The Charlotte News
Wednesday, June 17, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that the West had presented its eleventh-hour bid for a temporary agreement to end the Berlin crisis this date, and the Soviets had withheld reaction, with the Big Four foreign ministers agreeing to meet in another secret session the following day. Secretary of State Christian Herter and his Western allies were prepared to bring the conference to a close within a few days unless Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko showed serious interest in the newly proposed plan. A British briefing officer, speaking for the four ministers, said: "All I can say is Gromyko gave no indication of what his final position might be." Mr. Gromyko had limited himself to giving some brief observations on the Western plan, according to the British spokesman. He declined, however, to provide any details of Mr. Gromyko's remarks. He described the atmosphere of the meeting as good. The spokesman added in reply to questions that, as far as he knew, the question of a summit meeting had not been raised.
The President this date at his press conference rejected proposals that he call representatives of the steel companies and their employees to a White House conference aimed at avoiding a possible strike. The President made it clear that he believed that there should be no Government intervention in the collective bargaining process presently underway between the Steel Workers Union and the companies. The President said that he believed that for the Government to become involved in the bargaining process would be more harmful than helpful. But he also said that he wanted to urge again that each side ought keep in mind the stake which the American people had in a reasonable settlement of the wage controversy, indicating that the welfare of 175 million people was a lot more important than the issues directly involved in the dispute. Other issues covered included the Geneva foreign ministers conference, indicating that the talks seemed to have reached an impasse and that there appeared to be no prospects for a summit conference at present, while emphasizing that he still would be willing to go to a summit meeting if any kind of reasonable progress could be made at the foreign ministers conference. Regarding a Navy patrol plane which had been attacked by two MIG jets over the Sea of Japan, he said that the Government still did not know the nationality of the fighters, that the episode was being studied carefully. Regarding the stalled confirmation of acting Secretary of Commerce Lewis Strauss, he said that he was going to use every influence he could to get the Senate to confirm him, despite Democratic accusations that the Administration had been lobbying on behalf of the nominee. Regarding legislation, the President said that he had no specific plans at the current time for carrying the fight for his legislative program directly to the people, as hinted in a statement by RNC chairman, Senator Thruston Morton.
In London, it was reported that U.S. Ambassador John Hay Whitney had met this date with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, as rumors spread over London that a meeting between the British Prime Minister and President Eisenhower was imminent. Official Government sources had declined to disclose the nature of the talk, but insisted that there was no plan for such a meeting at the current time.
In New York, it was reported that former Teamster Union president Dave Beck had been indicted by a Federal grand jury on charges of accepting $200,000 from presidents of two trucking firms. There was no immediate explanation as to the purpose of the alleged action. The two company presidents, prominent in the trucking industry, had also been indicted. They were Roy Fruehauf of Birmingham, Mich., president of the Fruehauf Trailer Co. of Detroit, and Burge Seymour, of Litchfield County, Conn., president of Associated Transport, Inc., of New York. The executives were alleged to have passed the money to Mr. Beck on June 21, 1954. The indictment did not specify the reason and U.S. Attorney S. Hazard Gillespie had declined to elaborate. The companies also were named as defendants, along with the Brown Equipment and Manufacturing Co., a subsidiary of Associated Transport. The defendants were scheduled to enter pleas to the charges on June 24. If convicted, the individual defendants could receive a maximum sentence of a year in prison and a $10,000 fine each, with each of the companies subject to the fines.
