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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1962-12-06, Page 2?1,7tsi e (//, Inriggi'aeWMO ... CORRIDORS IN THE CLOUDS — Under study is a system of terminal air corridors near major airports, where air traffic is heaviest. Artist's drawing gives concrete form to these invisible highways. Aircraft entering a terminal area would be segregated by their speeds and other performance capabilities and be guided down sloping "ramps" to the runways un- der positive control from the ground. tfE COULDN'T BE TALKED OUT OF IT — Joseph R. Slavin, 60, an unemployed werehouserricei, Stand's at the edge of the 250-foot Fort Pitt' Bridge in'Pittsburgh and dives into space (top). Sloyiri falls toward the icy waters of the Monongahela River (bottom) He was still alive when pulled from the Water but he died oil the way to the hospital. 'These pictures were takerii by a photographer who tried to talk Slcivih out of jumping Memories Of Eleanor Roosevelt — .. When and if I ever Write that autobiography all good reporters earn, to write — but never have IMO for; — one chapter will be on my memories of Mrs. Franklin A Roosevelt. Here are a few: A week after the Roosevelt family moved into the White House in early 1,933, I dropped a letter into the mail box near My Akron home. I had conceived the wild idea that I might be the first woman after the inauguration to inter, view the country's new First Lady. "I'm only a reporter from way out in the sticks, but I'd like to come to Washington to talk with you," I told her. "I've heard you want to take flying lessons and I'm interested in. aviation, too." To my amazement an answer came back that very weekend. "Mrs. Roosevelt will grant you en interview for your paper Monday morning at 9 a.m.," wrote Mrs. Malvina Scheider, the beloved personal secretary she always called "Tommy." I received the letter after all Akron stores had closed on a Sat- urday, A kindly department man- ager at our biggest store, in ans- wer to my pleadings, opened the shop Sunday so I could buy a fresh blouse for my Monday visit. X flew to Washington late Sunday night with a palpitating heart. Bright and early, Monday, I reported at the White House front door. "I'm here," I told the sur- prised doorman. He read my letter and confer- red with someone within who directed me where to go to get My press pass. I was then escorted to a second floor bedroom where Mrs. Roose- velt sat in her dressing gown. She was gracious, gave me a won- derful interview, made me feel Very much at home and laughed at the story about her flying les- ions, She even invited me hack to her first tea for Cabinet wives phe was giving that afternoon, It turned out to be quite a famous lea as Governor Al Smith was Balling on President Roosevelt that day and "crashed the party." Later Mrs. Roosevelt let me etay for her first press conference iyith the women reporters of ,Washington in which we all sat On the floor at her feet, In between my interview and T e tea I dashed to the Akron acon Journal's office in the ess.Building. Radford Mobley, , Then the bureau chief, was amaz- ed when he heard I'd had an in- terview with the new First Lady, "No Washington papers have pet carried one. Get out and offer pour story to one of them," he kkeld. I went immediately to one of the Washington newspaper of- fices. The editor promptly bought filly interview — "but we must have it exclusively in Washing- ion," he said. Back at the press office I found at bunch of telegrams from other I 0apere Mr. Mobley had contacted or me. All wanted the exclusive tights in their territories, We sent them out. I think I. made more money on that story than. on any other I ever wrote; But the "Payoff" came later ... at the tea, Mrs. Seheider came over to me and said pleasantly, "Well, did you get your interview all right?" "Oh yes," I replied. "It's al- ready in one Washington paper." "Oh, ray goodness," the secre- tary fairly screamed. "I clear NT- got to tell you that the story had to be read and passed on by sev- eral people first." It was teo late then, writes Helen Waterhouse in the Chris- tian Science Monitor. Later on a tour I took with Mrs. Roosevelt through the New Deal housing projects in Cleve- land, she confided that the Wash- ington press women's noses "were a bit out of joint" because she allowed a Midwest reporter to have the first interview. She also presented me at that time with the very first orchid I ever had. I still have it, brown and faded, pasted in a scrapbook, I spent nearly two hours in May, 1935, touring the interior of the Willow