The Pittsburgh Press from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 9

fANVABY 1 3 4 UN I Case CaSeS Case By Fred Oihman The Pittsburgh Press 1 IMUI1UU WASHINGTON When conscientious fellow, like Sen. Francis Case, South Dakota Republican, dredges deep in his own mind, he comes up under oath with some extraor PAGE 9 SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1956 i Tmz 1 mm dinary information. You remember the Senator and the 25 $100 bills he wouldn't take from a Nebraska lobbyist, because he feared maybe the money was intended to influence his vote on the gas bill. Now a special committee of his peers sat under the television lights in the caucus room investigating his storv. Thev 4 the case because when he got the word that the money was waiting for him in an envelope at Sioux Falls, he gpsped.

Then he had to discover who left the cash. None of his clerks knew the donor, except possibly Mrs. Opal Van Horn, who was attending the funeral of her mother in South Dakota. 'he Senator finally did discover that one John M. Neff, a Nebraska lawyer, had left the bills fc- him In Sioux Falls.

That made Senator Case suspicious and he instructed his agents not to mingle this money with his campaign fimds, which then totaled $700. Makes Reporters These funds, he said, had been collected in donations of $100 or less. Not a dollar came from the liquor interests. It was while Senator Case was en route to deposit the $700 in a bank that the night lecame blustery and he turned in at a motel. fipsiHv he hd noet of details clear In his mind and he went home to write an outline on the speech he intended to deliver in the Senate.

He felt a cold In the head coming on. By then Mrs. Van Horn had got back to Washington. She said she did believe she remembered this man, Neff, talking to her about the gas bill. That's when she said "Good Lord," after the Senator told her about the sheaf of $100 bills.

Senator Case simultaneously wired his South Dakota agent to give the money back to Neff. If that turned out to be impossible, then he said donate it to the Children's Home Society. And get a receipt, he said. He added that this telegram was charged to his personal account A reporter listened to this recital for two hours and then with a heavy black pencil, wrote this headline: "Case Balks on Details Prior to 1909." suggested that the gentleman from Custer, S. tell all.

He did just that He mentioned a biustery night he spent in a South Dakota motel. Told about a job he had with the National Parks Service in 1914, described the home remedy he concocted for an incipient cold in the head, explained why his secretary was absent at a critical moment (her mother had died) and quoted her words when he told her about the $2500. She said: "Good Lord." Sfower Casing Case Senator Case, a deadpan citizen in eyeglasses who looks a smidgen like Harry Truman, added In passing that he once was a newspaper man, himself. The Senator is an upright man. I must believe him, but it is difficult to conceive of an ex-reporter including so much extraneous material in an essentially simple tale.

A copy reader on the Washington Daily News took one look at the mass of testimony and wrote the story in three words; "Case Cases Case." Senator Case was a little slower casing Skyscraper Hotel, Construction Boom Bet There's No Bust Last of Serei By BILL STEIP, Scripps-Howard Staff Writer LAS VEGAS, Feb. 11 The prettiest sight in this town today raises its russet walls 13 stories above the main drag, Fremont Street. Some time around April 1 Nevada's tallest building, the Fremont Hotel, will open and the town will achieve that mark of a city, a genuine skyscraper. The Fremont is a handsome building, with rosy ftps' rri w- I I i African Slaughter Robe" c-Ruark SYDNEY, Australia I hope somebody puts a bug in Queen Elizabeth's ear while she Is in Africa this time a little bug which will whisper about something that the British do not need to lose and which they look like they are los ing. This would be the greatest outdoor zoo in the world, I mean, and it is called Seren-getl and Is located in Tanganyika, and this is as selfishly a personal piece as I ever wrote in my life.

Let me tell you a little about the Serengeti game preserve, which is mm ONLY MULTI-STORY HOTEL, under one roof, in Los Vegas is the nine-story Riviera. This lush pleasure dome opened last spring with Liberace at $50,000 weekly holding the spotlight so long opening night that owners had jitters no one would adjourn to gambling tables. A new 13-story hotel will join the Riviera soon to give Las Vegas a genuine skyscraper. tS If 18 32 3) 34 toa MABCI 4 11 13 14 11 38 31 3S 34 27 31 SECTION TWO The twin blows crushed Smoot, his vices hardly minor became more pronounced and when he died he was penniless. Meantime, a syndicate headed by Al Parvin, a rich, horse-loving Los Angeles furniture man, and Col.

