North Carolina Newspapers

Page 4-B The Chapel Hill Weekly j "If the matter it important and you are sure of your ground, never fear to be in the minority." ORVILLE CAMPBELL. P*U*er JAMES SHUMAKER, Getteral Manager IPubtMwd every Sunday and Wednesday by the Chapel Hill Publishing Company, Inc. 128 East Rosemary Street, Chapel Hill, N. C. P. 0. Box 271 Telephone 967-7045 Subscription rates (payable in advance and including N. C. sales tax)—ln North Carolina: One year, 18.15; six months, $5.09; three months, $2.06. Elsewhere in the United States: One year, $6.00; six months, $4.00; three months, $3.00. Outside United States: One year, SIO.OO. Sale Os The Franklin Street School Property Step In The Right Direction Unassailable logic in the public af fairs of Chapel Hill is a commonly rare commodity. To assume a position here is to observe the line of would-be antago nists forming to the rear. Newly elected school board member Ed Tenney, however, may have hit a large lode of unanimity with his pro posal that the Board dispose of the pres ent site of the Town’s junior and senior high schools and use the proceeds to build new schools in better locations. Mr. Tenney’s thinking on the matter is not simply personal opinion. The pres ent West Franklin Street site is located strategically in what will become the commercial heart of Town, a location not notably conducive to the most ef ficient teaching and learning. It is also one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Chapel Hill. Its sale might well float the construction of two additional schools. If it is purchased and developed by commercial interests, the added reve nue from property taxes would sweeten the coffers of Town and County. Both are now stuck with relatively little in the way of a tax base because of exten sive public holdings by the University and other State agencies in Orange Coun ty. Also, the West Franklin plant is be ginning to show its age. In terms of con temporary school design it is already obsolescent. In a few years it will be out moded as a design and woefully inade quate to handle the school system’s an ticipated enrollment. It stands athwart a proposed link of Pittsboro and Frank lin Streets, a major item on the new’ Thoroughfare Plan, and a thorn Jn the side of the University’s complex. The link would enable the Uni versity to close off the present Pitts boro Road, which splits the Health Af* The Dog Days Os August Get Lost This must be the way the world ends not with a bang, but with Dog Days. The air is fevered, the sun vicious, the trees exhausted, and the tap water permanently tepid. In the distance at night the lightning flashes in wild spasms, but never a drop of rain falls. Dogs lie in the shade, tongues dangling and sides heaving like little bellows. The effect of a bath is bliss, for five minutes; then the skin be gins to grow sticky again. Even scientifically conditioned air hov ers close, threatening to press you to death if you drop your guard. The tongue grows weary and the throat muscles tir How About Some Freedom For The Dogs THE VINEYARD GAZETTE Maybe, with all the talk of freedom, something should be said for the free dom of dogs to bark, at least in the coun try. We have here not only what seems legitimately to be an inalienable right, considering a dog’s obligation to look after things and make appropriate com ments, but one of the last of the familiar country sounds <?f long ago. Tractors have superseded the horse’s whinny, the rattle of wheels, and the creak of harness. Now that milk comes in individualized (how’s that for a suit able word ) cartons, there is not much mooing or lowing. If you wake in the early morning, the chances are that you will hear nothing from any sheep. . The dinner bell has largely disappear ed along with the cow bell which was often adapted to the purpose. We don’t Wednesday, August 7,1963 fairs campus, and open the site to de velopment with good access over a through street. With considerably more than a proper school at stake, it is all but impossible to visualize the School Board's failing to take steps to dispose of the property, or some commercial interest’s not leaping to secure it for development. Hark What Sound? The new Miss North Carolina, Jeanne Swanner of Graham, visited the campus here recently and found, to practically everybody’s astonishment, Carolina Gen tlemen to be uncommonly bashful. Someone had advised Miss Swanner beforehand that the Carolina Gentleman of yore was suave, attentive, debonair, gregarious, and generally possessed of devastating charm. Thus forewarned, Miss Swanner might have approached the campus warily. Af ter she had been here a couple of hours, however, she was more dubious than cautious. “Where is he?” Miss Swanner asked of the traditional Carolina Gentleman. “Folks haven’t been this shy anywhere I’ve been.” The Carolina Gentleman is still here, of course. His voice may be idling smoothly in a dark corner of The Rat, holding forth with authority at a chap ter meeting of the frat, or baying the moon from the shore of Hogan’s Lake. The only explanation we can offer for his uncommon reticence in the pub lic presence of Miss North Carolina is that the Legislature’s gag law has cut wide and deep. Big Brother is listening, if not watching. ed after a couple of