The Charlotte News

Monday, February 2, 1959

ONE EDITORIAL

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Havana that Fidel Castro this date had launched an agrarian reform program which could prove a social revolution for Cuba's farmers. Sr. Castro had flown to his home province of Oriente to implement the program promised to the tenant farmers and squatters who had helped him and his rebel followers overthrow former El Presidente Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship on January 1. Meanwhile, the war crimes trials of the supporters of Sr. Batista, who had fled to the Dominican Republic, were expected to resume. Capt. Pedro Morejon, who had been the first to die in Havana's showcase trials, had been felled by a firing squad late on Saturday, according to revolutionist sources. To speed up the trials, the Government planned to set up six new tribunals in Havana, ten in Santiago, and others elsewhere. During his stay in Oriente, the birthplace of the revolution, Sr. Castro had planned to set in motion a vast program aimed at distributing millions of acres of undeveloped privately owned land to landless peasants. The Government said that fewer than 100 sugar producers and cattle barons controlled half of the land in the eastern province, most of it undeveloped. Some Government lands also were supposed to be distributed, and the Public Works Ministry had ordered the removal of all business houses established illegally on state property. The revolution leader was also expected to launch a large-scale program for the building of homes, schools and medical centers in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Sr. Castro and his brother Raul had been stressing that agrarian reform was an integral part of the revolution and that the farmer had been Cuba's forgotten man.

In Richmond, Va., for the first time in the state's history, black and white students attended public schools together. Grudgingly, but peacefully at the outset, the transition had been made to integration in a fraction of the public schools in Arlington County and the City of Norfolk. No violence or rowdy incidents had occurred as four black students filed quietly into Stratford Junior High School in Arlington, across the Potomac from Washington. In Norfolk, black children began showing up to enroll for the first time in six junior and senior high schools, also without incident. Police in riot gear had stood by in Arlington, but none were in sight at Norfolk. The four black students at Arlington, three boys and a girl, had gone into the school grounds from a seldom used roadway and through the doors of the school shortly before 9:00. Nobody had sought to stop them and there was an absence of picketing and demonstrations. Approximately 100 police officers, equipped with white helmets, portable loudspeakers and radios, canteens and the customary nightsticks and guns, had converged on Stratford long before the opening bell. Only pupils and school employees were allowed on the grounds, even parents having been kept away. In Norfolk, a male student and his mother had calmly walked past a cluster of white children on the steps of Maury High School to become the first black pupil to enter a white school in that city. There had been the usual chatter of schoolchildren, but no trouble of any sort. There was also no disturbance a few moments later when a female black student, one of 17 black students assigned to previously all-white schools, had gone unescorted into Granby High. The six Norfolk schools had been closed by Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., since September under laws passed by a special legislative session, since ruled unconstitutional both at the State and Federal levels. There had been no classes this date, only enrollment of the pupils and their assignment to classes. At Norview High School, two pairs of black girls had entered as white students watched curiously and quietly. By that time, police had been on hand and had cleared a path for them. One white girl was heard to say: "Here they are. I hope they're satisfied." Others said that they were glad to return to school. Some remarked that they did not think there would be any trouble, although one white boy had said he had heard that "rough kids" might cause some later in the day. At least 14 of the 17 black students had entered the Norfolk schools by 9:20. In both Norfolk and Arlington, police, community and school authorities, and student leaders had predicted and said that they hoped that there would be no violence.

