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Page TWO THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1960 ■LOT Southern Pines North Carolina “In taking over The Pilot no changes are contemplated. We will try to keep this a good paper. We will try to make a little money for all concerned. Wherever there seems to be an occasion to use our influence for the public good we will try to do it. And we will treat everybody alike.”—James Boyd, May 23, 1941. A Great Victory The victory of Democrats John F. Ken nedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the Presi dential election is cause for jubilation. It is evidence that the American people want forceful, dedicated leadership; that they want straight thinking and straight talk; that they recognize character as the fundamental attribute of the President and find in Senator Kennedy the consis tency and responsibility that are the foundation stones of character. The Pilot is proud that North Carolina is in the Kennedy column; that Democrat Terry Sanford will be Governor; that al though Moore County went Republican, as it has in the past two Presidential elec tions, it was by a majority of less than 300 votes; and finally we are extremely grat ified that the Southern Pines precinct went Democratic, 927 to 861, as compared with the 1956 election when the Repub lican vote was 1,042 and the Democratic 640, in the Presidential race. The Republicans’ great effort to make headway in Moore County resulted in not ,a single victorious candidate, showing that the people of Moore do not yet con sider them qualified to take over the reins of county government. Though the county went Republican in the Presidential race, it went for Sanford in the race for Governor, with a Demo cratic majority of 352. There is no doubt that the Republican party in Moore County showed more vi tality in this campaign than it has in many years, but it is also a fact that the campaign just ended has served to re vitalize and unite the Democratic party in this county, as it has not been united for some time. Certainly Democrats have reason to re- , joice in the quality of their leadership on both the State and national levels. The comparison between Kennedy and San ford—both young, vigorous, able and hon est—is obvious. The Sanford endorsement of Kennedy, which was so intemperately and foolishly criticized in some quarters —appears now to have been not only a natural and reasonable action but one which will certainly react to the benefit of the State in the years to come. If Kennedy and Sanford exercise in of fice the superb leadership which has been shown during their campaigns, it will in deed be a “new day” for the nation and' State. And unless the Republicans come up with better ideas, better policies,and better candidates than they have offered at all levels in this past canipaign, we feel that their bids for power will be futile for many years to come. A General Comes Home The American success story still has its particular charm. There is something that moves almost everyone in recognizing and honoring the achievements of a per son who goes out into the world from a little town and “makes good.” Warmth and generosity and pride are shown by people of a small town toward those of their native sons who have made a name for themselves. It is a good feeling and constitutes something enduring and changeless in the small town life which has changed so much in. the past few de cades. These thoughts come to mind as South ern Pines prepares to welcome Major General William P. Fisher for “Bill Fish er Day” on Wednesday of next week. It seems an awfully long time ago when Bill Fisher finished school here in the late 1920’s, went through State College and entered the “Air Corps.” In those days, that was high adventure. Not many young men enlisted for flying service. And practically nobody would have pre dicted that within a decade, the United States would be at war—a war^in which the airplane would play a decisive role. Now it has been more than another de cade since that war—in which General Fisher served with distinction—ended and the mighty Air Force that evolved from the relatively tiny Air Corps of Bill Fisher’s youth is said to be the most vital factor in keeping the peace of the world. We welcome General Fisher to his old home town and hope that he will enjoy here a few days of relaxation with people who have not forgotten him and are proud of his accomplishments. Education in the Spotlight Probably never before since 1921, when the observance started, has American Education Week attracted the interest and attention that it has this year. To evaluate the importance of educa tion—its needs and its potentialities—in the minds of the American people, one has only to look at the election campaign just closed. With all candidates, education was a major issue. Today’s Pilot reflects this interest in education. We are devoting two pages to day to a factual report on the program of the Southern Pines schools, in words and pictures. This report while showing the scope of the local schools’ program and the excellence of this program in many ways, does