gallons of cool liquid have been consumed. A drink of something anything becomes just something else requiring the exertion of ■swallowing. Cooking, though torture, is actually ' simplified. A roast will practically cook just by being brought into the kitchen; there is hardly any difference between the kitchen and the oven. A listless bird flies over now and then, but ornitholog ical activity is at a low ebb. Even the squirrels have gone elsewhere. It is a grisly time, the end of which you cannot hasten, but can only await, struggling for breath, forcing every move. The wages of sin must be August. know how people are called to dinner nowadays; maybe they show up without being called, or perhaps'we are so close ly civilized that we can all hear the words when someone stands in the door way and says, “Dinner is served". The language of the dinner bell was cheerier and more eloquent. These country sounds not the nat ural ones of birds, crickets, cicadas, breaking surf, and so on, but the ones associated with human activity, such as the putt-putt of the old time engines when fishermen started out at dawn have been too much superseded. But dogs still bark. To hear them is usually a comfort. Who wants an empty welkin? Who would be without the country companion ship that some few surviving sounds, such as this, communicate in an increas ingly estranged Atmosphere? Letters To The Editor ‘Old Well,’ Demonstrations & Heat Dear Sir: I am prompted to write this letter by the recent publication of an excellent work of fiction and by the fear that it might escape the notice of your book reviewing staff —a fear stem ming not from any lack of faith in the competence of your re viewers, but rather from the observation that they tend to concern themselves with publi cations of national, or at least State - wide, prominence, while the novel which has attracted my attention will be of only limited interest, concentrating as it does upon the affairs of an academic community. So, if your policies permit, I should like to under take a brief review ctf one of the most starkly penetrating books I have read in recent years. The authoress has aptly chos en the Epic style with which to illuminate her subject; the num ber and diversity of characters is jstrongly reminiscent of War and Peace, and the great variety of subjects with which she deals do nothing to dispel this par allel. Her theme is the terrifying helplessness of a young man thrust into the hostile environ ment of a liberal arts university, beset by the overpowering evils of a corrupt Administration wal lowing in its crumbling decay of homosexuality, bribery, oppres sion, and favoritism, and a Com munist-inspired and Communist dominated conspiracy between the local newspaper, the student operated University newspaper, and a group of hard-core Party members who dominate the Uni versity faculty, all culminating in the brutally inefficient hand ling by local and University law enforcement agencies of a hair raising Series of nine political assassinations, the true facts of which are caleulatingly suppress ed hy all concerned. The most frightening of the - ' -'“"'."A 1 * I * sis? ■. vßrv '• iHH Mate . ■ ; ~ f Id m ms 4m i•- gig * Hr.* , .rfniTMlllfl * ir. -. Morehead Sundial On The University Campus The Devil As A, Native American Type From the Bulletin of the Amer ican Association of University Professors. The San Francisco Examiner, no friend of the radical right, is nonetheless disturbed because Dr. Edward Strong, Chancellor of the University of California at Berkley, has equated the radical right with Communism. In his welcoming address to this Associ ation’s Forty-Ninth Annuel meet ing, Chancellor Strong stated that “a consistent open-forum policy ... is not being main tained when a speaker from the radical right is permitted to speak on campus but a Com munist is not.” For our part—taking him to several antagonists in this novel is a skillfully drawn example of the classic arch-villain. A pro fessor of philosophy, he towers cruelly over the sensitive young souls with whose education he has been entrusted, bent on in doctrinating them into his god less and anti-societal discipline. Shouting his message of doubt, disbelief, and heresy, he sows the seeds of discontent in their impressionable minds, seducing them into a state of confusion about the immutable self-truths which are their rightful heritage. In a flash of true literary greatness, the authoress leaves her protagonist-student nameless. In the labyrinth of darknes'- which she has created, he wan ders, stripped even of the pro tecting identity of a name; alone and friendless, stumbling along the depressing dirt paths of this 20th century Sodom at four o'clock in the morning, revolted by his chance presence at but one of the countless bacchanalian gatherings so typical of the com munistic students, importuned on every side by merciless homo sexuals, stymied in his search fdr the meaning of God and de mocracy by the crazed rantings of his professors, he has nowhere to turn —for even the clergy is infectaf, contaminated by its con stant exposure to the disease around it and undermined by the infiltration of the very left. His only hope is one courageous man: a retired Army Colonel who stands bravely apart, chal lenging the forces of