The Charlotte News
Wednesday, March 11, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President had said at his press conference this date that the U.S. had no intention of fighting a ground war in Europe, but declined to say flatly that nuclear weapons would be used by American forces in the event the Soviets started a hot war. He said firmly that the U.S. would do whatever it needed to protect its rights and responsibilities in West Berlin and that it would never back down in the face of Soviet pressure there. At the same time, he said that the free world was not going to become hysterical and go off half-cocked regarding the Berlin crisis. He said that he believed the public was more soberly aware of dangers in the Berlin situation than a lot of people around Washington. A reporter had asked him if he believed that the people recognized the dangers in Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's demand for withdrawal of allied troops from West Berlin by May 27, and he replied that they knew how serious it was or would not be voting all of the money required for defense. He added, however, that those who were advocating still greater defense spending ought have the courage to back higher taxes to pay for it. The President had been asked for his reaction to Mr. Khrushchev's proposal for a four-power guard in West Berlin, and he replied with some asperity that he did not ever expect to be in the business of reacting instantly to one of Mr. Khrushchev's wisecracks, or whatever the Soviet Premier called them. The free world was going to use the same democratic procedures which the U.S. used in dealing with such problems. He was asked if he thought the Soviets would be given a plain warning that nuclear war might result if the Communists cut off access to West Berlin and he had replied that he did not know how one could free anything with nuclear weapons, that if there were any push in the direction of real hostilities regarding Berlin, it would come from the side of the Soviets. He said that he could not believe that anybody was going to make hostilities of that kind a reality. He had also indicated that he did not think much of Mr. Khrushchev's proposal that Russia and the Western allies station token military forces in West Berlin. He prefaced that remark by saying that he was violating everything he had said earlier regarding the Berlin situation, apparently alluding to earlier remarks that the U.S. always consulted with its allies before expressing an opinion regarding Soviet proposals.
In Beirut, Lebanon, it was reported that relations between Iraq and Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser's United Arab Republic had sunk to a new low this date as a result of the revolt against the left-leaning Iraqi Government. The Government claimed that it had smashed the revolt against Premier Abdel Karim Kassem, and reports had spread that some of the rebel Army officers were seeking to escape across the Syrian border, while other reports stated that fighting was still ongoing, apparently by desperate holdouts seeking to flee the country. The UAR's semi-official Middle East News Agency had charged that Iraqi planes had shot up a Syrian border village, the Agency also reporting that Iraqi planes had strafed several Iraqi villages in the Mosul area near the border, the former stronghold of the rebels. Mr. Kassem meanwhile had expelled ten UAR diplomats assigned to the Baghdad Embassy, declaring them to be a menace to public safety and rendering them persona non grata. The Baghdad correspondent of the Middle East News Agency had also been ordered from the country. Nine of the ousted diplomats had arrived in Cairo and reported that the Baghdad Government apparently was still digging in for a fight. There was as yet no retaliatory expulsion of Iraqi diplomats from Cairo. The first reports of the revolt had made clear that the rebellious Army officers wanted to swing the Iraqi Government toward Premier Nasser and opposed the growing influence of the Iraqi Communists on Mr. Kassem. The military governor, in a broadcast over Baghdad Radio, had blamed a "foreign power" for inciting the rebellion, plainly referring to the UAR. Street demonstrations staged in Baghdad to support Mr. Kassem had turned into anti-Egyptian rallies. Premier Nasser's news agency accused Iraq of taking "provocative measures against the UAR". Details of the Army revolt remained sketchy. Diplomatic informants had said that the rebels had pulled out of the northern oil center of Mosul, where Col. Abdel Wahab Shawaf and a group of pro-Nasser followers had initiated the rebellion the prior Sunday. A terse report from Baghdad Radio indicated that the Government had regained control of Mosul sometime on Tuesday, saying that the military governor of Iraq had clamped a curfew on that city. The Baghdad station had announced on Monday that the revolt had been smashed within hours and that Mr. Shawaf had been slain by his own men, a report initially denied by rebel radio and then was heard no more after midnight on Monday. The Middle East News Agency said that travelers returning from the Iraqi-Turkish frontier had reported that Mr. Shawaf had been killed in fighting at Mosul along with a large number of the officers of his 5th Brigade.
