The Charlotte News

Monday, March 16, 1959

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President would report to the nation this night on the Berlin situation, with his half-hour address from the White House to be carried by all major radio and television networks. Advance indications were that he would detail his charges that the Soviets, in seeking to force allied military forces from Berlin, were trying to break solemn agreements entered during and after World War II concerning the four-power status of Berlin. He might emphasize that point by showing his television audience some of the documents setting forth the occupation agreements. He was also expected to reiterate the nation's intention to stand firm in Berlin and to emphasize the senselessness of nuclear war. Informed sources described the speech as a restatement of the American position and an effort to put into perspective the cold war battle regarding Berlin which had been raging since the prior November. They said that the speech would contain no surprises and would set forth no new policies. Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggested this date that the President ought lay down the general terms which the West would be prepared to consider in any Berlin negotiations with the Soviets, that in that way, the President's words would not only reach the people in the democratic and uncommitted countries but would also be carried into the Soviet Union and the satellite countries by the Voice of America, and that in view of the extreme gravity of the situation, might even be carried in part on stations in Russia. The President would begin talks on Thursday with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in a further effort to agree on a common stand among the allies. Mr. Macmillan was reported likely to urge agreement on a summit conference with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to follow up a meeting of the Big Four foreign ministers which had been suggested for May. Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said during a weekend television and radio program that the U.S. ought be willing to take Berlin and other problems to a summit conference.

A savage winter curtain call, fierce winds, snow and rainstorms had spread across the Midwest during the weekend and swept eastward with undiminished fury. At least eight deaths had been attributed to the storm. Thousands of persons had been stranded for hours, including nearly 350 passengers on Chicago and Northwestern Railroad trains which had gotten stuck in 12-foot snowdrifts in Wisconsin. All of the trains had sufficient fuel to heat the cars and all of their passengers had been supplied food during their enforced layovers, ranging up to 12 hours. The last of the stalled trains, with 150 passengers aboard, had been pulled free late on Sunday night, eight hours after it had been halted by huge drifts about 12 miles north of Green Bay. The storms had brewed tornadoes which had killed three people in Arkansas. Elsewhere, snow shoveling had claimed two lives in Iowa and one person had been killed on a highway on Sunday in Michigan when a heavy snowfall reduced visibility. A pulp cutter had died of exposure in his cabin in northeast Michigan. In Cleveland Heights, O., a man had been killed when blown off a second-story porch on Sunday during a windstorm which included gusts up to 82 mph. More than a score of persons had suffered injury in the storms and property damage had been heavy.

In Henderson, N.C., it was reported that about 500 workers had entered the two struck plants of the Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills during the morning under the watch of 100 Highway Patrolmen. Scores of strikers had been on hand, but only jeered. The peaceful plant opening had been in contrast to a violent weekend in which one man had been wounded by shotgun fire and two workers' homes had been damaged by explosives. Boyd Payton, Carolinas director of the Textiles Workers Union of America, said that only about 50 of the workers who entered the plant this date had been members of the two striking locals, which had a membership of 1,038. Police and newsmen estimated the number of workers who had reported this date to be about half the strength for a full three-shift operation, with the mills still operating on only one shift. The man wounded the previous day had been the first to be injured in the strike violence which had ebbed and flowed since the plants had reopened on February 16. A mill employee had told sheriff's officers that he had fired a shotgun blast at the man early on Sunday when he saw him "trying to light something" outside his home. Officers found a stick of dynamite and a fuse nearby. The wounded man, 23, was an unemployed former serviceman whose father was on strike, and he remained in the hospital after undergoing surgery to remove shotgun pellets from his hip and arm. The mill employee who fired the shot was charged with assault and he and his family had left town shortly after the incident but remained in contact with the sheriff after posting a $1,000 bond. Non-striking workers protected their houses during the night for hours during the weekend.