In Galveston, Tex., Mrs. Earl Long had arrived in a Louisiana Air National Guard plane during the late morning this date to bring Louisiana Governor Earl Long back home. Mrs. Long had been accompanied by three doctors and the Governor's executive secretary. She told newsmen, "As soon as we can get things ready, we're going to leave." The Governor shouted to newsmen from his second floor room in the psychiatric clinic of the hospital earlier this date that the group would leave for a hospital in New Orleans at noon. The Governor, 63, with his battle to win freedom from the Texas mental clinic apparently over, had spent a good portion of the night looking out his window, smoking and chatting with hospital attendants. He was expected to leave Galveston by plane before noon this date. To win his release, his family would have to withdraw its commitment petition placed before the probate court. The light in the Governor's second-story room had been the only one on during most of the night, and early in the morning, he had waved to newsmen who had maintained an all-night vigil outside the hospital because of reports that the Governor might leave during the night. He said that he would consent to treatment in Louisiana if released and his agreement apparently had started the move to have him released.
In Kanab, Ut., it was reported that a 15-year old Boy Scout apparently had fallen from a dirt bluff into the Colorado River and drowned, according to officials this date. The sheriff had called off the land search for the boy, from a Salt Lake City suburb. He had failed to return on Monday from an excursion down the river. The sheriff had planned to dredge the river below a point where search parties had found a dirt trail caved in, indicating that the youth apparently had fallen from the trail, hit two ledges and then tumbled into the river.
In Paterson, N.J., a 51-year old steeplejack had been atop a smokestack dismantling it the previous day when he apparently had cut his supporting rope by accident with an acetylene torch and fallen 50 feet to his death.
In Middleboro, Mass., two brothers, the object of the largest manhunt in the state's history, had been captured this date in woods about a half-mile from where they had held up a liquor store on Monday. Shortly afterward, at a hospital, the younger of the two brothers, 22, had died of wounds inflicted by the police. His brother, 24, was not wounded. The brothers had fled Philadelphia after allegedly killing a police officer. They had kidnaped a hostage, 49, and driven to Massachusetts in his car. The hostage had escaped when the gunmen had fled into the woods as they were surprised by police after the liquor store holdup. Troopers had gunned down the younger of the two brothers. The older of the two was stripped of his clothing, wrapped in a trooper's raincoat and hustled to police barracks. Both brothers had been heavily armed. A posse of up to 400 men, State troopers, conservation officers, FBI agents and area police had beaten through the woods since Monday morning in search of the two. At mid-morning this date, State police received a call from a man of Union City, N.J., who had been visiting his mother-in-law, who lived just up the road from the liquor store. In seconds, a State police car with two troopers in it had stopped suddenly at the mother-in-law's home. One of the State troopers who had shot down the younger of the two brothers said that they had walked into the woods there and had seen the two crouching down in a thicket about 25 feet away. Another trooper, right beside him, had yelled that they had fired a shot or two at the officers and so they had fired back. The younger of the two was shot in the head.
In Raleigh, it was reported that supporters had killed their crippled court reform program this date in the Legislature after it was beset with damaging amendments during a lengthy State House debate on Tuesday. The vice-chairman of the House Constitutional Amendments Committee had said that he did not feel they had wasted their efforts, but added that after a full day of debate the previous day, he had come to the definite conclusion that there might be some danger in perhaps hasty consideration of any amendments which might be offered to the people. He thus moved to postpone indefinitely a rewritten state constitution bill, embracing court reforms, with the remote hope that it could be considered at a special session of the General Assembly, or again at the regular session in 1961. The motion had carried on a voice vote with just a scattering of nay votes. The House had given the same treatment to two other bills which carried constitutional revisions and court changes separately. State Senator J. Spencer Bell of Mecklenburg County, who had led the fruitless fight for court reform, had no immediate comment. He had conferred with Governor Luther Hodges immediately after the House action had been taken and indicated that he would make a statement when the Senate convened. Several of the House members had voiced the hope that they would be called back into special session later to work out something on the court reform issue. The bill had been based heavily on recommendations of a State Bar Association committee and the Constitutional Study Commission. Mr. Bell had headed the bar group which had worked for four years on court reform.