In Henderson, N.C., it was reported that 15 strikers had faced hearings this date on contempt of court charges for allegedly violating a court order prohibiting violence at the strike-bound Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills. The Superior Court judge handed out jail sentences and fines to ten persons and imposed fines on nine others the prior Saturday for violence coming from the bitter strike. Sentences had ranged from $100 fines up to 30-day jail sentences, plus fines of $250. All 19 defendants had given notice of appeal to the State Supreme Court. The strike scene was quiet on Tuesday, except for the usual jeering and heckling by striking union pickets as workers entered and departed the mills. Meanwhile, the Textile Workers Union of America mailed to the NLRB papers containing charges of unfair labor practices against the company. The company president had commented that he was not guilty of any unfair labor practices. Mediators planned to get together again with union and management representatives on Thursday after a mediation session on Monday had produced no progress. The strike had begun the prior November 17 after management insisted that an arbitration clause be omitted from a new contract.
More snow had spread into the winter-weary sections of the Midwest this date as a storm center in the southern plains had kicked up violent wind, rain and hail storms in southern parts of the mid-continent. The Weather Bureau forecast four inches or more of snow across a wide area from the Central Plains eastward into sections of the Mississippi Valley and the southern Great Lakes region. A rash of heavy thunderstorms had swept areas in eastern Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, plus southern Missouri during the night. The hail pelted areas in northeastern Texas and eastern Oklahoma, with hailstones the size of golf balls reported 45 miles southeast of Dallas and in the Muskogee, Okla., area. At Arlington, Tex., east of Fort Worth, hail at one street intersection was piled 14 inches deep. Unofficial damage estimates at Fort Worth were more than a million dollars. Five persons had been injured there, though none seriously. The only death blamed on the weather had been in Greenville, northeast of Dallas, where a 43-year old man of Texarkana had been killed when an automobile plowed into the rear of his truck stalled in a driving rain by water on the road.
In Lansing, Mich., a $666 bundle of hot carpeting, which had kicked up a fuss around the State Capitol the prior fall, was destined to muffle foot beats at Michigan State University. The floor covering, 74 yards of it, was hot only politically. It had been paid for and had changed hands twice for cash, including $24.54 from the personal funds of State Controller James Miller, not to mention a high initial price and official sweat and embarrassment. Bought first by the State, it now had been peddled to MSU, which had paid in funds from the Kellogg Foundation and would use it in a new wing of Kellogg Center, the University's continuing education center. Originally, the carpet was destined to cover floors in a side chamber of the Governor's office occupied by staff aides and secretaries. It had been intended to replace a ten-year old faded green, threadbare floor covering patched with black tape. The State Controller entered the picture the prior summer as State supervisor of Capitol maintenance, foreseeing possible injuries to women whose high heels might catch on frayed spots or holes. He had ordered its replacement and subordinates had purchased a loom end of high quality, wool twist material at a bargain of nine dollars per yard. About that time, Governor G. Mennen Williams, then in a political campaign, found out what was occurring, as had State Senate Republican Harvey Lodge, the Legislature's top governmental waste detector. Governor Williams had put his foot down hard and no new carpet was to be installed. Mr. Lodge had fixed a beady stare on the State Controller and the carpet had gathered dust, first in the shop of the vendor and then in state storage. Recently, MSU had melted the deep-freeze by taking it off State hands. The Controller dipped into his own pocket to pay carrying charges assessed by the rug merchant. Michigan still could lay claim to threadbare floor coverings in its chief executive office which, without doubt, were unmatched in any similar place in the nation.
In Winston-Salem, it was reported that Robert M. Hanes, for 25 years the president of the South's largest banking concern, had died the previous night in a hospital, having been in poor health for several months. He was the former president of Wachovia Bank & Trust Co. and also a former president of the American Bankers Association. He had been born in 1890 in Winston-Salem and was the son of John W. and Anna Hanes, one of eight children. He had married in 1917 and was survived by his wife Mildred. Their two children resided in Winston-Salem. He had attended Winston-Salem schools, Woodberry Forest School in Orange, Va., and UNC, graduating from the latter with an A.B. degree in 1912, and then completing the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He had begun his business career in 1913 as secretary and treasurer of the Crystal Ice Co. of Winston-Salem, and in 1917, had entered the Army as a first lieutenant and was discharged at the end of World War I with the rank of major.
