Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 19

DETROIT AuiuM I A Changed America Emerges On Norman Rockwell's Easel i -v Bob -Vi I Talbert's Detroit kd? IT WOULD be most touching if Sugar Ray Robinson shows up at the "Salute The Champ" festivity at Cobo Aug. 12 to honor his idol, Joe Louis. If they can promise Sugar Ray there'll be no elevators, he may be here. He has a deathly fear of elevators and recently walked up 76 stories in a New York skyscraper to avoid using one Sammy Davis who may help honor Louis, says he would like to "go to Vietnam to entertain the troops, even though I don't believe in the war or any war. But I can't get over there.

The silent majority won't let me go. I even asked Bob Hope to take me with him, but he wouldn't. They never give me reasons, just refusals." iililllillil: plfc MOVIE-GOERS, get set for a flood of documentary-type films about rock music and Irock stars, a la "Woodstock" and the Bea-t 1 s' "Let It Be." A feature-length film called "Elvis" will be filmed live during Las Vegas run at the International Jthjp month. Film crews are already with Sly land the Family Stone, Jim Hendrix and Lulu tp record their every itch and twitch. i LOOKING BACK on his 14 years as an NBC newscaster, Chet Huntley says, "If I had to do It over again, there isn't one thing I would do differently.

I guess the most remarkable thing has been the fact that David Brinkley and I have never "had a cross word in all those years, al- 'though plenty of people have tried to -promote quarrels between us because of our differing views on Vietnam." SOPHIA LOREN and Jacqueline Onassls share something in common they would just 2 as soon forget: Both have extremely large feet (size 10) for ladies Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin are co-chair-gmen of the Sept. 13 Friars roast, in Las Vegas of comedian Joe E. Lewis. Says Hope, SLdon't think I'll carry my golf clubs with rne. If I have to get around those three, their breaths would melt all my irons." FAMED STRIPER Tempest Storm says, "I am not a nude.

Burlesque has never been crude. It is not vulgar. It always leaves something to the imagination. I wouldn't think of performing in the absolute nudel Never! I'd die first!" COMEDIAN George Carlln warns ladles that "a water sport is NOT a guy who grabs jMii in the swimming pool." SONNY LISTON on the Ill-fated Casslus Clay-Joe Frazier fight: "Clay would win. Frazier would never find him.

Brenda Davis WILLIAM FINE, president of Bonwit Teller who vows he's banking his career on-the midi length, says, "That first Eve bought a bad apple from a smooth-talking snake and it has affected all of us. There aren't any dumb Eves around anymore." So why is he pushing that bad-apple midi down the smart Eves throats? Tiny ginger Brenda Lee, who wears a size five dress, says: "The midi makes me look like I stole Granny's dress. But some micro-mini's are just as bad for me. Some girls wear theirs seven inches above the knee. I don't have seven inches above the knee!" infiii "Wnir Endeared to millons for his portraits of a Grandma- with love.

He sees Its current crop of youth as our and-apple-pie America that he wanted to believe in, best ever and believes that somewhere under the Norman Rockwell, at 76, still limns his country long hair is a genius for the world. Prat PrMt-New York Niwi Scrvlc STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. Some things are as American as well, a Norman Rockwell cover on the Saturday Evening Post. Now, the a a i that made him America's most famous painter no longer exists. Nor does the America he painted with a style and humor that a an enchanted era.

Perhaps it never did, except in the eyes of the artist and the beholders. But Norman Rockwell still exists, and at 76 he still works every day in the studio set apart from his rambling, white frame house, painting the portrait of the nation he loves. And reflecting its change. HIS CURRENT work is a sequel to an SEP cover he painted more than 40 years ago. The original showed an overheated model-T Ford stalled on a bridge while the disgruntled driver opts for a bracing dip in a lovely stream running below.

The sequel will depict the same man, 40 years older, showing his grandson that same stream now little more than a cesspool, its banks littered with beer cans and old tires. Several months ago, Rockwell painted Vice-President Spiro Agnew for the cover of TV Guide. Mrs. Rockwell, an Agnew-phobe of long stand-ing, almost stopped speaking to him. When it was mentioned that the Agnew trait didn't seem to be quite his style, the artist replied: "Neither is Mr.

