Newspapers / The Franklin Press and … / Sept. 10, 1931, edition 1 / Page 2
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r.cs two the Franklin press THURSDAY, SEPT. 10, 1331 Sin Jffnutklht tyxtss Published every Thursday by The Franklin Press Al Franklin, Nmili Carolina Telephone No. 2 VOL. XLVI PLACKBURN W. JOHNSON Knlcrcd at tlic Tost Office, Franklin, SUBSCRIPTION RATFS One year Eight Months Six Months . Single Copy Obituary notices, cards of thanks, V 'ucs, churches, organizations or societies, will be renamed as ad.ver- li nig and inserted at regular classified advertising rales. Such notices Will be marked "adv." in compliance The Pret invites its reader to expre their opinions through it column ond each week it plan to carry Letter to the Editor on it editorial page. Thi newspaper i independent in it policie ond is glad to print both side of any question. Letter to the Edi tor should be written legibly on only one idc of the paper and should be of reasonable length. Of course, the editor reserve the right to reject letter which arc too long or violate one' better sensibilities. Weekly Bible Thought: 'Trust in the Lord and do good; to shalt thou dwell in the land and verily thou shalt be fed." Fs. 37: 3. , No Place for Politics nPHK State Highway -Commission lias assumed a niomumental task in taking over the maintenance of county roads throughout the state. In Macon county alone there are nearly Jive hundred miles of county roads, the upkeep of which now devolves upon the new department of the slate highway body. When the General Assembly voted to put this heavy responsibility on the highway, commission it was hoped that much of the local politics which hith erto had entered into the county road problem would be eliminated. The new maintenance forces went in to action only a little more than two months ago but already small-minded polilicans are endeavoring- to take the work out of the hands of the engineers and use the new organization for partonage purposes. The inefficiency of the old the fact that it lent itself Jt is sincerely hoped that Commission, in the interest government, will deal firmly, with this 'problem and disregard the advice of local politicans solely interest ed in exploiting a new source of patronage. High way maintenance, like highway building, is a matter of engineering. The less politics enters into it the better roads we will have. The new maintenance organization's job is sufficiently difficult without hav ing it complicated by politics. The Highway Commjssion, more than any other part of the state government, should be non-partisian. Whenever it becomes the machine of any particular party, or any faction of a party, its purposes will be defeated. " Sometimes we are inclined to doubt the wisdom of the General Assembly in turning over to the state such a local matter, as county road upkeep. However, this has already been done and, in full justice to our selves as well as to the Highway Commission, we should give the road authorities full opportunity '.to work but their salvation. This they will never be able to accomplish if they arc hampered by meddle some politicians. School Consolidations. Inevitable CCHOOL consolidations are an inevitable, result of . modern educational methods and the development of good roads and automotive transportation. No matter how much we regret the passing of the little white or red school house, as the case may be, wc can not deny the fact that well equipped consolidated schools with three or four teachers-, instead of one, afford a higher standard -of ...educational' facilities. The chief complaint niade when a small rural school is merged with another is that the school children have to trudge too far from home. In some instances this . is indeed the unfortunate truth, but initially, when a consolidation is 'viewed as a whole, it :s found that it works to the advantage of a ma ority of the school children concerned. If the schools are a great distance from the homes of the children school busses usually are provided. We do not deny that there are a few instances in which consolidations appear to work a hardship on a few children, but-we do not know of a single case where, in the long run, consolidations have failed to benefit a majority of all concerned. j When complaints arise following consolidations they usually are directed at the county authorities. Under the present system the county authorities have very little to dowith it. and directed by the state department of public in struction and the state equalization board. When orders are given for consolidation, the local author ities are powerless to continue the school or schools eliminated, for nearly all the funds with which the schools are operated conic from the state. 