evil to meet him on the field of honor, in un armed combat. The hurled gaunt let exposes the powers of dark ness for what they are: cowards to the core, cringing in the blinding intellectual light cast upon them by the overwhelming logic of this battle-tempered warrior. This is, indeed, the high point of the novel, bringing into focus as it does the authoress’ commanding perspective of a mean only the extremists of the radical right—we like Chancellor Strong’s equation very well. In deed, the time has long passed when extremists of the radical right should be able to assert with impunity that they sit across the see-saw from Americans for Democratic Action. They em ploy methods frighteningly simi lar to those of the Communist Party. To reason with them is impossible, for they are concern ed not with reason but with in timidation, discord, and suspi cion. “It has all bee# research ed!” they cry, as they flourish their charges of Communist dom ination ; but the reaelrch proves to to it assn than a tangled situation fraught with the possi bilities of reality. The other individuals and inci dents with which the authoress illustrates the perils confronting her protagonist are too numer ous to chronicle here in detail, but they include a duet of ex hibitionists and a trio of Fas cists, all undoubtedly in the em ploy of the Communist-riddled University, a plot to vilify the image of Christianity, arising in a neighboring city but instigated and encouraged by the Marxist college newspaper and the sinis ter resignation of the President of another, nearby, university. With the technique of the au thoress, I can find only one fault. The continuity of the story line is a trifle ragged; the intercon necting events, so brilliantly painted, do not quite flow one into the other with complete clarity and logic. This may, of course, be en intentional device, used to further magnify the chaos created by her fertile imagination. The character de velopment is flawless: From the opening sentences, each of the individuals portrayed became for me living and breathing crea tures, so startlingly life-like that they might almost have been people I know, twisted and warp ed beyond belief by the sickness which the authoress so graph ically communicates on every gripping page. “Blood on the Old Well”, by Sarah Watson Emery, is indeed a masterpiece of fiction and a monument to the times in which we live. Respectfully, Barry T. Winston Dear Sir: “Why Chapel Hill?” you ask. 1) The greater the freedom, perhaps the more likely the free dom can be used to advance yet further toward equal rights for all persons. It is indeed salutary dream spun in a dark corner of a troubled mind. They look ask ance at the First, Fourteenth, Sixteenth, Seventeenth and what other?—Amendments, those chinks in the armor of their nar rowness. They would make of education not an hutrurnent for the advancement of knowledge, which they fear, but a machine clicking out propaganda to or der. According to the San Francisco Examiner, of “the. groups and individuals so loosely classified’’ as the radical right, none “has foreign political affiliation*.” Fair enough, if we assume that the devil is a native American when freedoms are used. We are grateful for the relative open-fiess to change which exists in Chapel Hill. 2) The more explicit and lofty one’s community goals, the more apparent is any failure to attain them fully and the more proper is an expectation to live up to them. Those who do not pro fess to be democratic or civiliz ed cannot be held to those stand ards. 3) The assessment of fi Com munity cannot rest entirely upon what it is now in contrast to what it used to be. One can feel very good in Chapel Hill when looking backward or look ing elsewhere when judging the community's moral stature. The gauge, however, must remain our practices in contrast to our professions. 4) The accompanying docu ment, which lists more than 50 -items that can comprise an agenda of “unfinished business” for the Mayor’s Committee on Human Relations and other con cerned citizens, may help explain “why Chapel Hill” cannot rest on its laurels. P.S. To the 14 segregated bus inesses of concern at the mom ent, one probably must add most, if not all, of the barber shops, beauty parlors, and some ether service establishments. P.P.S. In calculating the per centages of “open businesses” in Chapel Hill and Atlanta, one should include only the same types of businesses in the base— e g., restaurants. Certainly far more than 25 per cent of all the retail stores in Atlanta accept Negro money across the coun ters equally with that of others. Donald P. Irish Dear Sir: “Why Chapel Hill?” Because man has an obligation to con stantly seek improvement for himself. So long as there exists room for improvement (and there always is), then one must endeavor to improve. Athletes —Looking Back— From the files of the Weekly: IN 1923 Advertisement: Now for a Dip in the Pool! For fun, on a hot day, there’s nothing like an hour or so in clean, clear water. We have spared no effort to make this port ah Ideal one. It is lined with concrete and has a concrete walk running aU around. There is a spring board, and a diving stand. The water is filtered, and it is changed frequently. Parties find everything pre pared for them. They may