Jake Friedman, one of the Sands' top entrepreneurs, took over the track for a couple million and tried to raise some Interest in quarter-horse racing. After a 16-day meeting, this, too, was judged a failure. Convention Hall Finally, last year, the Horseshoe Club's Joe W. Brown started buying up the track's stock and the Chamber of Commerce's Herb McDonald led a movement to build a convention hall at the site of the Las Vegas Jockey Club. Plans are well-advanced for the hall now and In the spring a three-million-dollar bond election will be held to finance the project The bonds won't cost the Vegas citizenry anything; they'll be paid off by a room tax.

In addition to the Fremont, three other hotels are sched' the goal for this year's drive because membership rolls still are Incomplete. However, preliminary esti mates indicate the goal will be between eight and nine million dollars. Although none of the major agencies has signed an agree ment with the Fund, negotia tions are expected to begin shortly, with the Community Chest taking the lead. Chest President Aiken W. Fisher said he will begin talks with the Fund's admissions committee at once in order to make the Chest staff available to the Fund.

SIDE GLANCES ris Weinman) and Southern California's Wilbur Clark, have just remodeled their second-floor Sky Room and installed an elevator to it. On Dec. 7 they opened a 24-lane bowling alley at the entrance- to the Strip. They are building a three-story office building on Fremont Street. And they just built an Inn barber shop so luxurious it's a pleasure to pay $2.50 for a crewcut almost Sahara to Grow The Sahara, Nevada's biggest resort now, is going to get even bigger by spending $3.5 million.

The hotel's lounge and casino area will be enlarged; its main show room, the Congo Room, will be retiered and the stage will be revamped to allow presentation of complete Broadway reviews, and 300 rooms will be added, bringing the number to 750. The Thunderbird plans construction of a banquet hall on its second floor; the Flamingo just finished extensive renovation of its main show room; the Last Frontier went futuristic and became the New Frontier only eight months ago with the expenditure of several millions. Benny Goffstein, who in September became vice president and operating manager of the Riviera after 10 years at the Flamingo, is already talking about adding 200 units to his six million-dollar, nine-story bonanza. 100 Employe "The foundations are In," he says. "All we have to do is build maybe after the summer's over we can do something about that." Goffstein, it should be noted, took the Riviera over and found 1100 employes on Its payroll.

He has cut this number one-half without lowering standards of serv Ice and has elevated a losing proposition to the winner's column. Much current optimism is tied to the expectation in great danger of being sacrificed to inattention, slovenly politics, governmental stupidity and a few other minus qualities in the administration of the protectorate of Tanganyika. It is undoubtedly the nearest thing to the Garden of Eden still existing in this muddled world. It Is a broad plain, once the floor of a huge volancic lake, with distance so vast you may pick up a twin-peak landmark as far as 60 miles away. Game Abundant There On a good day In the protected area of the sweeping Serengeti plains I have been able to stand up in my jeep and watch the wild beast and zebra migrations blacken the country for a solid 60 miles a half-million animals on the move.

This vast reservoir constituted the breeding area for the great game that floods Kenya, Uganda and Rhodesia. I have never FEBRUARY I II 30 31 I 31 IT 31 2 5il4jl 12 19 6 13 7 14 8 IS 22 29 9 16 23 1UU I. UN III I 1 10 IS 14 IT 33M 3110 41 20 21 28 25 26 27 uled to open here in the spring. The three, all along the Strip, are: (D The Florida-financed, 300-room, four-million-dollar Tropicana, which has a 14 -million-dollar contingency fund in the bank and pays it bills on receipt to take advantage of cash discounts; 2) Frank Hofues 300-room Lady Luck; (3) The late Tony Cornero-Stral-la's 1052-room, 6Va-million-dollar Stardust, which will be operated by Tony's brother, Lou, and 2800 stockholders, will have rooms from $6 up and will have a casino operated by the Pioneer Club's Milton (Farmer) Page. Solidly Fnanced The Tropicana Is solidly financed and has already engaged Eddie Fisher to open the place.

