The Charlotte News

Wednesday, February 4, 1959

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Helmstedt, West Germany, that the Soviet Army had stood pat this date in its refusal to grant passage to a U.S. Army truck convoy held up for two days at West Germany's frontier. At the same time it had been learned that the Russians had searched a British truck on the same Berlin highway, the autobahn. A U.S. Army officer had met with a Soviet Army officer at the checkpoint for ten minutes, but apparently nothing had been resolved. A Soviet Army spokesman charged that the convoy's refusal to bow to Red Army inspection controls at the West German frontier had been "a deliberate and prepared maneuver". Commenting on a rapid-fire series of U.S. protests and demands that the four-truck convoy, with its five-soldier guard, be allowed to proceed immediately, the Red Army spokesman at East Berlin headquarters had said, "It is now up to the Americans to put this affair in order." The Soviets were insisting that the convoy either should allow the interior of the cargo trucks to be inspected or return to West Berlin. The U.S. was responding that the Russians had no right to search the truck interiors under four-power agreements. The U.S. refused to allow Soviet border guards to search the convoy when it had rolled up on Monday from West Berlin at the Soviet checkpoint in Marienborn, just over the line from the West German border point at Helmstedt. The trucks carried jeeps. The west-bound British truck, with a lone driver, had been held up two days earlier. Both incidents occurred on the autobahn, the 110-mile road linking isolated West Berlin with West Germany. The British said that their truck had been stopped at the Marienborn checkpoint as it was en route from West Berlin to West Germany. The Russians said that they wanted to check the interior of the truck, which was open at the back, and the driver had resisted. While he was arguing with a Russian officer, a Russian soldier had climbed into the back of the truck and looked around, according to the British Army spokesman, the Russian having evidently satisfied himself that there was nothing inside and the Russians having allowed the truck to proceed. The driver had gone across to Helmstedt and reported to his superiors, with a protest having followed. While the Soviet officer with an interpreter and the U.S. military police captain talked at the Helmstedt checkpoint, the four-truck convoy remained parked at Marienborn within sight of the free West. U.S. military authorities considered the convoy stoppage the gravest incident since the Soviets had begun their drive the previous November to oust the Western powers from West Berlin.

The President this date, at his press conference, said that it would be a wicked thing to set up a Federal police force to enforce civil rights. Simultaneously, Senate Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois said that the Administration's civil rights proposals would be sent to Congress the following day. It was an abrupt change of plans since the previous day, when Congressional leaders had expected a two-week delay in submission of the program. No reason for the change had been immediately available, although Senator Jacob Javits of New York had said that he would introduce a broad measure unless the Administration sent its own proposals promptly. The President said that he was never going to send to Congress anything other than a moderate and decent civil rights program which would improve the situation in the country. The Administration program was expected to be aimed at greater protection of voting rights and at curbing disorders in school integration. In addition, the President referenced Berlin at the press conference, saying that the Government had protested to Moscow regarding the Soviet halting of the American truck convoy, that the U.S. regarded the act as a violation of explicit or implied agreements among the four powers occupying Berlin. Regarding missiles, he said that the claims by Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky that the West lacked the missile might to cope with new Soviet weapons of pinpoint accuracy, sounded like propaganda. Regarding the budget, the President urged Congress to provide for higher taxes in every spending bill which would unbalance his 77 billion-dollar submitted budget. He said that he was sure that the public did not want tax increases, deficit spending and cheapened dollars.

In New York, as reported this date by the Charlotte Observer, the Federal Civil Rights Commission heard persistent demands for Federal action against housing discrimination as it completed two days of hearings on the subject on Tuesday. Representatives of black, Puerto Rican and Jewish groups, among others, had called on the Government to refuse further Federal guarantees or aid to housing which was not open to minorities. Some witnesses said that it ought be done by the President. Others had urged Congress to act. The Commission, which currently had a three-man Southern Democratic majority, had made little comment. The commissioners would make their recommendations in a report to the President and to Congress, due by September. There was virtual agreement among the witnesses at the hearings that particularly blacks and Puerto Ricans had been segregated into racial ghettos in New York and many other cities. But there was much disagreement about the causes of it. One commissioner, Robert Storey, dean of law at Southern Methodist University, had asked repeatedly witnesses if it was not largely because minority groups had chosen to live together. Several witnesses, including the executive director of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, agreed that such choice was a large factor in the pattern. He said that there were "many Negroes" in Harlem who would not leave if they were offered "gold-plated apartments" elsewhere. But he insisted that for many, living in a segregated ghetto was not a matter of choice. A spokesman for the real estate interests had placed responsibility for discrimination on tenants. General James Andrews of the New York Real Estate Board said: "Our tenants are the ones who are really opposed to integration. We don't know how to make the tenants stay where they don't want to stay." He claimed that the average landlord was "rather indifferent to the color line, but is interested mostly in making a profit." Others placed responsibility on real estate agents. The Rev. Gardner C. Taylor, a black man and president of the Protestant Council of New York City, said: "It is an open secret among minorities that the suppliers of private housing in our cities, the real estate interests, keep the supply of housing available to minorities at a trickle while the demand remains enormous in order to keep the price exorbitant."

