The Charlotte News

Wednesday, March 18, 1959

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.S. had prepared a tentative draft of a German peace treaty for possible use in a foreign ministers meeting with the Soviet Union. By contrast with the Soviet peace treaty proposal of several weeks earlier, the U.S. provisions would leave the way open for a sovereign all-German government to forge whatever links it wished with neighboring nations and other countries of the world. Some officials described the document as more of a statement of principles than a tentative treaty draft. It was proposed to Britain, France and West Germany for discussion. The Western European allies were reported this date to be cool to the idea of carrying forward plans for a German peace treaty at the present time, apparently believing that more urgent problems were those involving reunification of Germany. But U.S. officials emphasized that the Soviet Government obviously intended to raise the question of a peace treaty at a foreign ministers meeting, and so they wanted the Western powers to be ready to meet it in some way. It was believed in Washington that when the occasion arose, the allies ought be ready to tell the Soviets and the world the type of peace which they would make with an all-German government. Present Western planning was based on the idea that the essential first step in solving the problems of Germany was some move toward reuniting the divided country and creating an all-German government. To that end, Western policy planners presently meeting in Paris were discussing a proposal to the Soviets to create a federation to bring East and West Germany under a single political entity. Over a period of several years, the powers of the central federal government would gradually be increased and the powers of the present East and West German regimes would correspondingly decrease. One possible way to set up a central administration, presently being considered, would be to base it on the German provinces or states, called laender, of which there were ten in West Germany and traditionally five in East Germany, though in the latter, no longer recognized.

In Ottawa, Ontario, it was reported that British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, on his way to talks with the President, had this date urged the Western powers to frame a united policy on Germany based on "firm principles combined with a readiness to negotiate.". Mr. Macmillan had arrived by plane from London and before leaving for Washington on Thursday, would fill in Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and other Canadian officials regarding his recent Berlin crisis talks in Moscow with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Mr. Macmillan planned to see ailing Secretary of State Dulles at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington before he would meet with the President. Prime Minister Diefenbaker and other officials had been on hand to greet Prime Minister Macmillan, who had started his remarks with a tribute to Canadian Foreign Secretary Sidney Smith, who had died on Tuesday. Mr. Macmillan said that it was generally accepted that East-West negotiations on Germany had to take place during the summer. He said that he had gone to Moscow to gauge the ground and believed that he had achieved success. He was accompanied by British Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd, and hoped to convince the President that a summit meeting with Mr. Khrushchev could solve the explosive Berlin situation without any shooting. Officials in Washington expressed the belief that the President's televised and radio broadcast speech on Monday, conditionally endorsing a summit meeting, had greatly improved the atmosphere for the talks with Mr. Macmillan. In that address, the President had agreed to a top-level meeting in the summer, provided that a foreign ministers conference on Germany, proposed for mid-May, would give promise that the government heads could agree on at least some terms. Mr. Macmillan's visit with the President would climax a series of conferences he had recently with Mr. Khrushchev, French Premier Charles de Gaulle and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. His aim was to work out a unified strategy and proposals with which to approach the Soviets at the foreign ministers meeting. He had been reported to have been cheered by three points brought up in the Monday broadcast by the President, American readiness to take part in a summit meeting provided such a meeting could be justified, believing that on the basis of his findings in Moscow, Paris and Bonn, that developments would justify such a conference, second, the U.S. willingness to "listen to new ideas" and "to present others", and, third, the U.S. resolve to distinguish between negotiations and appeasement.

In London, it was reported that U.S. Ambassador John Hay Whitney had left for New York this date, on his way to Washington to join the meetings between the President and Prime Minister Macmillan.

In Washington, it was reported that the President this date had signed the bill to make Hawaii the 50th state. The next step would be a plebiscite in Hawaii to approve the move, with it intended to occur in time to send members of a newly elected legislative delegation to the Congress. Territorial Governor William Quinn had 30 days after formal notification of the President's approval within which to issue a proclamation calling for a primary election, which would have to be held no less than 60 or more than 90 days after the proclamation, after which a general election would occur no later than 40 days following the primary. The President's formal proclamation making Hawaii the 50th state would then be issued after the election results were officially certified. Hawaii residents would vote on three propositions, whether Hawaii would immediately be admitted to the Union as a state, whether Hawaii consented to the exclusion of Palmyra Island from the boundary of the new state, as provided in the statehood bill, and whether Hawaii accepted statehood under all other conditions specified in the bill, including land grant reservations, and allowing for only one member of the House, instead of two, as would ordinarily be the case based on its population. A second representative would be added after the 1960 census reapportionment. Rejection of any of the three propositions would nullify the Statehood Act and leave Hawaii in its territorial status, but there was no doubt that all three would be approved, as the territory had been pleading for statehood for half a century and its State Constitution was already adopted. Moreover, a previous vote in 1950 had overwhelmingly approved statehood.

