The Emporia Gazette from Emporia, Kansas • Page 2

GAZETTE Evcrette Ross Barr, Business Manager. Everett Ray Call, City Editor James Eugene 'Lowther, Advertising Manager. Theodore Fairbanks McDaniel, Managing Editor. William Lindsay White, Editor and Publisher In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he will direct thy 3:5. Why Notan Election? MPORIA'S' INQUIRY into Urban Renewal seems to be caught on a.

sand bar; good men are no: eager to serve on this 5-man committee which, if the plan finally goes through, would be in complete charge of it. Why do the best men hang back? Because, as the situation now stands, more, responsibility would be loaded on them than any good man would want. When they complete the plan they could be accused, justly or unjustly, of having favored special interests. And is not the cure for this to offer a firm guarantee that, when the plan is finished, that it will be iubmitted to an election? For, if the plan goes through, it is the peopie who will benefit by it if the plan is good, it the people who will be hurt if it is not, and it is the people who must pay for it, either so whv should not the people vote on it? It is our feeling that, if tn election could be irmly good men would not hang back. They would be proud to tackle the hard job, to do their best, in the sure knowledge that the people, not they, would bear final responsibility, which Is as it should be.

The City Commission has asked some of our best men to serve, men who are honest, sensible and high principled, with a broad view of the interests of the town. We should not settle for less. If the road block here is the matter of an election, this should not be hard. While the Urban Renewal Law not require a vote of the people, it does not prohibit such a vote. And surely the good legal minds available to the City Commission can find way to make the definite promise of an election to be held, after the plan is completed and before it goei through.

And would not such a promise greatly help us to get five fine men to serve on this board? And can we afford to settle for lesser C. The Wailing Place Another Olpe Retort Editor of The Gazettej Sir: After I read the article in The Gazette, Problem," it gave me die opportunity I have wanted for time. I have wanted to myself about the rude introduction from the Olpe area get when we travel to Emporia. dump is very easy to take at a glance, but if vou lived south of Emporia and traveled the road at least two times a day and four timea a day as a family, you would soon see that Emporia should clean back steps first, before complaining about Olpe's problem. The trip to Emporia includei just a matter of running over a few boards with nails sticking up, or a big tree branch in the middle of the.

road. It is nothing to see boxes and papers strung across the road to the ditches on either fide. On a windy day, junk of all are blown out of the dump trucks, right in front of your view. I feel safety is very important in all of our lives, as we have teachers, and relatives using this road every day and Highway 99 ag a large number of deaths to its credit already. The Merry Mixer 4 -H Club, of Emporia, is taking safety as a dub activity this year and we are interested in doing all we can to help our friends live just a little longer.

Let's all try to do a little extra toward safety and make it a practice of covering those trash trucks coming out of Emporia to the "Sanitary Land Fill." Respectfully, Mrs. Loren Merry, Olpe, Kansas. Watch out for frozen foods and don't drop a large turkey on your might be crippled for next Thanksgiving. It may be a man's world but the Clark County Clipper will give you odds that it's in his wife's name. The American way, it says litre, is using instant coffee to dawdle away an hour.

Sometimes a. family qlbum is the only thing that will convince some people that the truth is a terrible the Atchison Globe. After mentioning all of the February holidays, the Larned Tiller Toiler adds that only leaves the Ides, St. David's Day and St. Patrick's Day for March.

The college years, a man said to Flint Hills Peggy, are about the only free time a boy has between his mother and his wife. Did you hear about the folks who won a big door prize at the lumber yard it was a new back door. The policeman asked the lost little boy why he hadn't clung to his mother's skirt and the Wilson County Citizen says he replied: "I couldn't reach it." A Tennessee man has his name stamped on his upper plate. He says it in handy for identification if he has to cash a check. T.

L. 20 Years Ago February a8th, 1946 Lyon County draft board members with 200 or more hours service, received service medals. Eligible for the medals were H. W. Glass, Henry Brinkman and Jay Sullivan of Board No.

S. A. Doty, C. E. Coffman, C.

Caldwell and Everett Steerman, Board No. 2. Ens. George W. Keefer, son of Mr.

and Mrs. Sam Keefer, was commissioned in the Navy Supply in. after 18 of training in the V-ia and V-7 programs. He would be in charge or the department aboard the U.S.S. Turan- dot (AKA47).