The Lady Luck is a minor mystery, though work on it is progressing steadily. The Stardust well, no one knows, but some feel that the coronary which did in Tony at a Desert Inn craps table last summer may have done in the Stardust, too, while others suspect it may make money enough to founder a gambling ship. Such wild activity, both downtown and on the Strip, has left Its scars in the form of bitter feuds around town. One such, certainly the most public and the loudest, is between Hank Greenspun, editor of the upstart Las Vegas Sun, and Al Cahlan, edl-' tor of the long-established Review-Journal. In fact, about all the two editors agree on is that almost 10 million tourists who spent $200 million visited Vegas last year; that there are 105 hotels and motels, 51 beauty shops and four book stores in the area, and that Las Vegas on the one hand is just like back home in Peoria, and on the other hand, has the biggest, richest future of any city on the North American continent.

THE END By Gaibralth Ml PAA Story stone gracing big windows on the best corner In town. It is also a testimonial to the faith that a San FranciSco financier has in the future of Las Vegas. The financier is Louis Lurie, who has built 263 building in his life already and doesn't figure to make many mistakes on the 264th, particularly since the 264th happens to have a four-million-dollar price tag. No Excepton Lurie doesn't make deals lightly, and this one was no exception. He was all for building the Fremont, but he wanted to lease the whole kitand-kaboodle and did.

to Ed Levinson, a hotel-and-ca-sino man who's had many years of experience in Las Vegas. "The deal was completed," says Lurie, "when the leasee came in to my office and put cheeks for on my desk." What Levinson, and Connie Hurley, his casino-operator partner, are getting at the" Fremont is 160 hotel rooms, a 125-car basement garage, a barber shop, beauty parlor, health club, cocktail lounge, coffee shop, a 200apacity banquet room and facilities for the third Vegas TV station, Morry Zenoffg Channel 13, cm the top floor. That covers it all save one item a huge, street-level casino. Other Corners The lineup on the other three corners of the intersection is: (1) millionaire gambler Joe W. Brown's Horseshoe Club, where a million dollars in $10,000 bills sits pressed between two panes of glass while intense little old ladies drop nickels into the slots; (2) the Golden Nugget, furnished in Barbary Coast Provincial and probably the second most profitable club in town, next to the Horseshoe; (3) a Rexall drugstore, a fair-sized operation in its own unspectacular way.

All up and down Fremont Street building sites are being prepared, framework is going up and construction is being completed. Mayor C. D. Baker points out that the town issued $33 millions worth of building permits last year, compared to 54 millions worth in 1946, 84 millions worth in 1951 and $274 millions worth in 1954. "If we're going broke," he says, "I don't know how we'll stand prosperity." Residents are Boostzrs This is pretty much the attitude of every one In Las Vegas, despite the shutdown of the Royal Nevada and the Moulin Rouge.

The town's residents, like pioneers in most newly-settled territory, are boosters, and this approach pervades the thinking of the casino-hotel operators along the Strip, too. The men along the Strip aren't just talking, either: they are spending their dough to get ready for what many think is going to be the biggest deluge of people of all-time this summer. For instance, the owners of the Desert Inn, four ex-Cleve-landers (M. B. Dalitz, Tom McGinty, Sam Tucker, Mor- In the early part of this century a new form of club was springing up around the country a social athletic club designed to further sports events in a social atmosphere.

The New York Athletic Club had been born, was the pattern for others. Buffalo had one. The Detroit Meon, Fahless Head Officer List Athletic Club had been launched. For the most part the organizations were athletic clubs in name only, though most did promote and sponsor some athletes and athletic events. Membership rolls generally included all persons of note In a city, with the result that social affairs far outnum known a professional hunter or a client to violate the area, if only because the overflow on the fringes provided more than enough game for the odd trophy or the buck for the pot.