In Melbourne, Australia, evangelist Billy Graham had wound up his month-long crusade in Australia's second-largest city the previous day with the largest crowd of his career, more than 140,000. His previous record audience had been in New York's Yankee Stadium in 1957, attended by 100,000. Australian clergymen said that the evangelist's final local meeting had been the greatest religious gathering in the country's history. Leaders of virtually every church, including Roman Catholics and Jews, praised the crusade. During the month, Reverend Graham had drawn audiences totaling nearly 700,000, with millions having heard him on radio and television. He had spoken from a platform in the center of the five-acre Melbourne cricket ground, site of the 1956 Olympic Games. Victoria State Governor Sir Dallas Brooks, Lady Brooks and church leaders sat on the platform. The evangelist had opened his sermon by reading greetings from the President, and his religious message had indicated that man could serve either self or God, but only by serving God could man attain heaven. The President had said in his message that he was delighted to learn of the warm reception which the evangelist had received in Australia, indicating that America had a deep friendship with Australians and that he was not surprised at the traditional hospitality which the people of that country were showing. The Catholic Advocate paid tribute to the "great missionary effort which Dr. Graham and his collaborators have undertaken with a view to awakening the world to the vital truth and the all-importance of spiritual reality." A Jewish journal had lauded his innate goodness and fine character, adding, "No matter what faith one may be, none of us can help but be amazed and pleased with the influence of this American Evangelist." Almost every important Protestant church leader in Melbourne had praised the evangelist, with criticism limited mainly to a few letters sent to newspapers and a couple of articles and unimportant periodicals. The evangelist had flown to Tasmania this date for two meetings, and after a two-week holiday at the shore in Queensland, would start a crusade in New Zealand in April. As he left for the airport, a crowd had sung "God Be with You Till We Meet Again". The evangelist's finance committee had announced that the expenses for the Melbourne crusade were about $170,000 and had been more than covered by donations, with any extra money collected to go toward the evangelist's "Hour of Decision" broadcasts. An editorial this date in the Melbourne Herald, Australia's largest evening newspaper, with a circulation of 436,000, said that the evangelist's "crusading visit … has been a remarkable success. There is obviously a warm place in the hearts of our people for the pure evangelists."

In Indianapolis, it was reported that a woman had gone on trial before an overflow crowd of spectators this date for the slaying of a wealthy drug executive who had jilted her for a younger woman. The graying divorcee had arrived with the jail matron 15 minutes before the trial started, dabbing her eyes of tears. She said that she had slept for only three hours since Friday and reported that she was feeling nervous but remained optimistic. All 60 public seats in the courtroom had been filled and curious spectators milled outside in the basement corridor of the old courthouse. Questioning of prospective jurors was expected to take several days. The 54-year old victim had been shot to death the prior July in his parked Cadillac. The state contended that the defendant, 42, had followed him and shot him three times with a small revolver after he had returned to his car from a late-night visit with a younger woman. The defense claimed that the shooting had been accidental and occurred during a violent struggle after the man had begun to beat the defendant. The defendant told police that the man, who was executive vice-president of Eli Lilly & Co., had promised to divorce his wife and marry the defendant when his 14-year old adopted son finished school. The defendant said she had carried on an illicit affair with him for 15 years. The younger woman, 30, was a secretary at the Lilly firm. She had moved to California shortly after the slaying and was not expected to testify at the trial. The defendant also met the victim while working at Eli Lilly. The prosecutor's staff refused to say whether it would demand the death penalty for the defendant, who was charged with first-degree murder. Indiana had never electrocuted a woman. The victim had still been alive and conscious when police arrived on the scene, but had refused to identify his killer. The defendant was found about 20 hours later unconscious in her car after taking 75 sleeping pills mixed with pineapple juice, and remained in a coma for 2.5 days.

Leonard Engel, in the first of a series of reports, examines a surgery taking place at the University of Minnesota hospital, with a fictional composite young female, Joyce Wilder, 13, undergoing an open-heart operation at the locus where open-heart surgery had been first established. Everything which happened to her had happened to numerous patients. In the new main building of the University Medical Center, four operating rooms had glass domes and observation rooms above. It was still early in the morning as a technician who operated the heart-lung machine pushed the apparatus on a stand into the room. For between 15 and 30 minutes, or even longer if there were unexpected complications, the machine would breathe, pump blood for and sustain the life of the patient. During those minutes, the climax of an operation which would take some three hours in all, Drs. C. Walton Lillehei and Richard L. Varco would open her heart, mend a defect inside and close it again. Then the heart-lung machine would be disconnected and taken down the hall to be dismantled and cleaned, to be made ready for another operation on another day. The operating room was the largest of those available and was used for most heart operations. A varied array of equipment, all which modern surgery found necessary for the proper care and protection of the patient, was ranged along the operating-room walls and about the floor. The operating table stood in the center and near the head of the table stood an anesthesia machine, intravenous standards for holding blood bottles during transfusions, an EEG machine for recording brain waves and a cardiac pacemaker and defibrillator for meeting emergencies involving stoppage of the heart. The heart-lung machine stood on the side of the operating table and next to it stood a gleaming new machine for cauterizing blood vessels. On the other side of the operating table were an instrument table which could be wheeled over the end of the operating table, a back instrument table, Mayo stands, another type of instrument tray, "splash stands" for water basins and "kick buckets" for waste. The technician had been working for about ten minutes when two nurses entered, greeted him briefly and went to work. The operating room had been washed down the previous day after completion of that day's surgery. The remainder of the piece is on an inside page.

