The Charlotte News

Thursday, June 25, 1959

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Montréal that the President, who shunned the presidential yacht, would board Queen Elizabeth's plush Britannia on Friday and cruise with her along 31 miles of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the meeting to open formally the Seaway, the joint U.S.-Canadian project which could bring three-fourths of the world's ships to the heartland of America. A cruise aboard the 6 million dollar royal yacht would take them to Beauharnois, Québec, from the Seaway entrance at St. Lambert and they would then go through the first two in a series of locks, the liquid stairways which lifted shipping 224 feet from the St. Lawrence River into Lake Ontario. Seaway authorities were still ironing out kinks, but two months of operation had proved the system worked. More than 1,500 ships had used the waterway since its opening on April 25. On Friday, in less than 12 hours, the President would fly, walk, motor and sail about 1,000 miles. Flying from Washington, he would land in his plane, Columbine III, at the St. Hubert Air Base, 8 miles east of Montréal, a unit of the North American Air Defense network which maintained contact 24 hours each day with NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo. About 17,000 persons, some of whom were Americans, worked at St. Hubert. The Queen would meet the President at that location. Even during the royal greetings, groups of pilots would be in the ready-room, set to take off in CF-100 jet interceptors should the Northern radar stations signal an attack.

In Lincoln, Neb., it was reported that convicted murderer Charles Starkweather had been electrocuted this date, facing the electric chair "calm and self-controlled to the end". An ironic hitch had marked the execution when the prison physician, who was to have pronounced Mr. Starkweather dead, had suffered a heart attack and himself died. The 75-year old physician had been stricken only a half-hour before the midnight execution and alternates had carried out the act. The execution had taken place at 12:05 a.m., CST, in the white-painted basement execution chamber at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. The 20-year old convicted killer had no last words. At a minute past midnight, he had walked unassisted into the chamber, glanced at some 35 assembled witnesses, managed a kind of smile and ambled up to the bulky, wooden execution chair. His head had been shaved of its red hair and a trouser leg had been cut off to accommodate the electrical contacts. A curtain had been drawn in front of the witnesses as the condemned was strapped to the chair. The curtain opened and a half-mask covered Mr. Starkweather's face. The deputy warden had asked him whether he had anything he would like to say and he shook his head negatively. An eye mask was then affixed over his eyes and the executioner, out of sight behind a partition, received the signal and 2,200 volts had coursed through Mr. Starkweather's body, which strained against the bonds of the chair. The execution followed a day of frantic effort by Mr. Starkweather's family and Washington attorneys on his behalf to seek another stay of the execution, five previous dates having come and gone because of court stays. With all hope gone, Mr. Starkweather's mother and other family members had made a final call on the condemned, and then left by a side gate to escape some 25 newsmen and photographers milling about the main entrance. Guy Starkweather, the father, who had handled the last-ditch efforts on behalf of his son to obtain stays through habeas corpus petitions all the way to the Supreme Court, had said he was "busy with work" and did not go to the prison, not explaining what he meant. The petitions, exhausted, when the Supreme Court on Monday had declined to hear a petition for writ of certiorari, had claimed that his trial had been unfair on the basis of certain admitted evidence and primarily ineffective assistance of counsel under the Sixth Amendment because his two court-appointed attorneys had entered a plea on his behalf, against his will, of not guilty by reason of insanity, presenting the testimony of psychiatrists and presenting his various confessions to the 11 murders. The courts had found that the choice by the attorneys was tactical and strategic in nature and thus did not amount to ineffective assistance. The 11 murders to which he confessed had begun with the killing of a young service station attendant, a student at the University of Nebraska, on December 1, 1957, because the attendant would not extend credit to Mr. Starkweather so that he could purchase a stuffed animal for his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. The remainder of the murders had occurred in late January, 1958, starting with the stepfather, mother and baby half-sister of Ms. Fugate, then 14, and then continuing to a farm outside Lincoln, where Mr. Starkweather knew the elderly farmer, killing him and then consuming his food and staying overnight at the farmhouse. After Mr. Starkweather's old Ford had