The Charlotte News
Friday, March 20, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had gotten together this date and headed off for a weekend of informal talks on the German problem at Camp David in Maryland. Mr. Macmillan and British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd had come to the White House, from which they and the President had departed almost immediately after handshakes and formal greetings. They would go first to the Army's Walter Reed Hospital for a visit with ailing Secretary of State Dulles. After a half hour or so with him, they would then board helicopters which would take them to Camp David. At the rustic retreat about 65 miles from Washington, the President and the Prime Minister would enter detailed discussions which would keep them occupied through Sunday, with final talks probably to be held at the White House on Monday. Working with them would be Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter and Mr. Lloyd. During the conferences, they would seek to reconcile conflicting views and develop a unified Western allied viewpoint for negotiating with Russia. Mr. Macmillan had called for the development of "common policies that combine firmness and reasonableness." Among the chief allied leaders, including, in addition to the President and the Prime Minister, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French Premier Charles de Gaulle, there was no evidence of any disagreement on the need for firmness in facing the Soviet challenge regarding Berlin, as the governments of all four had proclaimed their intention to preserve their rights and access to West Berlin under the threat of a Communist blockade and the danger of war. The split among the allies appeared to be caused rather by the question of what constituted "reasonableness" in the preparation of proposals which they might present to the Soviets at a foreign ministers meeting scheduled for May. One of the points at issue was the possibility of following up the foreign ministers session with a summit conference. Another basic difference concerned the problem of German reunification. The President's advisers said privately that the U.S. wanted to press the Soviets in every way possible toward reunification.
In Washington, the Air Force had said this date that an airman had used a high altitude test chamber as a means to commit suicide. The headquarters spokesman said that it had been established that an airman of Anniston, Ala., had killed himself by that bizarre method at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona on March 8. The Pentagon spokesman said that the man had boosted himself to the equivalent of 70,000 feet altitude, where there was virtually no air and at which life could be sustained only by providing oxygen through a helmet or other such means. The Air Force said that the man had started the pumps on the chamber after all other workers had left in the evening and then had entered the chamber, with his body found the next morning and the altitude of 70,000 feet, the maximum capable in the chamber, having been indicated on a meter. His assignment had included work in and around the chamber and he had been considered, according to the Air Force, a model airman. He attended the University of Arizona during his off-duty hours.
In Redlands, Calif., it was reported that a toxicologist's report this date might determine whether an 18-year old University of Redlands bio-chemistry student had died from the effects of an hypnotic drug the prior Tuesday. He died shortly after he was found in a coma amid test tubes and vials in his dormitory room. Chemicals discovered in the room had been identified tentatively as mushroom crystals, mescaline and lysergic acid, all of which produced hallucinations. The student was described by relatives as "very curious about the effect of mushrooms on people, and interested in dreaming in color." Although he was a freshman, he was so advanced in chemistry that he had been enrolled in third-year classes. The deputy coroner had confiscated a tape recording on which the student had appeared to describe eerie dreams. The chief of police said that it had been established that he had conducted experiments with drugs on at least five fellow students, producing hallucinations by administering to them drugs. He said that investigators had found a notebook with entries by the student which, coupled with conversation on the tape recording, indicated that one of his subjects had experienced hallucinations for more than six hours. The student had written that his subject acted "sort of silly" and wanted to explain things, believing that he, as the tester, was sinister and was deceiving him. He said that the subject saw "a green tinge from behind my head. These are true hallucinations. His throat and stomach are bothering him." The police said that other tape recordings contained a philosophical dissertation on colors, believed to have been recorded by the student, and a recital of reactions to hypnotic mushroom potions. One of the log entries had recorded reactions of a student to an ambrosia known as LSD-25, which was said to cause temporary insanity. A University spokesman said that the student had been warned in January to discontinue his experiments. Mushrooms which caused visions had been known to man since the dawn of history. Mexican Indians had used six varieties to heighten the ecstasy of religious ceremonies.