Governor Luther Hodges had said in Raleigh this date that the death of Mr. Hanes had caused the loss of one of the state's most valued and best-loved citizens. He said it had been his privilege to know him intimately for many years and that he was proud to call him his friend, having provided a friendship which never wavered, and he would sorely miss him. They had worked together in many civic and business endeavors, including their associations in Germany during 1950-51 when Mr. Hanes had been the Marshall Plan mission chief there, having shown in that position the same courage, the same initiative and the same interest in human beings as he had always shown in North Carolina.
In Charlotte, a man had been seriously injured during the morning when a school bus and an automobile had collided on the Robinson Church Road near Hood Road. The driver of the school bus and two 7-year old passengers in the bus had not been injured. A County police officer said that a 24-year old man, driver of the car, had been admitted to Memorial Hospital with a fractured back and shoulder, and cuts on his wrist and forehead. The police officer said that the school bus had pulled out of a driveway into the path of the car and that the impact had rolled the car over on its top and onto its wheels again. A 17-year old student at East Mecklenburg High School had been the driver of the bus, and he told police that he did not see the car coming down the road. He was charged with failing to yield the right-of-way.
In Union, N.J., it was reported that several high school students faced disciplinary action because they had said "hell" and "damn" during the previous Saturday night's presentation of the play, The Man Who Came to Dinner. The original script of George Kaufman and Moss Hart had contained those words, but student players had agreed to eliminate them for the senior class play. They had on Friday night, but on Saturday night, they had not. The school principal was attempting to learn if the words were in a specially revised script or had been deliberately uttered in defiance of censorship. Hell and damnation, hang them.
In New York, at Madison Square
Garden the previous night, as reported on the sports page this date, UNC had been defeated by underdog Navy in
the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament, 76 to 63. The
effort of UNC coach Frank McGuire to rest his players the prior
Saturday night in the finals of the ACC Tournament in Raleigh against
N.C. State, who had soundly defeated North Carolina 80 to 56, had
obviously not worked. Navy would advance to the Eastern Regional
semifinals to face Boston University, to be played at the Charlotte
Coliseum the following Friday night. Navy, coached by former UNC
basketball coach Ben Carnevale, who had coached the Tar Heels for two
seasons in 1945 and 1946, coaching the 1946 team which had lost in
the NCAA finals narrowly to defending national champion Oklahoma A &
M, was unranked in the final Associated Press poll of the year,
published this date, while UNC had fallen from number five the prior
week to number nine, after the licking by N.C. State, which had risen
from number ten to number six. The latter was not eligible for NCAA
post-season play, being on probation for improper player recruitment.
That had been the reason why coach McGuire had rested his starters
for much of the game on Saturday night, after UNC had beaten State
twice during the regular season. It is obviously time to fire him.
Hell and damnation. Any coach who makes a poor decision in the course
of one game or who fails obviously to instruct his players properly
about the rules or the situational setting in which they find
themselves, ought be terminated at once and with extreme prejudice,
regardless of prior performance and the overall season performance of
his team and regardless of the returnees and recruits for the
following season. Ain't that right, little Dooky Doo?
We might note that, absent some scandal-related cause, prior to 2026, never in the prior history of NCAA Division I men's college basketball, spanning back to 1910 in the case we have in mind, has a head coach with a current season record as good as 24-9 been fired. Way to go, Moronic Jerks who never even for a magic moment attended UNC. You broke the record.
Well, when you're getting hornswaggled, the best thing to do is to get some fun
On the editorial page, "Bob Hanes: Citizen, Banker, Statesman" indicates that Mr. Hanes would linger long in the memory of his beloved state, having given more of himself to his state and its people than perhaps any business or professional leader of his time, having been North Carolina's first citizen. His death left a void which would never quite be filled.