But the native poachers, the meat hunters, have moved into the Serengeti. The Masai tribe has over-grazed its vast areas and there is talk of turning over the Serengeti to a rapidly dying tribe which is still being preserved as a sort of freak, immune from the demands of modernity. If the Masais' vast herds engulf the Serengeti and it loses its status as a proud preserve, you have almost said goodbye to the wild game of Central Africa. Someone Must Speak It Is interesting to note that a man who runs a safari outfit has written me asking that some plea be made for the preservation of this vast oasis of peaceful breeding land. It is not a selfish plea, for this man's clients cannot shoot on the preserve.

The people of Kenya and Tanganyika and Uganda have done a masterful job of protecting their wild life until now, where the controls seem to be slipping in Tanganyika. A safari firm recently confiscated over 500 wild beast tails, the animals having been coldly slain and left to rot in order that their tails might command 10 shillings each in the Indian shops as fly whisks. I suppose you In America wonder why I run on about this. I can only say that I see an awful lot of people when I go to the Bronx Zoo and I dont think anybody'd like it if the wild game of Africa followed the Indian pattern. There used to be a lot of lion in India.

Now there are under 200, and the rhino is tfearty extinct there. That's why I hope somebody whispers a word to Queen Elizabeth. By William A. White Press Staff Writer desire and the energy was offering life memberships in he club, at $1000 each, that were to be everlasting, could be handed down in a family, might be sold or could be transferred to some person. The building which still houses the club became a part of the Oakland civic and cultural center In 1911, for many years did sponsor many athletes and snorts events.

In what was then a field across Fifth Avenuenow the Pitt Cathedral site were tennis courts where many of the world's greats played. Amateur boxing bouts were regular features of the club and among those who appeared in its ring was Gene Tunney, who was later to dethrone Jack Dempscy as heavyweight champion of the world. Club's Teams Won Trophies Amateur wrestling events were also promoted and the club's teams brought back many titles and trophies from matches throughout the country. The late Harry Jenkins, of Sheraden, and Dex Very, of Penn State football fame, were two star niatmen of the club's early yean. Track and field athletes and swimmers, wearing the "Winged Head," emblem of the club, brought home many honors.

Gradually the interest In sports diminished, but sportsmen and businessmen continue to go through its doors in large numbers. Many of the clubs of this type born in the same era floundered and fell by the wayside over the years, but PAA managed to survive and bears the reputation of. being perhaps the only social-athletic club that never defaulted on Ms bonds. Today it is one of the City's outstanding clubs and a fitting part of the great civic and cultural center in Oakland. By Edward J.

Meeman Editor, Memphis Press-Scimitar a man smart enough to really speak a reading, instead of reading a speech, surely doesn't need a manuscript You need copies of your speech for the press? All right, then furnish copies to the press, but leave your own copy In your hotel room. Simplt Easy Memory Systtm Here is a very simple and easy memory system that has been tried and proved. Read your manuscript slowly and carefully. See what major natural divisions you have made in the subject Put a figure by each division. It is safe to have as many as 20, though only 10 is better.

Make a list of the numbers, and the subject of the section which follows each number. Then learn the list of numbers and subjects by heart. Learn it backwards as well as forwards. Learn It at random. Learn the list so well that someone can call No.

10, and you know that it stands for "More Trade With Europe," lhat No. 3 stands for "Senator Symington's Position," that No. 14 stands for "Free World Corporation Necessary If We Want to Continue Our Prosperity." If you forget something, or if you find when you are on your feet that a good thought occurs to you which you didn't have in your manuscript, use it and don't worry. If you are not an important public figure, no one will Vnow the difference. If you are, then reporters will note how you departed from your text, and there's added interest It's not a speecli unless you speak it Charter Granted to United Fund that Las Vegas soon will become a major convention center, rivaling Miami, Atlantic City and New York.