not attempt to evaluate or judge the quality of education here. Yet the report does note—and we em phasize this as highly important—that a committee of local citizens is attempting to do just that—to evaluate and judge the quality of education in Southern Pines. This Southern Pines School Study Com mittee is well along in an investigation' of the curriculum and methods of the Southern Pines schools—an investigation that appears to be undertaken with open minds and with no prior intention to praise or blame the schools for what they find. “Strengthen Schools for the ’60’s” is the slogan for National Education Week this year. It is good to know that the South ern Pines Schools, as the report in today’s Pilot shows, are attempting to afford local children the best in secondary education, that the minds of school officials are open to suggestion and willing to accept changes which would lead to better ed ucation in the future and that school peo ple welcome citizen participation in their task of piloting the schools through the years ahead. An exasperated father and family man, who also happens to be a public official, spoke out at the town council meeting Tuesday night, in a manner to warm the heart. Mayor Robert Ewing, at the close of the council’s session, said that he found that he was attending so many night meetings that he was not able to spend much time at home with his family and that, for his part, he didn’t think this was right. He said he had been told that there are 56 organizations in Southern Pines holding meetings at one time or another and that he thinks the town is over-organized. This is a complaint that we have heard from other sources. What happens is that civic-minded people (and how could a town exist and be a good town without them?) find that the very quality that leads them into good works of one kind or another puts them in a position, if they are not careful, of having to neglect their families. It’s a kind of thing that creeps up on a person, they say. So what the mayor went on to suggest was a “moratorium on meetings” in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day—a time of the year when family life is particularly important. So strongly does he feel about the matter, the mayor went on, that he’d almost like to make such a ban on night meetings an ordi nance under which parents who went out at night, except for something like tak ing their children out to dinner, would be subject to arrest. It would be interesting to see what the reaction to such an ordi nance would be, he 'said. Meetings and Family Life The Frost Is On The Pumpkin-Head sSia IS®ii sm Im ''SCO I W -X WAS A FALSk IMAGE DEVISED? New South and the Old Examined Writing in the Greensboro Daily News, “W.D.S.” considers a subject of interest to all South erners: “The South’s struggle to lejioin the mainstream of Ameri can life,” as approached in a new book of essaj s by several authors, ■The Southerner As American,” edited by Charles G. Sellers, Jr., and published by the University .of North Carolina Press. The Daily News’s comments will be of special interest in this area as reference is made to the late Walter Hines Page, of the Aberdeen Page clan and probably the most distinguished native son 01 the Sandhills. The article continues: Let us see exactly what Pro fessor Sellers and colleagues are driving at. They write of the trag edy of the Old South—‘the trag edy of a people who believed themselves compelled to defend a “peculiar institution” that was at war with their own deepset val ues, and who as a consequence drove themselves, down the sui cidal road to Appomattox. Yet the Old South’s tragedy was com pounded when the New South failed to understand or even to remember it. Either with defeat. realism and idealism arising from his experience of the reality of sin and evil, rendered anachron istic by the pragmatic scientism of modernity? Does modern life require that he forget his history and repudiate much of what he is? Must he hail the ‘vanishing South’ while succumbing to an undifferentiated Americanism?” Regard These are good questions raised by the young historians, all of them Southerners but some now living outside the region. All of them, across racial lines, write with a regard for their native land. Almost uniformly they sense the South’s w-arm feeling for peo ple. They love its individuality and its pleasant pace. They know, as the old folk saying goes, that in the South white people don’t mind how close a Negro gets to them as long as he doesn’t rise too high (economically and social ly), while in the North white peo ple don’t mind how high a Negro rises as long as he doesn’t get too close. “The tragedy of the South, ’ said Dean Acheson, “has been that racism has corrupted an otherwise respectable strain of protest and experimentation in the search fo’’ economic equality, dating back to Jefferson, Mason, Randolph and Jackson.” Problem The problem, as these young historians see it, is to find a new relationship which will do justice to both races and yet preserve what has been uniquely good about Southern society. That new relationship is being forged, whether