Editorial: Overseas furloughs
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Ferguson: Women drivers
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
I remember when I first learned to drive an auto. My third baby had just arrived. Dad was at the office all day and big brother was in school. In order to get places and back soon enough to provide the necessary sustenance for the newcomer, I simply had to master the danged thing.
“You’ll never be able to do it, Mom,” said the first-born. His father was equally pessimistic. He said:
You’ll probably break your neck and be maimed for life.
When I plucked up courage to get behind the steering wheel, the two yelled conflicting commands, making side remarks about woman’s place being in the home and general feminine ignorance of machinery. I didn’t learn to drive that day.
But one day I got mad at both and flounced into the house. After soothing my ruffled feelings, they considered the matter closed. Mom realized her limitations and had given up.
But Mom called in a sister who was a more tactful teacher, and a week later the male Fergusons were stricken dumb at the sight of unteachable but intractable Mom honking up the driveway.
“Where have you been?” they screamed.
“Oh, everywhere,” I replied in scorn.
I am moved to these reminiscences by a little newspaper item which said that:
According to a company executive, buses driven by women require 20% less gasoline and 40% fewer repairs than those driven by men.
Clapper: Flat top
By Raymond Clapper
This is another of the dispatches written by Mr. Clapper before his death in a collision of airplanes during the battle of the Marshalls.
Aboard an aircraft carrier, somewhere in the Pacific –
After a couple of weeks with the Army and the Marines in the jungles of South Pacific islands, I cam aboard this big, new, and most modern airplane carrier last night. I feel like a country boy going to the city, as I shift from the mud and the dirt to come aboard this floating community of some 3,000 persons.
As far as personal living is concerned, it is like a big hotel with an airfield on the roof.
My Army gear, which had been knocked around through the mud with the Marines at Cape Gloucester and Munda and Guadalcanal, suddenly looked filthy and out of place when I saw it in my cabin with its neatly-made bed and white sheets, its fresh-painted walls – and its modern bathroom instead of those ladders out over the water that we were using a few days ago.
‘Everything’s up to date’
I feel like the country boy in Oklahoma! who sings my favorite song, “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City.” For here they have “gone about as far as they can go.” You turn a knob over your bed and you hear the radio from San Francisco. But our colored mess attendant tells me confidentially that although it sounds as if the music is coming from San Francisco:
You know they take it down and play it on records right here on the ship. You ain’t listenin’ to San Francisco. You just thinks you is.
This boy’s name is Charles, and from Charles I have learned about city life again. My one pair of shows had worn through walking on the coral rock of the islands. Charles said he could have my shores resoled at the ship’s shoe shop. I asked how long it would take. He said:
Oh, they can have them back this afternoon.
This is not only city life, it’s a darn sight better city life than you can get in most places at home right now.
Of course there isn’t a man on this ship who wouldn’t rather take life at home, but if you have to be away the Navy has it over the Army in many things. As one sailor said:
Why should anybody want to live in the mud when he can live on a ship? Of course, you might get hit, but you can also get it in the Army, and it’s better to have it happen in a place like this than out in a foxhole full of mud and water.
Seven barbers aboard
Every day the ship’s canteen sells 80 gallons of ice cream to the sailors, and 24 gallons of Coca-Cola. On my first night aboard I had filet mignon, although that was probably very special. For lunch today we had hamburger and black-eyed peas – and two helpings.
They have seven barbers aboard. I got a much-needed haircut from a young fellow who learned barbering in a small town in Tennessee.
He said:
I didn’t want to do barbering in the Navy. I just wanted to be a sailor. But they caught up with me, and so I’m barbering again.
He works mostly on officers. He said:
They don’t like Navy G.I. haircuts, so I have to do it a little more fancy. They all want hair tonic. I only have one kind, but I’ve got their backs to the mirror so I just give them anything they ask for out of this one bottle. They can’t tell the difference.
He hopes to have his own shop when he gets out of the Navy.
Old minstrels used cigar boxes, tin cans to make instruments
By Douglas Gilbert, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Second of a series.