Emery Wister of The News reports that Charlotte could get a third television station under a new directive just issued by the Federal Communications Commission. A recent issue of Broadcasting Magazine said that the FCC had ordered its staff to prepare a plan to add a television station to the 21 largest markets having less than three stations, and Charlotte was one of those 21 markets. The FCC had made no official announcement of the plan which would add stations in those markets, but it was understood that the Commission had taken its action after deciding to continue its expansion of the VHF channels instead of the UHF channels. Both WBTV and WSOC-TV in Charlotte operated on VHF. The new station would be a low-powered station so that it would not interfere with stations in other communities having similar or near-similar frequencies. Under the present system, television channels had to be separated by at least 170 miles. Thus, the FCC would not permit another channel 3 or 9, the station designations in Charlotte, to be within 170 miles of Charlotte, but under the low-powered station plan, the mileage could be reduced to 140 miles. In addition, the new station would have at least a two-channel separation from the present channels 3 and 9. Available channels would be between 2 and 13, which would mean that Charlotte could be assigned 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12 or 13—or just hike. The new station might be several years away. The FCC staff would make its recommendation decision and channel allocations would then be made by the full Commission. Persons or firms interested in operating a station would be permitted to apply, and as it was likely that there would be several applicants, a hearing to determine which ones would be provided the channel might become necessary. The Raleigh-Durham area, which also had two channels, would also obtain a new station under the plan. Other cities impacted were Birmingham, Ala., Bakersfield and Fresno, Calif., Baton Rouge and Shreveport, La., Louisville, Ky., Grand Rapids, Mich., Binghamton, Rochester and Syracuse, N.Y., Dayton and Toledo, O., Johnstown, Pa., Providence, R.I., Wheeling, W. Va., and Knoxville, Tenn.
Jerry Reece of The News reports that if a person were taking a boat to the river, even if one were not going to fish, the person might need a license. A group of boaters at the Catawba River during the previous weekend had found that out the hard way. They were provided citations by officers of the Wildlife Resources Commission for not having a boat launching license. Many claimed that they had never heard of that requirement, but they received the citations anyway. The head of the Commission in Raleigh had told the newspaper this date that the reasons for the law requiring the licenses were that certain boat launching areas were built for the convenience of fishermen and hunters at considerable expense, and those areas were built with funds coming from hunting and fishing license fees, that pleasure boaters who were neither hunting nor fishing had begun to use them in some instances, taking them over. Thus the law had to require a boat launching license for all persons who used one of the state's boat launching areas.
Jack Adams of the Associated Press tells of an escaped German from a prisoner-of-war camp in the U.S. having voluntarily surrendered recently to the FBI, prompting questions of how many others were at large and what could happen to them if caught. Out of the total 2,803 men who had escaped from prisoner-of-war camps in the country during World War II, only two one-time German soldiers were still missing. Until recently, there had been three, but on May 10, one, presently 52-years old, once an officer in the Panzer division of Hitler's North Afrika Korps, had walked voluntarily into the FBI field office in Cincinnati and said he wanted to give himself up. An accomplished linguist, he had escaped from a North Carolina camp in 1945, had adopted an assumed name, obtained a Social Security card and had made a fairly comfortable life for himself for 14 years in the Chicago area, working as a punch-press operator, elevator man, bartender and waiter. Once, about five years earlier, a national magazine had run his picture and a fellow-worker in the hotel where he had been employed thought it looked like him. But his boss had laughed off the idea and nothing came of the incident, except that the man shortly afterward had changed jobs and associates. At an Immigration Service hearing in Cincinnati on June 4, he was ruled deportable. He had, however, requested and obtained permission to leave the country voluntarily so that he might reenter as a regular immigrant and apply for American citizenship. With his surrender, the only two remaining such escapees were one man, presently 38, and another, 37. Pictures of both men still appeared on conventional FBI "wanted" fliers on the walls of some Federal buildings, but no active search was being conducted for them. Thus far, they had broken no laws in the country, as far as anyone knew, and could not be prosecuted for escaping their camps in 1945, forbidden by the Geneva Convention on the conduct of wars among civilized nations. If caught, the Immigration Service probably would institute deportation proceedings, but in the case of one of the two men, his "stateless person" problem would arise, as he had been born in Silesia, which had been absorbed into Poland and subsequently had come under Soviet domination. Before he had escaped the prisoner-of-war camp at Deming Army airbase in New Mexico on September 21, 1945, he had told fellow prisoners that he had no intention of returning home. He had been captured in Tunisia in 1943 at the age of 24. He had rolled under the Deming stockade fence under cover of darkness and gone off into the night to find a new life in America. He traveled light, taking with him only an extra pair of khaki pants, a pair of German Army shoes and a handful of toiletries. He was just under 6 feet tall and then had weighed 170 pounds, had brown hair, blue eyes, fair complexion and was a master of both German and English. He had been praised as an expert draftsman by the post engineer's office at Deming. If you see anyone matching that description, even if they speak fluent English, be sure and contact the FBI. Send the little Nazi to hell where he belongs. He may work at Fox Prop.
