The Charlotte News

Saturday, March 21, 1959

ONE EDITORIAL

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Gettysburg, Pa., that the President and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had agreed this date on a formula for offering to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev the prospect of a summit conference later in the year. The proposed draft of the summit meeting plan had been dispatched immediately to the French and German Governments and the other NATO allies for their reaction. The formula, when fully approved, would be included in a new note to Moscow on negotiations regarding the Berlin crisis and German problems generally. The Western powers had already agreed to propose a foreign ministers meeting at Geneva beginning on May 11, and to hold out at least the possibility of a following summit conference. This date's agreement had been announced by U.S. and British press officers immediately after it had been reached. White House press secretary James Hagerty, with British spokesman Peter Hope by his side, had reported to newsmen on the progress of the Eisenhower-Macmillan discussions at Camp David, by saying: "Both Hope and I can say that there is complete agreement between our two governments that we are looking to negotiations as a means of settling controversies in Europe, that we have agreed on the general line on which we think the reply to the Soviet note dealing with the matter of a summit meeting should be formulated. We are now communicating our proposals to the French and German governments and to our NATO allies for their consideration." The two leaders had opened the second day of their Camp David conference in the Maryland mountains, joined with their regular advisers, and by Sir Anthony Rumbold, an assistant undersecretary of the British Foreign Office in charge of European affairs and high-level East-West talks. Mr. Rumbold's presence, along with such regular advisers as Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter and Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, had spotlighted the problem of working out some agreeable arrangement on the issue of the summit meeting. Mr. Macmillan wanted to give Mr. Khrushchev definite notice of unconditional Western readiness for a summit meeting. The President had been standing firm on his position that a summit conference ought be held only if developments in a prior foreign ministers meeting would justify it. The talks had been resumed in pleasant spring weather, the same type in which the President and Mr. Macmillan had flown by helicopter the previous day from Washington. But skies were beginning to show traces of cloudiness and there was a forecast for worsening weather and possible snow during the weekend. Mr. Hagerty had telephoned word of the opening of this date's discussions from Camp David to the press center in Gettysburg and had estimated the previous day that they would begin at 9:00 a.m.

In New Delhi, India, it was reported by the Indian Foreign Ministry this date that fighting was raging in Lhasa, the capital of Communist-held Tibet. A terse midnight radio report from the Indian representative in Tibet had said: "Fighting in immediate vicinity of consulate. Situation tense and rising." That was the only thing received in New Delhi, which suggested the possibility that the radio, the only free-world link with Tibet, may have been cut off. The Indian consulate was just outside Lhasa, between the Dalai Lama's summer and winter palaces, which were only two miles apart. The uprising had been sparked, according to the Indian press, by an order to the god-king from the Communist Chinese command in the capital, telling him to report at once without bodyguards. The whereabouts of the Dalai Lama, who was worshiped by the 1.3 million Tibetans as their religious and political leader, was not known. There was speculation in the Indian newspapers that the captive ruler might have been kidnaped by the Communists or had fled from his Potala palace under protection of friends. New Delhi authorities reportedly asked the Communist Chinese Embassy in New Delhi to take any steps necessary to protect the Indian consulate in Lhasa.

Winter had bowed to spring this date, after unleashing a farewell storm on Friday which had brought near-blizzard conditions and dust storms to parts of the Southwest and three tornadoes which had caused little damage in Texas. Two persons had died in Colorado from exertions blamed on the snow there. One tornado had struck near Trenton, Tex., 50 miles northeast of Dallas, destroying or damaging five houses and six barns. Another tornado had uprooted trees and damaged two houses as it brushed the northeast edge of Marshall, Tex. The third tornado had damaged 22 homes, three badly, at Paxton, a village of about 200 persons 40 miles south of Marshall, near the Louisiana border. Winds of 86 mph had howled across the Texas Panhandle on Friday night, piling up snow in three-foot drifts, with blowing snow having reduced visibility to zero. The Texas Highway Department had closed all roads in the Panhandle north of the Canadian River because of the drifts, saying that the drifts in the Texline area had been so big that snowplows had difficulty moving them.