A panel from a minstrel song cover (“Going Ober de Mountain”) dated 1843, the inauguration year of minstrelsy in America. It probably caricatures an act from the Virginia Minstrels, the first organized troupe. The song cover is a superb lithograph and a collector’s item.
Who devised the peculiar formation of the minstrel show’s first part, as the opening was called – the semi-circular arrangement with the performers (“40-Count-‘Em-40”) banked in tiers – is not known. Doubtless it was a gradual development. Certainly, it was a logical grouping, for the stages of the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the decades when the minstrel show was most popular, were small and poorly lighted.
The late Brander Matthews, one-time professor of dramatic literature in Columbia University, offered an interesting theory as to the origins of Bones and Tambo, the end men, and the pompous interlocutor, or middleman.
For his originals, Mr. Matthews went back to 16th-century Paris and the dialogue between Mondor, the quack, and his comic foil, Tabarin, buskers of the period, or, in the true sense of the word, minstrels.
Setting up a pitch in the marketplace, Tabarin would inquire of the doltish quack:
Master, tell me which is the more generous, man or woman?
Mondor replied:
Ah, Tabarin, that is a question often debated by the philosophers of antiquity and they have been unable to decide which is truly the more generous, man or woman.
Tabarin said, briskly:
Never mind the old philosophers. I can tell you.
What, Tabarin, do you mean to say you can tell us which is the more generous, a man or a woman?
Certainly.
“Pray do so then,” said Mondor.
The judgement? Shush
Then Tabarin would announce his judgment which, unfortunately, is too ribald to be printed today but which, in picklock Paris of the 16th century, was greeted with guffaws by the unsqueamish crowd about the quack doctor’s platform.
Although this smacks a bit of the medicine show, Matthews’ analogy is not too farfetched. The minstrel interlocutor was as fatuous as Mondor, and the end men as glib, if not as bawdy, as his Tabarin.
“You ask me, Mr. Bones, why did the chicken cross the road. And now, I ask you, why did the chicken cross the road?” Thus, the minstrel interlocutor. Eventually he was answered and the laugh (and the audiences really laughed at this) was on the pompous interlocutor.
Personal jokes
Sometimes the comedy was personal, even to the use of the performers’ real names. And sometimes either one of the end men, instead of the interlocutor, was the butt of the joke.
The San Francisco Minstrels, one of about 50-odd minstrel troupes in the late ‘80s, was headed by Billy Birch, Dave Wambold, Charlie Backus and Ad Ryman. The latter was the interlocutor; Birch and Backus were end men.
During the First Part (this designation was always capitalized), Birch would tell Ad Ryman of how Backus tried vainly to impress a pretty girl at a party.
Birch would say:
And do you know, Ad, she turned to him and said, “Mr. Backus, is that your real mouth or do you use glove stretchers?”
Backus had a mouth like a cavern.
Two ran for 40 years
This bucolic flavor was essentially minstrel and its greatest exponents were Carncross & Dixey’s Minstrels. In a bandbox theater in 11th Street below Market in Philadelphia, they established an unusual reputation – for 40 years they prospered.
Prospered, that is, in the same place and with the same organization. J. L. Carncross, the interlocutor, had a light tenor voice splendidly adapted to plaintive ballads – “The Low-Backed Car”, for example, or “When the Corn Is Waving.”
E. F. Dixey, his partner, was the bone end and his forte was “bone” solos played with two clappers of bone of ebony in each hand. He imitated barbers, woodchoppers and shoemakers and closed with a rousing interpretation of the race between Dexter and Goldsmith Maid, two famous trotters of the period.
Refinement of art
Dixey’s bone solos were a refinement of the art. The earliest end men used the jawbone of a horse. They rattled a rib bone between its forks to produce rolls and single and double clacks. Often, they accompanied an ancient bit of doggerel recalled by Jack Murphy, old-time vaudeville star:
Jawbone walk, jawbone talk,
Ain’t goin’ to work no more.
Jawbone eat with a knife and fork,
Ain’t goin’ to work no more.Rain little, snow little,
Ain’t goin’ to work no more.
