The Charlotte News
Friday, April 24, 1959
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Panama that National Guardsmen this date had reported finding a second cache of arms on the beach where Roberto Arias and a rebel band had landed six days earlier. The fugitive husband of ballerina Margot Fonteyn was still eluding patrols searching the coast and hills around Santa Clara, 75 miles west of the capital. The rebels were believed to be well-armed and several empty boxes had been found which officials said presumably contained rifles. The latest arms cache included 24 pistols, three revolvers, five loaded cartridge belts and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. A similar cache had been found on Wednesday. A Government prosecutor said that new evidence showed that Ms. Fonteyn was aware of her husband's plot to overthrow President Ernesto de la Guardia. The famed British dancer had been expelled from Panama on Wednesday following questioning in which she had professed ignorance of any revolutionary activities on the part of her husband. She had flown to New York and then back to London on Thursday, still refusing to talk about the revolt. The prosecutor told newsmen that he would not have let the dancer go had he then had in his possession letters which had been found in a beach cottage near Santa Clara on Wednesday. He said the letters, addressed to Ms. Fonteyn and her husband, had been written by a British friend living in New York, and the letter to Ms. Fonteyn said "the plot thickens very much", referring to "strange calls from Alastair to me." Authorities identified the latter as a friend of Sr. Arias, who had visited Panama recently. Officials said that a memo found in the cottage showed that Sr. Arias had received more than a half million dollars during the previous 18 months from American movie star John Wayne. The latter told newsmen in California that he was a longtime friend of Sr. Arias and that they were associated in a shrimp company along with other stockholders.
In Henderson, N.C., it was reported that first-shift workers had entered the struck Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills without incident this date after the third straight night of violence in the town. Following a pattern established earlier in the week, only a few strikers had shown up at the mills' heavily guarded North and South Henderson plants to jeer and shout at incoming workers. Rifle shots had hit the plants again on Thursday night until second-shift employees departed under police and Highway Patrol guard. No serious injuries had been reported among the workers or among the large number of shouting strikers gathered outside the gates. Operation of a second-shift at the plants, which had been struck on November 15, had brought criticism from Governor Luther Hodges who said that he had warned the management it might mean bloodshed. Shortly before the second-shift had left, Highway Patrolmen had fired two parachute flares over the South Henderson plant while other patrolmen patrolled a back street across from the mill where most of the sniper fire had originated. Under the light of the flares and the watchful eyes of the patrolmen, the workers departed without incident. In Raleigh, Governor Hodges, who had been a former textile official, disclosed that he had warned the mill president, John Cooper, on April 16 against opening the second-shift. Mr. Cooper, who started the second-shift on April 20, told the Governor that to close the shift would be "an absolute surrender to force and violence." The Governor said that he had released details of his letter to Mr. Cooper "to remind Cooper of his personal responsibility for the present difficulty." Mr. Cooper said previously that he would close the mills permanently if he had to close down any of the shifts. The strike had begun after the company had insisted on elimination of an arbitration clause from a new contract with the Textile Workers Union of America, the strike having apparently been settled on April 17, until the issue arose of the unexpectedly small number of workers being accepted back to their original positions, causing the TWUA executive board then to refuse to sign the settlement after it had been ratified by the membership.
In Montréal, it was reported that more than 50 ships anchored over 30 miles of river were ready to pass through the 475 million dollar tunnel called the St. Lawrence Seaway upon its opening the following day, and sail into the Great Lakes.
In Sacramento, it was reported that the State Senate on Thursday had joined with the State Assembly in voting to abolish the unique system which allowed candidates to run on both party tickets in state primary elections. Senate approval by a vote of 22 to 15 had sent the legislation to Governor Pat Brown for his signature, which appeared certain, as he had advocated the repeal of the cross-filing system in his inaugural message at the beginning of the year. The Assembly had passed the measure by a wide margin. A reform Legislature had installed the cross-filing system 46 years earlier and it had long helped incumbents win re-election in the primary. Until recently, most offices had been held by Republicans. Repeal of the law had been a fixture in the state Democratic platform. It was the first Democratic Legislature since 1898, as Democrats had won all except one state office the previous fall. The overturning of the cross-filing system would mean the end of widespread double nominations in state primaries. Republicans would be able to vote only for Republican candidates and Democrats for Democratic candidates. Debate on the bill had brought warnings and denials that removal of the system would lead to party bossism. The Senate Majority Leader, Hugh Burns of Fresno, a Democrat, had led the opposition to the bill which the Assembly Majority Leader William Munnell of Montebello, had introduced for the Governor. Mr. Burns declared that the repeal would restore party bosses, arguing that it would deny voters freedom of choice in selecting party candidates. Under the present system, he said, "California has been singularly free of party machinations that go on in other states."