In New York, it was reported that
conductor Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic would
appear on September 26 on a television broadcast which would be
beamed to 12 countries. A concert at the Venice Festival would be
carried on "Eurovision", a European network during the
orchestra's overseas tour. A presentation, to be subsequently televised on October 25, would occur on September 10
In Santa Monica, Calif., it was
reported that singer Peggy Lee
Incidentally, some additional information was published this date in the only article on the subject appearing in the Los Angeles Times, albeit inside page only, regarding the shooting death of actor George Reeves, declared to be a suicide. (It was front page news in The News the same day of its occurrence but second page news in the local newspaper in Los Angeles only on the day after.) The mother of Mr. Reeves would subsequently hire celebrity attorney Jerry Geisler to investigate the matter, as she did not accept the suicide ruling, but Mr. Geisler would eventually conclude that there was nothing to dispute the determination. She should have hired Bailey & Spencer, though they were on vacation for the summer and so were not available. Well, what do you think happened? It is conceivable that, given the times, before the Kennedy assassination, after which the country became far more sensitive to the whiff of a cover-up and far more skeptical of straightforward conclusions to highly publicized investigations, there was a kind of gentlemen's agreement reached between the persons at the house and the police and prosecutors to avoid embarrassment to the actor's memory, to cover the possibility that he had become unruly and perhaps waved around the gun, which he had only recently purchased, to get the late-night guests of his fiancee to leave, and, in an attempt to take it from him, it had accidentally discharged, killing him. That is pure speculation, of course. Any suggestion, however, of murder falls flat, given the statements made by the fiancee, which beg credulity. Had murder been committed, the explanation would have simply been that they suddenly heard a gunshot from upstairs and saw Mr. Reeves dead. There would have been no such elaborate embellishment with predictive statements from his fiancee. It should also be added that the actor had suffered a concussion in an automobile accident in April, perhaps contributing to his state of mind at the time.
The case, it should be noted, bears a striking resemblance to the death of young Smith Reynolds at the tobacco scion's family estate, Reynolda House
On the editorial page, "The Pudding's Proof Is in the Tasting" indicates that the City Council's "Big Four" new members had been dissolved as a political partnership apparently, but the proof would be in the pudding tasting. It finds that it seemed appropriate that Council member Gibson Smith would be the first member of the new "Better Government" group to rebel publicly against that label, as he was an individualist and was known for his sturdy principles and deeply held personal convictions. He was the least likely to be a "rubber stamp" which it had encountered in municipal government.
Under those circumstances, it would hardly be reasonable to suppose that he would be found trotting meekly in harness with any real or imagined voting bloc. Personal independence and the free exercise thereof were desirable in any political arena and Charlotte had wisely shunned the party system of municipal government, thus freeing the Council members from any ideological ties or peculiar loyalties. "Tickets" were often formed during local elections, but they had little or no durability. It was the application of individual intelligence which counted. A Council member was responsible to his own conscience and to the citizenry at large and would not be identified as a part of a bloc or faction unless the member voted that way consistently.