Hailstorm! Blind hawg,
Ain’t goin’ to work no more.
The bone solo was virtually a Carnegie Hall interlude for the minstrel show. Performers used many freak instruments, mainly of their own devising. Murphy & Mackin, an outstanding team, perpetuated the greatest novelty of minstrel times. They played a reel on the ribs of a human skeleton, and rigged it so the skeleton danced the last few bars.
Cigar boxes used
Fiddles and banjos made of cigar boxes were common. But a performer named Dilks played a tune on a tomato can. This also was a feat. He attached a string to the can, held the can between his feet and vibrated the string by scratching it with a rosined stick. He accomplished the musical scale by changing the tension of the string.
Then a team named Huber and Glidden developed the idea. They make a fiddle and banjo out of oyster cans. In those days, oysters were packed in tins about the size of a two-pound candy box. The team was so successful they billed themselves as the “Oyster Can Mokes.”
For contrast, Glidden would then play a real banjo. But Huber kept to his freak role. As Glidden strummed in orthodox manner, Huber played a whisk broom obligato all over Glidden, all over his banjo and all over the chair Glidden sat in.
Minstrel comedy musical acts ran the gamut, stopped nowhere. Performers made “musical” instruments out of crockery, bottles, flowerpots. One team even used top hats for tonal effects by stiffening them with shellac and spanking them with a paddle.
Johnny Saunders devised an act with eight beer kegs which he tapped for tunes with a bungstarter. He tuned the kegs with water, exactly as musical glasses. Fields & Hoey played “The Last Rose of Summer” on eight cowbells. And Jack Keating, of Keating & Sands, actually played a tune of his face. He played the “Carnival of Venice” by forcing the wind across his lips with a bellows. It sounded like a far-off steamboat whistle.
Tops in freak minstrel music, though, was Swain Buckley. He billed himself as “The One-Man Band,” and it was no understatement. Buckley tied a brass drum to his back, held cymbals between his knees, fastened bells to his head and ankles, fixed a harmonica on racks close to his mouth, held an accordion in his hands and strapped a snare drum about his waist.
Playing the accordion and using every joint and muscle in his body, he managed to play a march and several popular melodies of the day.
President’s ‘no’ only fourth term bar
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer
U.S. so sensitive, London editor says
London, England (UP) –
The London Daily Mail carried a large cartoon on its editorial page today depicting a gymnasium in which President Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie and Governor Thomas E. Dewey were training.Mr. Roosevelt was punching two bags bearing the likeliness of Hitler and Hirohito. Mr. Willkie was punching a bag labeled “McCormick.” Governor Dewey was in a corner skipping rope, standing by the door, Uncle Sam, in gym clothes, was telling a man peeking in to “Scram – This Is Private.”
In an adjoining column, the paper advised Britishers that:
If we want Roosevelt to carry on in the White House, we should shun advice-giving to the American electorate.
It said:
You have no idea how sensitive the people are.
Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt’s progress toward a fourth-term nomination is gaining such momentum today that only an abrupt and public disavowal from the White House could stop it.
Under those circumstances, Mr. Roosevelt’s refusal to reveal his political plans is accepted generally by politicians and political writers here as demonstrating his willingness or desire again to be drafted by the Democratic National Convention.
Asked directly at his press and radio conference yesterday whether he would accept renomination, Mr. Roosevelt replied there was no news on that subject. But the fourth-term campaign conducted by his associates has been making news for some time.
The Democratic National Committee last month did some precedented-smashing itself in adopting a resolution soliciting the President to stay on the job.
New Hampshire and California party leaders have nominated slates of Democratic National Convention delegates pledged to Mr. Roosevelt’s renomination. That gives the President a head start of 62 convention votes.
The Illinois Democratic organization announced yesterday it would enter Mr. Roosevelt’s name in the state’s April 11 presidential preference primary. Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, who rules the New Jersey Democratic machine, is out for a fourth term.