Grove Coal Mine in Bellaire, Ohio, riding side-by- side with the First Lady in one of those small mine cars, wearing a miner's cap as she did. While the rest of us all wore overalls Mrs. Roosevelt decided it would be more fitting for a President's wife to wear an old black dress and a faded sweater. When we emerged from the mine she was a dust-covered and disheveled as we all were. And there was to be a tea given for her in the one big house of the town immediately afterwards. I'll never forget how when we entered the house, women were already gathered around the sil- ver teapots. Running up the stairs Mrs, Roosevelt called back to me, "I'm going to take a quick plunge in the tub, you can be second." In all the adventurous trips she took on this tour of the Midwest, she kept reporters hopping, She hated bodyguards, and would frequently slip out of the hotel on a sight-seeing tour of her own. And. I'll never forget how I had to race to keep up to her long-legged stride. Official Secrets By The Billion! How many secrets the United States guard in its storehouses of secrets is itself a secret, but the current estimate is that the government holds around 3 bil- lion classified documents. That works out to at least one secret for every person in the world, man woman and babe in arms. There is something for every- body. If there is a problem here (and there must be, because just stor- ing all this hush-hush stuff costs around half a million dollars a year) the government might try solving it with some kind of Sur- plus Secrets Disposal Act. On the other hand, maybe the govern- ment ought not to try to share the burden. Most of us common folks have trouble keeping only one secret, The Sun (Balti- more) gance they make up for with the reliability and endurance of a tank. For two years the young men prepared for the adventure, Be- fore they could start they wrote 585 letters and presented 100 photographs, fifty copies of their birth certificates, twenty baptis- mal certificates and eight certi- ficates of residence in order to obtain forty-four visas. Finally, with every formality completed but with the mini- mum of equipment and very little money, Jacques and Jean- Claude. headed south from the capital towards Port Vendres on the Mediterranean coast:. The two Frenchmen had little idea of the adventures that awaited them or of the hazards they and their little car would have to face in the months to come. Crossing the Sahara, they were guests of honour at an. Arab feast which lasted six days. They also witnessed a bitter moonlit death duel between two Tuaregs, the clash of the broad- bladed swords ringing in the night air. In Johannesburg the pair camped on the outskirts of the city and bedded down for the night. In the morning they awoke to find that the canvas hood of the Citroen had been ripped open with a razor and their money and clothes had been stolen. The reaction of the chief of police, when they reported to him, was one of surprise. "And you are not dead? How lucky!" He explained that it is rare in- deed for a thief in that city not to murder his victim! Life is cheap in Johannesburg. A. murder can be arranged for as little as a shilling. . In Brazil it took Baudot and SeqUella twenty days of persis- tent badgering, form-filling and bribery to clear their car through customs. This was a re- cord they were told, some of the large and expensive American cars standing on the quay had been waiting two years for clearance! From the Mexican border they drove to New York in five days, stopping only to refuel and to eat at roadside cafes. In San Francisco they found themselves penniless again and Jean-Claude took a job as a shoeshine boy. On. the boat from San Fran- cisco to Yokohama, travelling economy class, they invested all the money they had in the world—$10—in a game of poker which went on, in shifts, without respite for seventeen days and nights and at their destination they tottered down the gangway, richer by $390. Mile after mile, country after country the little..Gittoen ate up the world. In Japan, to earn money, the adventtkers posed as models in a shop'', ;,window; in Hong 'Kong they ea'fnped in the foyer of a luxury cinema . . and in Thailand there were the bandits. When the two men regained their senses, they found them- selves tied to a tree. Their cap- tors had disappeared, Bitten ante, stung by mosquitos and with heads blazing with pain from the blows which had felled them, they semi relapsed back into semi-consciousness. It was morning when they woke again to find that a down- pour of rain had slackened their bonds and that they