Vincent Eccleston of the Post Office had recovered from the flu and returned to work. "Doc" Hertzler, Halstead's "Horse and Buggy Doctor," retired after 52 years as a physician, friend and confidant of thousands of Kansans. Five Emporia women attended a meeting of the Red Cross in Topeka when needs for aid with programs and recreation for Winter General and Topeka Army Air Field hospitals were outlined. Emporia ns were Mesdames Ray Marsh, Roscoe Graves and Paul Shebilsky and the Misses Nell and Pearl Todd. Forty Yeart Ago Paul She- bilsky, who worked in Williams Jewelry Store, went to Kansas City to vicie Prayer Breakfast It's My Opinion By Irene Corbally Kuhn HERE ARE laments in Washington about the passing of the so-called Establishment, meaning the dedicated public servants of eastern Ivy League background who have been taking government jobs ever since Professor Felix Frankurter set up a recruiting service at Harvard for Franklm D.

Roosevelt in the thirties. The implication is that Johnson, in losing a Richard Goodwin, an Arthur Schlesinger, a McGeorge Bundy, is depriving himself of irreplaceable brains. A more objective view of tilings might be that what Johnson is losing is mainly a matter of style. This sort of thing happened before, under Missourian Harry Truman. We heard a lot ihf.n of "government by crony," but the cronies did not keep Truman from making the indispensable foreign policy decisions, that have resulted in the containment of Soviet Russia.

What matters, after all, is not style, but the ability to' pick a course without arguing it to the point where your opponent gets the jump on you merely because you can't reach a commitment on your own. We flubbed the Bay of Pigs because the "stylists" talked endlessly. Johnson, then only the vice president, was impatient to cut through the mark of establishment dialectics about the S. image," but he could do nothing about it beyond stating his opinion that a powerful nation must "will the when an end has been accepted. Debate Too Long Johnson is simply not on the wave length of the establish- mentariaus who have insisted in so many recent instances on debating past the eleventh hour.

The other day, at the presidential prayer breakfast at the Hotel Shoreham in Washington, Johnson sat at the head table next to the Dr. Billy Graham, the evangelist who never has any trouble distinguishing between good and evil. Johnson had taken Billy Graham with him the day before to Atlantic City, where the President had told a group of educators that right and wrong in South Viet Nam were not matters for quibbling. At the prayer breakfast the President was so absorbed in his conversation with Billy Graham that he almost neglected to eat. And when Billy made the principal address, after readings from the Bible by Associate Justice Tom Clark of the Supreme Court and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Fowler, he spoke right to an activist's heart.

His theme was the Jesus Christ who came to bring, not peace, but a sword, and who did not turn the other cheek when it came to throwing the money-changers out of the temple. This, at a breakfast organized to bring the Spirit close to government, focussed the attention of the thousand or so who present on the always necessary connection between morality and decision. President Johnson, of course, is a complex character in which the vote-getting and poll-taking politico is always ready to make necessary moves. But the President has his lay preacher side, and when he told the thousand breakfasters that he relied on their prayers to sustain him in his Vietnamese war decisions he was obviously on Billy Graham's wave length. More Popular The big question is whether he is on the country's wave length.

What struck me was the number of Junior Chamber of Commerce representatives who had come to Washington to attend the prayer breakfast. These breakfasts are growing hi popularity. There is a House of Representatives prayer group that meets for breakfast on Thursdays. Congressman Albert Quie of Minnesota brought greetings from this group to the presidential prayer breakfast. Senator John Stennis of Mississippi brought greetings from a similar group in the Senate.

The governors of many states noy hold annual prayer breakfasts. And the immediate objective of the Junior Chamber of Commerce delegates to the presidential breakfast is to organize mayor's prayer breakfasts in every important city in the country. The Junior Chamber members are an activist group whose college debating days are behind them. They don't dramatize their views in the Latin American style, by marching and demonstrating. Whether they for a more and in society than the Vietniks and the "new left" Students for a Democratic Society is an interesting question 1 should guess that they by the longest sort of country I should also guess that Johnson is attuned to their wave length in recognizing that an older America still exists under the of public affairs.

(Copyright, 1966, King Inc.) THE GAZETTE And You Think It Looks Bad to Us! Peace Offensive Followed NeanvPanic Matter of Fact, by Joseph Alsop A NYONE WANTING an ex-" planation of the strange course of events in these last months must begin the search in Viet Nam, at about the end of October or the beginning of November. At that time, in the U. S. Headquarters in Saigon, a recalculation was made which in turn made history. The recalculation took the deceptively simple form of a revised estimate of enemy capabilities.