'There is only one truly valid and enduring title to land, and that is the undertaking to make the besUpossible use of it. This holds for a continent, for an archipelago, for a quarter-section farm in Iowa. A man may have a perfect legal title to his farm, but if he is a slacker on the lan! he will surely lose it." Garet Garett, in The Satur day Evening tost,. February 21 1931. Number ,W KD1TOU AND PUBLISH FR N. C, as second class matter. $1.50 $1.00 .75 ...05 tributes of respect, by individuals, with the postal regulations. system was largely due to to political machinations. officials of the Highway of good roads and good Consolidations are plannerf ( : :' (Continued ' from last week) I 'or years the meandering red clay roads that were little more than trails had seen only occasion al bunnies, farm wagons, horsemen, in Indian family creeping along in . . . i a miserable cart or rareiy an automobile making perilous prog ress through the thick dust in the dry season or the slippery dough in the wet. Now those same roads were choked, impassable. The frail - t .i wooden one-way unuges uvei creeks' and draws sagged and splintered with the stream of traf fic, but no one took the time to repair them.. .A torrent of vehicles of every description flowed without ceasing, night and day. frequently 1 lie- torrent choked ilself with its own volume, and then the thous and were piled there, locked, curs ing, writhing, battling, on their way to the oil fields. From the Crook Nose field to Wahoo was a scant four miles; it sometimes took half a day to cover it in a motor car. Trucks, drays, wagons, . rigs, fliv vers, buckboards. Every day was like the day of the Opening back in W. Millionaire promoters from the East, engineers, prospectors, drillers, tool dressers, shooters, pumpers, roustabouts, Indians. Men in l.oudon-tailortd, suits and shirts from Charvct's. Only the ruthless and desperate survived. In the days of the covered wagon scarcely twenty years earlier those roads had been trails over the hot, dry plains marked by the bleaching skull of a steer or the carcass of a horse, picked clean by the desert scavengers and turned white and desolate to the blazing sky. wagon wheel, a rusted rim, a split wagon tongue lay at the side of the trail, mute evidence of a travel er laboriously crawling his way across the prairie. Now the ditch cs by the side of these same roads were strewn with the bodies of wrecked and abandoned automo biles, their skeletons stripped and rotting, their lamps staring up at the sky like sightless eyes, test! money to the passing of the modern ravisher of that tortured region Up and down the dust-choked roads, fenders ripped off like flies' wings, wheels interlocking, trucks overturned, loads sunk in the mud, plank bridges splitting beneath the strain. Devil take the hindmost It was like an army push, but with out an army's morale or discipline. Hear Creek boasted a killing a day ami not a jail nor a courthouse for miles around. Men and women manacled to a common chain, wcrt inarched like slave convicts down the road to the nearest temple of justice, a rough pine shack in a town that had sprung overnight on the prairie. There were no rail roads where there had been no towns. Boilers loaded on two ' wagons were hauled by twenty-mule-team outfits. Stuck in the njud as they inevitably were, only mules could have' pulled the load out. Long lines of them choked the already impassable road. , Wagons were heaped with the pipes through which the oil must be led; with lumber; hardware, rigs, tools, port able houses all the vast paraphcr nalia f sudden wealth and growth in a frontier community. Tough careless young boys drove the nitro glycerin cars; a deadly job. oh those rough and crowded roads. It was this precious and dreadful stuff that shot the oil Up out of the earth. Hard lads in corduroys took their chances and pocketed their high pay, driving the death -dealing wagons, singing as thev drove, a red shirt tail tied to a pole flaunting its warning at the