Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
TACOMA, Wash. – There are all kinds of records, but I’ve just talked with a man who certainly holds an odd one. He is a lawyer who has handled more cases than any other lawyer in the world.
His name is Oscar S. Galbreath. He is 95 years old. He was in active practice right up to a year and a half ago. Even now he has his license to practice for another year. He calls it his “dog license.”
“I’m going to keep right on till I die,” he says, “provided I’ve got sense enough left to apply for my license each year.”
Mr. Galbreath doesn’t know how many cases he has handled. He can’t even give an estimate. “I’m not very proud of it,” he says. But friends of his tried to figure up roughly for me, and they said a round figure of 75,000 wouldn’t be far wrong.
Mr. Galbreath’s career at the bar has been divided into three parts – 15 years in Nashville, Tenn.; 30 years in Durango, Colo., and 29 years in Tacoma. He has now been a lawyer for 74 years.
He hung out his first shingle in Nashville when he was 21. The suit of clothes in which he tried his first case was made from cotton that he himself had planted, picked and carded. His mother made the cloth and sewed it into a suit for him.
He started his wholesale filing of suits – which eventually resulted in his odd record – in those early days at Nashville. The county paid him $600 for collecting a $15 poll tax, whereupon he opened the sluice gates and poured thousands and thousands of poll-tax suits into the courts.
Then at 36 he went West, to Colorado. They say he made the change because he had gambled away all his money and wanted to start in a new place. From that day on he was a bitter fighter against gambling.
Never smoked, drank
Mr. Galbreath can quote large portions of the Bible from memory. When he lived at Durango, he established the Southern Methodist Church there. He never smoked nor drank. At Durango he had some historic fights with the saloon interests. He was county judge there in the ‘30s. Twice he was challenged to duels. Both times he accepted, but friends interceded and the duels never came off.
He was 66 when he moved from Durango to Tacoma – to start another career. It was here he put the finishing touches on his unique distinction of suing people along mass-production lines.
He worked for a collection agency – the National Association of Creditors. From 1912 until today they estimate he has handled more than 50,000 cases for this outfit. Why, for many years they were running 200 suits a week, and Lawyer Galbreath handled nearly all of them. When he’d go to the weekly sitting of a suburban court he’d have two suitcases of papers.
Oddly enough, Mr. Galbreath never made much money out of his colossal law practice. He worked on a straight retainer basis during these hectic years in the West. He is in comfortable circumstances, but not rich.
He has five children living, now well along in years. One of them is a millionaire.
Mr. Galbreath has made it a practice to go back to Tennessee once a year. He was there last fall.
Wished he’d been soldier
He lives in a ground-floor room of a residential hotel. When we went to see him he had one shoe off, and was toasting his foot before an electric heater, although the room itself must have been at 90. He was doctoring a corn.
His voice is high and frail. He isn’t sick, but the doctor comes to see him frequently. Like everybody else in America except me, he is taking vitamins. He listens constantly to an old-fashioned radio. Friends brought him a modern one, but he didn’t like it.
If Mr. Galbreath could live his life over, he would do one thing that he didn’t do – and that is get in the Civil War. He was 14 when the war broke out. He was a violent Confederate sympathizer.
Time and again he ran away to join the Southern armies, but his plans always went amiss. Finally his father put him in school to keep him from joining the South. And although that was 80 years ago, he has never got over it. He says the question “Why weren’t you in the war?” has embarrassed him all his life.
Mr. Galbreath has always been a determined Democrat. His first presidential vote was for Horace Greely (Republican), but he says he voted for Greeley on the same principle that made him use rye coffee sweetened with sorghum – he had to.
“Since that time,” he says, “if I have ever voted for anybody except a straight dyed-in-the-wool Democrat I’m not aware of it.”
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
NEW YORK – George Spelvin, American, called to Washington to state his position on the matter of profiteering, testified as follows:
Q: By Sen. Nilly, I-Indiana. Please state your position on profiteering in the war.
A: By Mr. Spelvin. Well, senator, my position on that when you boil it all down into a nutshell without any ifs or ands why I say when your country is fighting the foe there is no excuse for any man to go to work and take advantage of a situation where everybody is supposed to be doing their bit and the boys behind the guns are depending on you to deliver the goods you can well imagine how they are going to feel if they hear somebody is getting rich just because they happened to have a certain kind of machinery or the Government needs a certain kind of material and you stick them up for a fat profit why now it certainly doesn’t seem to me–
Q: By Sen. Nilly. In a word, then, you believe…
A: By Mr. Spelvin. T positively do but senator with all due respects and I want to say nobody has a higher respect for our great American institutions but you take like back there in 1932 and the President said we were engaged in a war on want so we naturally all figured in such a war profiteering should be out.