Also reported in The Observer, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith had protested to the Commission on Tuesday housing restrictions on Jews in areas of the Carolinas. Eugene Sugarman, chairman of the New York advisory board of the Jewish organization, called for Federal action to forbid racial or religious discrimination in Federally-aided housing, as well as for state and local laws everywhere to bar discrimination in private housing. Mr. Sugarman had delivered a prepared statement which covered many areas of the country, naming two areas of Columbia, S.C., as examples of restrictions on housing for Jews in the South. He said that the two areas were "an old area known as Heathwood" and "a newer section owned and developed by M. R. Bagnall, Jr., and R. R. Rigby, Jr., under the title of Trenholm Building Co." Protest had been lodged with Mr. Bagnall against restrictive covenants barring Jews, according to Mr. Sugarman, but the developer had "remained adamant". (Such restrictive covenants, while, themselves, not subject to prohibition in a private contract, could not be enforced in the courts as that would entail state action in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, as held in 1948 in Shelley v. Kraemer.) Mr. Sugarman also said that residential area restrictions were found in Gastonia and Wilmington, N.C., but he did not mention the particular developments. He conceded that Jews fared much better than blacks as far as housing was concerned but said, "Islands of senseless housing restrictions against Jews still exist."

The Senate had agreed on Tuesday to take up the 2.9 billion-dollar Democratic-sponsored omnibus housing bill this date and leaders were aiming for a final vote by the end of the week. Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, the major sponsor of the measure, told reporters that he was confident that the Senate would pass it without reductions. The President had asked for a 1.65 billion-dollar measure. It required unanimous consent for the Sparkman measure to be made the Senate's business for this date. Senators Spessard Holland of Florida and Frank Lausche of Ohio had agreed to go along only after obtaining assurances that committee reports on the bill, not yet filed, would be filed by this date.

In Vienna, Austria reported that unemployment had increased by 8.9 percent over the previous year's figures, with the total 227,857 out of work representing 10 percent of the labor force available.

In New York, it was reported that an American Airlines jet plane with 73 persons aboard had crashed into the chilly, fog-covered waters of the East River late the previous night and that 65 persons aboard had apparently perished despite feverish rescue efforts by harbor craft. The plane's pilot, using instruments because of the murky weather conditions, had been feeling his way toward a runway of La Guardia Airport on a nonstop flight from Chicago, when, for an undetermined reason, the four-engine turboprop plane had smacked into the water and burst apart about half a mile from the shore end of the runway. Some of the passengers and crew were flung from or had floated out of the wreckage before it sank to the river bottom, 30 to 36 feet below. A tugboat chugging along a few hundred feet away had cut loose two barges it was towing to New York from Connecticut and raced to the crash scene. Crewmen leaped into the water or used boat hooks to pull out the eight persons known to have survived the crash, one having been an eight-year old boy. A member of the tug's crew said that the sights and sounds were something he would never forget. He said that there seemed to be bodies all around and that there were continual screams for help. All through the night and into the gray, rainy dawn, a huge array of boats searched the river for bodies and by mid-morning only 19 had been recovered, leaving 46 still missing. The eight survivors had been taken to hospitals. The mother of the rescued boy had been pulled from the water alive but died later. The boy said that his mother had swum and held his head above water before he was rescued. Swirling river currents, plus rain and wind up to 40 mph, had hampered the search for other bodies and had given rise to fears that some of them might be swept miles out into Long Island Sound. The site of the crash had been marked by a few floating pieces of the 1.7 million dollar Lockheed Electra airliner, which had been put into service only a few weeks earlier. It had only been happenstance that the tugboat was nearby the crash scene, as ordinarily the tugs would be busily scurrying up and down the river, but were presently tied up by a strike of crewmen. The tug had not been hampered by the strike as it was based in Connecticut. The new airliners were designed to combine jet power with the advantage of the propeller, the engine operating on the principle of a turbine. The plane had been easing toward La Guardia through light rain and fog, and 38-degree weather with a ceiling of visibility at about 300 to 400 feet at the time of the crash.