Vice Chairman Oscar R. Ewing of the Democratic National Committee told Portland, Oregon, questioners this week that Mr. Roosevelt’s reelection to a fourth term had been assured within the past six weeks by public realization that the war would last for a long time.
Vice President Henry A. Wallace held a San Francisco press conference this week and said:
I suspect President Roosevelt will run for a fourth term. As for me – I am in the lap of the gods.
Washington gave Mr. Wallace top marks for accuracy on both statements. The facts are that the Democratic organization with a few notable exceptions
Former Governor J former Senator James A. Reed of Missouri are trying to raise the anti-Roosevelt battle standard in the Midwest. James A. Farley is struggling against powerful Roosevelt forces in New York. Senator W. Lee O’Daniel (D-TX) and some other Southerners are off the fourth-term reservations.
There are mutterings in Ohio and elsewhere. But the President had similar pre-convention opposition in 1940 and his fourth-term campaigners promise that he will roll it flat again. There seems to be willingness to concede, however, that the 1944 presidential nomination will be considerably closer than any since 1916.
Willkie tour opens in Idaho
Twin Falls, Idaho (UP) –
A change of administration would be “less disturbing in wartime than during the Reconstruction period,” Wendell L. Willkie declared last night in an address in which he charged the present government with keeping the people ignorant of foreign affairs t increase the impression it is indispensable.
Army officers are directing the war, he said, and they would continue to do this with a new administration.
Mr. Willkie’s address was the first of his tour of the West, generally recognized as a test of his popularity as the GOP standard-bearer this year.
He said:
As a matter of fact, our relations with other nations would be strengthened and clarified through new leadership – leadership not grown too tired and cynical to lead; leadership less enamored of the panoply and show of power; leadership fresh from the people.
Mr. Willkie, scheduled to confer with Republicans in Boise today, will continue to Portland, Oregon, and Tacoma, Washington. He will deliver a Lincoln Day address at Tacoma Saturday.
Wallace advocates high peace aims
Portland, Oregon (UP) –
This world was made to be one world, and unless a lasting peace is evolved, the newly developed destructive forces of warfare will make it unsafe to live anywhere, Vice President Henry A. Wallace told a Jackson Day dinner audience in Portland last night.
Mr. Wallace said:
My trips through western war plants, and what I am hearing about rocket planes and high-powered explosives, has convinced me we must set our sights high at the peace table to avoid another war.
Mr. Wallace left last night for Seattle and then Wisconsin.
Fourth term market gets bullish again
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
Every flick of President Roosevelt’s cigarette, every flicker of the eyelash, the tone of his voice – all these little signs are interpreted these days when he is asked at his press conferences about a fourth term.
Therefore, it may be reported today the market is bullish again for a fourth-term try.
Not that the President said so. But he didn’t deny it. No longer, as a month ago, did he dismiss it as a “picayune” question.
He enjoys repartee
It was one of those things, he said, and there was no news on it.
But he was not blunt or brusque, as sometimes in the part, to the political inquiries put by reporters when they saw that he did not mind them. Instead, he seemed to welcome them and enjoy the repartee.
The inevitable question was raised again in connection with Vice President Henry A. Wallace’s statement in San Francisco that he “suspected” Mr. Roosevelt would run again.
Mr. Wallace’s “suspicions” are worth nothing. For he boasts that he knew in March 1940, before even the President himself knew, that Mr. Roosevelt would be a candidate for a third term.
Soldier-vote victory
Mr. Roosevelt may have been elated at his press conference by the Senate action in tacking the Green-Lucas federal ballot bill on the House’s “states’-rights” measure, which assures at least consideration of a short federal ballot for soldier voting in the conference between the two branches.
It was a partial victory for the administration.
Smith: Roosevelt secret weapon – Double talk
By Merriman Smith, United Press staff writer
Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt has unveiled his secret weapon for use against those trying to pry out his 1944 political plans – double talk.
In 1940, reporters who asked him about his third-term intentions were told to wear dunce caps and go stand in the corner. His strategy this year, however, is to talk all around the lot, leaving the reporters breathless from the chase and more than mildly confused.