Agnew." In 1960 Rockwell said of his work: "The view of life I commit to canvas excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be." But today he says: "There was a time when all you had to do was draw a mother, a kid and a dog. If you really wanted to get sentimental, you put a bandage on the dog's leg. It was a world where mothers loved their kids, kids loved their mothers and they both loved dogs. But I don't want to go back to that again.

That's passe. "I really believed the war against Hitler would bring the Four Freedoms for everyone. But I couldn't paint that today, I just don't believe it. I was doing this best-of-possi-ble words, Santa-down-the-chimney. lovely kids adoring their kindly grandpas kind of thing.

And I liked it, but now I'm sick of it." Recently, he has done paintings showing the integration of schools in the South, the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, the space program and modern youth, but the old SEP covers remain his heritage. ROCKWELL confesses to moments of despair, feeling that his work is shallow and somehow incomplete, but he says this acts as a spur and makes him work all the harder. "If I thought I was perfect, or even close to perfect," he says, "I would probably pawn my brushes and quit." "I no longer believe I will Aug. 2-8, 1945 News of the Week Prince of Arabia woo Detroit work-ing girl. Detroit woman divorced by her husband when the joins Marines spat blamed on service rivalry.

"Ration Free" stove on sale at Sears for 64.50. Detroit joins Chicago in plan to build expressway between two cities when war ends. 0 Plane hits house near Detroit; 2 die. Orphanage blaze kills 200 escape in Detroit fire. Cheers greet Churchill tie takes Houm of Commons seat, Fastest plane in world, jet-powered P-80 Shooting Star, flies from Dayton to N.Y.

in I hour, 2 minutei. Movies: Ernie Pyle'i "Story of GI Joe" with Burgess Meredith premiers at Palms. is Robert Mitchum, the handsome new screen thrill. Air Force Day celebrated; Ma, Gen. H.

M. McClelland warns in Detroit that day is not far off when US. cities could be bombed by jets and missiles. have jobs or anything much to do, but they were pleasam girls and all quite pretty. "About three months after we had moved in, my father came to see me.

He climbed the stairs, shut the trap-door very carefully and asked if 1 knew what I was doing. 1 asked him what he meant and he told us that our studio was in the attic of a house of prostitution!" It has been said that no thing so much reminds us of our past as Norman Rockwell, but his work during the decade just passed (much of it for Look), exhibits a strong social conscience. Rockwell is deeply committed to makins his work relevant to our time. He now comments on canvas on civil rights, exploration in space, the generation gap, the Vietnam war, poverty and our threatened ecology. Discussing his work recently over luncheon atn Manhattan restaurant (Rockwell orders apple pie) he discussed his work, past and present.

"I don't think my style has changed, but America has, and hence, so has my subject matter. Perhaps there never was a country like the one on the cover of the Post, that I was stubbornly painting the best vision of us. There's no denying that life was easier, less complicated 50 years ago, but that is not to say that doomsday is at hand-Lord knows we have problems plenty of them but we should also have great confidence in the present generation of young people who are, I think, the very best we have produced, long hair and all. Who is to say that one of these hippies won't be a genius of the future?" I start each picture with the same high hopes, and It I never seek to fulfill them, I still try my darnedest. Somebody once asked Picasso his favorite of all the pictures he's ever painted and he replied, 'The next "111 echo the master." When Charles A.

Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 33 hours and 29 minutes in 1927, Rockwell worked non-stop for 26 hours to salute the historic event via a Post cover. And when our astronauts reached the moon a year ago, Rockwell produced a Look painting of awesome power the imprint of Neil Armstrong's left foot in the dusty surface of the Sea of Tranquillity. ROCKWELL'S experiences in painting politicians over a period of four decades are a of many anecdotes. His all-time favorite among presidents, from both a professional and a personal standpoint, was Dwlght D. Elsenhower hen Ike gave you that grin he was an artist's but though he has done President Nixon half a dozen times he considers him a dull subject to paint.