back, of the load. Often an expect el wagon would tail to appear The workers on the field never took the trouble to trace it or the time to wait for it. They knew that somewhere along the road wa a great gaping hoh with never a sizable fragment of wood or steel or bone or flesh anywhere for yards around to tell the tale they already knew. Acres that had: been carefully tended so" that they might yield their scanty crop of cabbages, on ions, potatoes were abandoned to oil, the garden truck rotting in the ground. Rawboned farmers and their scrawny wives and pindling brats, grown, spectacularly Hen overnight, walked out ol (iilr EdnaRrbw Illustration. ' bti S IrwirvMatffj houses without taking the trouble to move the furniture or lock the door. It was not worth while I'hcy left the sleazy curtains on the windows, the pots on the stove. The oil crew, clanking in, did not bother to wreck the house unless tliey found it necessary. In the midst of an interno ot oil rigs, drills, smoke, steam, and seeping oil itself the passer-by would often sec a weather-beaten farmhouse, its win dows broken, its front askew, like a beldame gone mad, gray hair streaming about her crazed face as she stared out at the pandemonium of oil hell about her. The farmers moved into Osage. or Oklahoma City, or Wahoo. They bought automobiles and silk shirts and gew-gaws, like children. The men sat on the front porch in shirt sleeves and stocking feet and spat tobacco juice into the fresh young grass. Mile on mile, as far as the eye could see, were the skeleton frames of oil rigs outlined against the sky like giant Martian figures stalking across the landscape. Horrible new towns Bret Hartc wooden-front towns sprang up overnight on the heels of an oil strike; towns . in habited by people who never meant to stay in them; stark and hideous houses thrown up by dwellers who never intended to remain in them rude frontier crossroad stores stuf fed with the necessities of frontier life and the luxuries of sudden wealth all jumbled together in a sort of mercantile miscegenation The thump r.nd cl;::ik of tru- pump and drill; curses, shouts; the clat ter of thick dishes, the clink of glasses, the shrill laughter of worn en; fly-infested shanties. Oi smearing itself over the prairies like a plague, killing the ' grass, blighting the trees, spreading ove the surface of the creeks and riv ers. Signs tracked to tree stumps or posts; For Ambulance Call 487. Sim Ncely, Undertaker. Call 549. Call Doctor Keogh 735. Oklahoma the Red People' country lay heaving under the hot summer sun, a scarred and dread ful thing with the . oil drooling down its face a viscid stream. Tracy Wyatt, who used to driv the bus and dray line between Wahoo and Osage, standing up to the reins like a good-natured red - i i . . lacea cnarioiecr as tne wagon bumped over the rough roads, was one of the richest men in Okla homa in the whole of the United States, for that matter. Wyatt lhe Wyatt Oil company. In an other five years the Wyatt Oil com panies. You were to see their signs all over the world. The "Big Boys' from the East were to come to him, hat in hand, to ask his advice about this; to seek his favor for that. The sum of his daily income was fantastic. The mind simply did not grasp it. Tracy himself was, by now, a portly and not un dignified looking man of a littl more than fifty. His good-natured, t t r . . ruDicuna iace wore the grave slightly astonished look of a com monplace man who suddenly finds himself a personage. Mrs. Wyatt, plainer, more horse faced than ever in her expensive New York clothes, tried to patron ize Sabra Cravat, but the Whippl blood was no match for, the Marcy The new money affected Mis. Wy att queerly. She became nervous full of spleen, and the eastern doc tors spoke to her of high blood pressure. Sabra fraiikly envied these lucky ones. A letter from the adder tongued Felice Venable to her daughter was characteristic of that awesome old matriarch. Sabra still dreaded to open her mother's let ters. They always contained sting. "All this talk of oil and million and every one in Oklahoma rolling in it. Ill be bound that you and that husband of yours haven't so much as enough to fill a lamp Trust Yancey Cravat to get hold of the wrong piece of land. Well, at least you can't be disappointed. It has been like that from the day you married him, 'though you can't say your mother