Like something from the realm of snasafran and biddleclip was his reaction to fourth-term questions at his news conference yesterday. A woman reporter sounded the keynote when she frankly told the Chief Executive: “I’m confused.”
So is everybody else, the President agreed.
Another victim of the cruppletub and blimplerip was a reporter who planned to ask the President for his views of the Democratic vice-presidential possibilities. Instead, he said “presidential.” But Mr. Roosevelt got the idea, anyway.
The reporter noted that Vice President Henry A. Wallace had been touring the country making what some people construed as political speeches. In view of these statements, the newsmen asked, what did the President think of the Democratic candidacy for the Presidency?
The air was heavy with quirmadil and falantopery as the President started to speak. When he finished it was strictly pluddlestan and number four.
Well, the President started out, those people–. He paused for a split second as if to let his drummolt sink in. he continued by saying there was only one thing for him to do and that was get out and make a speech. Of course, he added, all this criticism about Henry Wallace–.
Somebody in the back shouted “louder.” Raising his voice, Mr. Roosevelt said: Read the sermon on the Mount – is that political? Then he answered his own question by saying that some people would say that it was.
Clearing the tropodgas from his mind and brushing the hornstrawp from his notes, this correspondent asked Mr. Roosevelt: “Would you accept a fourth-term nomination?”
With an expression that seemed to say “I-realize-you-have-to-do-this-sort-of-thing-for-a-living,” the President explained that that was one of them things. It goes back, he said, to the killer of stories – there’s no news on that today.
It was here that the young lady injected her classic cry: “I’m confused.” The President agreed with her.
This seemed to make everybody feel better. Most of the newspapermen thought the doubletalk would be more pleasant to cope with until the President’s fourth-term candidacy is an official fact than the old dunce cap and stand-in-the-corner routine.
As one veteran correspondent put it, “the geigensplock will hemdurndyl better than ever.”
Völkischer Beobachter (February 10, 1944)
Noch dem völligen Fehlschlag der Roosevelt-Agitation –
Neuer Nervenkrieg gegen Europa angekündigt
Amerikanischer Komödienschmierer wird den Lügenfeldzug dirigieren
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Machtpolitische Verschiebung durch das Vordringen der USA –
Englands Stellung im Indischen Ozean
Von unserem Marinemitarbeiter Erich Glodschey
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U.S. Navy Department (February 10, 1944)
CINCPAC Press Release No. 263
For Immediate Release
February 10, 1944
Air attacks on enemy‑held islands in the Central Pacific continued during February 7, 8, and 9 (West Longitude Date).
On the night of February 8‑9, Coronado bombers of Fleet Air Wing Two raided Wake, with bomb hits on the airdrome and barracks areas. All of our planes returned safely.
During February 7, 7th Army Air Force Warhawk fighters and Mitchell medium bombers dropped 33 tons of bombs on enemy bases in the Marshall Islands without loss or casualties to our forces.
On February 8, 7th Army Air Force Warhawk fighters, Dauntless dive bombers and Liberators dropped 24 tons of bombs on Marshall Islands targets.
On February 9, Army Liberators dropped a total of 57 tons of bombs on Marshall Atolls.
During the same period covered by these raids, units of the Pacific Fleet shelled two enemy‑held atolls in the Marshalls while Navy search planes carried out individual bombing and strafing missions.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 10, 1944)
FORTRESSES BATTLE INTO BERLIN DEFENSE ZONE
U.S. bombers cut through fighter wall
Brunswick’s plane plants hit despite frantic Nazi tactics
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
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Allies smash 6 attacks on imperiled beachhead
Nazi shells rip narrow front but British and Yanks hold
By C. R. Cunningham, United Press staff writer
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Shipping reaches lowest ebb –
Jap warships flee Rabaul as U.S. raids ravage base
Submarine hit, 34 planes blasted in air assault; Madang, New Guinea, may be evacuated
By Don Caswell, United Press staff writer
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Wake hit again, Japs announce
Third attack in 10 nights on island reported
By the United Press
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