Some get $50,000 a crack
But then you began to hear all this and that how this one got a soft job in Washington for $8000 a year and some contractor with connections he is building a golf course that isn’t going to do somebody else’s property any harm or another fellow is related to somebody and he is writing insurance and the next one is getting rich on the radio and then we finally get into this war and the first thing you know somebody quits a Government job to become a lobbyist at $50,000 a crack so contractors can break the red tape then it comes right down to a case of…
Q: By Sen. Nilly. Well, Mr. Spelvin, I am afraid there are two sides to that question because you take for example a case where labor makes certain demands and statistics show you have depressed areas and everything is so urgent that you simply have to jump in with both feet or the situation is likely to get out of hand although I agree in principle up to the point where a public man’s family isn’t supposed to just stay idle if there is a chance to get ahead so there is always a question whether that is profiteering on the people’s predicament or…
A: By Mr. Spelvin. Yes, but you take a case where…
Q: By Sen. Nilly. But I think you have to distinguish…
One hour isn’t like another
A: By Mr. Spelvin. I know, Senator, but with all due respects, in my humble opinion I think if a man has a plant and we will say he has been losing money six or eight years with taxes going right on and then you say he can’t profit more than six percent but he has to rebuild the plant first so it won’t be good for his original business after the job is done and then you have to remodel it back but meantime the unions say if you work overtime you get time and a half well there is a 50 percent markup right there and a 100 percent markup for Sundays.
And I don’t see the difference between the regular working hours and the overtime hours or Sunday but nobody thinks the owner ought to get markups like that because his plant works overtime or Sundays and after all it is his investment and…
Q: By Sen. Nilly. You mean…
A: By Mr. Spelvin. Well, all I can say is, suppose this man earned his money by working the same as anybody else and that money is the fruit of his own toil over the years but he has got to take a loss because this six percent on one particular order won’t show a profit on the alterations it is plan as the wart on your face that we are asking him to give his investment free and lose the fruit of his toil whereas you pay the war worker that big markup just because he works certain hours that are no different from any hours and the overtime is the fruit of his toil too, but we say you have to pay that because he is labor.
Q: By Sen. Nilly. Have you any sons in the service, Mr. Spelvin?
A: By Mr. Spelvin. Yes, sir, two and there are millions of Spelvins in this country and practically all of us have sons in the service, and none in the youth advisory section of civilian defense.
Q: By Sen. Nilly. The committee thanks you, Mr. Spelvin.
Clapper: Wickard’s error
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – Congress is giving Secretary of Agriculture Wickard what he wanted – control over farm prices. But after Secretary Wickard gets it, he may wish he had never asked for it.
That action in splitting up price control between a price administrator and the secretary of agriculture is a flagrant violation of the principle that responsibility should be centered at one point.
But to place farm price control in the hands of the secretary of agriculture is to compound the offense, because the secretary of agriculture – no matter what man holds the job – is always a special pleader for agriculture.
He is tied to the farm lobby organizations. They play his game and help him get appropriations, and he plays theirs. Any secretary of agriculture who was so headstrong as to turn the powerful farm organizations against him would have hard going. He would be sabotaged at every turn. Circumstances make the secretary of agriculture in any administration the captive of the farm lobby.
That is the official who will, under the price-control bill as finally drawn, have the last word in determining farm prices. The price administrator cannot impose prices on farm commodities unless they have been approved by the secretary of agriculture.
Wickard will have no alibi
This is going to make life miserable for Secretary Wickard. As a special pleader for agriculture, he could always have been in a position to argue with the price administrator in behalf of higher farm prices.
There would have been nothing unexpected about that. But now, because Secretary Wickard has asked for and obtained power to determine the prices, he will have no alibi when the various farm groups begin to crowd him for higher prices. He has the power. They will expect him to use it in their favor.
No doubt Secretary Wickard is embarrassed by the controversy that has developed and will try to lean over backward in order to avoid favoritism or the giving of undue concessions in farm prices.
Yet if he succeeds, he will suffer severe martyrdom in the process. Because if the farm organizations don’t get the prices they want it won’t be Leon Henderson’s fault, as it would have been if farm price control had been left with the price administrator where it belonged.
Whatever the farm organizations don’t get now will be Secretary Wickard’s fault. He won’t be able to go back to them and say, “Boys, I am with you but I haven’t been able to sell it to Leon.”
Roosevelt will be involved
Secretary Wickard put himself in a position where he can deliver if he wants to. If he chooses not to deliver, then the woe is on his head. In the last war Herbert Hoover, as food administrator, tried to hold wheat prices within reason and he made himself the target of the farm bloc for years afterward. The farm lobbyists blamed him, and one of his hardest struggles in his later political activities was to overcome that hostility.