In Rawlins, Wyo., it was reported that four Wyoming State Prison inmates, three of whom had been convicted of murder, had been thwarted in an escape attempt the previous day by a flash explosion in the tunnel they had been digging. One of them, 38, was in serious condition following the explosion, having suffered second-degree burns. The four had jimmied their cell doors and the bullpen door, then forced their way into the old hanging chamber of the prison, then dropped through a trap door into a tool shed, had then broken a hole in its concrete floor and started digging the tunnel. Near the end of their venture, some 50 feet away from the west wall of the prison, the explosion had taken place, apparently caused by the ignition of a leaking gas main running along the wall. One of the prisoners was considered an habitual offender and two others had been convicted of second-degree murder. The group had returned through the tunnel to the tool shed after the explosion and sought help. The prison doctors said that one of them had been burned and had possible lung damage, but none of the others had been injured.
In Charleston, W. Va., a 29-year old mother and her three children, pawns in an ex-convict's scheme against a former inmate to exact vengeance by demanding release of the latter to his custody, had been rescued by State Police after being held captive for 20 hours. The man had surrendered late the previous afternoon at a roadblock near Logan, some 70 miles south of Charleston, after firing two shots at trailing police. He had planned to use the woman and her children as a wedge to force the release of the man with whom he had previously served time for armed robbery at the State penitentiary. He had vowed death against the man and threatened torture and death against his hostages if his demands were not met. The two men had been cellmates for 17 months of the kidnaper's seven years in prison. The latter had been released from prison eight days earlier. He now faced kidnaping charges. He said that he had planned the kidnaping for about two weeks but had not selected the family in question as his victims until he had gone to their home, three doors from his own house, and gained admittance on the pretext of wanting to use their telephone. The family car had been spotted late the previous afternoon on a West Virginia highway by a state trooper who radioed ahead for help, after which the detachment commander at Logan had set up a station on the edge of the city to intercept the vehicle. Neither of the shots fired by the man as they trailed him had struck an officer. He eventually stopped and surrendered about 100 yards from police headquarters, where the detachment commander confronted him with a riot gun.
Another story on the kidnaping indicates that the man, while in the police station, had sworn this date that he would have his revenge against his former cellmate. Only when he talked about him did he appear upset. He said that if they sent him back to the prison, he would kill the man, that they could not keep him from the other in the prison and he hoped that the man was ready for him. He asked reporters who were questioning him: "Have you ever heard of hate at first sight? That's the way it was for me," when he had seen the other man. The previous day, the other man had said that he knew of no reason why his former cellmate was out to get him, that he had not been his cellmate when the other man had been released a week earlier after serving a term for armed robbery. But the kidnaper said: "I hate him with all my existence. When I see him, it's like being almost overcome by a blinding light. There isn't room enough in this world for both of us to live." He said, when asked, that the first thing he had done after getting home from prison was to look for a gun, that he had planned every move of the kidnaping long before his release from prison. He said that initially he had intended to kill two of his kidnap victims but that after he had gotten to know the children, he could not do it. He said: "I should have blocked my mind in order to carry out my plans. That was a personal weakness on my part." He might need some counseling.
In Henderson, N.C., as dozens of lawmen observed, resentful pickets and persistent non-strikers had met each other again this date as another work week neared its end in the four-month strike at Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills. During the mid-afternoon, representatives of the company and the Textile Workers Union of America were to meet for another negotiating session, one which a union leader believed could lead nowhere because "this company has no intention of settling this strike in a peaceful manner." The president of the mills, however, expressed the opinion that some progress had been made at the session with Federal and state mediators. During the morning, the mediators had conferred with Governor Luther Hodges after which the Governor had conferred with several State officials, including Attorney General Malcolm Seawell, Motor Vehicles commissioner Ed Scheidt, and SBI director Walter Anderson. A Highway Patrol lieutenant, in charge of the Patrol contingent at Henderson, had also attended. A Federal mediator said that his group had merely reported to the Governor on the talks. The secretary for the Governor, Ed Rankin, said that the meeting with Mr. Seawell, Mr. Scheidt and the others had been merely a regular conference which had become routine since violence had erupted at the strike scene. On Thursday night, crowds of strikers had roamed restlessly about through the streets, shouting "Scab!" outside the homes of non-strikers. Two dynamite blasts had been set off, one outside the vacant home of a worker who had fired on and wounded another man there whom he had seen "trying to light something" the prior Sunday night. The origin of the other explosion was not located. At the police station, an assistant mill foreman, almost in tears, told officers that the crowds were stoning homes of non-strikers, that he had a wife and kids, one of whom was epileptic and could not stand a lot of noise, saying he would not stand for it and would kill somebody first.