we like it or not, in daily decisions kt the lunch counters, in the market place, churches and schoolrooms of the South. Place to Stop’ Grains of Sand Gold Plated After we learned that bath rooms are considered the top sym bol of status in some quarters— as with trepidation noted in this column last week—here comes The Charlotte Observer on, Mon day morning with a half-page ad from a department store in Char lotte, featuring “24-Karat Gold Plated Bath Accessories.” Wow! Tarheelia is coming up fast in the world! Two faucets and a spigot, for instance (the spigot shaped like a swan,) can be had for $69.95. A soap dish is only $5.98. A double towel bar, with more curlicues and .thingamajigs on it than you can imagine, is going at $23.98. ■ N. C. per capita income may be low, but it looks as if somebody in the state is doing OK. And, honest and truly, if you had gold-plated fixtures in your bathroom (even without the painting and sculpture recom mended by the authority cited in last week’s GRAINS), wouldn’t you be just itching for your guests to see them? And how WOULD you engineer this tour, if they didn’t ask to be shown around? Bookworms At Enfield, termites in the pub lic library buildihg worked up through the sills, floor and book shelves into some of the books, showing, says the N. C. Depart ment of Agriculture which re ported the incident, that these in sects will continue eating from wood into most any matter com posed of cellulose materials: no choice of reading matter prefer red, we suppose. Some books seem especially written to be riadled by termites —a fate to which we would be happy to consign a number of the “novels” that we’ve seen for sale. Many readers of such books— and we’re talking about some of the sensational blood-and-sex paperbacks—must resemble ter mites, in fact, to be able to get through them: boring into them blindly and mindlessly, without exercising any sense of value other than an insatiable appetite for the contents. 'Can Talk Big' Gordon M. Cameron of Pine- hurst who was chairman of the board of county commissioners for many years, before his retire ment from the board in 1958, was at the commissioners’ meeting in Carthage Monday, in connection with the appointment of a con- sta'ble in Pinehurst. Somebody, asked him how he liked “sitting on the other side of the table”—that is, as a spectator, not a board member. “I like it fine,” Mr. Cameron replied! “I can talk big over here. You have to talk mighty quiet when you’re on your side of the table.” “We must have state-wide co operation in promoting our tour ist industry. We should concen trate not just on getting the tour ist to North Carolina, but in keep- anrhumiliatio'n'”in the postwar jng him here. We must quit sell- The ordinance suggestion, of course, was offered only to indicate the intensi ty of the mayor’s feeling on the matter. Without setting up such a drastic situa tion as one in which parents could be jailed for going out to meetings between Christmas and New Year’s, the morator ium proposal makes sense. It would have to be a matter of voluntary action. We suggest parents start making their plans for the week after Christmas with the importance of family life in mind. Meters Not Answer Evidence that installation of parking meters does not necessarily solve the problem of merchants and their employ ees using parking spaces comes from San ford where The Sanford Herald reports editorially: “A check of Steele and Wicker Streets a few minutes before time for the stores to open will show nearly all of the park ing spaces are filled. A high percentage of the cars parked are owned by persons working in the stores. A steady check throughout the day will show the same cars in the same spot. Workers in the stores are constantly dashing out to ‘feed the meter.’ ” The survey of opinion made by the local study committee showed that use of parking spaces by merchants and their employees was considered the biggest single factor in the Southern Pines park ing problem. But it looks as if meters won’t solve it. years, Southerners sought emo tional balm in the sentimental ■ myth of the Lost Cause, a pseutio- tiagedy which gave the South a false history, a false image of it self, and a rnythical social ideal that Southerners had not really accepted even in the heyday of secession.” Cut Off By forgetting the tragedy of the Old South—that is, its anguish and bitterly divisive feelings about slavery—Southerners ‘'cut themselves off from the very ele ments in their tradition which might have helped them resolve their inner conflicts and escape their tragic dilemma. Professor Sellers uses Walter Hines Page as an example of the Southerner, a Tar Heel, whose whole life was a quest for a tra dition “by which he could remain a Southerner outside the con strictions of the Confederate myth, but the only tradition he could find was that of Northern business society.” Eventually he ended up as a successful New York publisher. But he never came home again, in spirit. Dilemma The question still haunting us is whether Page’s personal dilem ma remains the dilemma of the modern South: “As its Atlantas and Birminghams and