bring their own bathing suits, hr may get them here. If they bring a picnic dinner or sup per, benches and tables await them under the trees. CARRBORO SWIMMING POOL Admission 25 Cents. Suits of Quality Are Rented at 25 Cento Each. IN 19&J From Chapel Hill Chaff: “One day this week I arrived at what is frequently called— disagreeably, to my mind—the half-century mark. Taking stock of myself, I make the following observations: I have lost a large part of my hair, so that the sun’s rays dance upon my crani um as upon burnished glass. Many of my most useful teeth are gone. I have an extra chin. My eyesight is nothing like as good as it was; when the doc tor put glasses on me a year or so ago I thought I would need Ihem only for reading, but now I find I must have them to get the bones out of shad. When I examine my waistline thought fully, in the shower bath, I am reminded of a barrel. When some emergency requires me to move rapidly, I soon begin to wheete. With a deep distaste for toil of every description. I have not achieved prosperity that permits me to indulge the hope of prolonged periods of idleness; and that’s the way I want ’em— prolonged. “The sunshine boys will tell me that this is a distorted pic ture, that there are maty things I have to be thankful for. And they are entirely right, of course. No doubt I will soon be in a mood of cheerfulness. I am merely setting down my domin ant reflections upon becoming 50 years old.*' m ims - "Dasttid Cm fMt ftw* are constantly attempting to set new records; inventors ar» dili gently trying to build better mouse trapse and no one asks "why?” \ It surely is not contradictory for one to be proud of his past accomplishments and still seek greater perfection. “Why Chap el Hill?” Because almost is not good enough! Sincerely, Irwin Sacks Dear sir: Last week the Junior Carolina Playmakers presented “Spring for Sure,” a sprightly comedy revolving around the complexi ties of mankind. All was flood was mockery between the polish ed urbanites and the mountain hiUbillys. Each exemplified a contrasting way of life, difficult for the other to understand. But it is not of this I wish to write. 'Whether the play was good or bad, different or indifferent, a tragedy or a comedy is not the point. It is the fact that the audience, with one accord, were “Hot for Sure!’’ Have you ever tried concen trating on the lines of a drama at the Playmakers Theatre when perspiration is running down all sides as you swelter in the heat? Only two windows were opened and they wafted nary a breeze, or if they did, it was absorbed before it reached my seat. Those that had been forthright enough to bring fans were using them, a distraction to others in the audience but one was grateful forj any air they set in motion. And if we in the arena were hot, how about the poor players, enacting their parts in suits, coats and heavy make-up, May be "the play’s die thing,” but a larger, air-conditioned theatre would certainly do more justice to it. And also be more credit to this, one of the first universities to have a Dramatics Course. Sincerely yours, Frances Berkeley Floore out in Westwood, has the ambi tion to become the director of a zoo, but right now he seems to face the necessity of getting rid of the zoo that he already has. “This zoo consists of a vervet named J. T. A vervet, if per chance you need to be told, is an African monkey. For a while tltolw was another inmate of the Campbell zoo, a, skunk. But Don ald sat the skunk free not long ago- He sees her in the nearby woods NOw and then but does not attempt to recapture her. “The reason he is going to give up J. T. is that he is going away to school in ieptsmber and his family doesn't want to take charge of the vervet. “But school won’t last forever, and Donald is looking forward to the time when he can go into the zoo busniess seriously. “ ‘What I’d like to do is go on an expedition to Africa. Some times young men are taken along on these expeditions as assist ants, but usually they have to pay part or all of their expense. I don’t know what I’ll do about that.* ” 1 IN 1953 .1 Jeff Mg Jim Tired “For the first time since he • opened his establishment 25 years ago, Jeff Thomas closed the Campus Confectionary last Sun day for a two-weeks vacation. It will res pen on Monday, August 17. Customers stopping by his place Monday morning were greeted by a simple printed sign on the door proclaiming ‘Jeff end Jim Tired - Closed Until August IT. “In the past when he’s taken a vacation Jeff has always been able to get someone to fill in for him, but he ceukin’tf make such arrangements I 'this time. On Mon day he took his mother, Mrs. Stella Thornes, who has been visiting him here for a while, back to her home in New York. He will spend a week there . . . Later he will go to Myrtle Beach. “Jim Moutmoules, who works with Jeff, la spending the two weeks at Virginia Beach.’’ <Jfan contends that actually he convinced Jeff that the Campus Confectionery, which he took ov er on Jeff’a death In 1957, ought to be cloned in August because there wasn’t enough business be tween the end of the University summer school and the beginning of the fall quarter to Warrant opening the door. This year Jim. who has closed svery ye*- dur ing ths first part as Augadt, will Mess lalar la tea minte Ed.)