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the Charlotte City School Board would meet the following Monday in the morning and petition the County School Board to take the City Board under its wing, the first step toward school consolidation. The City Board would join the County Board in becoming a consolidated City-County Board if a vote on a supplemental tax levy would be approved by the voters. If voters did not increase the supplemental tax rate, the boards would retain their separate identities and the school systems would not be merged.
Mr. Scheer also reports that a young man had a date for Davidson's big dance weekend this date and the following day, and on Monday had a date and 15 offers of other dates, on Tuesday had a date, plus 30 offers, on Wednesday, a date, and 35 offers, including one marriage proposal. On Wednesday night, he had no date, just 35 offers and the marriage proposal. On Thursday morning, he had a blind date, 35 offers and one marriage proposal. On Friday, he was a worried man because of the blind date. His simple college life had become complicated on Sunday night when the 21-year old Davidson student had appeared on the "College Bowl" program on CBS from Minneapolis. The University of Minnesota had defeated Davidson in the quiz game and the student from Davidson was a member of the four-man Davidson team. The program had a break in the middle during which the master of ceremonies talked informally to the participants. The conversation was set up in advance and it was suggested that the student from Davidson mention the dance weekend, with Duke Ellington's band to be present, and to say that he did not have a date. He followed his instructions, saying, "I'm making an appeal to the American public for a date." Things then started happening fast for him and letters started coming in. By mid-week, he had 35 offers of dates and the marriage proposal, albeit from a 12-year old. He enjoyed it all, until Wednesday night, when he called a girl at Duke University with whom he had a date all the time. She said that he did not need a date as she had heard him on television. The boys at the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house came into the picture and decided to try one of the offers. They flipped through the letters and one of the boys had known one of the letter writers from Atlanta. The student who had received the offers then phoned the girl and she accepted. He was a little apprehensive, but found that her picture looked good and he would take a chance on the blind date. "That's show biz."
Max Muhleman, sports writer for the newspaper, reports that a reported "battle of speedways", one to be constructed by automobile racing star Curtis Turner and associates and the other a project of Concord promoter Bruton Smith, apparently was no battle at all. According to reports from parties concerned in both ventures, the only super-speedway Charlotte would see was the one announced a week earlier by the Turner group. Their proposal for a mile and a half track to be constructed 6 miles from the city limits on N.C. Highway 49 South had been met with enthusiasm by Pat Hall, general manager of the Arrowood Industrial Development Corp., on whose property the site was. A meeting had been scheduled the following week to decide the exact leasing terms. Topographical maps were being produced with actual construction expected to begin within 30 days. The lease still had to be approved by Mr. Hall and four other officers of the Arrowood corporation. Mr. Hall said that he could not yet announce official approval since it had to come after a meeting of the Arrowood directors, which would occur soon. The Arrowood industrial sites encompassed 2,266 acres and land proposed for the track would require between 200 and 250 acres, flanked by the U.S. 21 superhighway to be built in 1960, as well as the present Highway 49. In announcing purchase of a 200.8-acre tract bordering the Arrowood land adjacent to Pineville for the proposed two-mile, 2.5 million dollar track, Mr. Smith emphasized the imminence of a collaboration between him and the Turner group. It was said that both the latter and Mr. Smith felt that two speedways would be out of the question and that a merger was certain. But Mr. Turner this date discounted any possibility of a merger. It was known that the Daytona Speedway's 2.5 mile layout cost less than 2 million dollars, and that the Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, 1.5 miles, was in the range of $500,000. Mr. Turner said that his track would be in the neighborhood of $700,000, not 2.5 million. Zoom-zoom-v-rooom, wop, bop, belew-bop, wop, bam, boom…
In San Francisco, it was reported that Osmo was an ocelot who loved two club-footed chickens not only unwisely, but too well. The Shah of Iran had presented Osmo to an airline stewardess the previous year in appreciation for her services on Pan American during his visit in the U.S. The stewardess had made a pet of the Brazilian ocelot but needed a sitter for it during her overseas flights. The previous week, she had left the pet in the care of a friend across the bay in Berkeley. Osmo had escaped. A professor of poultry husbandry at the University of California, who had spent more than five years developing club-toed white Leghorn chickens, said that club toes showed the chicken had an inherent lethal disease and he had been breeding them for club-toes to learn how to eradicate the ailment. On Sunday night, something had gotten into the professor's genetic research plant and slaughtered 14 of the chickens. The plant supervisor was asked to lay an ambush for the invader. With a small-caliber rifle, he bagged the intruder with one shot on Tuesday night. It had been Osmo. The ocelot was taken to the University's vertebrate museum for taxidermy.