In order to show why such routine event can have produced great consequences, one must begin by sketching in the earlier background. In August through October, in brief, the first returns came in on the large American troop commitment in Viet Nam. They were remarkably encouraging, indeed stirring, returns. The green American troops fought like veterans. The untested American units regularly won engagements with greatly superior numbers of the enemy.

In the light of these happy results, the first experience-based studies were made of the enemy's probable riposte to the much more massive U. S. intervention in Viet Nam. Initially, the conclusion was that the Communist riposte would follow the Communist rule book. In other words, the Viet Cong were expected to return to Gen.

Vo Nguyen Giap's phase II: to dig in for a very long pull; and to resume classic guerrilla warfare in Email formations. General Is Dubious Among the military, General Westmoreland had grave doubts about this assessment. His staff, however, was the more worried about the tactical difficulties of prolonged "penny packet war" than about further large scale North Vietnamese invasion of the South. Somewhat more pessimistically, the civilian analysts meanwhile predicted the invasion of the South by one or two additional Northern divisions; but even this was not especially disquieting. Briefly, the civilian forecast gave a maximum future balance of four North Vietnamese divisions plus the equivalent of eight divisions of Viet Cong regular troops against six U.

S. divisions, one Korean division, and 13 South Vietnamese divisions. Such a balance would not have been alarming. But throughout October, the South was invaded by more and more North Vietnamese troops; and the earlier assessment began to seem more and more dubious. This led to the recalculation already mentioned.

It mainly took the form of carefully revised estimates of the numbers of the troops and quantities of supplies the enemy was capable of bringing into South Viet Nam over the Ho Chi Minh Trail or Geneva Accord Memorial Highway, as it is usually called Saigon. The new estimates were pretty formidable. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese were now credited with the capabilities of increasing their strength by two regiments per month from November, 1965, through December, 1966. The North Vietnamese were further credited with the capability of bringing into the South between 140 and 174 tons of supplies per day, or enough to sustain a greatly expanded inva- These new estimates were then presented to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara when he visited in Viet Nam in late November. The estimates meant that the enemy could well increase his strength by the equivalent of eight full divisions more than had been previously thought likely.

Political Panic Obviously, this in turn meant that a great many more U. S. troops would be needed to redress the balance. Thus when Secretary McNamara returned to Washington, his report on the recalculation in Saigon caused what can only be described as a near-panic. Essentially, it was a political panic.

Because of McNamara's reform of the armed services, six U. S. divisions could be, and had been provided for Viet Nam without undue political strain. Providing additional divisons meant severe strain, however. The first consequence of the panic was the peace offensive and the pause.

The President and his advisors were clearly warned of extremely negative effects in both Hanoi and Saigon (which were duly produced). Hence, one must assume that domestic political considerations were the prime motives of the vast international which the President staged. As it turned out, of course, the peace offensive acted, in this country at least, as a kind of i sy advertising campaign against the President's own pol- icy. Furthermore, as always happens in such cases, the near- panic inside the administration seeped outward to the Senate and elsewhere. Thus the public dialogue came to its present pass.

It remains to be seen whether such intense concern was justified; but this must be examined in another report. (Copyright, 1966, The Washington Post distributed by the Los Timei Syndicate) Sleep Gap in Washington JL JL By Art Buchwald ONE IN Washington is talking about it, but is a sleep gap in the Jobn- admiriistration and it's getting more serious all the time. The President, who according to reports doesn't need much sleep because of extra glands, makes no secret of his admiration for those who are able to operate on as little sleep as he does. Time and time again he has praised those who are in their offices at seven in the morning and don't leave until very late at night. I can well imagine what is happening at a Cabinet meeting these days.

All the Cabinet officers are in their chairs dozing waiting for the President to He enters the room and everyone tries to wake up. gentlemen," the President says, "it's good to see you all looking so haggard and bleary-eyed. We're getting a lot done." The Attorney General stifles a yawn. "Were you trying to say something, Mr. Katzenbach?" "No, sir, Mr.

President. I was just yawning." "Good boy. You're doing a fine job. Well, let's get dowfl to business. I'd like to discuss the opposition we're getting from the Senate.

