The Charlotte News

Friday, May 29, 1959

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that the Big Four foreign ministers had announced this date, following a trans-Atlantic sky conference, that they had a useful exchange of views on their overnight flight from Washington following the funeral services for former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. They had agreed to start the final round of their Geneva talks on German problems, the Berlin crisis and the prospects for a summit conference at the villa of British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd upon their return. The Air Force plane carrying Secretary of State Christian Herter, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Foreign Secretary Lloyd and France's Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville had landed in Geneva early in the afternoon, and the four ministers were in a jovial mood. Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Berding, who had ridden in an accompanying plane, issued a statement on behalf of the foreign ministers, saying: "The four foreign ministers had an opportunity on the aircraft of reviewing the progress of the Geneva conference and to discuss certain details of their respective positions. All agreed that their exchanges of views had been most useful. The four ministers agreed to meet again privately and informally at 5 o'clock at Mr. Lloyd's Geneva residence." Mr. Berding had supplied some details of the conference after talking briefly with Mr. Herter. The four ministers had taken off from Washington in mid-afternoon and for the first hour had chatted informally and read newspapers and magazines, then had organized a meeting to talk about conference issues for about 90 minutes. A Russian advisor and several American officials had been seated near the conferring group. They had also discussed East-West problems for about an hour during the morning before they had reached Geneva.

In New Orleans, the season's first tropical storm had swirled out of the Gulf of Mexico this date and aimed its winds of 50 mph at the marshy Louisiana coast. An early morning bulletin from the Weather Bureau had placed the storm, named Arlene, about 150 miles south of New Orleans, moving northwestward at about 15 mph with squalls becoming stronger along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts. The center of the storm, where the winds were strongest, was expected to reach the Louisiana coastline late this date, but the Bureau did not predict where or when it would hit. The storm had stirred up waters and pushed tides 2 to 4 feet above normal. Small craft warnings advising such craft to remain in port had been displayed from Sabine, Tex., just across the Louisiana border, to St. Mark's, Fla., 300 miles to the east. The Louisiana coastline directly in the path of the storm, in its last advised direction, contained scattered fishing villages and swamp lands dotted with oil rigs. Further to the west by 250 miles was Cameron, La., devastated by Hurricane Audrey in June, 1957, where more than 500 lives had been lost with property damage beyond estimate. There had been no indication whether the storm would increase in intensity before moving inland. The Coast Guard said that all of its men and ships were on alert to assist immediately if the call for help came.

In New York, it was reported that the arrival of the tropical storm off Louisiana this date had found the Weather Bureau ready with a full list of hurricane names for the season, which it provides. Chances were that all of the names would not be used as it was unlikely that there would be 26 such storms in the course of a year. The previous year had begun with Alma and ended with Janice.

In Sydney, Australia, it was reported that evangelist Billy Graham was at the end of his "Down Under" crusade and he rated it the most exciting of his career, saying: "The Australian crusade is by far the biggest I have known. It has meant a great deal to me personally. I hope to return in the next couple of years and speak also in New Guinea and the South Sea islands." He made the trip from Melbourne to Sydney on a ship to spend a couple of days at sea with an English friend, Bishop Hugh Gough, who was traveling from England to become Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. Mr. Graham was on a plane for Brisbane for an hour after the ship had docked. He would speak in Brisbane this night, the following day and on Sunday afternoon, and by that time would have drawn Australian crowds totaling perhaps 2.25 million persons during the previous three and a half months. Already, crusade organizers had counted 2,058,800 Australians having attended and 100,608 "decisions for Christ" having been made in 56 crusade meetings. In addition, 355,000 had seen and heard the evangelist in New Zealand, where 16,000 had made "decisions". Immediately after the Sunday afternoon meeting, he would fly back to Sydney to take a plane which would leave that night for Europe. He said he would have a couple of days of sleep in Switzerland and then join his wife in Paris and that they would arrive in London on the afternoon of June 6 by boat train, spending four days in London and then it would be up to his wife where they would spend the following week taking a holiday in Europe. He said that he planned to spend the entire summer at his home in Montreat, N.C., with his family and expected to do plenty of golfing and hiking. Crusade officials were still talking about some of the dramatic results in Sydney, among them being that a gunman had turned in his revolver and a shoulder holster to a counselor at a meeting, a burglar had turned in a kit of tools and promised to give up crime, a man who had contemplated suicide had gone to a meeting and then had taken a job, and a former convict had dropped in at a meeting on his way to meet safe-blowing friends, and had made a "decision" and stayed at the meeting. (But as earlier meetings in the U.S. had disclosed, including one attendee two years earlier, reportedly a devout Christian teenager, who had attended a meeting a few hours after raping and murdering his girlfriend during lunch break at school, the magic did not always work with everyone.)