gotten stuck in mud, the two began hitchhiking and 17-year old Robert Jensen and his 16-year old girlfriend, Carol King, happened along and stopped to pick them up as a friendly gesture. Both wound up being held at gunpoint and forced into an abandoned storm cellar, where Mr. Starkweather then shot both to death, with Ms. Fugate allegedly aiding and abetting the murders by maintaining a shotgun on the two as they rode along. In a separate trial, delayed because of appeals through the courts seeking to get her tried as a juvenile rather than as an adult, as sought by the prosecution, she had been convicted of Mr. Jensen's murder also, as had been Mr. Starkweather, and was sentenced to life imprisonment, the prosecution not having sought the death penalty in her case. Mr. Starkweather, because of the sentence of death, was never prosecuted on any of the other murders, though, to bolster his insanity defense, his attorneys had introduced his various and sometimes inconsistent confessions to all 11 killings. He had, at times, sought to exonerate Ms. Fugate, while at other times implicating her, for instance, contending that she had fatally stabbed the wife of a well-to-do businessman in Lincoln, whose house the two had taken over on the day following the three murders outside of Lincoln, those of the farmer and the young couple. All three members of that household, the husband, the wife, and their deaf maid, were found murdered. The last victim had been in Wyoming, a traveling salesman who was asleep in his car when Mr. Starkweather and his girlfriend had driven up in the stolen Packard from the well-to-do family, and Mr. Starkweather then killed the salesman in an effort to steal his car. As Mr. Starkweather tried to get the emergency brake released on the salesman's car, another good samaritan stopped alongside the road and offered help, at which point Mr. Starkweather told him that if he did not help him release the emergency brake, he would "blow his goddamned head off", whereupon the man, seeing the sawed-off shotgun in the car being wielded by Mr. Starkweather, began wrestling to get the gun away from him, was able to do so and avoid injury. At that point, Ms. Fugate surrendered to an arriving patrolman, as Mr. Starkweather took off in the Packard, eventually caught after a chase at high speeds over several miles. He had finally surrendered when a bullet from the pursuing officers had punctured the rear window of the car, causing flying glass to lacerate his right earlobe, the resulting blood flow causing him to believe that he was seriously wounded. Before the execution, according to the deputy warden, Mr. Starkweather had spurned a final steak dinner and settled instead for some cold cuts. He had done some painting, some reading and had visited with the prison chaplain as the end had neared. Ms. Fugate would eventually be paroled in 1976 after serving 18 years in prison, and is still alive. She has consistently maintained that she never participated in the killings in late January and was not a willing participant in the rampage of "Chuck", but had been coerced by him to accompany him, that he had hidden behind the door to her home after, unknown to her at the time, killing her step-father, mother and baby sister and hiding their bodies in a shed in the backyard while she was at school, and had accosted her and told her when she arrived home that some unidentified third party had taken her family members and would kill them unless she did whatever he told her. She claimed that until she was told after her surrender and arrest in Wyoming that her three family members were dead, she still believed that he had been telling her the truth and so followed his directions and never sought to escape despite numerous opportunities to do so, on fear that her family members would be killed. Prosecutors found her story flawed on the basis, in part, of the widespread publicity attracted to the homicides and the headlines on the front page of the Lincoln Star which told of the bodies of her family members being found, at a time when the two had returned to Lincoln and spent the night in the car before entering the home of the well-to-do couple, where they had watched television for a time.

In Newark, N.Y., it was reported that a nine-month old boy had been found dead at the base of a lamp, apparently having touched an exposed electrical cord and been electrocuted, according to the coroner the previous day.

In Duluth, Minn., it was reported that a semi-trailer grain truck had gone out of control down a hill without brakes and hit a car and smashed into two homes on Wednesday night, with three persons having been killed and four others injured. The impact had caused the truck's heavy load of grain to pass through the wall of the first house and into another, around the corner. Two of the seriously injured had been a couple watching television in their living room when the truck smashed into the front of their home and the other two had been a couple injured in the other home when an oil drum from the truck had entered the home and rolled into the couple.