Mr. McNamara. Will someone wake up Mr. McNamara?" Mr. McNamara says, "Uh- what-uh, oh, yes, sir, Mr.

President." "Mr. McNamara," the President says, "when I called you at three this morning, your wife said you had already gone to bed." "Yes, sir, I was at the Pentagon until two, so decided to make an early night of it." "Well, it isn't important. I'm sorry your wife woke you up." "That's all right, sir." "It was the four o'clock call that was important. You can imagine my surprise when I found out that you had gone back to sleep." "I wasn't really sleeping, I Just had my eyes closed, waiting for your next call." "Acyway, neither nor there. Mr.

Rusk." Mr. Rusk is going, "Zzzz, zzz- zzz, "I called the State Department at 6:30 this morning, Mr. Rusk, and you hadn't arrived yet. Something wrong at home?" "No, sir. I just went to the dentist and hadn't gotten in yet.

Was there anything special, Mr. President?" Well, when you left the White House at his morning, I still had a couple of questions to ask you Nam," "You should' have called me at home." "At that hour? Come to think of it, I tried to, but someone took the phone off the hook." "It must have been one of the servants, sir." "It doesn't make any differ- instead. He sounded very chipper. I was surprised. Apparently I'm still not giving Hubert enough to do." The President then turns to his Postmaster General.

Mr. O'Brien, you look wide awake." "I'm sorry to give you that impression, sir. I'm dead tired." "How much sleep did you get last night?" "Five hours, sir, but I slept fitfully." "All right, gentlemen, I guess that winds up the Cabinet meet- 5ng. Let's all meet back here at one in the morning, unless any of you have something better to do. The Cabinet members all put their benzedrine capsules away as one of them says, "What else could we possibly have to do?" (Copyright, 1966, Publishers Syndicate) ft COUPLE OF SPINNERS MONTICELLO, 111.

(AP) Robert McNabb and his 14-year- old son, James, have togetherness In an old hobby a spinning wheel. They travel throughout central Illinois demonstrating the wheel. "Our purpose for these exhibitions is not that of being showmen," McNab!) said, "but to give people an idea of how old arts were performed and to try and perform them In as authentic manner its possible." EmporU, Kansas, MoncUy, February 28, You Should Buy and Read Changing New Orleans And from thti t'tty, tbi New Orleani To-Day, whet menage? What tiJlngi and whit tigntt? Firtt anj fortmoit, thit, which our d'etre, that it it in tht throti of Irtmsitiem all it Change, Alteration, Innovation Hen truly "the eld order Changeth, yielding to tht New." A THINGS TURNED OUT, the unknown prew agent who penned choice piece of puffery for New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, in 1894 was about seven decades ahead of his time, JFor long after the Korean War, when nearly every other major city in the country roared to the sound of the trip hammer arid wrecking ball, New Orleans' dominant old order of Creole and aristocatic Anglo-Saxon merchants continued undisturbed its "leisurely conduct of the traditional businesses shipping and shipbuilding, tourism, retail and wholesale trade. Life in "Big Easy," as the town'g Negro call it, remained graciously indolent, and about.this time each year, the revelry of Mardi Gras provided all the excitement required. Yet the city's slow economic pace was itself the lure that began attracting shrewd outsiders.

And when southern Louisiana's offshore petroleum strikes grew into a full-scale oil tnd petrochemical boom in the. early and the Federal government began moving into its sprawling Saturn moon-rocket plant smack into New Orleans in 1961, the outsiders pounced. The Big Shakers Men like Clint Murchison Sr. and his sons of Dallas oil fame, New York builder Marvin Kratter and Chicago's John Mack launched vast office, residential and. industrial schemes.

And they were quickly joined by a pair of unlikely local non- bluebloods, Sam Recile, -who began selling real estate at 15, and Louis Roussel, a driving, entrepreneur. Both are now among the biggest movers and shakers in town. Today New Orleans is a boom a circumstance that does not always -please the upper crust of the historic old river city. "A diamond is rather smaller than a bulldozer," sniffed one New Orleans matron of impeccable pedigree. "But we would rather have our small diamond than the.