In Carson City, Nev., it was reported that a bill repealing an old statute which had banned interracial marriages for 98 years, dating back to territorial days, had been signed by Governor Grant Sawyer on Tuesday after the old law had been held unconstitutional by a judge in Reno the prior December, when he granted a marriage license to San Francisco longshoremen's union leader Harry Bridges and his Nisei fiancée, the judge observing that marriage was a right and not a privilege.

In Washington, it was reported that the Textile Workers Union of America had asked a House Labor subcommittee to look into recent attacks on textile, hosiery and garment union organizers. William Pollock, president of the union, said that attacks were "part of an expertly planned campaign to wipe out old, established unions." He had made public a letter he had written to Representative Carl Perkins of Kentucky, in which he had reported recent beatings of Sol Greene of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Teaneck, N.J., of Robert Beame of the American Federation of Hosiery Workers in Franklin, N.C., and Boyd Payton, of the TWUA, in Hendersonville, N.C. He described the situation in Hendersonville as being "a lockout of 1,200 Harriet and Henderson Cotton Mill workers who are asking only for renewal of a standard-type of agreement which has been in effect 14 years. The moves made by the company executives in Henderson are part of a carefully planned pattern. They are identical to those which precipitated an attack which destroyed one of our long-established local unions in Winston-Salem, N.C., last fall."

In Hollywood, two men had died in a bedroom gun battle this date, which police said had erupted after one had tried to interfere in a love triangle involving the other. One man, 35, part-owner of three Los Angeles restaurants, and the other, a 47-year old jazz musician, had died in the gun battle, taking place in a house rented recently by a woman, 38, identified as the central figure in the dispute, being the wife of a third man, a wealthy Los Angeles produce dealer from whom she had been separated for several weeks. The woman told police that the jazz musician was her cousin who had been living at her home in Los Angeles for several years. A detective sergeant said that the cousin had come to her newly rented home late the previous night to urge her to return to her husband. The detective said that her cousin evidently had carried two weapons, a Mauser automatic and a .38-caliber revolver, but had given up one of them in a scuffle with the other man. He had then produced the other and the two men had dueled to the death. An early report that the two men had paced off in the traditional manner of dueling partners had later been discounted, police attributing that report to the woman's hysterical condition when first questioned. Officers said that she had returned to her husband's home and was given sedation by a physician, that she was in a state of shock, but had not been wounded, as had been initially reported.

In Raleigh, the State Supreme Court this date had ruled against the Motor Vehicles Department's informal point system of determining when to suspend licenses of habitual traffic violators. It reversed a Wake County Superior Court ruling which had upheld the suspension of a man's driver's license. It said that the law providing for such suspensions did not contain fixed standards or guides to which the Department had to conform, but had left it to the sole discretion of the commissioner of the Department to determine when a driver was an habitual violator, thus holding the law to be an unconstitutional grant of legislative power. The Motor Vehicles commissioner, Ed Scheidt, had ordered the man's license suspended following a hearing, which had found that the man had been convicted of six violations of traffic laws between April, 1952, and the end of October, 1957.

In Denver, Colo., a 77-year old man, last of the old-time train robbers, had died. He had spent more than half of his life in prison, though dying a free man, having been released from the Kansas Penitentiary the prior December 30. He had then immediately gone to Denver to live with a sister, but had soon become ill and ten days earlier had entered a Denver hospital where he died. He had made his reputation on Christmas night, 1910, when he held up a Missouri Pacific train between Kansas City and Leavenworth, pushing a frightened porter ahead of him through the cars as he robbed the passengers of $2,000. Captured and sent to the Kansas prison, he had escaped in 1915, and had then committed a robbery in Chicago, before being wounded in World War I, followed by another arrest and the completion of his prison term. He had made an effort to go straight, opening a shoe repair business in Kansas City, until the experiment had ended with a holdup of a gambling game, causing him to be returned to the Missouri prison. Upon his release, he had gone back to the Kansas prison after two men had been shot in a holdup of a dice game at Parsons, Kans., in 1942, on that occasion receiving a life sentence. He had escaped again, but was soon caught as a sick and broken old man. During his years in prison, his mother had burned a light in a window of her Kansas City home for the time when "my Willie" would return. She scrubbed floors and saved $1,800 to give to him when he finished his first prison term, but two days after his release, the depression had forced the bank to close and the money was gone. His mother died in 1938, while her son was in prison.