In Brownwood, Tex., scientists, preparing to send aloft balloons as large as small hotels this date, postponed their efforts for the second straight day because of unfavorable wind conditions. When launched, the craft might break altitude records. The initial launching set for Sunday had also been postponed because of high wind in the west central Texas area. A University of Iowa physicist, Dr. Frank McDonald, said that the scientists wanted to send the unmanned instrument-laden balloons 27 miles from the earth. Four balloons were to be released over a two-week period by 14 scientists from the University of Iowa, Washington University of St. Louis and Atlantic Research Corp. The Office of Naval Research was sponsoring the releases with equipment furnished by Raven Industries of Sioux Falls, S.D. Each balloon would carry about 250 pounds of instruments aloft and was expected to reach a height of about 142,560 feet, or 27 miles. (Mr. Poe, however, provides the tell-tale heart suggestive of this being as much fausse nouvelle as the moon landings and all the gov'ment lies about Roswell since 19 and 47, as much as the condemnation of that absolutely truthful saga of the boy in the flying saucer balloon a few years ago, the miracle of which, sustained fuel-less flight with a solid body aboard, the main-stream meteor, chagrined by having fallen victim initially to its only superficial distraction, whether a boy was aboard, ignoring the while the actual pièce de résistance, then covered up by labeling it a "hoax" for money and publicity. Don't believe a word of any of it.)

Ice and snow had glazed vast areas of the Southwest this date, causing the deaths of at least 14 persons in weather-related accidents. Many schools were closed because of slick roads making bus travel hazardous. The heaviest snow had been recorded at Gage, Okla., near the Texas border, where eight inches had fallen—at least by the snow gauges. The freezing precipitation had reached as far south as Del Rio on the Rio Grande and as far east as the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the north central part of the state. The snow and ice areas stretched from the eastern slopes of the Rockies and eastern Wyoming through New Mexico and parts of Texas, and over most of Oklahoma, according to the Weather Bureau.

In Kerrville, Tex., it was reported that 25 men, some of whom were painfully injured, had managed to scramble to safety after a commercial DC-3 had crashed and burned in the central Texas hill country the previous night. Three men had died in the flaming wreckage of the ice-laden transport plane which hit a hill 17 miles southeast of Kerrville just prior to midnight. The plane had been carrying 25 Idaho National Guardsmen and a crew of three. Three bodies had been taken to a Comfort, Tex., funeral home and 13 men had been taken to a veterans hospital in Kerrville, with 12 others going to another Kerrville hospital. Two of the dead had been civilian crew members. The third victim was an Air National Guardsman. One surviving pilot said that icing conditions had plagued the plane for several hours prior to the crash and that after two unsuccessful passes at the Kerrville Airport, it had been attempting a third approach when one engine failed. He said that the chief pilot, one of the two pilots killed, had stated that he was going to have to put the plane down, and that it was a miracle that anyone had gotten out alive. The plane had been demolished and had been burning fiercely, according to the assistant publisher of the Kerrville Times, one of the first to reach the scene. Rescuers had found most of the survivors, muddy, soaked and battered, huddled in a freezing rain a short distance from the wreckage. A rancher said that he had heard the crash and could see the fire of the wreckage. At Boise, Ida., the chief of staff for the Idaho Air National Guard said that most of the 25 enlisted men aboard the plane had been from southwest Idaho.

In Halifax, Nova Scotia, weak radio signals had stirred faint hope this date that some of the 95 persons aboard the missing Danish ship might yet be found amid the iceberg-dotted seas off Greenland, where the ship had sunk on Friday after striking an iceberg. The director of Denmark's Greenland Department said in Copenhagen that there was little doubt that the signals, picked up by a rescue ship and two Greenland shore stations, had come from a survivor of the sunken vessel. But Royal Canadian Air Force search and rescue headquarters in Halifax said that the irregular dot-dash messages had been on a frequency normally used by aircraft sending "homing" signals and that it was convinced that the signals had not come from a lifeboat of the sunken ship. U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in New York also said that its cutter, which had been engaged in a fruitless search for survivors since Saturday, had not received any signals on the frequencies normally used by lifeboats. The cutter had been en route to some object, perhaps an overturned lifeboat, which had been sighted the previous day at a spot about 100 miles southwest of Cape Farewell, the southeast tip of Greenland. Danish officials in Copenhagen said that it was almost the exact spot where they calculated a lifeboat would have drifted. Thus, they had some hope that the signals were from such a lifeboat. The director of the Greenland Department said that irregular transmission would result if an inexperienced person sought to operate the set after studying the brief instructions. Continuing bad weather hampered the air search by one Canadian Air Force plane. A search plane on Sunday had reported that it had spotted what could have been an overturned lifeboat near the ship's last reported position in the north Atlantic.