Actually this is going to involve President Roosevelt himself. Any real issue between Secretary Wickard and Leon Henderson probably will have to be settled by the President. It becomes something more than merely backing up his price administrator. Secretary Wickard has a legalized place in the decision.
Mr. Roosevelt must either allow Secretary Wickard complete sway over farm prices or else order him to accept or compromise with the price administrator. That is placing an additional and unfair responsibility on the President in such times as these.
If I seem to be crossing bridges before we get to them, it may be said that not yet has the farm bloc shown any disposition to hold in its demands. Through the long, weary months of the price-control fight the farm bloc maneuvered ceaselessly to shove up the ceiling.
There has been no limit to its demands. Now every member of Congress who has played the game of the farm bloc will be crowding the luckless secretary of agriculture to come across. Recent history seems conclusive enough on that point.
Maj. Williams: Simple logic
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
This thought was given me by an airman. It is the best, most logical and concise reasoning for revamping our national defense system into three departments – Army, Navy and Air. If the tools of a trade or profession can be interchanged with those of a kindred trade, why shouldn’t the personnel be interchangeable also or formed into the same organization? What he was getting at is this. There are three methods of attacking warships from the air: One is by high altitude bombing, the second is by dive bombing, and the third is by aerial torpedo attack. All three methods are used separately or simultaneously by crafty commanders to divert the enemy defenses while driving home the telling attack.
For instance, the Japs attacked the British battleships “Prince of Wales” and “Repulse” with high altitude bombing and while the warships’ anti-aircraft gunners were working on the planes way up in the heavens, a batch of dive bombers pounced on them. At the same time that the high altitude bombers and the dive bombers were at work, the aerial torpedo attack was driven home.
To date, and from the record, high altitude bombing against warships has not been as effective as either dive bombing or torpedo attack. And of the latter two, the torpedo planes have the highest score.
The reason for this scoring is simple. The chances of missing are greatly increased with an increase in the altitude from which bombs are dropped. It takes an appreciable length of time to study and compensate (with the bombsight) for the maneuvering of a warship. Then, too, the big bomb is not nearly as effective when it is exploded on the deck of a warship as the same explosive charge is when detonated close to the warship below the waterline. When exploded on the deck, the charge takes the line of least resistance, and most of the effective expansion is lost in the air. The dive bomber runs less chance of missing the target warship, but its explosive is open to the same ineffectiveness.
The torpedo attack
On the other hand, the aerially-launched torpedo is an underwater weapon, running close to or under the waterline. Its explosive charge is exerted against the side of the warship. Then, too, one must remember that the vastly greater density of water enables vibrations td travel far more effectively in water than in the atmosphere. And, after all, the forces of an explosion are nothing more than violent waves of vibration.
The aerial torpedo is a personally-delivered load of destruction. It is launched from a plane not more than 20 or 30 feet from the water and seldom more than 300 or 400 yards from the target. The torpedo plane can outmaneuver the giant warship. This means for every trick of maneuverability resorted to by the battleship, the torpedo plane can correct for it – and sometimes in anticipation. Then, too, the torpedo plane attack, if properly planned, can be executed with the aid of smoke-screen-laying planes. This is one of the most deadly methods of aerial attack against warships.
With all the warship anti-aircraft guns working against the high altitude bombers from the moment they first come into range, only a certain number of these guns will be available against dive bombers. Into this melee comes a few smoke-screen-laying planes on each side of the selected warship, establishing a smoke horizon hundreds of feet in the air. Behind his smoke-screen, unseen and hence unmolested by the warship’s anti-aircraft guns, are the torpedo planes squaring away for the drop.
The pilots of these torpedo planes can’t see the warship either, but they know its exact position from the steady line of anti-aircraft tracers streaking up from behind the smoke-screen. They get set and level out. A second or so run through the smoke-screen, and they are in the open – and drop their torpedoes.
To launch a warship…
Who buys pretties?
Vinson asks whether U.S. pays as Washington wives vie for honor – and jewelry
WASHINGTON (Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance) – Launching a warship is an expensive item. It includes a diamond wrist watch, bracelet, or some other expensive token for the lady who smashes a bottle of champagne across the bow. Wives of officials here vie for the honor – and the jewelry.
Rep. Vinson, D-Georgia, House Naval Affairs Committee chairman, thinks the government ought not to pay for these pretties. He has written to all shipbuilders with Navy contracts, inquiring whether they foot the bill for such jewelry, or whether it is included in the price they change for ships.
If it develops that the government is buying the watches, he will introduce a bill to stop it.
If the shipbuilders want to finance the gifts themselves, well and good.
The Maritime Commission recently issued an order banning elaborate launchings, which heretofore, as in the case of the Navy, included cost of entertainment, meals and travel expenses for distinguished guests – sometimes whole trainloads of them – and, of course, the jewelry for the sponsor.