On the editorial page, "North Carolina's Patience Is Exhausted" indicates that when sit-down strikes paralyzed U.S. industry during the Depression, President Roosevelt had summed up his impartial disgust with a line from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet": "A plague on both your houses."
United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis had been outraged by the remark and had said so in several thousand words, but the country had generally agreed with the President.
Governor Luther Hodges similarly had the support of most North Carolinians during the week when he had criticized with equal ire the deception and irresponsibility of both management and union officials in the disastrous dispute at the Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills. It suggests that no North Carolina Governor had ever worked harder to bring peace to a strike-torn community. But he had been thwarted at every turn by both the mill owners and the labor leaders. As a result, there had been new bloodshed and civil disorders despite the "settlement" which had been negotiated the previous week.
It finds that both sides had to share the responsibility for prolonging the problem and both sides deserved the criticism of the Governor. Officials of the Textile Workers Union of America, by not taking proper steps to prevent violence, had done irreparable harm to the cause of organized labor in the state. Strikers had run wild in Henderson, committing acts of lawlessness which worried decent citizens. The mills' management had actually invited further trouble when it left the Governor, the mediators and the TWUA with a wholly false impression of the number of workers who would be returned to their jobs. It finds it to have been a shoddy show from start to finish and the state's patience had been thoroughly exhausted.
It indicates that the mess would be settled only when both sides would begin to demonstrate a decent concern for the community in which they lived, for ethics and moral standards of public behavior. It wonders how long it was going to take.
"Why Bring Back the Bad Old Days?" finds that the state would be re-divided into 14 political baronies if the General Assembly passed a bill which had already been endorsed in the current week by the House Roads Committee. The measure, introduced by Representative Walter Jones of Pitt County, would junk the present seven-man "statewide" Highway Commission and replace it with a larger body made up of representatives of 14 geographical divisions. It was the same discredited system which had been abandoned in 1957.
Thanks to groundwork conducted by Governor Hodges and an excellent study commission headed by State Senator Claude Currie of Durham County, the state now had a Highway Department of which it could be proud, providing a more unified operation throughout the state and building roads according to overall needs rather than the private whims of some local political boss. That assured adequate long-range development of a highway system to meet the growing needs in the motor age. Under the old system of geographical divisions, the local commissioner had more authority than was good for him or the state. The result had been that highway operations and practices often differed from division to division. Some commissioners had used their peculiar power somewhat recklessly and the reform, when it had come, had long been overdue.
It urges that the state ought not turn back the clock, that the highways ought be built on the basis of needs and traffic rather than on political favoritism and private pressure. The Jones Bill ought be defeated.
"Confused Compass" indicates it could sympathize with the Omaha mailman who had visited Los Angeles and gotten tangled in the freeway system for seven hours, finding it something akin to the feeling it had when it first discovered the Charlotte Coliseum in the eastern quadrant of the city with North Independence Boulevard headed south when leaving town.
"As We Prepare for the Big Invasion" indicates that in about ten days, the staff of The News would migrate over to the Charlotte Observer building. As a common denominator, it looks to television program titles, including "Wagon Train", "the speed which our swift motor-scooter couriers seem to use when delivering News copy; "Restless Gun", "when one of our copy runners has to wait just as he's ready for a scooter takeoff; "Trackdown", "the day a scooter apparently decided to go by way of Belmont; "What's My Line?", "trying to find the right telephone to talk with the cross town composing room; "County Fair", "the perimeter area to which reporters run to escape all this madness"; "Union Pacific", "a settled state once these operations are merged in a single building."
"Bargains Vanish" finds the economy indeed to be in a sorry state when a person's penny could not net but 3 1/2 peanuts from a vending machine.
A piece from the New York Times, titled "April as It Is", finds April to be a welcome transition from March to May, a time of hope and promise. But despite a persistent myth, April was seldom sweet and gentle, devoted to bee and blossom, especially in the Northeast. The origins of the myth, it suggests, had probably come from England. Geoffrey Chaucer had spoken of "April with his showers sweet," and Robert Louis Stevenson had written of "April come to bloom," and Robert Browning had yearned, "Oh, to be in England, now that April's there."