In Lawrenceville, Ga., it was reported that a strange fight in the smoking car of a train had puzzled authorities in the section this date as they sought to solve the case of a body of a dead man found beside the railroad tracks. What had caused a disagreement between the young man heading for college at Davidson near Charlotte and the older man going to visit a relative was as yet unknown. The young man killed in a fall from the train was 20 and from Atlanta. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents and the Gwinnett County sheriff's office, along with the director of the state crime laboratory, were examining autopsy results in Atlanta. A GBI agent said that details of the fight, which had taken place in the smoking car, had come from a witness from Birmingham, Ala., a 49-year old man who was being held as a material witness in the case but without charges. He had been questioned at length by GBI agents and the sheriff and had said that he was alone in the Southern Railway smoking car when the young man had entered. He said that he spoke to the young man and the youth then hit him in the eye, knocked him down and finally grabbed a cigarette stand and struck him on the head. The man said that he had left and later found a broom, had broken off the handle and had gone back to see why the young man had hit him. He said that the young man had laughed at him and he then struck the youth with the broom handle, had left the young man in the car and did not see him afterward. The young man's body had been discovered beside the railroad tracks between nearby Duluth and Sewanee on Saturday and identification had been made by a Davidson student who had planned to meet the young man in Charlotte and by employees of an Atlanta bank where the young man had worked. The GBI agent said that the man who had related the story had a black eye and a bruise on his head when he was picked up at his daughter's home in nearby Gainesville on Saturday night. He had also told investigators that he did not know why the young man had hit him.

The victim, a former Davidson student of Quincy, Fla., had dropped out the previous February, though his academic standing had been categorized by Davidson College officials as "satisfactory". In high school, he had been in the glee club, on the student council, a member of both the 4-H and Future Farmers of America Clubs, was sophomore class president and had later lettered for three years in football. At Marion Institute in Alabama, where he had attended, he was editor of the school newspaper. Davidson College officials said that when he had filled out his enrollment questionnaire, he had not yet decided on a major and had originally entered the class of 1960. One Davidson official described him as a nice, clean-cut boy. He had been accepted for readmission to the second semester at Davidson and was on his way to register when the tragedy had occurred, according to a spokesman for the College.

In Kings Mountain, N.C., it was reported that a ten-year old girl had died in a hospital this date without regaining consciousness after a midnight traffic accident on Saturday which had killed her mother and father and two others. The girl, of Chamblee, Ga., had suffered broken legs, a broken back, a crushed skull and brain damage in the head-on collision and had been unable to breathe without assistance since the accident. An electric respirator had broken down the previous day and nurses and orderlies had pumped a hand-operated version for more than three hours before a replacement iron lung had been obtained from Charlotte, 35 miles to the east. A sergeant of the State Highway Patrol said that a car driven by a Gaffney man had gone out of control at high speed and hit head-on the car in which the fatalities occurred. The Gaffney man was in good condition at a hospital and the Highway Patrolman said that he was charged with murder. The sister and brother of the girl who had died were in other rooms of the hospital with minor injuries. The seven-year old sister cuddled a doll and held up her injured wrist, saying that she was going to show her band-aid to her "mommy" when she came in. The 15-year old brother said ruefully that the family probably would already have been at its destination instead of being involved in the crash had it not been delayed three times by a bad cylinder in the car's engine. The family had been on their way to visit the mother's brother in Sparta, N.C. The father had been a Marine tech sergeant stationed in Atlanta, previously having been stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

In Atlanta, it was reported that a suburban drive-in had noticed a decline in horn-blowers since its carhops had begun handing out cards with the verse: "When you want to call your waiter/ And you're sitting all forlorn—/ You will get him to you quicker/ With your lights than with your horn/ For there ain't a man among us/ Who has eyesight that has growed/ To the point where he can look around/ And see whose horn has blowed." You can add to it, "… unless he is the Toad." We do not know what it means either but we thought it sounded kind of clever. Anyway, it's just a part of the carnival of life, we suppose.