"In 19(4, 1 did Barry Gold-water (A remarkable cranium to draw, though I'm not sure what's inside and three weeks later went to the White House to make sketches for a companion portrait of President Johnson, whom he de-scribes as "a very tough cookie." "He was very brusque when I went into his office," Rockwell recalls, "and when I asked for an hour to make sketches he a 1 hit the ceiling. He told me the best he could afford was 20 min- three orange crates; Jack Outwater had an uncle who had been a pirate; George Dugan could wiggle his ears. I could draw." At 16 he 'dropped out of high school after his sophomore year, bent on becoming an artist. He enrolled at the Art Student's League, studying under the late George Bridgman and a Fo-garty, and began to mold the style which was to make him the l's most famous alumnus. At 18, Rockwell and a fellow student at the League, E.

F. Ward, went halves on the first studio in the attic of a brownstone on the upper West Side, one of his few glimpses of the underside of life. "A ROUGH wooden stairway without railings led up to a trap-door in the third floor ceiling," Rockwell recalls with a chuckle. "The room was small, making it necessary for us to move our easels whenever someone came up and wanted to come the trap-door. But there was a skylight and it was quiet up under the eaves.

The middleaged woman who rented to us provided us with three or four chairs. "Right off we noticed that there was something strange about that house. We'd come in at 9 o'clock in the morning and there wouldn't be a soul stirring. Then along about noon someone would start playing a piano somewhere downstairs and would keep it up until after we left in the late afternoon. Every once in a while one of the girls who lived in the house would come up to our attic in a dressing gown and smoke a cigaret and talk.

They didn't seen) to utes and told me to get cracking. I decided to do the best I could, but he was just sitting there glowering at me. I finally said, 'Mr. President, I have just done Barry Gold-water's portrait and he gave me a wonderful grin. I wish you'd do the And for the rest of the session he sat there with a fixed smile like he a competing for the Miss America title.

"I took out the wattles under his chin and shortened up his ears a little and he was delighted with the portrait, which he had on the wall in his office. When I went back to paint him a second time he treated me like I was his long-lost buddy and wouldn't let me go. He took me on a tour of the White House and couldn't have been more gracious and charming. "In 1967, Peter Hurd did a portrait of him which Johnson called "the damnedest thing I ever saw and' pointed out my picture on the wall as an example of something "worthwhile. Hurd, of course, had him as he was, while I had done him as he would like to think he is." ROCKWELL GREW UP in genteel poverty, doing the things most boys did around the turn of the cenutry: Stealing pieces of ice from the back of a horse-drawn ice wagon, learning life's headier secrets from the pictures of naked African women in the National Geographic.

"I was a skinny, pigeon-toed kid with glasses and a huge Adam's apple," he recalls. "My brother, a i was an excellent athlete. My ability was just something I had, like a bag of lemon drops. Jarvis could jump over History's Biggest Air Raid Hits Japan bring back the golden age of illustration. I realized a long time ago that I'll never be as good as Rembrandt.

But I think my work Is Improving. GUAM, Aug. 2, 1945 Approximately 800 Superfortresses cascaded nearly 6,000 tons of incendiary and high-explosive bombs early today on Japanese targets in the greatest single bombing mission in world history. They attacked the cities of Hachioji, Toy-ama, Nagaoka, and Mito, as well as petroleum installations at Kawasaki. The bomber force exceeded by approximately 175 the number of planes sent out previously from the Marianas by the 20th Air Force.

They carried a bomb load estimated to be the equivalent of that carried by 2,400 Flying Fortresses from bases in England to Berlin. The raid was the last mission planned and directed by Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, retiring as leader of the 20th Air Force to become chief of staff of the new Strategic Air Forces.

The enemy had been warned publicly that the cities hit Thursday were among a dozen or more towns to be burned out by incendi-ajy attacks. But the pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners who went out on the maximum effort mission did so with little fear of opposition. Japanese military leaders have kept their fighter planes on the ground ejther to conserve them for combatting a later invasion or to hoard precious fuel Millionaire, Dancer Traffic Cops Bomber of the type that hit Japan Today's assault exceeded in bomb tonnage any single mission ever flown in the European war theater. At the same time, Wake Island was coming under bombardment by battleship and carrier planes. There was only slight opposition from shore batteries and anti-aircraft fire, according to Adm.