In Raleigh, it was reported, in a review of the week's legislative session, that the City of Charlotte had been given approval to go into the business of transporting passengers, property and airmail via helicopter. The State Senate had followed State House approval by enacting into law this date a measure which authorized Charlotte to apply to Federal or state authorities for a franchise to operate a helicopter transportation service within a 65-mile radius of any airport owned by the City. A bill designed to find new markets for products turned out by prison industries had received approval from the State House this date following lengthy debate, the main provision of which would require State agencies and departments to purchase from prison industries as long as standards of quality and price were met. The measure would now go to the Senate. Representative Norwood Ansell of Currituck County had announced that he would draft legislation aimed at enabling parimutuel betting windows to operate again at the Moyock dog racetrack. To get around a State Supreme Court Court decision which had closed the tracks at both Moyock and Morehead City, the Representative said that his bill would be a statewide measure with local option features, permitting any county to vote on whether to legalize the tracks and the betting. Bills to provide uniform assessment of property taxes in the 100 counties of the state had been introduced in the House and Senate this date, the identical measures carrying out recommendations of the State Tax Study Commission, with one bill to set up a uniform assessment plan, while the other would provide for systematic revaluation of property on an eight-year basis. The House and Senate would meet in joint session on Monday night to act on appointments by Governor Hodges to the State Board of Higher Education.
Also in Raleigh, it was reported that after a State Supreme Court decision had opened the door, requests were now pouring into the Motor Vehicles Department for the return of driver's licenses suspended for habitual violators. The assistant Motor Vehicles commissioner said that the Department was returning the suspended licenses as fast as requests were received, indicating that they had no choice after the decision on Wednesday by the Supreme Court, which had found that the law under which the Department had been suspending licenses of persons classed as habitual violators had allowed the director to exert unfettered subjective discretion, without guidelines for imposition, to suspend licenses, and was therefore unconstitutional.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that Charlotte's ancient Southern Railway train depot was "practically ready to fall down", and the new airport terminal was "beautiful", at least according to Congressman William Springer of Illinois, who had made the remarks on the House floor during the week. He had seen both facilities on a recent trip to the state to speak to Lincoln Day dinners in Morganton and Hickory and had made the remarks while addressing a Federal airport bill. He had found that the airport facility had marble inside reaching a level higher than his head, and that the City could build any kind of airport it wanted, but that the airports generally were receiving subsidies which were going to the ultimate benefit of the airlines. Mr. Scheer notes that plans for a new Southern railroad station were going ahead and invites the Representative to return in a few years when they would have something new for him to see, but could not guarantee head-level marble.
In Philadelphia, it was reported
that a Swedish freighter, plagued by a pigeon during the previous
nine days, called to mind "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The pigeon had shown up seemingly out of
nowhere, most likely from Long Island, N.Y., as the freighter had
headed down the sound for Boston on March 11. The cook had fed the
bird and the pigeon had liked the food. The ship had put in at Boston
and a crewman had released the bird ashore, but a few days later, as
the ship steamed toward Newfoundland, the pigeon returned. Again, in
Newfoundland, the pigeon was put ashore and again, as the ship sailed
for New York, the bird returned. It did not like New York any better
because it had rejoined the ship for the trip to Philadelphia. The
cook knew better than to shoot the bird, the sin of the ancient
mariner, for no one knew what dreadful tragedy might have befallen
the men of the ship in that event, perhaps to be cast adrift with water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink, a ship devoid of motion as if upon a painted ocean, and moreover, the cook had not a
crossbow. Instead, when the ship reached Philadelphia the previous
day, he called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,
and its representative traced the registration number on a metal band
attached to the pigeon's leg and found that it belonged to a man of
Rahway, N.J. The representative said that if experience taught
anything, the previous owner would not want the bird back, as bird
fanciers believed that a homing or racing pigeon which did not return
home had proved itself to be out of the pigeon family. It concludes
that the crew of the ship could quote the poem of Mr. Coleridge: "He
prayeth well who loveth well/ Both men and bird and beasts."