In Spoleto, Italy, it was reported that Louis Armstrong, one of the top ranking jazz men for his trumpet playing, lay gravely ill in a coma the previous night. Italian doctors said that the musician had suffered heart disturbances which seriously complicated an attack of pneumonia, from which he had become ill on Tuesday. His American physician, who had accompanied him to the central Italian town for a musical festival, insisted, almost tearfully: "He never had any kind of heart attack. He just blew himself out, that's all. Any musician who blows on a wind instrument for years suffers some weakening of the heart. That's inevitable." "Satchmo", as he was affectionately called, had been making music on his horn since the birth of jazz. In dramatic evidence of his rise from the old Tin Pan Alley days of New Orleans music, he lay ill in a town dedicated to Italian classic opera. Mr. Armstrong would fully recover.

In Mexico City, it was reported that recovery of the last three missing buses, the property of Carolina Scenic Trailways of Spartanburg, S.C., was expected soon according to the U.S. Embassy. The Embassy declared on Wednesday that two of the buses already had been recovered and they were certain to recover the third bus shortly. The location of the third bus had not been revealed to facilitate its recovery, according to officials. The president of Carolina Scenic Trailways had sent the three buses to Laredo, Tex., for sale to Mexican interests. The potential buyer had made a $4,200 down payment and promised the $91,990 balance after testing the air-conditioning of the buses. He said that the buyer had driven the buses into Mexico on May 24 and had not returned. He had appealed to Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had notified the State Department and Ambassador Robert Hill. The Embassy said that return of all of the buses would be demanded under the stolen car convention between the U.S. and Mexico. It revealed that one of the buses had been found in Ciudad Miguel Aleman in the state of Veracruz. The district attorney in Laredo said during the morning that the grand jury had taken no action on presentments to the grand jury in connection with the case and said that he could make no comment on Jack Love of Charlotte in connection with the matter. One of the bus company's attorneys said that he could make no comment about Mr. Love in connection with the missing buses, indicating that Mr. Love had not been acting for them in any capacity and was not their agent "in any sense of the word".

Ann Sawyer of The News, in the fourth in a series of articles on consolidation of the City and County School Systems, indicates that many people and organizations viewed it as the salvation for the community's schools. Among those on record as favoring consolidation of the two systems were the City and County School Boards, the superintendents of both systems, the Chamber of Commerce, the 32 white PTA's in the County system, the League of Women Voters, and the executive committee of the Charlotte PTA Council. The League of Women Voters for years had taken the position that schools ought be consolidated and when the consolidation discussion had resumed two years earlier, the League had issued a statement reaffirming that position. One of the League's leaders was Mrs. Oliver Rowe, wife of the man later to take the lead in working for consolidation. In a statement prepared by Mrs. Rowe, Mrs. Elmer Rouzer and Mrs. Paul Hansell, the League in March, 1957 had said it "wholeheartedly" supported the issue, that it would be worth the effort involved, the small personal dissatisfactions entailed, and the initial cost to the community's purses, to be able to feel that in Mecklenburg County as a whole, each student had obtained that ideal toward which they all had been striving, equal opportunity for children of the whole area. The Chamber of Commerce committee had followed suit in April, 1957, and had a report ready the following January 13. At a meeting of Chamber members, school boards, City and County PTA groups and the League, the report officially had been presented and was approved by the Chamber's executive committee. The report said that action ought begin immediately toward possible consolidation by the beginning of the 1959-60 school year. At that meeting, some City School Board members had approved, but most County School Board members had taken a dim view of consolidation anytime soon. Members of the study committee are listed. A few days after the meeting, the City superintendent, Dr. E. H. Garinger, had read a letter to the City Board from Chamber president Thomas L. Robinson, then-publisher of The News, asking the Board to take the necessary steps for consolidation. On the night of February 6, Mr. Rowe had made a noteworthy speech in favor of consolidation.

