhaps, is to take one's child as one finds him or her as an individual, treat their normal behavior as normal and their "abnormal" or anti-social behavior as merely an aberrant phase through which they are passing and not become unduly alarmed, dialing for the police or a psychologist at every instance of what a parent might obsessively perceive as "abnormal" because it transgresses the household norm or, God forbid, what some outsider to the family, even if a teacher or guidance counselor, might suggest as such, with the best response to such third-parties, especially the generalized variety of tv "help" shows, being one which is diplomatic but firm in the notion that the parent is in the best position to understand their child. Of course, when a child shows assaultive or violent tendencies aimed at other children or adults, some responsible action by parents has to be undertaken to avoid the worst. But searching for that "root" cause applicable to all people and all circumstances is dumb and foolhardy and will result in more difficulties for society than it can ever remedy. We must all start with the basic assumption that every human being has, left over from primordial instincts, the capability under certain circumstances to kill another human being, and, by that admission, learn to conquer any such impulse aborning, a primary aim of all societal norms in any proper society, and to ameliorate potentially volatile interpersonal situations which might unleash such impulses. Obviously, it goes without saying, reducing the fascination in American society with guns and gunplay is a good starting point for reducing the level of violence in the society. While that may not eliminate, obviously, all assaults and all homicides, it would, as demonstrated by statistics in foreign countries which have done so, significantly reduce same and breed a lower climate of violence, which, when otherwise gaining traction in a social order, tends to breed more violence, sometimes of the copycat variety.

We make these remarks just after the news came yesterday that actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife were brutally murdered by stabbing in their Los Angeles home, resulting in their 32-year old son being arrested and accused of the murders. It does no good at this point to ask why, for the reasons suggested above. It is an individual case with individual variables involved too complex for anyone to understand with any degree of certitude. We must leave it to the professionals involved in the case, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and any psychologists or psychiatrists employed by either side, to suggest an approximation of what might have been the immediate or "root" cause of that incident. There is abounding in our society, with social media at hand for over two decades, far too much speculation, volunteered far too quickly, by those without knowledge of an event and jumping to wild conclusions, with or without professional credentials, which benefit society not one whit, designed only as click-bait by click-bait artists seeking a "following" for reasons of pure vanity and to try to earn a living by talky-talk. And it also does even less good for an elected leader to send out on social media a completely bonkers, insensitive statement, accusing one of the two victims, Mr. Reiner, of "Trump Derangement Syndrome", causing others to react toward him in a murderous way. Could one not turn the tables regarding the murder in Utah in September and say that the victim of that particular murder, with his vile, redundant hate speech aimed at the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and calling for the execution of President Joe Biden for "treason" while he was still in the White House, had caused someone to murder him? The most vivid example of derangement which we see right now in our society is at the very top, seeping down into each one of his Cabinet appointees, who must satisfy the dictator or be fired. To compare that trash to the Third Reich is most apropos and correct historically. If you think otherwise, then find a responsible history of Nazi Germany and read it carefully. Being mealy-mouthed and spineless, fearful of repercussion, about it will only encourage more of the same. It is how the thing got traction in a society of human beings in the 1920's and 1930's, a phenomenon which can happen anywhere in any time if left unchecked, the blaming of any identifiable minority, such as "illegal immigrants" or the amorphous "antifa" and "Black Lives Matter", or earlier, "hippies", "radical leftists" and "civil rights activists", for all manner of society's ills and then licensing hate against those groups in the name of curtailing "political violence" toward the chosen ones, an invented repository for the sins of the society on the notion of alleviating it of its worst tendencies to build the "perfect state" which has never existed in the history of mankind and never could except under such repression as to be monstrous, all ultimately aimed at chilling free speech and commentary on current events so that anti-Constitutional thugs might thrive.

In Savannah, Ga., an unlikely sounding medical term, "pickwickian syndrome", was giving state prosecutors consternation in their bolita, or numbers racket, case against 425-pound "Sloppy Joe" Bellinger. The latter fell asleep at the drop of a hat involuntarily and two doctors, including one appointed by the State, had agreed that the portly man could not help it because of the strange malady from which he suffered—which ought be renamed for current times as "humpety-trumpian dormousian syndrome". The man's attorney complained that he was unable to prepare a defense for his client because the client would fall asleep in the middle of a sentence. One physician said that the only way the man could be kept awake at a trial was by keeping him on his feet and "moving him around. If you try to put him in a witness chair, he'll fall asleep … and if he were convicted, you probably couldn't put him in jail in his condition." The man's case had been continued in city court until the problem could be solved.

John Kilgo of The News reports that former City Recorder's Court clerk Allen White, a police officer, had been sentenced to a 12-month suspended sentence and a $500 fine in Superior Court during the morning, following his plea of guilty to two misdemeanor charges of willful neglect of official duties and failure to pay collected monies at the proper time. His probation would run for two years. The solicitor had agreed with the defense attorney at the conclusion of the evidence that responsibility of the court, itself, was to see that the records were kept. Previously, Judge Basil Boyd of the Recorder's Court had been acquitted on a misdemeanor charge of not fulfilling his official responsibilities.

As we have fallen behind, there will be no further comments on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.

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