Maybe the bird
In Albuquerque, N.M., it was reported that a man had submitted to the District Court a petition to have his name changed from George Peter Janetakos to George Bill Janetakos.
As reported on the sports page of the following day, this night in the national semifinals of the NCAA basketball tournament at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Ky., the University of California would defeat Cincinnati, 64 to 58, and West Virginia would defeat Louisville, 94 to 79. The two winners would meet the following night for the championship, preceded by the consolation game for third place between the two losing teams. In the final Associated Press top 20 poll of the season, issued March 11, California had been ranked number 11 while West Virginia was number 10. Cincinnati had been ranked number 5 and Louisville was unranked.
Meanwhile, perhaps predictive of the
outcome, "Wrong Way" Spencer
On the editorial page, "Mecklenburg Must Seize the Moment" indicates that time was running out for school consolidation and that if the controversy over purse-string control was not resolved the following day, the issue might wind up closed and abandoned. In consequence, legislators, City and County School Board members, the County Commission and the Classroom Teachers Association representatives who would gather at the courthouse were confronted with a grave responsibility.
The big questions had generally been decided, with the value of a consolidated system of public education having been recognized for the entire county. The potential benefits to the children, their parents and the citizenry at large had been provided in detail. Furthermore, almost everyone wanted to avoid a bitter struggle for possession of the perimeter, a source of revenue which the City system needed and the County system could not afford to surrender.
The only problem of significance remaining was one of fiscal control. The County Commission wanted authority to determine any supplementary tax levy themselves, but the school boards said that the authority ought rest in the hands of the proposed consolidated board of education. The point at issue was little more than a technicality, for in practice, it would not greatly matter who held the purse strings.
It believes that the school board could handle the chore with a greater degree of sensitivity and care, that the Commission's intrusion was somewhat unnecessary, but that it was better to have a little bureaucracy than a stalemate on one of the most important issues facing the county in years. It thus urges the interested parties from both sides to come to the following day's conference with a willingness to compromise some on technicalities to achieve the larger objective. For if appropriate legislation was to be secured during the current session of the Legislature, the local delegation would have to have bills drawn without delay.
"Further Protection for Our Aged" indicates that hardly a month went by without tragic news from some point in the country of a disastrous fire at a home for the aged. It finds that, fortunately, the state had been spared, but wonders how long that luck would last.
There was presently a bill before the State House Welfare Committee to require licensing of all boarding homes for the aged. It represented a chance to lock the barn door before there were any losses. State Representative Ed Kemp of Guilford County had told the committee that there were some 62 unlicensed rest homes in the state, about half of which were substandard, overcrowded, understaffed, inadequate and fire hazards.
Not long earlier, a fire in the Midwest had taken the lives of nine elderly people who had been trapped in a rest home. Others had been injured while leaping for safety. It finds it a typical story because many of the residents of such homes could not help themselves in an emergency, and in a building which was a fire trap, there was little safety possible.
Representative Kemp predicted darkly that "someday the state will have a major tragedy." It finds that the possibility of that macabre event could be reduced by bringing into the fold all unlicensed homes for the aged and that such a measure of help to people who could not help themselves was owed them.
"Newest Outlook" indicates that the agent rivalries and traditions were crumbling fast, as Yale University students had snowballed cars and at a St. Patrick's Day parade, had battled police, resulting in the entire student body being placed on probation. Looking on in brotherhood, the Harvard alumni had formed the Committee for Restoration of Civil Liberties at Yale.
"Oct. 1, 1960: Saga of the GOP—I" indicates that with its imposing list of wealthy contributors, the Republican Party could stage a coup on October 1, 1960, about a month before the ensuing presidential election. From the first sampling of grassroots organizations, it appeared that the Republicans faced a heavily barred door.
The timing was important because October 1 would be the best date, according to space experts, to fire a rocket toward Mars. It suggests thinking of the advertising possibilities were the Republicans to sponsor that rocket.