Thus far, Charlotte residents had been treated to only one important example of factionalism, occurring during the search for a new chief of police. It finds the meeting of the minds among the Big Four on that issue to have hardly been coincidental, but that there would be hundreds of other tests and on the basis of those tests, the records of the seven individual members of the Council would be made.
"Adenauer Shows Traces of Bismarck" indicates that looking back over the decision of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer not to quit his post, as he had previously announced he would the prior April, he had explained to an interviewer that he made the change in decision in the name of Western "unity". He wanted to know that his work would be carried on—as had been more fully explored by Walter Lippmann the prior Thursday.
It indicates that the West owed much to the old man from Cologne who had established new faith and credit for Germany in the postwar era. Yet its confidence in his bold statecraft ought not distort the estimate of what he had done in the name of "unity", nor cause it to ignore the effect on relatively fresh German democracy. It had been his design to preserve his grip on West Germany even beyond the next election, where his age would be an issue, by raising himself suddenly to the presidency of the Bundestag, usually a ceremonial position, and putting a virtual puppet in the chancellery. But he had quickly found that his economics minister, Dr. Ludwig Erhard, had great confidence in the Christian Democratic Party and that he was considered his heir-apparent by so many that he could not be brushed aside for Dr. Adenauer's own personal choice, Franz Etzel, a firm supporter of the Adenauer policies, without an embarrassing and divisive party feud.
No one outside Bonn would probably be equipped to say why there had been bad blood between Dr. Erhard and Dr. Adenauer. Some said there was a personal rivalry while others said the differences came from discord over the larger terms of the East-West struggle. The Chancellor was almost as bluntly anti-Soviet as the late Secretary of State Dulles, and insisted that Germany had to be reunited in "free elections". Dr. Erhard was said to believe that the hard approach to German unity might prove less effective than the approach by way of trade, cultural intermingling and travel.
It finds that there was no way of getting around the fact that Chancellor Adenauer, however vigorous his belief was in democracy, had betrayed a tint of the Teutonic strongman, a trace of the same vanity which had led Bismarck in his time to equate himself with Germany and to revile his parliamentary opposition as "enemies of the Reich".
"Yes, Isabel, There Is a Bear out There" indicates that it had been accosted by a little girl name Isabel who wanted to know whether a bear was really roaming Mecklenburg County, as indicated in the newspaper of the previous day, as all of her friends had read the Christian Science Monitor and did not believe in bears.
It responds that her little friends were wrong, that they had been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age and did not believe anything except that which they saw, that yes, there was a bear out there.
"Gracious! Didn't Vicki the elephant roam this same terrain only a few short years ago? Didn't big-game hunters come from all over to join safaris venturing far across the Douglas Municipal Airport runways? Hasn't the Beast of Bladenboro been rumored in the neighborhood for months? Don't you even believe in the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence?"
It indicates that of course there were bears in Mecklenburg and perhaps giraffes also, not to mention heffalumps, slithy toves and registered Republicans.
"Not believe in bears? You might as well not believe in the House Un-American Activities Committee.
"Of course, he exists. Folks have heard him growling, haven't they? It wouldn't surprise us one bit if he waltzed right in and growled a little at the next City Council meeting.
"He'd certainly feel right at home."
"Hatched in Hate, Dissolved in Laughter" indicates that the South's sense of humor was still intact, as exampled by the "great crusade" of certain white supremacists against "The Three Little Pigs" and other childhood classics. The campaign had been hatched in hate, but had been quickly dissolved in laughter.