Chester W. Nimitz. "No personnel casualties were suffered, and damage to our ships was extremely minor," Nimitz said. nameslpfaces Did You Wonder? out on bail pending his draft conviction, has been denied a mere 18 hours in Toronto to meet Joe Frazier in a championship bout. East Koom Gels Paint Job Meanwhile, back on the east coast, the East Room of the official White House has been repainted for the first time since 1965.

The East Room is where the Presidential family's formal' social events are held. The walls are still white. The room has gold draperies and gold benches. Andre Watts, 24-year-bld American pianist, will be the first artist to perform in the repainted room. He will play during a state dinner next-Tuesday night, hosted by President Nixon for L.t.: Gen.

Joseph Mobutu, president of the Democratic Republic of The Congo. In South Africa there's a millionaire who is a traffic cop, and in Yugoslavia there's a traffic cop who is a ballet dancer. Richard Hoyle is a rich textile tycoon in Johannesburg. Each morning he rises at 5:30, dons his policeman's uniform and rides his motorcycle to his assigned traffic directing post, arriving by 7 a.m. He tells the streams of cars when and when not to go for an hour before he's off to his regular office.

He's proud of his police work, for which he's paid less than $1.50 an hour. He wears his uniform all day long, and at the end of the day he directs traffic for another 90 minutes. His "moonlighting" has cost him his wife; however. Mrs. Hoyle, a former British ice skating champion, said in court her husband associated with traffic policemen who were "rough." "Whatever became df Gen.

Curtis LeMay, who master-Biinded the B-29 ftiids against Japan in August, 1945? 5D As for Jovan Bulj: His' avocation is ballet dancing and he practices while directing traffic full-time in Belgrade. A policeman 10 years, Constable Bulj's performance attracts hundreds of tourists every time he's on duty. His Belgrade footwork won him the vote in Venice as Europe's No. 1 traffic policeman. But when a dream came true and he was allowed to direct traffic in London, the motorists were baffled.

Said Constable Cyril Hughes, as he swiftly tried to sort out the chaos: "His signals were a bit too flowery." Bulj said he has never trained for the ballet, but he had taken a few hints from the State Ballet Company. Commented Bulj after his London debut: "I was a little upset that the London police would not let me dance as I do in Belgrade. They said I had to stick to the normal traffic signals." Abbie Can But AH Can't Irv Kupcinet of the Chicago Sun-Times says that granting Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman permission to visit Cuba while out on bond during his appeal of the Chicago 7 points up what many blacks believe there is one code, of justice for whites, another for blacks-Hoffman was given permission by U.S. Appeals Court Judge Robert Klley to visit Cuba for 26 days while Muhammad (Casslus Clay) All, also years later he was chief of the Strategic Air Command. In 1961, President Kennedy chose LeMay to be Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

From his Pentagon office, the general lobbied actively for such weapons as improved manned bombers and satellite "death rays." In 1965, LeMay retired from the Air Force at the age of 58, and went to live quietly in Bel Air, Cal. He took a job with an electronics firm then in October, 1968, George C. Wallace asked the general to be his running mate in the presidential campaign. LeMay accepted. It was a disastrous error.

Wallace had picked LeMay, among other reasons, for his hard-nosed views on Vietnam and national defense. But even he had to wince at some of LeMay's statements. LeMay said he considered the bomb "just another weapon in the arsenal," and that as far as Vietnam was concerned, "If I found it necessary, I would use anything we could dream up, including nuclear weapons." The American people would not buy that kind of thinking. The general is back in retirement in Bel Air. te Wit rwf; ft As a militarist LeMay was a genius; as a politician he was a flop.

"Old Ironpants," as the troops called him, was a strong-faced, cigar-chomping dynamo. A stern disciplinarian, the legend grew that LeMay was once seen smoking his cigar too close to bombs being loaded on a plane. When a junior officer approached and suggested the bombs might explode if LeMay didn't put out the cigar, the general was said to have snapped? "They wouldn't dare!" LeMay's war record was so impressive that by 1944 he was one of the nation's youngest two-star generals at 37. Seven 4t in Policeman Bulj Policeman Hoyle;.