It imagines a conversation between Cape Canaveral and "Ed Zorro", which it then proceeds to relate, which you may read if you so desire. As it is pure science fiction, we tend to ignore it. It suggests that the trip would take 260 days, when, in fact, NASA estimates that it would take between two and three years each way. And whether Zorro would make the trip appears rather doubtful, since he always insists on wearing a mask and carrying along his sword, which might not fit well aboard a spacecraft. It could, if miswielded, endanger either the crew or the wiring of the vehicle, and either could prove disastrous to the mission.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Experimental", indicates that someone was bound to notice the flaw even before the invention of the electric toothbrush was on the market. It was a motor-driven gadget to which one could attach a tiny brush which went round and round.
It finds that not all of mankind's inventive talents were going into destructive devices, that some of them were being used to make existence more tolerable, to push back the frontier with all of its hardships and to save people from back-breaking tasks, to conserve their energy for plugging in electric toothbrushes.
But it finds that there was a catch. The electric toothbrush was not yet self-plugging-in and it suggests that perhaps it was the reason why it was not yet being marketed. They had heard that it was connectable to the radio to transmit one's favorite morning program while brushing one's teeth.
"In other words, the electric toothbrush has a long way to go, and we're not sure yet that we intend to follow."
Don't worry, soon enough, by 1963 or so, they will come out with a rechargeable version so that you do not light yourself up while brushing your teeth.
Drew Pearson indicates that to understand the U.S. position during the conversations between the President and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, it was necessary to understand the position taken by the Administration at an important National Security Council meeting three weeks earlier, wherein it was decided that Premier Nikita Khrushchev was bluffing regarding Berlin and that there would be no military showdown. The decision had been based on the intelligence that the Red Army marshals did not want war, that the Soviet Presidium did not want war, and that although Mr. Khrushchev had talked about war and even threatened war regarding Berlin, he, personally, did not want war. Even if he did, he could not afford to buck both the Red Army leaders and the Presidium to precipitate war.
A careful study of Mr. Khrushchev's statements showed that he had threatened war or the equivalent of war on at least four occasions. When the British and French had landed at Suez in November, 1956, he had threatened to send rockets to London and Paris. Again, when the U.S. had landed troops in Lebanon, he had talked of military retaliation. When Formosa's offshore island of Quemoy was under Communist Chinese fire from the mainland, Mr. Khrushchev had again threatened military action. Finally, he had threatened war if the U.S. used armed force to open the highway to Berlin. In none of those cases, thus far, however, had he carried out his threat.
Weighing all of those factors, the National Security Council had decided that Mr. Khrushchev was gambling over Berlin and that under no circumstances would he risk a nuclear war. It was decided that he might risk a local war with ground troops, as he had 22 Red Army divisions in East Germany against only five U.S. divisions in West Germany. But it was decided that he would not risk nuclear war and that the best way to call his bluff was to make it clear that in any showdown, the U.S. would use atomic bombs. It was why the President, at his last press conference, had talked at length about nuclear war and had diminished the prospect of use of ground troops. It was not unusual for the President to ramble at a press conference, but in the last one, he had turned aside reporters' attempts to change the subject and had continued to talk at great length about the fact that he would rely wholly on nuclear weapons and not on ground troops.
He indicates that the President had been angry at General Maxwell Taylor, Army chief of staff, for telling Congress about the need to mobilize for the Berlin crisis and the necessity of obtaining more ground troops, conveying the opposite impression desired by the National Security Council, another reason why the President had gone out of his way to diminish the need for troops. His remarks, however, when cabled to Europe, had cut the ground from under General Lauris Norstad, U.S. commander of NATO, who had been arguing, begging and cajoling NATO members to fill their quota of troops. That was the background of White House statements on Berlin during the previous week, and also the background guiding the President in his talks with Prime Minister Macmillan.
Doris Fleeson indicates that the visit of Prime Minister Macmillan in Washington was strictly a summit meeting, as planned by the White House. He had talked with the Canadian Prime Minister in Ottawa the previous day and then had flown to Washington in time for a dinner at the British Embassy, to which only Vice-President Nixon and a select list of the upper-ranking officials of the State Department had been invited, with no members of Congress included, not even the chairman of committees dealing with foreign policy.