didn't warn you. I hope Donna "I show more sense"." "w Donna, home after two year at Miss Dingnum's on the Hudson, seemed Indeed to be a grand-'dad'i daapiir after fence Yenablt'i own heart. She was in coloring, contour, manner, and outlook, so unlike the other Oklahoma girls Czarina McKce," Gaclle Slaughter, ewel Riggs, Maurine Turket as to make that tortured, wind-devil- (1 day of her birth on the Okla- loma prairie almost nineteen years age seem impossible. Even during icr homecomings in the summer vacations she had about her an air of cool disdain together with a kind of disillusioned calculation very disconcerting to her former intimates, not to speak of her own family. The other girls living in Osage ind Oklahoma City and Guthrie and Wahoo were true products of the new raw Southwest country. They liked to dress ir crude high colors glaring pinks, cerise, yel- ow, red, vivid orange, magenta. They made up naively with white powder and big daubs of carmine on either cheek. The daughters of more wealthy parents drove their own cars in a day when this was considered rather daring for a woman. Donna came home tall thin to the point of scrawniness in "What a Rotten Deal You've Had, Sabra, Dear" their opinion ; sallow, urougheJ, drawling, mysterious. She talked with an eastern accent, ignored the leter r, said eyether and nye- ther and rih'ally and altogether made herself poisionously unpopu lar with the girls and undeniably stirring to the boys. She paid very little heed to the clumsy attentions of the Oklahoma home town lads, adopting toward them a serpent-of-the-Nile attitude very baffling to these frank and open- faced prairie products, Her school days .finished, and she a finished product of those days, she now looked about hci cooly, calculatingly. ' Her moiher she regarded with a kind of af fectionate amusement. "What a rotten deal you've had, Sabra, dear," she would drawl "Rih'ally, I don't see how you've stood it all these years. Sabra would come to her own defense, goaded by something strangely hostile in herself toward this remote, disdainful offspring, "Stood What?" "Oh you know. This being a pioneer woman and a professional MarCy and hcad-hcld-high in spite of a bum husband.' "Donna Cravat, if you ever again dare to speak like that of your father I shall punish you, as big as you are "Sabra, darling, how can you punish a grown woman? You might slap me, and I wouldn't slap you back, of course." But I'd be terribly embarrassed for you. As for father he .is a museum piece You know it." Your father is one of the great est figures the Southwest has ever produced." "Mm. Well, he's picturesque enough, I suppose. But 1 wish he hadn't worked so hard at it And Cim There's a brother! A great help to me in my career the men folks of this quaint fam ily" ; "I wasn't aware that you were planning a career." Sabra retort ed, every much in the manner.; of P elite Venable. Unless getting ui at. noon, slopping around in r kimono most of the day, and ly ing in the hammock reading is called a career by Dignum gradu ates. If it is, you're the outstand ing success of your class." "Darling, I adore you when you get viperish and Venable like that Perhaps you have influenced me in my early youth. That's the new psychology, you know. You used to tell me about grandma trailing around in her white ruffled dimity wrappers and her high heels, nev er lifting a fcly hand." "At lejast your grandmother did not consider it a career." "Neither do I. This lovely flower iikc neaa isnt so empty as. you think, lolling in the front porch hammock. I know it's no use counting on father, even when he's not off on one of his mysterious jaunts. What is he doing, any way? Living with some squaw ? . . . Forgive me, mother darling I didnt mean to hurt you . . Cim's just as bad, and worse, be cause he s weak and hasn't even phony Ideal i. You're busy with the paper, That's nil right JUST HUMANS "He Just Came Back From Greece." "What's He Do?" "He's in the Lard Business!" I'm not blaming you. If it Weren't for you we'd all be on the town or back" in Wichita living on grandma in genteel -poverty. 