The Pittsburgh Press (January 12, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
Nice – and ugly
By Florence Fisher Parry
Nice: The parish priest of Gertrude and James Degnan broke the news to them. “You have strong faith?” he asked. And they nodded. That means that they will recover. People of strong faith get through things. Pity the man or woman who cannot turn to God.
Ugly: The Germans’ passion for recorded statistics has boomeranged fatefully. Testimony now uncovers the fact that the German purpose in attacking the Soviet Union was to exterminate 30 million Slavs; these in addition to the whole Jewish population of Europe. What would they have done with the atom bomb?
Nice: Mayor Lawrence: “If there is anyone on the city payroll who thinks he has reasons for not putting in a full day’s work every day, he will weigh those reasons against his city salary and choose between them. He’ll work or he’ll get off the job and will give it to a person who will work.”
Come the day when such a promise can be realized, for one of the most frightening attitudes ever developed in this country to threaten its security is the sullen, hostile attitude of ever-increasing numbers toward their jobs and their employers.
Ugly: Remark overheard at a luncheon party: “As hard as this Westinghouse strike might be on working people, it would really be fine for us, for John, even though he has a swell position, will not have to be working and it will give us a chance to take a trip together.”
Servicemen back
Nice: We walked into a men’s clothing department. On the lapel of nearly every salesman was a discharge emblem; no way o know what their service had been, what heroism had been theirs, what nightmares lived through – all just ex-servicemen back at their jobs once more.
One of the nicest results of the war is the way our men are taking their old jobs back, grateful and appreciative of them, asking nothing more than to be taken back.
Monday night at the Nixon Theater, John Howard, an officer in the Navy, a commander of a minesweeper in the Mediterranean, who had participated in the landings at Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and Southern France, and who had won the Navy Cross for heroism after his ship was sunk, performed with scrupulous devotion, his role in the play “Portrait in Black,” a false and phony melodrama in which he played the part of a cold murderer. I was embarrassed for him that he should have got, as his first civilian assignment, so bad a break.
In the last act of the play, he and his partner in crime, the lovely Geraldine Fitzgerald, are locked in an embrace. They had just committed their second murder. Yet when she begs him to go off with her, he adjures her righteously. “But darling, that would be wrong!”
Is there not some way for us to spare our returned heroes from anything like this?
Ugly: “The Lost Weekend”, now showing at Loew’s Penn Theater, will serve as grim reminder to thousands of the wages of alcoholism. They say that in New York this picture (conceded to be the best motion picture of 1945 in practically all of the critics’ lists) has drawn audiences made up of 70 percent men. This dislocation in male percentages in movie attendance is attributable to the fact that a large number of these men are attracted to their own problem.
Let your mission be somehow to induce any alcoholic member of your family or any alcoholic friend to see this really great picture. Any man or woman not yet reduced to the slavery of alcoholism yet headed in that direction, will find in this picture a haunting lesson impossible to throw off.
Consideration
Nice: A young bride recently returned home from her honeymoon.
“Yes, it was marvelous and Bill and I met so many young people who were wonderful to us, but I don’t think I’d want to go back there. You see, they didn’t know about John’s race – his name doesn’t indicate it – and so often someone would make a slighting remark, never dreaming how awful it sounded to us.”
“But why didn’t you tell them?” her young friend asked.
“Oh, I couldn’t bear to. Not on our account, you understand, but on theirs. It would have embarrassed them so, you see, and I couldn’t bear to hurt their feelings.”
Ugly: I keep thinking how harrowing it must be to the innocent suspects the Chicago police already have questioned regarding the murder of little Suzanne Degnan. We must remember that innocent men and women accused of crime manifest a guilty behavior; and the mere shock, humiliation and fright of being accused of something one has not done, distorts his actions, confuses his replies, and his physical reactions are almost identical with those of a guilty man.
I remember hearing the story from an old dowager in Boston of how her trusted butler was accused of stealing a priceless piece of jade. He never denied the theft. He simply disappeared. Years later the jade was found in the possession of a friend who had visited the home at the time. They instituted a search for the old butler and finally located him.
“Why did you not protest your innocence?” he was asked.
“I could not,” he said simply. “To be suspected was to me as horrible as the crime itself.”