At noon this date, Mr. Macmillan was scheduled to leave with the President for Camp David, 30 miles from the press headquarters at Gettysburg. For the better part of three days in virtual seclusion there, past the deadlines for the Sunday newspapers and television news programs, the two old friends would discuss the Berlin crisis. The only engagement which British authorities would acknowledge for the Prime Minister was a private briefing for British correspondents at the end of the visit, it being understood that he wanted to see American correspondents also, but was reluctant to initiate that meeting until he was certain of the President's wishes. The arrangements were said to represent the President's conviction that the Russians were being told too many military secrets and ought be denied news about allied diplomacy.
The President also carried over from World War II his belief in shirt-sleeve conferences carried out as far away as possible from the protocol of state dinners and other formalities. There was, in addition, every evidence in recent weeks that the President realized the gravity of the Berlin crisis and the peculiar burden which he carried regarding it since the illness of Secretary of State Dulles. The President's press conferences were not always an effective use of that sounding board, but he had held of late many more in succession than at any time in his Presidency. During the current week, the press conference shared in the lowering of the curtain regarding the visit by Mr. Macmillan by not occurring, and reporters could make contact with Camp David only through White House press secretary James Hagerty.
To give himself the last word, the President, in another change of pace, had reversed his 1955 summit strategy when the leaders had met and referred their agenda to a foreign ministers meeting. On this occasion, the President wanted the foreign ministers to meet first and turn over their findings to the heads of state for final choices. Implicit in that change was acknowledgment that no substitute existed at present for the ailing Mr. Dulles. It was being noted that his probable successor, Acting Secretary Christian Herter, had made less than a forceful appearance in his important role as principal advocate of the embattled 1959 foreign aid program, a revealing measurement of the burdens on the President in a dark hour.
Robert C. Ruark, in Limuru, Kenya, tells of a man from the Wakamba tribe who would have been indistinguishable from any American black man of good station, except that he had his front teeth ceremoniously knocked out. Sometimes the front teeth had been filed to sharp points and later replaced with fangs when the exposed tooth rotted. His tribe was still savage and as elephant poachers and bushmen, were unsurpassed. But the man differed from his cousins in many respects. Mr. Ruark regards him as one of the best gun bearers in the world and as a hunter, the equal of most men, white or black, whom he had ever known. He was also a fine mechanic on any type of modern vehicle and an excellent chauffeur, yet not interfering with his ability to swarm up a tree like a monkey. He owned many huts, many sheep, had many wives and many children. The wives tended their own patches of maize, chattered happily with each other and raised their children in communal friendship. He was a happy man with a happy family.
He could be duplicated more or less by a half-dozen African friends of Mr. Ruark who had not been hurried into civilization. They were Africans who had not been forced by spellbinders, Mao Mao oaths, noisy agitators and mob conductors into the current frenzy of immediate nationalism. The Tom Mboyas and Dr. Hastings Bandas depended primarily on the simple savage for their raw material, people who were unlettered, naïve and not far from the bush people, who could be stirred to frenzy by any witch doctor, people who still lived in a strange world of spirits, superstitions and dark fear.
To his knowledge, the aim of the over-aged, decent white men in Africa was not to retard the African but to help him through a gradual process toward what was called civilization, largely by teaching the African trades, improving his health, inoculating his cattle and teaching him not to ruin the soil by over-grazing and over-planting. That was a necessary step between bush savagery and the future parliamentary operations of the African's own country.
But the Mboyas would not have it so, and the present tragedy of Africa, he finds, had come basically from black hands and unscrupulous heads and hearts.
A letter writer from Chapel Hill commends the newspaper for its contribution to safety through its editorials and feature articles, especially one by reporter John Kilgo which had appeared on March 12, titled "How Would You Like To Be Child's Killer?"—even if appearing in the "final edition" under a different title on the front page. He indicates that he was an experienced driver of 45 years without ever having injured himself or anyone else. Many people had sought to establish the reason for the slaughter on the highways. He attributes it to a "whirlwind of a generation untrained in habits, manners, customs, courtesies and attitudes." He advocates that licensed driving not occur before age 18 and that driver training courses be established in all of the high schools of the state. The schools which had such courses were doing a magnificent job, he finds, and the formal training ought be required for everyone to obtain a driver's license. He finds it unnecessary to put on another 100 Highway Patrolmen, enabling the state to save millions and still make a greater contribution to safety by taking at least half of the present force, those qualified to teach, and placing them in the high schools to help with the driver training courses. He believes that a patrolman should have no more right to break the speed limit than any other citizen by driving between 90 and 100 mph. He finds that the attitude of most people involved in accidents was that they were in charge of their own world exerting their own will, and he encourages changing the attitude toward others, having a moral responsibility for the other fellow, a moral personal responsibility for the slaughter on the highways. "We should have the vision, courage and daring to rise up with a determination to stop this unnecessary carnage. It's murder."