He had been known in the state first as a distinguished banker, as present and later honorary chairman of the Wachovia Bank & Trust Co., but his career and record of service spanned many fields of endeavor, including business, government, education and economic diplomacy. It served wherever and whenever duty had called him, but he had always returned to the state and the people he loved, where his roots were, along with his heart. His efforts to promote the economic progress of the state had been boundless. The results, the mills, factories and office buildings which dominated the state's new industrial landscape, had been his monuments.
It finds that he had been a man of bold imagination and raw courage, who had shrunk from no experience, but was also a warm-hearted man who took just as much interest in a "little fellow" who owned a delicatessen as he did in some impressive business tycoon with 50,000 employees, part of his genius and bigness.
It finds that in addition to his enormous courage, he had also been an astute judge of men, able to size up an individual young or old instantly and determine if that person "rang true" and "shot straight", using two of his favorite expressions.
When News publisher Thomas L. Robinson had first come to the state from New York in July, 1946 to explore newspaper opportunities, Mr. Hanes had first greeted him and made him feel that there was no place in the world quite like North Carolina. He had spent countless hours of his time getting Mr. Robinson oriented and established in Charlotte, a typical gesture of friendship and kindness.
It concludes that the state had lost one of its great citizens, "a man whose achievements and contributions to the life of his state will not be soon forgotten."
"The Reform that Brings up the Rear" indicates that a bill which had been introduced simultaneously in the State House and State Senate to give Superior Court solicitors full-time jobs at $11,000 per year with no private practice allowed and provide the State Attorney General administrative supervision over solicitors with the authority to appoint assistant solicitors and the responsibility to recommend redistricting had been a controversial caboose hitched to the long train of events leading to court reform during the week.
Somewhat similar legislation had failed to pass in the 1957 General Assembly, but earlier proposals were neither as comprehensive nor as well-reasoned as the present plan, which came directly from the Bell Committee's historic study of the administration of justice in the state.
Although solicitors were historically officers of the executive branch of government rather than the judicial branch, the proposed changes went together with the court reform program proposed by State Senator J. Spencer Bell and his colleagues. It would help give the state the unified judicial system it needed to improve and expedite the administration of justice.
It indicates that there was at present a serious imbalance in the workloads of Superior Court solicitors and gross inequities in the manner in which their offices operated. The proposed legislation would protect the public and the solicitors and put the whole statewide system on a fair and reasonable business-like basis. The North Carolina Bar Association's Committee on Improving and Expediting the Administration of Justice, headed by Senator Bell, had developed a mountain of evidence indicating that the present system was inadequate. While the state's 21 solicitors theoretically received the same salary and allowance, there were in fact wide differences in their pay. For instance, one district's area was 900 square miles, while another was 3,800. One solicitor had the help of six assistants, paid for by the six counties in that district, while another handled seven counties without any help except that which he engaged at his own expense. One solicitor's secretary and office supplies were paid for by the county and another paid $2,840 per year from his own pocket for those items. Some could devote substantial time to private practice while others had no time at all for that purpose. In one district, the solicitor had to be in court only 68 days per year to prosecute criminal cases while another's duties required 214 days. It had been found by the study that conflicts often developed because the 21 solicitorial districts were so arranged that a solicitor might be serving in three judicial districts and criminal terms might be set for two of his counties on the same day.
The major need was for both unity and equity and the Bell Committee's proposals would furnish the administrative machinery for both. The grounds for making the solicitorship a full-time job were substantially moral, involving the elimination of "a possible conflict of interest with a temptation to neglect the duties owed the state in favor of increased income from private practice."
It concludes that the measure was sound in principle and perspective and deserved affirmative action.
"The Black Record of 'A Born Loser'" wonders aloud whether Adlai Stevenson deserved another shot at the Democratic presidential nomination after having been the Democratic nominee in both 1952 and 1956, losing badly each time to President Eisenhower. A local political thinker had assured that he did not deserve a third chance and had pledged his allegiance to Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri.
The man said that Mr. Stevenson was okay, but had "a black record", clarifying that he had "a kind of aura of defeat about him. He's a born loser. The public just won't go for a loser and, believe me, Adlai's a loser."