Credit for it belonged to Representative Jim Wright of Texas, who had been regaling his countrymen with the story of a mythical move to require grocers to place the white bread and the brown bread on separate shelves. When asked what possible significance there could be in the integration of loaves of bread, he had fixed his questioner with his baleful eye and asked: "Do you want your daughter to marry a heel?"
Ernest Rogers, writing in the Atlanta Journal, in a piece titled "Carmen, Filtered", indicates that anyone who did not know the story of "Carmen" had not been paying attention, as it had been knocking around opera houses since making its first appearance, a flop, in Paris, circa 1875. Georges Bizet, composer of the music, had died soon after the opera's debut without any idea of the success it would achieve eventually.
The story, it suggests, opened just outside a cigarette factory in Seville where the boys and girls were arguing about the effectiveness of filter tips and whether there was any connection between smoking cigarettes and diseases of the lungs. "It's what's up front that counts," declared a flashy gypsy dame named Carmen, as she shot a meaningful glance at Don José, a young soldier who had just made corporal. The latter had gotten the message and returned it P.D.Q.
When Carmen asked him how he liked being a soldier, he said he was not really a soldier, that it was just a hobby with him, that actually he was a tenor who appeared periodically in an opera called "Carmen". Carmen then said: "I see. You're a man who thinks for himself while smoking filter tip cigarettes. Do you think everyone should sing tenor in an opera called 'Carmen'?" He said in response that he thought everyone should make up his own mind.
Carmen was greatly impressed by the man and it set in motion one of the most torrid love affairs in the history of grand opera. So smitten was Corporal José with the gypsy that he completely forgot a young lady named Micaela with whom he had previously been in love, and had gone off into the mountains with his new inamorata. But Carmen was as fickle as a Las Vegas roulette wheel and soon got a crush on Escamillo, a bullfighter. She was fascinated by the way the latter fought the bull, and furthermore, he smoked Toreador regulars, a he-man's smoke. Don José, however, did not give up easily and told Carmen that if she would only resume her affair with him, he would give up filters and smoke a pipe, cigars or even rabbit tobacco if she would only give her bullfighter up.
To all of his pleas, Carmen had turned a deaf ear and was waiting outside the bullring to get the results of her bullfighter's latest fandango with a he-cow, when the corporal, now AWOL, showed up with dagger in hand and plunged the blade into the proud beauty who confronted him. As Escamillo emerged triumphantly from the bullring, he saw Carmen lying there dead and Don Jose trying to rub the tattoo from the back of his right hand.
"LSMFT", Escamillo cried, explaining to a questioning Don José, "Yeah, Let's Smoke More Filter Tips."
"The curtain comes down on an opera called 'Asbestos.'"
Drew Pearson indicates that 33 top Republicans in the House were hoping to maintain a secret, but they had worked out such a hard and fast deal with Southern Democrats that one would think they belonged to the same party. They had organized whips and assistant whips to work together on at least six major economic and social measures, regardless of whether the President favored them. Several Dixiecrat-Republican coalitions had operated in the past, but never with as much ironclad discipline as the one presently organized. The 33 Republicans had even agreed to meet regularly with 33 Democrats on major measures before the House. At those meetings, the tentative strategy would be worked out, a nose count made of the prospective votes, and whips instructed to whip each side into line.
Significantly, the leader of the coalition was the President's own leader in the House, Charles Halleck of Indiana. The Democratic leader was Congressman Howard Smith of northern Virginia. Significantly also, Mr. Halleck, though the President's leader, was vigorously opposing the President by pushing the Supreme Court override bill, introduced by Congressman Smith, drastically to curtail the power and jurisdiction of the Court. The President had taken a stand against it, but Mr. Halleck, whom the President had helped elect to be Minority Leader over Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, was working the other way.
Other bills which the coalition had secretly decided to block included Federal aid to education, the Kennedy-Ervin anti-racketeering and labor reform bill, the Flood-Douglas factory loan bill to aid areas suffering from acute unemployment, the community facilities bill for aid in supplying sewage and sanitation, and the new housing bill.