In Henderson, N.C., the unoccupied home of a worker at the Herriot-Henderson Cotton Mills had been shattered by an explosion on Friday night for the second night in a row in another upsurge of violence in the bitter strike there. Officers reported that the blast apparently had gone off inside the home of a family who had fled their home during the week after the father had wounded a man outside the home early the prior Sunday morning. Two rooms of the house had been extensively damaged by two explosions. The man had been charged with assault the prior Sunday morning after he told officers that he had fired a shotgun blast which had wounded a 23-year old man, whose father worked in the mill. The latter, still in a hospital, was charged with attempting to dynamite the other man's home and with conspiracy. Meanwhile, Governor Luther Hodges in Raleigh was keeping close watch on bargaining sessions being held daily in an effort to end the four-month, violence-marred strike. Union and management negotiators were to hold their third bargaining session in as many days during the current afternoon. Officials of the mills were to reply to a union counter-proposal on one of the key issues in the dispute, arbitration. Boyd Payton, Carolinas director of the Textile Workers Union of America, had said the previous day that the union had offered to limit the number of cases which could be called to arbitration. When the company had refused to renew a 14-year old arbitration clause in a new contract with the union, the two Henderson locals of the union had walked out on November 17. Management had reopened the two mills on February 16 on a one-shift basis. Since that time, some 500 persons had crossed the union picket lines, through jeers and sporadic outbursts of rock-throwing, with most of the workers being newcomers to the two plants. Thus, the negotiators were faced with another formidable obstacle to a contract agreement, the seniority rights of workers as against those of the strikers. The Governor had met with Federal and state negotiators on Friday night at his mansion, saying that he was encouraged that the bargaining was continuing and urged that the two sides reach an agreement. Officers reported that for the second successive night a motorcade of automobiles had paraded through the streets, with their occupants honking horns and shouting as they passed homes of persons who had returned to work in the mills. An officer said that as the motorcade had passed the home of a woman whose son-in-law was working in the mills, a steel pellet had been hurled through a picture window.

In Raleigh, the scoreboard for the week in the Legislature showed that some legislative proposals had been moved forward but that others had fallen back for losses. The lawmakers were achieving their fastest pace to date. Some important bills had begun to move from committees to the floor and each day had brought fresh debate in the State House. A bill for a commission to plan and supervise construction of a new legislative building had survived arguments in the House, but had met fresh questioning before a Senate committee. The Senate had sidetracked a measure to provide legislators seven cents per mile in travel expense for weekly trips home. At present, they received only one round-trip each session. By a vote of 23 to 22, the Senate had delayed its consideration of the measure until the general appropriations bill. After two days of debate, the House had cleared a measure to expand prison industries by giving their products preference for purchase by State agencies and institutions. The bill would now go to the Senate. More House debate had been sparked by a measure to set up a study group to consider highway organization and it would gauge sentiment for the present seven-member Highway Commission, or the old 14-member arrangement.

Bob Slough of The News reports that Vicki the elephant had munched on peanuts and tugged at a leg chain at the Airport Park and Zoo during the morning, as an auctioneer chanted musically in the background. Vicki was being sold, along with rides and equipment and all the other animals of the zoo. An auction company had started the sale during the morning and hundreds of people had jammed the grounds to take a last look at Vicki, while others were planning to buy the amusements being sold. The head of the auction company explained that the property had been sold for industrial development and everything would be sold off, including Vicki, who had once roamed Mecklenburg County while police and hastily-called elephant "hunters" had tracked her down, attracting national attention in the process. All of the big rides, ten of them, were to be sold as one unit. Animals would be sold later in the day. The auctioneers chanted away as an assortment of tools and miscellaneous equipment had gone up for sale, the first of the equipment to be sold. Vicki was expected to be sold sometime after noon, after the rides and other equipment had been auctioned off. In addition to Vicki, an ostrich, a lion, a bear, a chimpanzee, an ocelot, a lynx, a wildcat, a wolf, five foxes, an alligator, and an assortment of other animals were being sold. Also for sale were auto rides, a ferris wheel, a train, a tilt-a-wheel, a chair plane, car scooters and a merry-go-round. Buyers had come from 20 states, some as far away as Texas.