It had then produced a newspaper clipping from its pocket and shared it with the man, stating: "Failed in business, '31. Defeated for legislature, '32. Failed in business again, '33. Elected to legislature, '34. Sweetheart died, '35. Suffered a nervous breakdown, '36. Defeated for speaker, '38. Defeated for elector, '40. Defeated for Congress, '43. Elected to Congress, '46. Defeated for Congress, '48. Defeated for Senate, '55. Defeated for vice-president, '56. Defeated for Senate, '58."
The friend had said that the person was a "born loser". But it had then indicated that he was nevertheless elected President in 1860, the subject of the clipping having been Abraham Lincoln.
Harry Golden, writing in the Carolina Israelite, in a piece titled "Getting Old", finds that the debutante thought that her 30-year old sister was virtually middle-aged and a young bride wondered if sex life continued at all after 40. Poets were "young" poets until they were 40, while mathematicians were "burned out" at 35. The politician who, two terms earlier, had decided not to run for the Senate seat, was stunned when the party leader told him that now he was too old.
Age was relative and the movies kept telling people that the "young in heart" belied gray hairs and stooped shoulders. So women called themselves "girls" even though they were in their 50's and their husbands said without self-consciousness that they were going fishing with the "boys".
"Yes, age is imperceptible and we want to believe that we are only as old as we feel. But every once in a while we are caught up and realize this just isn't so. I knew a lady who worked her way through college, married, had three children, and went back to work. She didn't look as though time had changed her and so she never realized it really had. Never realized it, that is, until one day as she walked past four boys who were having a snowball fight, she heard one of them caution: 'Watch out! Don't hit the old lady.'"
He finds that age was not so imperceptible that Joe DiMaggio did not know it when the Washington pitcher had passed Gil MacDougal with two men on base so that he could pitch to the "Clipper".
It was the same with a fat man who went to bed one night a regular fellow but the next morning, considered himself a fat man. The imperceptible process had an imperceptible point which, once past, one could not retrace. "Once in a while you know you're passing that point. I knew I had passed it once and knew I was getting old that day I noticed that all the cops looked so young."
Drew Pearson finds that leadership in Washington was coming from Congress, not as the Constitution intended, from the President, finding that never in his long history of covering Washington had the contrast been so great. The White House had made late, sometimes uncertain, moves. It had not whipped a labor bill into shape before sending it to Congress, until after Senate Democrats had gotten the jump with their own labor bill. The White House did not decide on a civil rights bill until after Senator Lyndon Johnson, the Majority Leader, had introduced his own bill. That was in direct contrast to other Administrations, both Democratic and Republican. Ordinarily, major bills were worked out by the White House long before Christmas and sent to Congress during the first week in January. But the President and his Cabinet had differed on labor and civil rights, dilly-dallying and discussing those issues while the Democrats had acted.
The most dynamic figure in Congress at present was Senator Johnson, doing the back-seat driving, playing the legislative keyboard as Van Clyburn played the piano. He had already passed a housing bill and soon would have a space bill, an airport bill, an insurance bill, an international monetary fund bill, a civil rights bill, a bill for educational television and a measure for Hawaiian statehood, enacted into law. The Senator was now being called a dictator, when actually no person could dictate to the Senate, for to get a bill passed, Senator Johnson had to have the approval of at least 26 members of steering and policy committees plus a majority of the body itself. No one could get away with dictatorship under those circumstances. On the contrary, it took persuasion and statesmanship.
He finds that Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin was correct in asserting that Senator Johnson should hold more party caucuses, but the end result would be the same. What made Senator Johnson appear as a dictator was the contrast between the dynamic leadership from Congress and the hesitation from the White House. Even regarding the Berlin crisis, Senator Johnson had publicly pledged Senate support of the President's policy at a 2,000-plate Democratic dinner one week before the President had called Democratic leaders to the White House to obtain their support.