On the other hand, the coalition had just added $500,000 to the President's budget for the control of water lilies and vegetation which clogged Southern rivers. The $500,000 had been denied by the House Appropriations Committee for economic reasons, but Mr. Halleck, despite his public lectures about spending, had privately decided to add that amount to the budget. He sent word secretly to Representative Otto Passman of Louisiana that he was making the $500,000 concession for Southern river control as a gesture to the new alliance.
Doris Fleeson indicates that the Joint Senate-House Committee on Atomic Energy was about to give the citizens a preview of a nuclear attack on the country, gruesome reading for the public. Its principal purpose was to suggest that the doctrine of massive resistance was outdated, although the hearings might prove more than that.
A subcommittee, chaired by Representative Chet Holifield of California, would begin hearings on June 22, to be liberally provided with maps showing likely Soviet bomb drops, the size of the bombs required by the size of the target. The dispatch of Washington would, for instance, require one large bomb and another medium-sized one. It would take, according to calculations, three large hydrogen bombs to demolish Los Angeles. Nearly every reporter in Washington would be able to provide a story about the hearing with a local angle. According to U.S. experts, it would take about 224 bombs of assorted sizes to destroy the country. By contrast, Premier Nikita Khrushchev had recently been quoted to the effect that Western Europe could be put out of commission with 18 hydrogen bombs, all apparently large ones.
What the subcommittee would be attempting to drive home was the fact that with bombs of present size and the means of delivering them rapidly being perfected, the odds were on the side of an attacking power. It believed that under all circumstances, if the country waited to be hit before it would retaliate, it would be able to deliver only about 20 percent as much damage to the aggressor as the aggressor had inflicted on the country.
Military potentialities had changed considerably since the late Secretary of State Dulles had enunciated the doctrine of massive retaliation. The balance of military power had shifted in the direction of the Soviets. Of late, both the President and Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy had been delicately suggesting an emendation to the doctrine, that being that if the U.S. saw an aggressive move from afar, it would immediately launch one as well. Whether under all the circumstances, the U.S. could see a strike coming had not been discussed in public.
The hearings by the subcommittee would go into such things as blast and fire damage to be anticipated from an attack with nuclear weapons, and would also demonstrate the dangers from radiation as a result of such an attack. The hearings would rely on the wind patterns of a typical day the previous fall to show the direction of radiation and fallout pattern. A fall day had been chosen because it was assumed that the enemy would have taken the precaution to harvest and store its crops in radiation-proof storage before beginning a deadly attack.
Two things appeared likely to result from the hearings, one being that the attack simulated by the committee would probably be far more modest than an actual one, and the other being that the hearings might persuade many people that there had to be no nuclear wars.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, says that he was aware that he was prone to be hostile to haute-style, but the most beautiful lady he knew, Ava Gardner, had come calling to his house not long earlier and she had not been as lovely as she had once been. "Either she didn't have on any lipstick at all, or she had on one of those shades that the Italians have made so fashionable."
He indicates that Ms. Gardner needed much less help than most women to appear beautiful and since she and his wife and he were old chums, maybe she had figured that she had no need to be so glamorous and put on a face when she came calling in her slacks. He had a sneaky hunch, however, that it was not that, that instead she was wearing a shade of nothing but white salve on her lips, which all the European film stars had inflicted on the public.
He says he was ruthlessly against white lipstick, pale-pink lipstick, orange lipstick, lemon lipstick or any other, if the lipstick was not red. When he had gotten caught coming home with evidence on his collar, he did not want to be hung for no lamb, but wanted it red and lots of it, and if the handkerchief people got rich off of him, he did not mind.
His wife had lunch recently with the top editor of Harpers Bazaar in New York and had asked her what was the matter, whether she had cold sores or something, to which the editor had responded, "No, it's the chic new lipstick the European film queens have turned into high style." His wife said that she felt terrible because she had red lips, but she also said that she felt healthier.