In Worcester, Mass., it was reported that a little girl, whom the President had called "a brave little girl", had won her fight against death. Lili Sargis, eight, had heard the news on Friday that she was going home from the hospital the following Saturday after nearly a year of treatment for serious burns. A hospital spokesman said that it was almost a miracle, that she had an unusual convalescence. The doctors and nurses spoke of her recovery in awed tones, recalling the child's condition when she had been rushed to the hospital on April 7, 1958, with 81 percent of her body seared, and 70 percent of the burns listed as third-degree, the worst type. No one had said it, but the general feeling in the hospital then had been that her chances were at best very poor for survival. Nevertheless, the painstaking work of bringing her back from the brink of death had gone on without respite until definite signs of progress had begun to manifest themselves. In the months-long fight, every bit of medical knowledge of the hospital staff had been brought to bear. There had been 56 operations involving general anesthesia, and varying phases of multiple-stage skin grafting. Her accident had occurred through her desire to excel in school. On the morning of April 7, she had awakened early to review her homework, with her mother upstairs. She had become intrigued by a new table cigarette lighter which her mother had received the previous day and when she flipped on the lighter, the flame had spurted up and ignited her nightgown. Her screams had brought her mother racing to her side. Her entire body was now fully surfaced with skin and function was returning to her muscles. There was still much therapy ahead and one phase had been the learning of how to knit, with the little girl proud of her prowess with the needles, telling visitors that she could now knit. It had been the previous fall that she had received a message of encouragement from the President and Mrs. Eisenhower, writing from their vacation home in Newport, R.I., urging her to keep up the fight. The little girl was looking forward to seeing her fellow townspeople and wanted to thank them personally for their tireless efforts in raising more than $2,000 to help defray the cost of her treatment. Don't play with lighters or matches.

We, incidentally, know whereof we speak, as once, when we were 14, we, as if motivated by some hidden, nefarious force from without, decided within, one afternoon after school, to light aflame with matches the newspapers atop the magazine rack in the hallway of our abode, the result having quickly developed into a small conflagration which we had not foreseen, though, fortunately, the lavatory, through an adjacent open door, was only steps away and we were able quickly to extinguish the blaze, which, in another 30 seconds or so, might have been far worse. As it was, it only singed our lashes. Fire is nothing with which to play. On that occasion, our older brother happened to arrive at the home in the minutes afterward, and inquired as to what had happened to the magazine rack's charred contents, and we responded, abashed and not a little nonplussed at our own prior actions, that we had lit it aflame for unknown reasons—even if, about a year later, it might have intersected with some sublimated referent point of casual muse in our cranial vault with leaden clarity of protracted compass, as, in retrospect, we might inquire as to whether we were seeking to eliminate in the rack Life and Look from our lives because of the content being carried, often of a tempestuous and troubling nature. Our brother merely laughed, not, after all, though ten years our senior, able to respond with any less than hypocritical remonstration for our myopic demonstrative activity, for, a mere four years earlier, in the same locale, he had, while at home from college on a Wednesday in January, presumably during an exam intermission, found the water cut off, and promptly then went out for awhile. When we arrived home from school later in the afternoon, we found a maintenance manager of the apartment complex standing in the middle of the living room with our brother, observing a floor full of fallen plaster and a gaping hole in the ceiling above, the plaster having fallen after becoming saturated with water from the lavatory across the hall, obviously finding its low spot in the middle of our bedroom, thus seaping over the living room to produce the mess. Our older brother had, mistakenly, but without proper foresight, that higher faculty perhaps having been cut off temporarily by the pressure of exams when, it is said, students enter a state of mind psychologically indistiguishable from that accompanying psychotic reactions, turned on the water faucet of the lavatory to its full extent, and, finding no flow, had failed to effect its closure. All we recall was the maintenance manager saying, as we walked into the sad, silent scene, "Ya'll gonna to have to pay for this here." We did not say what we were thinking, such as, "Why was the water off in the first place, little moron from maintenance management, with whom we have had truck previously, and who likes to act as if you own the place and everyone in it are your serfs and peons?" No, for our understood youthful place in the world and the need to be respectful of our elders, we maintained our mum. But, we did get a new carpet to replace the somewhat worn old one, saturated as it was beyond salvage, though for a bit of time, the living room had only bare oaken floors on which for us to put together our cars from Detroit, utilizing all of that glue. Well, the point being that everyone has to live by experience, regardless of age, especially when young, and develop foresight for our actions, lest they wind up doing us in from without. If we recall the time sequence correctly, the latter incident occurred only a week or so after the little chihuahua, which hated our guts for stealing its thunder in birth, had suddenly shrieked and keeled over of a heart attack, gritting its teeth the while across the floor at us per its usual demeanor. Whether it was the spirit of the disconcerted little doggie, demonic as it was, at work then, we know not and need not speculate, especially as it may have gone to the great beyond a week or so after the incident, perhaps shivering from the absence of its usual carpet to keep it warm underneath the chair. It was, if that was the case, a blessing in disguise as its periodic yap-yap-yapping was not conducive to studious attention to our homework.