biggest bulldozer there is." Mustached little Mayor Victor Schiro retorts happily: "Tht; people have had their sleep. Rip Van Winkle is waking up." Indeed, as the balls and celebrations mounted steadily last week toward Shrove Tuesday's Mardi Gras climax, the awakening was everywhere in sight. The float-filled parades wound through the ihadowi of gleaming new skyscrapers, like the 45-story Plaza Tower, and past the rubble of decayed old buildings like the Campbell Mansion, which is being torn down to make way for a parking lot. In the Vieux Carre the famed French of moldering old Creole buildings have been restored as private homes or combined and remade into chic apartments like the 24-unit Bourbon Orleans. As for the themselves, mock rockets and space capsules honoring the city's great new Saturn rocket plant formed the centerpieces for dozens of spectacular floats, and hundreds of mummers dressed as astronauts and moon creatures elbowed those costumed traditionally fairy Cjueens, mythological figures and imaginary beasts.

In their own way, the colorful city's cold statistics are just as impressive as the changing cityscape. The metropolitan population soared 16 per cent from 1960 to 1,053,900 the first of this year. Spurred by £303 million in insurance payments and loans resulting from damage caused by last fall's Hurricane Betsy, retail sales last year climbed 16 per cent over 1964 to billion. Construction activity, also boosted by Betsy's damage, rose 36 per cent to billion. And despite a 34-day dockworkers' strike last year, the Port of New Orleans, second only to New York, managed to boost seagoing and Mississippi River tonnage some 6 per cent to 88.5 million tons.

In fact, the bustle prompted one perhaps overenthusiastic booster to promise, last week: "Someday, the Lower Mississippi will be one long Ruhr Valley." Money Begins to Work To keep up with all this growth, the local gat, electric and transit utility, New Orleans Public Service, will spend $209 million on almost three as much ai it spent 1964. In a city where, the tinkle of crystal at well-laid supper party has been a more cherished than the ping of a cash register, a whole new financial horizon ia opening up. "We are learning that money in the bank is nothing unless, it is put to work," said awed Philip Werlein IV, president of an old-line musical instrument house that was the original publisher of the song "Dixie." "New will never be the same." But the rebirth of New Orleans has not come about without growing pains; the developers and planners have had to battle the deep-seated antipathy or outright resistance of those who like New Orleans as it is. Their view was summed up by an aristocratic businessman, as he sipped a cup of French- drip coffee in the drawing room of his porticoed Garden District mansion one day last week: "We are a rather indolent people." Nowhere has the clash been more heated than over ft proposal to build an elevated, six-lane, expressway along the banks of the Mississippi River above a set of sunken railroad tracks. The three-story-high erpressway structure would ait the French Quarter off from the river, closing the now open river side of famous Jackson Square and partly hiding the celebrated St.

Louis Cathedral. In addition, a number of the new access roads would be dropped into one corner of the venerable French Quarter itself. A dedicated group of businessmen, architects, lawyers and preservationists called HELP (Help Establish Logical Planning) is frantically fighting this "desecration of New Orleans heritage." Is New Orleans destined to be a catastrophe like New York?" asks architect Ronald Katz anguish. To protest the project, which is in the final stages of approval, HELP partisans decorated a number of buildings along the Mardi Gras parade routes last weekend with black crepe instead of the traditional purple, green and gold bunting. Snakes and Skeeters Back in 1959, the New Orleans Establishment scoffed when the Murchisons and- other Tesas oil interests shelled out $30 million for 50 square miles of undeveloped land on Lake Pontchartrain.

The land, the city's elite said, was a worthless mosquito- and snake-infested bog. But the land also adjoins a government factory that NASA, two years later, picked for its giant Saturn rocket plant, which now employs 11,000 workers. The Texans brought in to fill lowland, constructed a pumping station to drain it, and New Orleans East, as the area is called, now has 5,000 people living in residential areas and two large chemical works and a cement plant, worth $54 million, in big industrial tract. "We're just beginning to walk," Harold Cook, executive vice president of the planned 3o-year- long development. "In the next two or three tha city is just plain going to explode." Marvin Kratter, 50, a hard-driving New York developer, also has invested $19 million in 5,000 undeveloped residential acres next to the Saturn complex.

But New Orleans has found Kratter and rude," in the words of one publication, and he had trouble with zoning and in getting the city to service development with drainage and sewage lines. In an effort to-woo New Orleans, Kratter lias given money to such culturally correct projects as the "Save Our Symphony" drive, and offered', to land for the proposed domed where hopefully a National team wcnild be NeWiweek 1.