Ms. Sawyer also reports that extension of Charlotte's water system to the perimeter area to be annexed to the City on January 1, would cost a little more than a million dollars. Bids had been received the previous day at City Hall and would be presented to the City Council on Monday. The water superintendent had said that he would recommend contracts be awarded to Boyd & Goforth, Inc., for two sections of the work, and to Blythe Bros. Co., for the other two sections. To get all of the work in the perimeter area started at the same time, as well as to give small companies an opportunity to bid for the job, the perimeter area had been divided into four sections. Boyd & Goforth had been the low bid on the Wilkinson Boulevard and Providence Road-Sardis Road areas, with bids having been $237,358 and $303,524 respectively. Blythe Bros. had been the low bid for the Hoskins-Thomasboro and Park Road-Selwyn Avenue areas, with bids having been $269,387 and $217,872 respectively. The total base bids were $1,028,143. The work would bring minimum fire protection to the area as well as supply domestic water. Bids for extending the city sanitation sewer system in the perimeter area were to be opened on July 16. That job, also expected to cost more than a million dollars, was being handled by the City Engineering Department, involving about 490,000 feet of pipe. The 37 square-mile perimeter area had been divided into three geographic areas for the sewer work.

Vehicular traffic along Tryon Street, it was announced, might be slower moving in the ensuing 60 to 90 days while Piedmont Natural Gas Company installed new pipelines.

John Kilgo of The News reports that over 400 Charlotte motorists had already felt the State's new traffic "point system" after the new plan had gone into effect the previous Friday. Through the previous night, the points were piling up in a hurry. If a motorist received 12 points within a 24-month period, their driver's license would be suspended for 60 days. Charlotte police had given out 201 speeding ticket since the prior Friday, resulting in two points for each such motorist, and if their speed had been more than 55 mph, three points. Since the new system had gone into effect, 67 residents of Charlotte had been given citations for running red lights, a three-point violation. Thirty-four had been cited for running stop signs, worth two points, and 22 had been cited for failing to yield the right-of-way, a three-point violation. The captain of traffic said that he thought the new point system would have a tremendous impact on the driving public, that when a person accumulated three points, they would begin to think harder before breaking the law again. He believed that it would cut down on moving violations.

Julian Scheer of The News reports on lightning bugs, indicating that it was really a firefly, both being slang expressions for a night-loving beetle of the Elteridae and Cantharidae families. There were 90 species of them and he had not had a chance to find out to which the local lightning bug belonged. He had determined that the luminous organs of the bug's body lit up a specialized portion of the fat-body of the beetle. The female had more light in her body than the male. The function of the flashing was, according to the experts, probably to facilitate the meeting of the sexes. One bug was apparently saying to the other, "Hiya, buggy." Even the eggs would give off a light. Ladies in Cuba and Mexico used lightning bugs or fireflies to decorate their hats and dresses and some people in tropical South America had used them as light. He suggests that a half-light was better than none in that latter application. Lightning bugs were only found in warm climates. Eskimos knew nothing of them, but African natives knew nothing of the Northern Lights, making things even. "And, kiddies, if you think you've got something special in your backyard at night, you ain't seen nothin'. The kids in Paraguay have a lightning bug called a railroad beetle. The bug lights up red on the end and green on the sides. So there, too." If you see one of those, you'd better run.

Max Muhleman of The News, the newspaper's boxing writer, would be at ringside in Yankee Stadium this night when Floyd Patterson would risk his heavyweight championship against Sweden's Ingemar Johansson. Mr. Muhleman would interview both fighters after the bout and provide the inside story on the sports pages of the newspaper the following day. His coverage of the pre-fight picture continued in this date's sports pages in an interview with Charley Norcus, who had been fired by Mr. Johansson's sparring partner after he hit the challenger too hard during a workout. Mr. Norcus told why Mr. Patterson would win the fight.

In Hollywood, it was reported that tv actor Roger Smith, of the "77 Sunset Strip" series, had undergone surgery on Wednesday for removal of a blood clot, after suffering a concussion earlier in the month in a fall at his home.

On the editorial page, "Charlotte Needs a Sense of Urgency" indicates that it was now or never for a single, coordinated public school system for Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, as viewed by the experts who had studied voting behavior on such issues elsewhere.