Leonard Engel, in the third installment of his chronicle of open-heart surgery being conducted in a Minnesota hospital on a fictional composite patient, a 13-year old girl, indicates that senior resident Dr. Herbert Warden continued to work on the patient's ankle, as voices could be heard in the sub-sterilizing room, one being the brassy bass belonging to Dr. Richard L. Varco, whose whisper could be heard 100 feet down the hall, and the other, somewhat higher pitched, being that of Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, with a resident and an intern present who would also be at the operating table, all scrubbing in preparation for the surgery. Everyone at the table and everyone who handled sterile articles or instruments had to scrub every square inch of their skin from elbows to fingertips with between nine and 30 strokes with a stiff, well-soaked brush, also having to have clean fingernails, utilizing a file dipped in disinfectant to effect that process. To make sure that medical students learned how to scrub, instructors frequently required them to cover hands and arms with salad oil and lampblack and then practice until they had gotten the mixture off while blindfolded. In the Minnesota hospitals, operating-room asepsis began in the basement of the main building, where dressings were made up and towels, drapes, caps, masks, gloves and gowns were washed and packed in sealed wrappers and exposed to steam. In a fourth-floor work room, special dressing packs and tubing for the heart-lung machine were prepared and similarly sterilized. No one who was not scrubbed could touch the inside or contents of sterile packs and no one who was scrubbed could touch the contaminated outside of the packs. The only exception was the circulating nurse, who opened the gown and glove packs, as well as the instrument packs, and helped the surgeons and scrub nurses into their gowns and gloves, though she did not touch any side which would be exposed to the patient. As in all other operating rooms throughout the country, that morning, the men and women in the operating room had gone through their separate parts of the aseptic routine. The patient's stream of questions had continued in the meantime, wanting to know how soon after the operation she would awaken, told by Dr. Warden that it would be right afterward. She was so busy that she failed to notice that the anesthesiologist was inserting a long-barreled syringe into a branch of the intravenous tube, which led into her vein, and was injecting a few cubic centimeters of a yellow solution, at which point she suddenly felt light-headed and the room started to turn, until she faded away. After she was completely asleep from the solution, which contained pentothal sodium and Flaxedil, the former an anesthetic related to the barbiturate sleeping powders and the latter not an anesthetic, belonging to an unusual class of substances, one of the great developments of modern medicine, called curarizing agents, the name coming from South American Indian arrow poison, curare, paralyzing the muscles and producing muscular relaxation, making it possible to achieve that state without deep anesthesia. The patient would be given only enough pentothal to keep her on the table, while another anesthetic, nitrous oxide, would be given to shield her from pain, provided via a tube, along with oxygen, slipped past her larynx and deep into her windpipe. It would enable her to breathe while the surgeons cut down through her chest to reach the heart and connected her to the heart-lung machine, as lungs filled and emptied poorly when the chest was opened. As soon as she was asleep, the anesthesiologist placed a mask over her face and turned the oxygen valve on the anesthesia machine. The rest of the piece is on an inside page.

In Sierra Madre, Calif., it was reported that there was a musical mailman rolling down the street, followed by a string of children, known on his route for his ways with music and children, a kind of pied piper on rollerskates. He believed that people liked letter carriers to be informal and happy, and he had been proven correct. He had a transistor radio on his belt which was constantly blaring jazz, having purchased it with Christmas money given to him by the people on his route, who, he said, liked music. He had been using skates to get around on since the previous Christmas when he had two deliveries per day. Some days, he did not skate, but also did not walk, rather running, as he took vitamins. He carried mail all day in Sierra Madre, a community adjacent to Pasadena, but also had duties in the Marine Reserve fighter squadron at a Naval air station, having been a machine gunner with the Marines during the Korean War. The main reason he was in a hurry to get his daytime work done, however, was his other job wherein, by night, he was the leader of a dance band, having his own 12-piece orchestra, playing bass, saxophone, clarinet and drums, as well as singing. On his day off, he liked nothing better than a nice, long hike, saying, at age 30, that he had to "keep in trim, man."

In London, it was reported that Britain's arbiters of male styles, the Men's Fashion Council, had this date decreed the new look for man's 1959 Easter suit, that the coat, the vest, the pants, and the topcoat all would have flares. To illustrate, the Council hired the ballroom of a large London hotel and produced a team of male models, all decked out in flared coat lapels, coat cuffs, coat hems, vest edges and pants bottoms. "You can move in this new style," said the chairman of the Council. "It's not like those continental tubular things which curl up all the time," referring to the Italian line, with its short coat and drainpipe trousers. In addition to flaring, the suits for 1959 were as colorful as an explosion in a paint factory. One model had worn a red-checked flared suit, the coat lined with hunting scenes which would frighten a fox, as it depicted only dogs and galloping horses. Another had worn a Prince of Wales checked jacket with the lining striped like an awning in green, scarlet and royal blue. Yet another sported a gray and black diamond weave which ran riot with fox heads. The puzzled reporter had asked what the flare meant, and the chairman of the Council responded with a downward and outward wave of his hands.

On the editorial page, "The Hot Air that Leaves Us Cold" finds that March had ushered in a great deal of hot air about a special session of the General Assembly, suggesting that the legislators were currently too busy to worry with the intricacies of State constitutional revision and court reform, and so action on those matters ought be put off until sometime in the fall at a special session.