In Modesto, Calif., it was reported that 32 slightly built students had crammed themselves into a telephone booth on the Modesto Junior College campus the previous day and laid claim to a silly season record. The mark had been set even as 20 sophomores at St. Mary's College in Moraga, Calif., were boasting of their record in a regulation booth, 32 by 32 by 84 inches. That was also the size of the booth on the Modesto campus, but there had been one difference, that the booth was horizontal and did not contain a telephone. One of the students, who was in the middle of the pack, and had emerged looking slightly like a well-pressed tablecloth, had commented: "I feel like a sardine, one on the bottom of the can." Hundreds of fellow students had cheered as the 32nd student had crammed into the mass of bodies, leaving his legs in a V-for-Victory sign. Radio station KFIV had three reporters on the scene making frequent "beeper" calls to the station on the progress of the stunt, taking two hours to complete. Students had been selected at random, with first one and then another trying unsuccessfully to jam inside the booth, which had been loaned to the students by the telephone company, one of their surplus outdoor types. After the 32 students had made the grade, it was found that the average size of each was about 5'8" and the weight, about 140. Apprised of the Modesto feat, St. Mary's students had scoffed: "It must be a wrong number." The season had opened two weeks earlier when 15 students at England's Cambridge University had wedged themselves into a phone booth, followed by a claim from Hatfield Technical College in Hatfield, England, that 19 students had set a new mark. Then had come the news that 25 students in South Africa had managed to cram into a booth. Hence, the cry at Modesto Junior College the previous day: "Beat South Africa." (The Life piece attributes this cry to the St. Mary's students, but, based on the logic of the situation, it appears that the newspaper story had the better of the ascription. Perhaps, the St. Mary's students can sue for casting them in a false light.) In San Francisco, a telephone company executive had pondered the news and observed: "Very interesting, but I just hope that some of these students come to realize a booth can be used also for making a telephone call." As soon as one of those booths keels over from the weight beyond any company testing limits for the anchorage, one of its windows then breaks in the resulting crash and slashes open a carotid artery or two, you young hellions are going to regret your devil-may-care, winding up in prison for manslaughter, where you wild desperadoes belong.

On the sports page of the Charlotte Observer the following day, it was reported that this night at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Ky., California had defeated West Virginia narrowly, 71 to 70, to win the NCAA national championship in basketball, the first time a Pacific Coast Conference member school, later the Pac-8, had won the championship since Stanford had done it in 1942. It would not be the last, though California has come close only one other time, the following year, losing to Ohio State in the finals. Oregon had won the first NCAA tournament in 1939, and since, other than 1959, and UCLA's eleven titles, ten of which were in the John Wooden era between 1964 and 1975, only excluding 1966 and 1974 in that run, with the last in 1995, plus Arizona in 1997, no other member of the former Pac-12 has done so. (The above-linked newsreel, in stating that it was the first "West Coast" championship in 17 years either confuses the conference name, changed in 1959 to the Athletic Association of Western Universities, or forgets the consecutive championships of the University of San Francisco, led by Bill Russell, in 1955 and 1956.) California had been ranked number 11 and West Virginia, 10, in the final Associated Press top 20 poll of the year, issued March 11. Number 5 Cincinnati had beaten unranked Louisville in the consolation game, 98 to 85, for third place.

On the editorial page, "The Case against American 'Rigidity'", an editorial book review of What's Wrong with U.S. Foreign Policy, by C. L. Sulzberger, indicates that the latter, a roving diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, had been in Rangoon in the autumn of 1957 to record for several hundred thousand subscribers the activities of the murderous, if affable, Burmans. But he had been plainly fed up. Outside his hotel, a noisy Buddhist festival was in progress and inside, the air was filled with swarms of small green insects. He found Burma to be a bore.