Incidentally, while searching for the above-referenced piece, we came across an item on an inside page, indicating that Robert F. Kennedy would speak this date at the Charlotte Executives Club, on the topic of the numerous complaints received by the Senate Select Committee on Misconduct by Labor and Management, of which he was chief counsel and on which his brother, Senator John F. Kennedy, sat. Senator Kennedy had spoken on January 15 to the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce.
The president of the Executives Club during the current year was Pete McKnight, editor of the Charlotte Observer and a friend of the late W. J. Cash when the two had worked together at The News between 1937 and May, 1941, Mr. McKnight eventually having become editor in March, 1949, holding that position until going on leave for a year at the end of July, 1954, to head the Southern Education Reporting Service, investigating and reporting to newspapers on the impact of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of May, 1954, eventually not returning to the newspaper at the end of the year, instead becoming editor of The Observer in October, 1955. The outgoing president of the Chamber at the time of Senator Kennedy's talk, the occasion of installation of new officers, had been Thomas L. Robinson, publisher of The News.
Hey, as reported the following day, you could not accuse The News of any, even slight vestige of prejudice, as they afforded the black News carriers a separate-but-equal banquet on Thursday night to that on this date for the white carriers. And don't get snide and say that they were all carriers of the same disease, as they were laying down their papers in the afternoons as candles in the rain.
Speaking of 1941, this date's episode of The Epitaph
And there was, according to the Reno newspaper, in Minneapolis a ten-year old boy who had a magnetic hand. He might have been able to move west and make a living as a hired gun, assuming his magnetism did not throw off his aim and disturb the agility of his trigger finger. Whether it was better or worse than the notorious case of the hairy hand from 1929, in which it was recounted that a surgeon was sued for malpractice for making the burned and scarred hand worse for the skin graft from the patient's chest having produced a hairy palm when the surgeon had guaranteed a 100 percent good hand, we cannot ascertain. But that was the way of it in those days, at least in 1882, when the nattering nabobs of negativism proliferated in and around the town too tough to die.
Anent W. J. Cash, or "Wilbob" as stated in the Mexican certificate of death, later in the year, in November, a brief piece would appear in The Wake Forest Student regarding the life and death of the author. While the student author of the piece compressed some of the details, such as Cash's life in Shelby, which actually did not follow until 1932 when his parents moved there from Boiling Springs, ten miles down the road, to which they had moved in 1912, when Wilbur was 12, from his native Gaffney, S.C., plus some other trivia of varying degrees of import, such as his doing post-graduate work at Wake Forest in journalism when actually he had attended the Law School for a year, in total, the errors do not amount to any substantial detraction from the general accuracy of the overall picture. The student also added, in the last sentence, the detail that when Cash was found dead in the Reforma Hotel bathroom on the night of July 1, 1941, hanging from a hook on the door, his feet were touching the floor.
While not definitive and discounted by 1967 biographer of Cash, Joseph L. Morrison, both in a pre-publication article in the Red Clay Reader and in the chapter titled "Why?" in the biography, W. J. Cash: Southern Prophet, finding that most suicides wound up with their feet touching the floor, the student was on the right track for being skeptical of the suicide conclusion, as we have demonstrated herein. For the critics of the murder-by-Nazis theory uniformly had overlooked the single fact that the largest spy bust to that point in U.S. history had occurred on the weekend of June 28-29, 1941 in and around New York and New Jersey, resulting in the arrest of 32 spies, and, within hours of it becoming front-page news on June 30, the Nazi spies in Mexico were frantically wiring their masters in Hamburg and Berlin seeking means of egress from Mexico back home. Neither of the two biographers of Cash made even scant mention of those facts, though we ascertained the fact of the spy arrest for ourselves in about 20 minutes at the library in July, 1991 by simply looking at Time for the week of July 7, 1941, searching therein for mention of Cash's death.