April, however, in the Northeast was not England's April. Of the U.S. poets, Robert Frost had come closest to the truth when he said that April could be "one month on in the middle of May" or "two months back in the middle of March." Stephen Vincent Benet, speaking in urban terms, called it "grimy April".
"True enough, April can be lovely, spangled with bloom and the newest of young leaves. It can be, and usually is, melody with the voice of song sparrow and robin, red-wing and oriole. And the call of the spring peeper is the very voice of April. But April can also be cold rain, raw wind and, on occasion, snow. The cruelest aspect of April's tantrums, however, lies in the way they sometimes frost our hopes and expectations. We want to believe in that myth of gentle April. We want May in April. We are tired of winter's cold leftovers. Given a taste of spring in April, we want a full meal of it. And that's the gist of the whole matter of April."
Drew Pearson indicates that Northern Congressmen for a long time had griped at the way Southern Committee chairmen had used high-handed methods to block important legislation, but now found the shoe on the other foot. The previous week, a Northern Congressman, William Dawson of Chicago, the senior black member of Congress, had gone to Chicago after either sending or authorizing a mysterious telegram aimed at influencing a grand jury investigating corruption in Alabama. The grand jury was digging into an important highway scandal and had not sought advice from Washington, though it had sought the testimony of a Congressional investigator sent to Alabama on behalf of the Government Operations Committee, who had brought back a report which indicated serious charges made against Governor John Patterson's Administration by State Representative Charles Trimmier in the Alabama Legislature.
But without wanting to read the report, though after consulting Congressman Frank Boykin, Alabama's leading race-baiter, Mr. Dawson had either sent or authorized Mr. Boykin to send a telegram to the grand jury stating: "There is not a scintilla of evidence in the land case. We washed our hands of this case on the floor of the House yesterday." The telegram not only had been untrue, but was couched in terms deliberately calculated to influence the grand jury. The fact that the deceptive and misleading telegram had been sent in the name of a responsible chairman of a House committee illustrated one of the great weaknesses of the "democratic" system in Congress at present.
The telegram had been sent from Congress to Mobile at 3:58 p.m. on Thursday, April 16. Word of it had reached Congressman John Blatnik of Minnesota, chairman of the subcommittee on Public Roads, on Friday, April 17, from Mr. Trimmier. Mr. Blatnik, who was in charge of the investigation, did not know anything about the telegram but knew all about the investigation and should have been consulted. But Mr. Dawson had not bothered to do so. When Mr. Blatnik learned of the telegram, he tried to reach Mr. Dawson, but the latter had gone to Chicago. Meanwhile, the grand jury, meeting in Mobile to find for or against one of Governor Patterson's henchmen in the serious highway scandal, had received a telegram from Mr. Dawson saying that there was not a scintilla of evidence. Yet, the jurors knew that the Congressional investigator sent from Washington had found just the opposite. They were thus left wondering whether to believe Mr. Dawson or the evidence.
Mr. Pearson indicates that in the situation, not a single member of Congress had been willing to go over the head of the absent Mr. Dawson and inform the grand jury that the telegram had not represented the Committee's actual findings. The system of committee seniority was such that Congress was willing to see a miscarriage of justice rather than overrule an absentee chairman.
Walter Lippmann indicates that the previous week, the German Embassy in Washington had published an address delivered by the West German Ambassador to the U.S., Wilhelm Grewe, in which he had replied to a series of recent articles by Mr. Lippmann regarding the two Germanys and Berlin. He had argued fairly and in good temper, but the sum of his plea was that all proposals for negotiation thus far were bad and that any change from the status quo would be for the worse.
Mr. Lippmann regards it as a dismal and defeatist attitude to insist that it was not possible to improve the present situation and that even if it were true, it was a counsel of despair. He regards it as sheer fantasy to suppose that the present situation could be maintained into the indefinite future.
Dr. Grewe, who, in addition to being the Ambassador, was a principal legal advisor to the West German Government, had gone so far as to declare that "every new treaty arrangement on Berlin can only worsen the situation." He said that if a new treaty were negotiated with the Soviets for Western presence in and Western access to Berlin, it would concede that it was within the power of the Soviet Union to grant such rights to the West. Mr. Lippmann regards that as a strange argument, suggesting that the new statute or treaty could recognize and reaffirm the right of the Western allies to be present in Berlin and that to argue that every new treaty arrangement could only surrender Western rights in Berlin and that no new treaty arrangement could fortify those rights. It was not a legal or political proposition but rather a political neurosis engendered by profound self-distrust.