1 think you're wonderful, and 1 ought to try to be like you. But I don't want to be a girl reporter. De scribing the sumptuous decorations of dandelions and sunflowers at one of Cassandra Sipes' parties." Goaded by curiosity and a kind of wonder at this unnatural creat ure, Sabra must put her question: "What do you want to do, then?" "I want to marry the richest man ii Oklahoma, and build a palace that I'll hardly ever live in, and travel like royalty, and clank with emeralds. With my skin and hair they're my stone." "Oh, emeralds, by all means," Sabra agreed, cuttingly. "Diamonds are so ordinary. And the gentle man that you consider honoring let me set From your require ments that would have to be Tracy Wyatt, wouldn' it" . "Yes," replied Donna, calmly. "You've probably .overlooked Mrs. Wyatt. Of course, Tracy's only fifty-one, and you being nineteen, there's plenty of time if you'll just be patient." She was too amused to be really disturbed. "I don't intend to be patient, Vaccination For Typhoid Schedule Schools to be visited and vaccinated to prevent typhoid fever on the dates here given: ' BURN1NGTOWN Aug. 31-Sept. 7-14 Oak Dale Bumingtowri Morgans Tellico COWEE Sept 1-8-15 Rose Creek Harmony Liberty Cowee Oak Grove ! ' - . SMITH'S BRIDGE, etc Sept. 2-9-16 Clark's Chapel Hickory Knoll Upper Tesenta s Otto SMITH'S BRIDGE, etc. Sept. 3-10-17 Union 1 Coweta Mulberry FRANKLIN Sept. 4-11-18 lotla ' .V Olive Hill .-- Pattons Colored School Skeenah V NANTAHALA Sept. 21-28 Oct. 5 Aquone Kyle Otter Creek Camp Branch Fair View Beecher. HIGHLANDS Sept. 22-29 Oct. 6 Highlands Scaly FRANKLIN and Cartoogechaye Sept. 23-30 Oct. 7 Franklin Slagle " Allison-Watts Rainbow Springs MILL SHOAL Sept. 24 Oct 1-8 Watauga rA Oalo Ridge , . f Holly Springs Mountain Grove By GENS CARrt mamma darling." Something in her hard, ruthless tone startled Sabra. "Donna Cra vat, don't you start any of your monkey business. I saw you coo ing and ah-ing at him the other day when we went over the Wyatt's new house. And I heard you say hi g some drivel about his being a man that craved beauty in his life, and that he should have it; and sneering politely at the ncwhouse until I could see him beginning to doubt everything in it, poor fellow. He had been so proud to show it. But I thought you were just talking that New York talk of yours." . "I wasn't. 1 was talking busi ness." Sabra was revolted, alarmed, and distressed, all at once. She gained reassurance by telling herself that this was just one of Donna's queer jokes part of the streak in her that Sabra had never understood and that corresponded to the prac tical joker in Yancey. JJiat, too, had always bewildered her. Ab sorbed in the workings of the growing, thriving newspaper the conversation faded to a dim and al most unimportant memory. (Continued next week) ELLIJAY Sept. 25 Oct. 2-9 Mashburn Branch Cullasaja Higdonville Ellijay SUGARFORK Oct 12-19-26 Walnut Creek Buck Creek Pine Grove -Gold Mine This vaccination treatment is a preventive of typhoid fever. It is given FREE to all the people of Macon County, regardless of age, who will meet the physician at the. places and dates here given. Three trips to the school hc--se in the various districts Snay be the means of saving a long spell of sickness and it may be life. In some sec tions of Macon County a few cas es of typhoid have been reported this Summer. You never can tell when you may be infected. VAC CINATION gives IMMUNITY for from one to three years. It costs only a little time to be on the safe side. j It is the expectation of the Boards of Commissioners, Educa tion, and Health that not less than. lO.OUO people in the County will' be vaccinated this time. From the nature of - the case fc will not be possible to tell the: exact hour at which the doctor willl arrive. He will follow this sched ule: He will get to the first school house on .the list in each group by or soon after 8:30 A. M. East ern Time. He will proceed cn to each school in that particular group as rapidly as he can. For ex ample: In the first group given, he will begin at Oak Dale about 8:30 A. M. then Burningtown, next Morgans, and last at Tellico, and -so on through all the other groups. If he should fail to reach some schools which are last in their grup before sshool closing time, '4:00 P. M., the people should wait till he arrives. The schedule giv-, en heje .will, be followed exactly. . M. P. BILLINGS, Supt. Schools, and Secy. Co. Board oi Health., Abguit tl, 1531, ;
The Franklin Press and the Highlands Maconian (Franklin, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
Sept. 10, 1931, edition 1
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