U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Josephus Daniels, close friend to FDR, having been his "chief" as Secretary of the Navy to FDR as Assistant Secretary during the Wilson Administration, and whose son, Jonathan, had co-sponsored, with Blanche Knopf, Cash for the Guggenheim Fellowship which took him to Mexico at the end of May, 1941 with his wife, Mary, a fellow News writer whom he had married on Christmas night, 1940, also apparently had other ideas about the death of Cash, though he never expressed them publicly. For on July 12, 1941, after he had been made aware of Cash's death by Mary early on July 2, and had, along with his wife, a distant cousin of Mary, been essential in keeping Mary from falling apart in the wake of her husband's death and arranging through the State Department in Washington a cooked-up passport to enable her exit from the country for Cash having locked their papers in a safe deposit box, Ambassador Daniels had written to Ezequiel Padilla, Mexico's foreign minister, seeking, without elaboration or explanation, the arrest of three named German spies, Georg Nicolaus, Friedrich Karl von Schleebrugge, and Paul Max Weber. Later, in February, 1942, 240 German spies in Mexico were arrested, two tried for being saboteurs, though none were convicted, all deported back to Germany.
And there was in place a contingency plan to kidnap a specific Mexican journalist who was reporting from Berlin in 1940, to hold as a hostage in the event the Mexico spy ring was ever compromised, to get the spies out of the country. It takes little imagination in an emergency to convert such a plan to the kidnaping of an American journalist known to be in Mexico by the fact of various periodical announcements of it, including in Time on March 31, 1941, and holding him for ransom to get back to Germany, perhaps with something having gone awry during the course of the attempt and the victim, perhaps resisting the effort, having been strangled.
There is much more, which we have previously related, as the fact that oil man William Rhodes Davis had arranged an elaborate scheme between Mexican and German officials to enable in 1939 the flow to Nazi Germany, hard-pressed for oil to power the Panzers, of expropriated Dutch and British oil from Mexico, incapable of beng sold on the ordinary world market for the fact of it having been expropriated in March, 1938 without payment to the companies which had owned it—the oil shortage to be resumed after the British blockade of the Baltic, following the declaration of war against Germany on the heels of the Nazi invasion of Poland, September 1, 1939, becoming dire by late 1941; hence Pearl Harbor, to exploit the oil reserves of the Dutch East Indies for oil-deprived Japan and Germany. Mr. Davis was staying in the presidential suite at the Reforma in June, 1941. Mr. Davis had been a subject of excoriation by Cash in some of his late editorials at The News in 1941. Was he invited perhaps in his last days to meet with Mr. Davis at the Reforma for an exclusive interview? something which would have attracted Cash at the time, eager to supplement his writing of the novel about an old Southern family with more contemporary reporting, specifically his previous dedicated reporting on the Nazis and their wartime movements. Mr. Davis was found dead at his home in Houston on August 1, 1941, the apparent victim of a heart attack, though it has been suspected by researchers, not without confirmation in the records, that he was dispatched by British intelligence agents operating within an arm of MI6, British Security Coordination, for his continuing activities seeking to aid the German war effort for his own profit.
In any event, without the benefit of the incomparable resources of Bailey & Spencer of Hollywood, we had to do what we could by our lights through the years in ferreting out this mystery.
A letter writer from Elkhart, Ind., indicates that the spirit, body and hope of the purposes and promises of the various wartime agreements at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam had been to defeat, disarm and divide militaristic, aggressive Germany for the safety and security of Russia in particular, and the whole world in general. He finds that now, not only the letter but the spirit of those wartime agreements had been broken by again rebuilding, rearming and now seeking to reunite Germany. He acknowledges that the large capitalist corporations now nearly ran West Germany and that they and their West German partners had grown sleek and fat on the rich subsidies of foreign aid which was contributing billions of tax dollars to the former enemy's economy. The Russians figured that since the West had torn up most of the wartime agreements, it would tear up the remainder, namely the Berlin part of the deal. He indicates that there was a desperate need for statesmen who would lead from the mess back to friendly coexistence in a disarmed world, at which point a united Germany might be possible.
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