Houstons expand and multipy, is the South fated simply to reproduce in a sunnier latitude the urban mass society of the Northeast, while manifesting its Southernism only by last-ditch resistance along the crumbling segregation line? Are the Southerner’s stubborn indi- vididualism and his respect for the individuality of others incom patible with ‘progress’ and the American way of life’? Is his Christianity, with its blend of ing this State as a convenient route to Florida, and start selling North Carolina as a convenient place to stop. There is very little that Florida has to offer that can not be topped by North Carolina. We have variety in just about everything the tourist should be interested in—and that is a thing we must continue to stress. But unless we tell the tourist what we have, he will not know about it. “There is one other important aspect to the efforts of the Travel Council that I think is too fre quently overlooked. We are fa miliar with the great contribution that this industry makes directly to the North Carolina economy, but what about the indirect con tribution. The efforts of this or ganization to make our State more attractive benefit more than just the motel or restaurant operator andothers directly involved in the tourist business. I am con vinced that these efforts have been helpful in the success of our over-all industrial development program in recent years. “An attractive, clean state at tracts not only the tourist, but the prospective industrial investor as well. Industrial growth strength ens the entire economy’, raises standards of living, creates more leisure time for travel and recrea tion and therefore returns the original investment made by the travel industry. This is a point you can emphasize in your effort • to encourage greater state-wide cooperation on the part of business and communities that are not di rectly tied to travel income.” —Gov. Luthei H. Hodges, speaking in Southern Pines recently, at the annual meeting oi the Travel Council of North Carolina. ‘Civil War’ Wins a War Relief from Rallies Most everybody’s glad the elec tion’s over. Keep hearing folks say they think campaigns last too long. And one of the most re lieved groups of people, aside fiom the orating candidates them selves, will be newspaper editors who have to keep thinking up some word to take the place of “rally” for a political meeting. “Rally” is a good word—and a nice short one to make fit in headlines—and there’s really no substitute for it. When you use “meeting,” ‘‘gathering,” or some other substitute, you lose some of the life and color that “rally” im plies. Most every Pilot the last few weeks, has had announcements of coming “rallies” and reports on past ones, from both parties, and we’ve been hard put not to have the word in three or four head lines at the same time, on the front page. Ah well, everybody has his problems. The PILOT From The Smifhfield Herald Was it the ‘“Civil War” or the “War Between The States”? That question has popped up again on the eve of the 100th an niversary of the outbreak of the . . . er, that war that was fought between the military forces of the Union under General Grant and the military forces of the Confederacy under General Lee. The South—the United Daugh ters of the Confederacy, in par ticular—^has preferred to call the conflict of 1861-65 the “War Be tween The States,” though South ern kids who went to school a generation or so ago studied, in Southern schools, the “Civil War.” (Yankees, of course, wrote the textbooks.) The official designation used by the Union Government was the “War of Rebellion,” but that didn’t exactly catch on even in the North. “Civil War” has per sisted, winning the battle of usage. When we went to the Col umbia Encyclopedia to see what it had to say on the subject, we turned to the “C’s” and found what we were searching under the heading “Civil War.” But let it be said that the UDC and its allies had a point. Even the Columbia Encyclopedia pub lished by the Columbia Univer sity Press in Yankeeland ac knowledges it. Read what it says: ‘“Actually this name (Civil War) is somewhat misleading, for the war was not a class struggle, but a sectional combat having its roots in such complex political, economic, social, and psychologi cal elements that historians still do not agree as to its basic causes.” O. K., the name Civil War is not exact, but it sticks. Published Every Thursday by THE PILOT, Incorporated Southern Pines, North Carolina 1941—JAMES BOYD—1944 Katharine Boyd Editor C. Benedict Associate Editor Dan S. Ray Gen. Mgr. C. G. Council Advertising Mary Scott Newton Business Mafy Evelyn de Nissoff Society Composing Room Dixie B. Ray, Michael Valen, Jas per Swearingen, Thomas Mattocks and James C. Morris. Subscription Rates: One Year $4. 6 mos. $2. 3 mos. $1 Entered at the Postoffice at South ern Pines, N. C., as second class mail matter. Member National Editorial Assn, and N. C. 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The Pilot (Southern Pines, N.C.)
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Nov. 10, 1960, edition 1
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