In Kingsport, Tenn., it was reported that the roll of Civil War veterans had been cut in half this date with the death of 112-year old John Salling, a Confederate soldier from nearby Slant, Va. He had been stricken by pneumonia the previous week and had been brought to a Kingsport clinic on Thursday, but doctors had said that he was too old to withstand his last illness. His death left only one other known survivor of the war, Walter Williams of Houston, Tex., also a Confederate veteran, now past 116 years of age. He had been bedridden for several months. Mr. Salling had retained his mental faculties until his last illness and had enjoyed talking about his boyhood experiences. He had been only 16 when he enlisted in the Virginia forces opposing the Yankees. Scores of descendants had survived him, his wife having died nearly 20 years earlier. His condition had weakened steadily since he had been admitted to the hospital and he had been receiving a constant supply of oxygen. He would have been 113 on May 15. About a year earlier, a group of WAC's at Fort Myer, Va., had presented him with a summer-weight Confederate uniform, which he had worn on special occasions. He had once said, "I never saw a girl I didn't like."

In Manila, it was reported that two Japanese diplomats had trekked through the jungle the previous day in an effort to get two World War II holdouts to surrender, but their answer had been a volley of shots. The holdouts were a lieutenant and sergeant who had taken refuge in the jungle of Lugano Island after the end of the war. Posters, newspapers and letters from relatives in Japan deposited in mailboxes posted in the jungle had failed to get them to emerge. The previous day, a consul and attaché with two Japanese civilians, Philippine police and guides had sought to reach the two men, but they had opened fire on them and then escaped into the thick vegetation. The only casualty had been the party's Filipino motorboat driver who had received minor cuts as he ran into the bush to escape the fire.

In San Francisco, it was reported that a controversy had made the San Francisco Bay Area's Girl Scout cookies hot even before they were ready for the oven. Because some of the fund-raising cookies to be sold between April 3 and 20 were being bought in Tulsa, Okla., the Bakery Drivers Local 484 of the Teamsters Union in San Francisco had decided to withhold a previously voted $4,000 contribution to the United Crusade, an area-wide fund-raising organization which supported the Girl Scouts and other organizations. The Girl Scouts received part of their funding from the Crusade and part from the cookie sales. The local's secretary had said that they had no argument with the Girl Scouts but were simply saying that when their men assessed themselves for a charity, they had a right to say that the money ought be spent in a particular area. A Bay Area cookie committee member said that only one of 11 Girl Scout councils in the five-county area had been buying cookies from outside the Bay Area, that being the Mount Diablo Council in Contra Costa County, which had ordered its cookies from the National Sales and Service Co. in Tulsa, which had given assurances that it was completely unionized. In Tulsa, the National Sales and Service president said that he only distributed the cookies, indicating that they were union-made at a company in Lowell, Mass., and that most were shipped directly to the Girl Scouts. The union local's secretary said that there had been a lot of dissatisfaction in the labor movement about the United Crusade and that in the particular case, they did not feel like subsidizing Okies in Oklahoma. He said that when they contributed, they preferred that their money would go to support local shops, as they had to work there and earn their money there. The union local representative said that fighting the Girl Scouts would be like fighting home and mother and nobody could do that, but that Bay Area Crusade money ought be spent in the Bay Area. The girls of the Mount Diablo Council had better be careful as those Teamsters sometimes play rough and might come around and bust your cookies if you don't cooperate.

On the editorial page, "Cultural Enrichment Is Important, Too" suggests that Venus de Milo in an ashcan symbolized vividly the plight of the arts in Charlotte, as culture was being shamefully neglected while the spirit was willing, though the wherewithal was weak. (Venus de Milo was not of the Ashcan school of art.) Organizations which ought be spending hours creating sights and sounds had been spending too much of their time passing the hat for nickels and dimes, with the result having been anything but inspiring.