A tugboat captain had provided a graphic eyewitness account of the crackup of the plane near his vessel and of the frantic efforts to rescue passengers, saying that he would never forget some of the awful sights and sounds he had witnessed. He said that he pulled three persons out of the river and there seemed to be bodies all around, with continual screams for help. They had been able to get eight persons aboard, using boat hooks to retrieve most of them. One of the bodies had been under 4 feet of water and the only way they had seen it was from a reflection on a belt buckle. He said that one of the survivors picked up had been the eight-year old boy, later identified as being from Long Island. He had been swimming in the frigid waters and was numb with cold and unable to talk. The captain said that if there had only been more tugboats around, more survivors might have been retrieved, but that they could not last long in the frigid water. He said that they had waited until they were sure there were no others around before starting toward the shore. He said that when they had arrived at the scene, the plane was in small bits, with the tail section, seemingly intact, sticking out of the water, the rest in pieces. They managed to snag with boat hooks a large part of the fuselage on which there were perched three persons. As they had hauled them aboard, he saw a hand poke through a door in the wreckage and it looked like the pilot's door. He heard a man cry for help and they yanked at the door with boat hooks and tried to open it just as the wreckage began to pull away, and he saw the hand disappear and heard a man cry, "Stop." He said he would never forget it and believed it was the pilot. They had to let it go.

The eight-year old boy had been sitting in the seat of the airliner next to his mother and nearby had been his father and two sisters. They had been on a happy excursion to visit relatives in Chicago as they often did and were returning home. From a hospital bed later, the boy told about having emerged from the shock of a terrible series of events, saying in a halting voice: "I was sitting in the seat next to mommy. I don't know what happened but all of a sudden I began to slide and we went under the seat. Then I was on something in the water. Mommy was holding me. Then in the water we couldn't stay up. I tried to hold my breath. I was cold. My arms felt frozen." He had been unable to speak any further. His murmurs to attendants made it plain that he was aware that his parents and sisters were dead. He and his mother had been rescued from the icy waters and rushed to the hospital, where his mother had died later. His father and sisters, ages five and 13, had been listed among those missing as searchers continued to look for bodies. A relative of the family said that the family had a close attachment with other relatives in Chicago and often flew there for visits. The father had been a flier during World War II and had been shot down, spending 11 months in a prison camp. He had continued, according to the relative, to enjoy flying as a civilian and was nearly always traveling by plane with his family, indicating that to them, "flying was just like taking a bus."

In Brooklyn, a mother of two heard a news bulletin on the television advising of the crash, with her husband having been aboard. She telephoned American Airlines but it was too early to confirm whether he had been a survivor or not. The woman's father, who lived with her, sped with the worried woman to La Guardia and there they learned that some survivors had been taken to Flushing Hospital. They then raced to the emergency ward at the hospital where their hopes were confirmed, being advised that the man was stunned but alive, not knowing where he was. Sometime later, he had been able to report that he owed his life to leaving his regular seat just prior to the crash, having gone to the lounge in the rear of the plane. After the crash, he had helped two stewardesses and a little boy out of the plane and next recalled swimming toward a tugboat in the East River. Before his wife had reached him, the hospital had called and their two children, ages 14 and nine, had learned that their father was all right. He had flown to Chicago early the previous day on business and had sought an earlier plane back to New York, but had been unable to obtain one.

The highest death toll to date in aviation had involved a military plane which crashed June 18, 1953 near Tokyo, with 129 U.S. servicemen aboard. The worst commercial airline disaster to date had occurred over the Grand Canyon on June 30, 1956, when a United Airlines DC-7 and a TWA Super Constellation had collided and crashed to the rocks below, killing 128 persons. The most disastrous single airplane crash in the history of commercial aviation had occurred on August 14, 1958, when a KLM Royal Dutch airliner had disappeared over the Atlantic with 99 aboard. Other major crashes and their death tolls had been at Cardiff, Wales, on March 12, 1950, when 80 soccer fans returning from a Dublin match had been killed; at Issoudin, Québec, on August 11, 1957, when 79 in a chartered Maritime Central Airways DC-4, returning from England, had been killed; and off New Jersey on June 20, 1956, when 74 persons in a Venezuela Air Lines Super Constellation bound for New York had been killed.