In Salisbury, N.C., a North Carolina Baptist minister this date complained of treatment he had received at the Southern Baptist Convention in Louisville the previous week. The pastor of the East Spencer Baptist Church, the Reverend James Bulman, said that he was "arbitrarily stopped" from speaking to the convention "and was even physically led off the platform." He had been involved in heated discussions at both the Southern and State Baptist conventions and said that there was "as much difference as night and day" between the previous week's convention and the special session of the State Convention in Raleigh a few weeks earlier. At the Louisville convention, he had sought to air his claim that the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville "was teaching, under the official supervision of the seminary president, so as to allow that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Jesus were to be classified as 'myth'." He said that he was prepared to support the claim by reading from a Seminary publication but that before he could do so, he was interrupted and the floor given to the Seminary president who "was allowed to quote certain parts of this publication, from which I had not been permitted to quote so much as one word. Thus I was condemned without being allowed to cite one word of evidence concerning the charge which I had made, whereas the other side was allowed to cite its version of the printed material under discussion." Later in the convention, he said that he had been given the floor on a point of personal privilege but again was halted by the presiding officer. He contended that it violated parliamentary rules "and when I raised a point of order, which, according to the rules, any member can state at any time, I was not allowed to say anything, and was even physically led off the platform."

In Mexico City, it was reported that gunmen had snatched a valise which police said had contained more than three million Cuban pesos from an American woman in a quiet residential district the previous night and had wounded her with a shot as they fled. A quick investigation, however, led to arrest of the woman from Miami and a score of other persons, both some of her associates and men suspected of engineering the holdup. Even while pressing the inquiry into the robbery, police said that they believed they had stumbled onto an international ring dealing in foreign currencies, jewels and perhaps narcotics. The arrested woman's husband was among the persons rounded up in that connection. He had been taken into custody after he called police headquarters from a downtown hotel to inquire about his wife. Police said that the stolen valise had contained 3,767,500 Cuban pesos, nominally worth the same amount in dollars but actually of restricted value because of currency regulations imposed by Premier Fidel Castro's Havana Government. Police said that the money had been brought to Mexico for black-market conversion at a rate of 36 cents per peso, or a total of $1,356,300. Details had been vague, but the police outlined that four U.S. citizens and three Mexicans were involved in the attempt to sell the currency, that the American couple had left their rented apartment in a prominent residential district with the money, that the gunmen had driven up, fired twice and made off with the valise. One of the bullets had struck the arrested woman in an arm and among the persons with her had been her husband. A number of suspects had been arrested, including some Cuban gunmen, American gangsters and former Secret Service agents. But the money had not been recovered and at least the driver of the getaway car of the holdup gang was apparently still at large. The missing pesos were reported to be among the currency printed by the regime of former El Presidente Fulgencio Batista of Cuba. Millions had been sent out of Cuba by Sr. Batista, his supporters and American gamblers before Sr. Castro's revolutionary movement had triumphed the previous January 1. The revolutionary government had taken steps in early April to render the exported money worthless. All 500 and 1,000-peso bills were called in for conversion into new notes after the origin of the money was determined. The conversion deadline was April 30. In addition, Cuban regulations forbade travelers to take more than 50 pesos into Cuba. Many persons had been detained at Havana's port and airfield pursuant to that regulation.

In Centreville, Md., an investigation was underway this date to determine whether a vagrant arrested in the town was wanted for a 29-year old slaying in New Bern, N.C. The 51-year old man had been arrested the previous Sunday and sentenced to ten days in jail for vagrancy. State police at Easton said that they were checking to verify a report that the man was wanted in connection with the slaying of an IRB agent in New Bern in 1930.

In Los Angeles, it was reported that a woman had been accosted on a dark street and shot in the back as she fled in terror seven years earlier. She had written of the experience, saying: "I knew I was finished with this life … but if I could only tell someone what happened, maybe that devil of a man could be found before he could kill some other woman. He said, 'See here, this is a gun.' Looking at that long black gun … pointed at me … I was really frightened speechless. I must at that minute have started to run, and as I did he grabbed my purse. Then he shot me in the back … a deafening bang and a sickening pain all the way through. I ran out into the street waving both arms frantically in front of a bus…" She had recovered and police had found the written description at her home and released it the previous day. The police had been present because early the previous day, the same woman had again been overwhelmed by terror in the night as a shadowy figure had leaped from behind a tree on a darkened street and dragged the 57-year old secretary, screaming, into a parking lot where he beat her with a length of oak flooring and raped her. The woman, suffering a fractured skull and internal injuries, was in critical condition. The man who had shot her seven years earlier had never been caught and the man who raped her the previous day was still at large.