If this is so, some of the credit must devolve on Joe Smooth, who was in his 70s when he went to post for the last time early las. year. Joe SincGt," recalls one Las Vegan, "was a big man in his day he built Hialeah and Santa Anita and, I guess made a pretty good pile. Built a Track "When he came here six-seven years ago, he had an idea and a beautiful, young wife. The idea was to build a track, and he was the front man for a bunch that went out and collected around five million bucks lots of It in $10 and $20 shares of stock-to build the Las Vegas Jockey Club out there in the desert back of the Desert Inn." After two days of racing the pinkhued track went broke "who wants to wait a half-hour between bets?" Las Vegans asked one another and shortly thereafter Joe Smoot's wife divorced him.

McDonald, vice president of community participation. Harry B. Higglns, vice president of finance; Fred Foy, vice president of public relations; Hugh D. MacBain, treasurer; C. E.

Mattes and George K. Latimer, assistant treasur ers, and J. Stanley Purnell, secretary. 35 Elected to Board In addition, 35 of the 42-member Board were elected. The rest will be elected next year.

The deadline for admission of organizations into the fund JL tn Ma invito to all those eligible will be sent out well before that date, Mr. Hanley said. No action was taken to set Sketches By BEN BURROUGHS Without Children Without children life is dreary for we need their tenderness who can deny the wonder of a baby's soft caress children paint the world with sunshine and they make the blues depart those blessed with little ones are those who have a happy heart childish laughter Is a tonic which fosters peace of mind it is a magic cure-all for the troubles of mankind there is joy beyond comparing in a little angel's kiss God flavors it with untold love and purest kind of bliss true, sometimes they make us worry but for every rugged mile there are a thousand other times they cause our hearts to smile without children life is dreary even if we're rich in gold yes, they are priceless treasures for us to have and hold. (Copyrliht 195ft. Gtnertl Future Corp.

bered other events. The Pittsburgh Athletic always more commonly known as "PAA." was born in this era. Ncoa Credited with fdeo Whose idea it was may-rbe a mailer for discussion, but generally it is credited to Frank Nicola, whose Sclrenley Farms Co. was In the first full blast of creating a civic and cultural center in Oakland. The year was 1908.

Soon It was announced that the Pittsburgh Athletic Assn. had been organized and that a piece of property had been purchased from the Schenlcy Farms Co. at Fifth Avenue and, the then Grant Boulevard, where there were some "flats" which would be called apartments now. And before long anybody who had the Why Ruin It? Sir Anthony Eden, British prime minister, after reading a prepared speech in Washington, made some informal remarks. The Informal remarks made a bigger hit than the I i r.

VI 1 HI I .1 OFF THE RECORD 8 Ed Reed The United Fund of Allegheny County is officially in business today. A temporary Board of Directors met yesterday to accept a charter granted the fund raising organization by Common Pleas Court The Fund will combine the y-raising activities of most of the County's health and welfare agencies into one effort. Officers Listed Fund President E. J. Hanley, president of Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corp got Board approval of a complete slate of officers for the coming year.

The of ficers are: Richard K. Mellon and Ben jamin F. Fairless, honorary co-chairmen; Robert L. Garvey, operating vice president; I. Wilson, vice president of ad missions; C.

Lee Austin, vice president of allocations: David ing I remember was my desk." prepared speech. I have always said that only a prime minister or a president had any excuse for reading a speech, but I am beginning to doubt whether even the heads ot state need read a speech. It is said that the importance of their utterances demands word for word care. Rut nrdeidents and Crime 'j MOTORS bTb I bd'Reed Tfc, Kmimm ministers speak off the cuff at press conferences and elsewhere. These utterances are Just as Important as any they make in a for-mal speech.

President Eisenhower has shown that he can think as soundly, and express himself as clearly when a fresh question is shot at him, as ever he does in the closet with a speech writer and a secretary. Not a Speech Just Why a man will go to a lot of trouble to prepare a speech, and then spoil it all by reading It, I can't understand. Oh, he says, but I look up from my manuscript. That won't do-helps hardly any. It's still not a speech if it's read, it's a reading.

Reading results usually in a sing-song delivery which fails to hold the attention of the audience. A few nien avoid this, but don know the 1 "I'm going to leave the price tag on this valentine Herschel will know that if I spent 30 cents I'm not kidding!" dozing at.