A pretty girl whom he knew from Denver had turned up in Africa to go on safari with them sometime earlier and she was the fashion editor of one of the newspapers for which he worked. She had one of the new lipsticks on her, except hers was reversible, being able to lighten up the pink with white, or something like that. His head man on the safari, a Swahili gentleman name Juma, had asked him the same thing he always asked in the morning when they had been up too late. He was a Moslem teetotaler who disapproved and when he saw the woman in question, he said: "Wassamatter Memsaah, she seeck?" He had explained as best he could in his Swahili that the woman was not sick but was just carrying out the dictates of high style. Juma had muttered something about not caring that she did not have a ring in her nose, but thought that girls with lips ought to have red lips. For otherwise no one would buy them because the natural assumption was that they were not well, and would be unable to work. He indicates that having been accustomed to Juma's logic for a decade, he wormed out of it by saying that the woman was rich and already had a husband. Juma still could not understand what manner of man would buy a wife with white lips.
He indicates that because his wife, born in Tennessee, raised in Washington, and who had lived a great many years in various capitals of the world, and Juma, half Congolese Arab and half Kikuyu, both had come to the same conclusion about lipstick, they could not be wrong.
"Personally I would not buy Brigitte Bardot or this Juliette Greco on a bet, because their hair is all rumpled and they got white lips and sort of green streaks around their eyes. They look like something that have been slung out of a Second Avenue bar for the sin of not being neat. I wouldn't give 50 goats for either one of them, let alone some blankets and a fat ram or so." He does not believe that women who wore atrociously pale makeup and rag-mop hairdos looked young, as apparently they thought. "It just makes them look un-neat, rather dirty, and very, very anemic. That Greco dame looks like something you'd find in a gypsy cave in the low-rental area of Andalusia."
He finds that one lipstick firm had 12 shades of lipstick to sell in a four-color, double-truck, slick-paper advertisement, and that none of the shades were red. "If I'm going to get clobbered for accidentally (how else) getting it on my collar, I want it to be red, not orange float or toffee sherbet or coral vanilla."
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., finds that lately there had been a lot of controversy as to whether Senator John F. Kennedy's religion would be a factor in the 1960 presidential race, that on the one side there were those who contended that his election would mean Vatican rule in the country while on the other, there were optimists who believed that he could win the votes of Catholics who might otherwise vote for a Republican. He indicates that being an atheist and completely immune to religious brain-stuffing, he took no sides in the argument but nevertheless believed that he had a solution to the problem, to nominate an atheist. Since an atheist had no religious affiliations, neither Protestants nor Catholics could be offended. The country would be more or less neutral as far as religion was concerned and there would be no objection from the Pope. He finds that it would be difficult to find someone with the intestinal fortitude to admit publicly that they were an atheist. He says that he would be a fine candidate since he was young, energetic, good-looking and played the guitar. He was also unmarried, which meant he could get along on considerably less than $125,000 per year, thereby saving the taxpayers. He did not care for Cadillacs or helicopters, indicates that an old Ford or a Piper Cub would do, and would rather watch television than golf. He concludes by saying that he would promise two pots in every car and each garage full of chickens, that he smoked, drank, cussed and engaged in bloody street brawls, which meant that he was a normal red-white-and-blue-blooded American boy. He indicates that he knew nothing about politics, but that it should not matter since knowledge of politics had ceased to be a requirement circa 1952.
A letter writer says that he had been concerned about city politics for some time, that up until the present, he felt he should go along with the choices made for city officials, but recently, the new police chief and the new city manager had made him think. He believed that the outgoing chief, who had only been on the job for a few months, had been doing a good job. He wonders why the new City Manager had to come from Florida rather than someone from Charlotte or at least within the state. He believes that it suggested that there were no men or women in Charlotte capable of handling the jobs of running the city.
Framed Edition
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