In Punxsutawney, Pa., it was reported that the groundhog had nearly frozen to death during the morning, but it was determined definitely that there would be six more weeks of winter. The usual procession by members of the famed Punxsutawney Groundhog Club had gone to Gobblers Knob, a little hill on the outskirts of the western Pennsylvania town, at 8:23 a.m. The temperature was ten below zero, but nevertheless the groundhog, according to the president of the club, had poked its nose out and, as promptly, had scurried back into its hole, meaning that there would be six more weeks of winter. The club president declared that the groundhog actually did not hibernate in the current winter but was helping him promote the sale of a cookbook, titled "Cooking with the Groundhog". All proceeds went to a local hospital. The club president said that the groundhog had been properly attired in his chef's hat and checkered apron when he said the words: "Six more weeks of snow to shovel. Icy winds and zero nights ahead. This is the one year I should have stayed in bed!" Loyal followers of the tradition never doubted the infallibility of the groundhog and sneered at scoffers and imitators. Members of the local club particularly discounted the reliability of upstart groundhogs at Quarryville and Allentown in the eastern part of the state. (A question we have, therefore, is whether the Quarrymen of Liverpool had gotten word of the imitation groundhog at Quarryville, and whether they would like to contest the matter by writing a song on behalf of the poor little creature competing for equal time. Perhaps call it, "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away on Groundhog Day".) Believers in the infallibility of the groundhog pointed out that it had been customary since the Roman sweep of Europe to forecast weather on Candlemas Day, that being February 2, based on whether any animal could or could not see its shadow. They also ascribed the legend to an old Scottish saying: "If Candlemas Day is bright and clear, there'll be two winters in the year." Did it go on to say, "But if the weather is kind of queer, you may have a nuclear apocalypse in the future near"?

Well, this date, actually February 7, UNC—as on the prior Monday, though then having lost some of its warmth in the last ten minutes—, did not see its shadow of the prior year, was not cold in its shooting hand against Duke, and defeated the Blue Devils in their basketball contest, another tradition which forecasts whether there will be six more weeks of winter or a nice early spring, the latter always occurring when UNC wins the first of the two contests, and a fierce winter being surely to follow when they fail in that endeavor. On this occasion of the annual predictive forecast, a mirror image of the game in mid-January which UNC managed to lose to Stanford amid false-spring weather, having led, and substantially so for most of it, for the entire contest up until the last two minutes, Duke had led for the entire game, up 6 with under three minutes to go, until UNC tied it with 100 seconds remaining, and after both teams then failed to score on their ensuing possessions, UNC's senior leader hit the winning three-point shot from the corner right at the buzzer to provide UNC its only lead after 40 minutes of action, its greatest comeback for a win against Duke, from 13 points down at one point in the first half and 12 points at halftime, since March 6, 2005—an eventual national championship season for UNC, though that was only a nine-point comeback, albeit in the last three minutes. There will be thus a fine spring ahead, rest assured—though destructive hurricanoes could follow should the feat not be duplicated in four weeks in Durham, and intervening which there is also not smooth sailing with plenty of red skies at night and none at morning.

On the editorial page, "Tall Task Ahead for 1959 Legislature: A Check List of North Carolina Needs" finds that a new state constitution topped the list of such needs, as the present 1868 version was unsatisfactory in the modern era. A special state commission had been at work since late 1957 on the task of drafting such an instrument and the Legislature would be expected to attack the problem with equal dedication and determination.