Sensing a tough battle over his confirmation to become Commerce Secretary, Admiral Lewis Strauss had been making an astute play for some of the Senators who would vote on him, arranging a Commerce Department ceremony to present the two Senators from Alaska with an official set of weights and measures for the newly admitted state. Significantly, Senator Robert Bartlett of Alaska sat on the Interstate Commerce Committee, which would first vote on the Strauss appointment. One Senator's vote on which Admiral Strauss could definitely count was John Pastore of Rhode Island, the first Italian-American ever to serve in the Senate. During the Admiral's feud against Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, the Admiral had gone out of his way to cultivate Senator Pastore as an offset to Senator Anderson on the Joint Atomic Energy Committee.
Joseph Alsop tells of a discovery of charred mammoth elephant bones, the meat on which had obviously been consumed by man more than 20,000 years earlier on Santa Rosa Island off the coast of California, the discovery having been examined recently by Dr. Philip Orr of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum, Dr. Wallace Broecker of Columbia and Dr. George Carter of Johns Hopkins. Dr. Broecker had obtained carbon-14 dating on the bones and found that they went back beyond 27,000 B.C.
It was a byproduct of an inquiry into radioactive fallout addressed to Dr. Walter Libby as a kind of farewell before his anticipated departure from the Atomic Energy Commission. He was the inventor of carbon-14 dating, measuring the age of ancient organic remains by testing for radioactive carbon. Dr. Libby had preferred talking about carbon-14 to strontium-90. His talk revealed that which should have been major news, that American history was getting longer. Until recently, experts had limited that history to about 10,000 years, with some contending that man entered the hemisphere only about 5,000 years earlier. But those assumptions began to be upset by the discovery of flint weapons, known as Folsom points. Now, because of carbon-14 dating, the old restriction of history of man in America had come apart.
The date for the dwarf mammoth elephants, which had become confined to Santa Rosa Island eons earlier when continents had broken apart, was only one among several discoveries which had expanded the time for man in America. The Tule Springs site had been established by carbon-14 dating as going back 23,800 years. There were new Mojave Desert campfire sites, discovered by Dr. Ruth Simpson of the Museum of the Southwest in Los Angeles, who said that the flints at those sites were "typologically closely similar to the European Lower Paleolithic period."
At the Sandia Cave discovery, with a date earlier than Tule Springs, there were hearths of a camel-eating people found near Dallas, Tex. The Humble Oil Co. laboratory had conducted those tests and dated the site to 38,000 years before the present era.
Finally, there were the campfires and the seeming tools found by Dr. George Carter in the middle of San Diego, which dated back to 40,000 years earlier.
The more conservative scholars in the field were not happy about the discoveries and claims of their age. Although most of them could not absolutely reject Sandia Cave and the hearths of the camel-eaters, they did not fully accept the putative dates associated with them and sternly rejected most of the other early dates, clinging to the belief that man had been in America for only between 5,000 and 10,000 years. As Dr. Robert Heiser of UC-Berkeley had sadly put it, "A quite new interpretation of American pre-history needs more evidence," a typical comment.
Mr. Alsop says that he was against Dr. Heiser. "Prometheus-Man has now invented weapons that can conceivably bring this end of our history, the H-bomb end of history as you might call it, to a loud, sudden, dead stop. In this situation, it is oddly consoling to think that our history is constantly growing at the other end, the flint chopper end, when Man began his bold adventure on this continent."
A letter writer indicates that it was hardly surprising that Robert C. Ruark, "the poor man's Hemingway, synthetic adventurer, and not-so-gay boulevardier," regarded Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago to be below his critical standards. He finds that Mr. Ruark had developed a highly lucrative career of "purveying the surest bombast, and, as you would expect, looks with a jaundiced eye upon any man of real genius and highly developed artistic integrity." Only time would tell whether Mr. Pasternak's novel would hold in the history of letters, but when so eminent a critic as Edmund Wilson, whose reputation in the field of literary and historical criticism was considerably better established than Mr. Ruark's, regarded it as the novel of the century, there was reason to believe that it would survive long after Mr. Ruark's excursion into literary criticism. It was true that the phenomenal sales of the book had come largely from the delusion that it was exclusively an indictment of Soviet society and particularly its underlying philosophy that man's salvation was to be discounted in the historical process. He finds that Mr. Pasternak had, in effect, translated into art what Nikolai Berdyaev had declared in philosophy, and like the latter, his defense of the dignity of the human spirit crushed by the monolithic state was hardly confined to the excesses of Bolshevism. As Mr. Wilson had said in his review in the New Yorker, if a few terms were changed, it would equally be an indictment of any modern state, including that of the U.S. It was a book which people concerned with the freedom of the human spirit in modern times would ponder over long after Mr. Ruark, "who obstreperously pontificated his besottedly partisan point of view in some barroom in Nairobi, is consigned to the garbage can of forgotten writers."