In West Palm Beach, Fla., it was reported that aviation authorities had gone into the Everglades this date to study the wreckage of a single-engine plane which had apparently disintegrated during flight, killing four men from Orangeburg, S.C. The plane had departed Key West during the morning on Thursday on a flight to Orangeburg but had met disaster 225 miles from the point of origin. It fell into a swampy area 25 miles northwest of West Palm Beach and 6 miles southeast of the Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Plant. A deputy sheriff said the plane apparently had disintegrated in flight as they could not find the tail assembly or the right wing. First word of the crash had come from a man and his son who had been fishing from a swamp buggy when they sighted the wreckage. (Incidentally, should you ever have the vast misfortune to be on a plane set to land at the newly dubbed "El Presidente Donald J. Trumpistadore Aeropuerto", you had better reschedule your flight for Miami, lest some disgruntled family member of an illegal deportee should decide, and quite justly, to hijack the damn thing and take it to Cuba, in which case, you, with your insensitive little red cap, may become an international incident unto yourself. To call this act of hubris, one among thousands in this moron's tenure deliberately designed to anger the opposition, disgraceful is to engage in such rich understatement as to beg categorization as irony. Of course, it is just another of the increasing number of items which confirm that Trumpistadore is actually dead, thus being given memorials by his loyal retinue, replaced by some A1 monstrosity, explaining the daily erratic behavior and utter incompetence when gauged by any normal human behavioral pattern. The "person" in the White House is simply a robot impersonating El Presidente.)

In Raleigh, it was reported that following State Senate action by 24 hours, the State House Constitution Committee had provided a favorable report this date to a rewritten state constitution, and then approved the revised judicial article and reported it out as a separate bill. The judicial article would allow the creation of a uniform system of courts in the state to be administered under the direction of the chief justice of the State Supreme Court. The Committee voted 12 to 3 to retain provisions allowing creation of an intermediate court of appeals, eliminated by the Senate committee the previous day. Members approved amendments clarifying the State attorney general's authority to tell district solicitors how to dispose of criminal cases, and restoring health and sanitation as fields of local General Assembly legislation. Representative George Uzzell of Rowan County, substituting as chairman, had broken a 7 to 7 tie vote to retain language directing that the Legislature "shall" create a courts advisory commission. Representative Ed Yarborough of Franklin County had wanted it to read "may". The Committee had defeated another amendment aimed at making it unconstitutional to raise the salaries of judges during their terms of office. Representative Frank Snepp of Mecklenburg had told members that Benjamin Franklin had warned delegates to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia that they would get no constitution at all if they continued advocating for pet projects outside the convention.

John Kilgo of The News reports that somebody was missing a pony, a black and white muddy one. Police had found the pony the previous day when he walked up to kindergarten classes at the Forest Hill Presbyterian Church in Charlotte. A County police officer had gone out and caught the pony, but had not yet found the owner. The officer asked the people at the church if he could use their fenced-in playground until he could find the pony's home and they had agreed. Now the church people did not know what to do with the pony, as it had eaten up their grass. The pastor of the church said that he did not know what to do with the animal, that he had told their ball team that if they won their game the previous day, he would give the pony to them, but when he left the game, they were getting beaten. He said that the fact that the pony was eating their grass might be a good thing as they would not have to cut it. The minister had brought the pony a bucket of cold water during the morning and a woman was trying to get him to eat a carrot. The pony was not too friendly and the minister said he was afraid it might rear up and kick one of the children. Police wanted to find the owner of the pony and were working hard this date trying to do so. The minister said they thought it would only be there in their yard for a few hours as a churchyard was "not exactly an ideal place for a stray pony." A picture of the pony is included, in case you know its owner.

In Houston, it was reported that a couple had a problem so big that it would take two newspapers, a helicopter pilot and a private plane to solve it. Both husband and wife were San Angelo, Tex., school teachers and had a son graduating from the University of Texas dental school in Houston the following Monday afternoon. That night, their daughter graduated from Texas Technological College, 512 miles from Houston in Lubbock. The parents had given up hope of attending both ceremonies until people started coming to their aid. A San Angelo businessman had offered his private plane for a flight from one ceremony to the other, until a major drawback came up caused by the fact that the family name was Young, causing the graduating son to be one of the last to receive his dental surgery diploma, and by that time, Houston traffic would be too thick to allow the couple to reach the airport by late afternoon when they needed to take off for Lubbock. But then the newspapers got involved as the Houston Post outlined the problem to the president of a Houston helicopter firm who noted that there was a heliport in the Texas Medical Center, less than two miles from the church where the son would receive his diploma. He volunteered a helicopter for the couple. Then the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal offered to furnish a car at the Lubbock airport to whisk the couple to Texas Tech Stadium to attend their daughter's ceremony, to which they could afford to be somewhat late, as again their family name would make her one of the last recipients of her bachelor's degree.

On the editorial page, "Mach-3 Mumbo-Jumbo Hits Charlotte" finds that the brain-teasers of the country's 40 billion dollar per year arsenal had descended on Piedmont North Carolina two weeks earlier when the Army's Nike-Hercules ground-to-air missile, the internal systems of which were manufactured by Western Electric plants in Burlington, Greensboro and Winston-Salem, encased and assembled in Charlotte at Douglas Aircraft, had been caught in a life struggle in Congress with its rival, the Air Force's costlier and as yet non-operational Bomarc.