could strug- gle free, Barely 100 yards away stood their deserted ear and scattered around it were a few of their belongings, Tahing stock, they found they had been robbed of more than $750 worth of equip- ment. Undaunted, they travel- led On arrival in India the cus- toms dismantled the Citroen bit by bit, including the tyres, Cruel Blow for. .Stamp colloctor.A. The blow was a cruel one for American stamp collectors—per- baps the cruelest in the 100-odd years they have been, following their hObby, 13ut to :make matters worse, the culprit was J, Edward pay, Postmaster General of the. .U.S., and the .time he chose to deliver the blow was National Stamp Collecting Week, which lia'jir t PPOassri. ri Office Department had issued a 4-cent commemora- tHivairie'5ierrfitjhoold7 During°ngth the el4WPrint- ing pag of • 120 million of the com- memoratives, however, someone searching for smuggled gold and then, finding nothing, charged the infuriated Frenchmen for both the dismantling and the re- assembling. On November 9, 1959, Baudot and Sequella drove into Sofia, Three days later they were in Paris, The long journey was over. For the first time in his- tory a French car had circled the globe. Gallantly the now-battered two-cylinder Citroen had sur- vived tropic heat and sub-zero cold; roads that were rivers of mud and desert tracks so rutted that after each bucketing mile it was necessary to stop and tight- en nuts and bolts. The car's gearbox had, in an emergency, been stuffed with a dozen bananas as an improvised lubricant and had functioned successfully in this way for 180 miles. The full story of this amaz- ing global trip is told in the brilliantly entertaining book, Drive Round The World, by Jean-Claude and Jacques Sequ- ella. It is an account of enter- prise, initiative and sheer guts told with great humour and ex- cellently translated by George Malcolm. These are excerpts from Rich- ard Nixon's farewell press con- ference at the Beverly Hilton Hotel the 'morning after defeat by Gov. Edmund G. Brown: Good morning, gentlemen . , Now that all the members of the press are so delighted that I have lost, I'd like to make a statement of my own . . I believe Governor Brown has a heart, even though he believes I do not. I believe he is a good Ameri- can, even though he feels I am not . . , I am proud of the fact that I defended my opponent's patrio- tism, You gentlemen didn't report it, but I am proud that I did that. And cur 100,000 volunteer workers I was proud of. I think they did a magnificent job. I only wish they could have gotten out a few more votes in the key pre., cihcte, but because they didn't Mr. Brown has won and I have lost This cannot be said for any other American„ figure today, t guess, Never in my six- teen years of campaigning have I complained to a publisher, to an editor, about the coverage of a reporter „ I believe if it report= or belieVes that one min ought to win rather than the other, w!•lether it's on television or radio or the like, lie ought to say so, , I wish you'd give my opponent the same going over that you give me. And as I leave the press, amide a t'aro' slip et the littree.4 of Engraving and Printing, .and. at least two sheets of 200 stamps each wort, sent backward through. the presses for the second of two color Impressions. The resulting misprints somehow' passed spectors and were snipped out, The error was still undetected when the first wave of America* 15 million stamp collectors went to the post offices Oct. 24 to buy the newly issued stamps; But twelve clays later, three phila- telists. in Akron, Ohio, spotted the misprint and jubilantly announc- ed that their nineteen stamps were worth up to $3,000 apiece. When the error was confirmed, a postal official remarked with pride that such a -mistake last oc,, curred 44 years and 1 trillion, 100 billion • stamps ago. Leonard Sherman, an Irvington, N.J., jew- eler, who had an unbroken pane of 50 misprinted Hammarskjold stamps, valued his bonanza at $500,000 and announced happily. that the booty would send his: five sops Nougli college. But these dreams were short- lived, To help fight philatelic in- flation, Postmaster General Day announced that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing • would "devalue" the misprint by issuing 1 million identically incorrect stamps. "We aren't running a lot- tery," Day said. Similar action. will be taken on a recently dis- closed Canal Zone slamp mis- print, in which a bridge is miss- ing in the design. "This is utterly ridiculous," snapped Finbar Kenny, a New York dealer, "It's something out of George Orwell," - Sherman, who