There is nothing in The News this date or the previous day regarding the crash of the small plane near Mason City, Iowa, the previous morning which took the lives of singers Buddy Holly, 22, Ritchie Valens, 17, and J. P. (Big Bopper) Richardson, 24, as reported this date on the front page of the Charlotte Observer. The troupe with which the trio had appeared had entertained an estimated 1,100 teenagers and their parents at the Surf ballroom in nearby Clear Lake on Monday night. The Beechcraft Bonanza plane, chartered from the Dwyer Flying Service of Mason City, had been slated to take the three singers to Fargo, N.D., in advance of the troupe's engagement there on Tuesday night. The others in the troupe had traveled via chartered bus, with two band members having been substituted by Mr. Valens and Mr. Richardson, the latter suffering from a bad cold and the former winning a coin toss to fly aboard the plane. Subsequently well-known country singer Waylon Jennings had given up his seat to Mr. Richardson because of the latter's ailment. The three singers who had soared to popularity among teenagers in recent years, had chartered the plane to take care of advance arrangements at Fargo. Authorities had tentatively blamed weather conditions for the crash. In addition to snow, the temperature had been 18 degrees and a southerly wind had been gusting at 35 mph. The left wing tip had apparently struck the ground first and flown off, with pieces of wreckage ripped from the plane, as it plowed a distance of about two city blocks across a field and piled up against a wire fence. The plane had come down about 5 miles northwest of the airport on a farm and apparently no one had heard the crash. Three of the bodies were lying on the ground near the wreckage and one remained inside the wreckage. A woman, whose husband managed the Surf ballroom, said that everything had sounded okay when the plane had taken off. Hollywood trade sources said that the combined record sales of the three singers had been in the millions. As we commented yesterday, while it was sad, as would be any loss of life from such a mishap, it was not "the day the music died". Get over it. By that point in time, it was, in truth, little more than a footnote to the news, as demonstrated by its total absence in The News, as the folk trend had already taken hold, largely replacing the rock 'n' roll scene for at least the time being during the ensuing five years, which had fallen on hard times, basically being supplanted by little more than easy-listening mush. Even the latter songs of Mr. Holly bordered on mush. We remember this news story appearing in our local newspaper, though we were not able to read it. Our older sibling, knowing that we liked listening to "Peggy Sue" among his record collection, pointed out the fact to us as he arrived home from high school in the afternoon, as we recall it, probably the previous day—even if the schools had been closed that day for inclement weather. At that moment, an image of the Kingston Trio passed through our brain. Apparently, we saw the pictures. But we could not read the accompanying text.

King of the hill? We used to play that on the bank beside the Greenbrier, near the Avalon. You remember.

In Honolulu, it was reported that a 65-year old woman in Kentucky and a Jewish businessman of New York City had been offering their eyes to evangelist Billy Graham, afflicted with an ailment of his left eye. The 40-year old Protestant crusader from Charlotte had received thousands of letters and telegrams expressing concern, coming from Catholics, Moslems and persons of many other faiths. They had come from prominent people and those unknown in many countries around the world. The evangelist said that he was overwhelmed and humbled. He said that many persons had written that they were praying for him. He was nearing the end of a three-week rest in Hawaii and said that he was convinced that God did answer prayer and that although he did not consider his condition critical, it had done something to him spiritually to know that so many people all over the world were praying and were interested. He said of the woman from Kentucky who had offered her eye that he was so overwhelmed that he was moved to tears by it, having never had anything like that happen to him before. He said that one Catholic seminary had written that special prayers were being offered for his recovery, and he thought it a "very wonderful thing". Among those who had sent letters or telegrams had been Vice-President Nixon, UAW president Walter Reuther and the late film producer Cecil B. DeMille, the latter letter having been written only four days before its author's death the previous month. The evangelist had been stricken by the condition late the prior year and doctors had described it as a nervous disorder, probably from overwork and strain. They prescribed complete rest and the evangelist and his wife had arrived in Hawaii on January 18 for the three-week stay. He would leave around February 8 for Australia, where he was to open a religious crusade a week later. He said that the vision in his left eye had improved some and that he would be taking the medication prescribed by his doctor. He said that his general physical condition was excellent and that he did not think he had ever felt better. He spent most of his time in Hawaii relaxing at the beach, playing golf and deep-sea fishing.

In Chitose, Japan, it was reported that Japan's lone Sabrejet combat wing on Tuesday had gotten its first operational orders, to attack a task force nearing the southern coast of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island. The task force annually invaded the southern coast of Hokkaido, preying on fish and wreaking havoc with fishermen's nets and boats, being made up of large walruses weighing at least a ton. Unlike seals, the walrus was not protected by the Government and the fishermen had petitioned the Japanese Air Force to defend them. The Air Force had decided to send out its Sabrejets to attack with cannon and destroy the enemy task force or drive it back north.

In Houston, it was reported that oilman W. Howard Lee the previous day had filed suit seeking divorce from actress Hedy Lamarr, his petition alleging cruel treatment prior to the couple's separation the prior August. The marriage was his second and the fifth for Ms. Lamarr.

In Providence, R.I., a woman said that her family soon would dispose of the ten Christmas trees they had kept since Christmas, saying on Tuesday night that her family had been keeping the trees because of a feeling that "Christmas isn't over until Lent begins", which would be on February 11 in the current year.

On the editorial page, "Growing up Includes Emergencies" indicates that the Charlotte First Aid and Life Saving Crew, a voluntary organization, was in danger of no longer being able to continue as such amid growing responsibilities in a booming population. The Life Saving Crew had made known its needs for a centrally located headquarters from which to function, saving time and rounding up equipment, training of its men and being able to respond to calls, presently averaging nearly one per day.