A letter writer from Salisbury suggests that the threat of war might be the only means by which to do away with war, that the horrors of war ought be played up by the newspapers, magazines and movies to the extent that politicians would make every effort to prevent war. He finds that being prepared would enable the nation to deal with Russia in a way that would be impossible, though it robbed the country of a great deal of money which it would like to put to work to make a better world. But as long as Russia remained prepared and threatened to destroy the U.S., it had no alternative except to spend billions on horrible weapons of war.
A letter from the former superintendent of Public Welfare of Mecklenburg County responds to an article in the Friday newspaper about B. L. Baker, the clerk of Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, expressing his appreciation. He indicates that at the UNC Law School, Mr. Baker had tied with the late Edwin Cansler for leader of their class. The article, he finds, had not mentioned a great service which Mr. Baker had rendered to Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, that, as an attorney, he had a large part in drafting the bill which had given Charlotte and Mecklenburg its Domestic Relations Court, and in prompting the passage of that bill through the 1929 Legislature. On March 14, 1929, the last week of that Legislature, on motion of Republican State Representative Grant of Davie County, the bill had been tabled. Mecklenburg legislators succeeded in having the bill passed the following week, however, just before the adjournment. The bill provided that any county with a city of 25,000 could convert its Juvenile Court into a Court of Juvenile and Domestic Relations. In its final passage, all counties which could qualify were exempted, except for Mecklenburg. The State Welfare Board had provided no help in securing passage of the bill, though it had sought to secure passage of a similar bill two years earlier, that having been tabled.
A letter writer from New York indicates that while staying in Charlotte in a motel for a few days, he had become an interested reader of the newspaper and had been fascinated by a half-page ad appearing a couple of days earlier which had shown a group of men in a club, with a caption saying that one of the men was a "misfit" because he was not dressed properly, going on to ask "which man is the misfit?" He had studied the picture carefully and believed that he knew which man was the supposed misfit, but was not sure and seeks help to determine whether he was right in believing it was the man on the left who was wearing "the awful looking necktie." He is not sure that he was the one, as there were two other men in the picture who were standing there with their hats and coats as if they did not quite know what to do or where to go, which made the reader wonder what kind of a club it was they were in, whether it had a check room. He suggests that it could have been that they were both misfits for they certainly looked as if they were out of place and wondering what to do next. There was also another man sitting down comfortably in a big chair, but the lights were so dim in the club, or else the photograph so dark, that he could not possibly make out what that man was wearing. Nevertheless, he looked fairly happy. The most comfortable-looking man in the group was one who obviously was enjoying himself reading a magazine and who looked as if he owned the place, wearing a rather sporty outfit and probably just coming in from the golf course and stopping to read something on his way to the locker room. He did not seem to mind and it was plain that the other men in the picture did not mind him either. He again asserts that he believes that the "misfit" was the one on the left with the awful looking necktie.
He obviously has a lot of time to kill while in the motel. We suggest maybe getting out and about the city and taking a long walk for good exercise, so that you do not develop early varicose veins and a flabby paunch, even if that would probably not render you a misfit in 1959 among middle-aged men at a club. That there was some snow on the ground March 2 is irrelevant, as perambulating in it gets the blood stirring the more and affords a retreat to childhood, as long as one does not get carried away and stay out all night, develop pneumonia and die, as did columnist and bon vivant Heywood Broun one cold New York night in December, 1939—just 19 days before Duke Indoor was opened, a year after FDR had stated in Woollen, 11 miles away, that he liked scrambled eggs, not grilled millionaire, for breakfast.
In any event, the apparent Rorschach on misfitness reveals that it is plainly the dog or seal in the lower right corner which does not belong.
Framed Edition
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