seemed about to be bereft of his $500,000 paper fortune, .cried: "The government should never have done this," and took the matter to court, where he got an order suspend- ing sale of the misprints until the issue would he permanently lick- ed. ISSUE '19 — 1062 Millions To See can say is this: For sixteen years, ever since the Hiss case, you've had a lot of fun—a lot,'of fun — that you've had an opportunity to attack me and I think I've given as good as I've taken. It was carried right up to the last day . . . „ . It's time that our great newspapers have at least the same objectivity, the same full- ness of coverage, that television has. And I can only say thank God for television and radio for keeping the newspapers a little more honest . The last play, I leave you, gen- tlemen, now and you will now write it. You will interpret it. That's your right. But as I leave you I want you to know — just how much you're going to be missing, You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gen- tlemen, this is my last press con ference . ,I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you, I have always respected you, tut unlike some people, I've never canceled a. subscrip- tion to a paper' and also I never' I hope that what I have said today will at least make televi- sion, radio , recognize that they 'have a right and a respon- sibility, if they're against a can- didate, give him the shaft, but also recognize if they give him the shaft put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now (met then, from NEWSWEKK Around The World In A The small French car slither- ed. to a halt before the fallen tree which blocked the narrow track through the dense Siamese forest. With sighs of resignation the driver and his companion wear- ily got out and walked forward to see if it was possible to lift the obstacle aside, or find some way round it, The night was dark, the air hot and damp and choked with the foul stench of decaying vegetation. Clouds of insects danced in the beams of light from the headlamps and on ev- ery side the jungle trembled with strange sounds. Intent on their inspection, the two men were suddenly con- scious of movements behind them. They spun round, but it was too late. They were surrounded by eight bearded thugs, armed with a variety of deadly weapons — four rifles, two carbines and two vicious, razor sharp kukris. The travellers had fallen into the hands of Burmese outlaws who had crossed the border into Thailand to rob, murder and pillage. The bandits indicated that while one of their captives should get back into the driving seat, covered all the time by an unwavering rifle, the other should take off his shoes to make it impossible for him to escape. Then, with the bare-tooted prisoner pushed roughly ahead of the car, they set off down a barely recognizable path. Progress was slow and diffi- cult, With his feet torn and bleeding, the man on foot col- lapsed twice, but was forced up again at knife-point. Two-Cylinder Car When he pitched forward on to the ground for the third time, however, he refused to go any farther. For a moment it looked as though the bandits would kill him on the spot, but after some discussion they made his friend change places and then the pain- ful, harrowing march was re- sumed. Five hours after the ambush, the bandits called a halt in a small clearing. As the driver of the car was hauled from his seat, his companion was left momen- tarily unguarded. Summoning all his strength ho flung himself at the nearest Bur- mese in a desperate attempt to wrest the carbine from hie hands. The thug doubled up, gasping for breath, winded by the knee' that dug deep into the pit of his stomach, For a few seconds the clearing was the setting for a wild struggle. But it was hope- less. Outnumbered, tired and in, great pain from their injured feet, the two men were no match for their captors and soon swing- ing rifle-butts sent them reeling senseless to the ground. More than ten months earlier, on October 9, 1958, the two young Frenchmen, Jean-Claude Baudot and Jacques Sequella, both in their twenties, had set out from Paris to drive around the world. They chose a tiny, two-cylin- der Citroen with a five-horse- power air-cooled engine. With their unusual suspension and distinctive body-work these cars look like speeding, corrugated iron beetles. But they are mir- acles of engineering design and vrhatever they may lack in ele- He Blew His Top For A GOOD SORE LOSER..— At his news conference in Los Ange- les, Richard Nixon concedes his defeat in California's guber- natorial race to Gov. Edmund (Pot) Brown,