He also finds it a diplomatic blunder for it ignored the fact of the great change in the Soviet position between the previous November and the prior March. In the Soviet note of November 27, 1958, the Soviets had asserted that the Four Power Occupation Agreement of 1944 and 1945 had become "null and void". On March 19, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had declared that the Western governments "have lawful rights for the deployment of troops as occupiers." Mr. Lippmann regards it as a mistake not to propose that the latter position be put in writing. It would not do the Western allies anything other than good to have lawful rights clarified and reaffirmed as there was considerable confusion about them. The State Department lawyers had been talking about the West being in Berlin by "right of conquest". But according to Ambassador Grewe, the right of conquest did not exist, stating that it "has been overruled by the common declaration of the victorious allies that they did not intend the annexation of Germany [by the declaration regarding the defeat of Germany, June 5, 1945]."
Considering those factors, Mr. Lippmann believes there was good reason to take advantage of Mr. Khrushchev's admission to tidy up the Western legal position.
But that was not the only or most important reason for negotiating a new statute. A substantial reason was that it would afford the chance to correct past mistakes and make precise the exceedingly loose and vague documents under which the allies and also the West German civilians dealt with West Berlin. He believes that the Western powers would be unwise if they did not consolidate the legal position in West Berlin before the Soviet Government made a peace treaty with the East German state.
A clarification of the right of access to West Berlin, based on the recognition of the West's lawful right to be in Berlin, would be an infringement on, not a worsening of, the status quo. What the West could not forget was that although the nerves of the West Berliners were good, they were not superhumanly good and they could not be counted on for an indefinite future in which there was no hope of getting out of the strategic trap in which they had to live, for a future in which their daily lives depended on imprecise and fragile agreements.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that if the Western nations meant to defend the freedom of West Berlin, they had to obtain for West Berlin a constitution which rested not only on the military power of the West but also on the assent and approval of the whole society of nations. It was for that reason that he believed the West ought take the new statute of Berlin to the General Assembly of the U.N., first, to make the enforcement and observance of the new statute more visible to the world, and to provide an opportunity to reaffirm the idea that Germany would be reunited with Berlin as its capital. He asserts that, practically and morally, such a reaffirmation was needed. The world in general, and the Germans in particular, would not place much faith in any declaration about German unity which was made by the Western allies alone as it was well known that the Western allies had adjusted themselves comfortably to the partition of Germany and that their hearts were not in the reunification.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain,
indicates that it had been diet time in England the previous week and
on every woman's page of the newspapers fresh "crash" diets
were appearing. He supposes that it was also diet time in America
because the bathing suit and shorts season was "a-cumin'
He says that the sordid thoughts occurred to him because he was "as fat as a hog" at present and never felt better in his life. He was fat all over, not just in one place. It bothers him so much that he had just finished a lunch including asparagus with hollandaise sauce and a covey of lovely little spring potatoes, with a delicious second helping of the dessert. Psychologically, the reason he was as fat as a hog, he suggests, was that he had been eating like a happy man, as he was, resulting from having spent the previous three months in Africa consorting with honest savages and honest hyenas, and because he had been eating everything in sight except people.
Now that he was home again, he did not want to be beautiful and did not want to start making a chore of food consumption. By the time he finished a new book and the column and attended to other chores, he would be as lean as a rake handle anyway.
And he goes on about it… He finds dieting hopeless and asks for pardon as he goes to walk around the block because they were having apple pie with clotted cream for dinner this night and he still had a guilt complex about the hollandaise sauce they had for lunch.
A letter writer indicates that in the February 24 edition of the newspaper, there had been a report of a half-hearted gesture made on behalf of the voting rights of perimeter residents in the upcoming municipal elections. The delegation to the Legislature could not pass a law to permit perimeter citizens to vote in those elections, but had no trouble passing a law to let city residents vote on a county issue, the establishment of the perimeter. He finds it peculiar. He says that he was biased because he lived in the perimeter area to be annexed at the start of the following year. For paying the extra taxes, he would obtain garbage service, for which he presently paid $15 per year. He believed that the majority of the perimeter area was being taken. They also would not have the ability to vote for city officials, upcoming bond issues, etc., which they had helped to pay off. He regards it as unjust and taxation without representation.
A pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "In Which Is Disclosed A Magic Word In American Business:
"When you say 'Credit'
Man, you said it."
But if you bet
Man, you'd best beat it.
Framed Edition
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