Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 1 December 1937 — Page 13

- Vagabond

From Indiana — Ernie Pyle

It May Be Argued Whether Nevada Really Saved the Union, but State At Least Turned Flour Into Money.

IRGINIA CITY, Nev., Dec. 1.—A friend who knew I was coming to Virginia City asked me to dig up the story of how Nevada, during the Civil War, gave forth the riches from her new Comstock Lode and thereby

probably saved the Union.

Does seem sort of queer to think of a land so far away from the fighting, a land which wasn't even a state before the war, jumping in and saving the day. But even if Nevada's gold and silver had actually saved the Union, I still think the deed is overrated. The Union paid for this bullion, didn’t it? At least, I suppose she did. In fact, after reading biographies of the bonanza kings, I know very well she paid for it, or she wouldn’t have got it. Nevadans contradict each other on the problem how Nevada came into the Union, and that hooks up with the “saving the Union” story. Mr. Pyle One Nevadan, a sort of debunker. told me that Nevada simply bribed her way in with her Comstock Lode. She had tried for admittance once, and been turned down. Then, according to this man. when the Comstock Lode got to hitting on high gear, and the people out here began to feel their oats, they threatened to sell their metal in foreign markets unless admitted to the Union. And since by that time the Union was badly in need of metal, Congress voted Nevada in. Other people say the real story of Nevada's entrance into the Union is this: Lincoln needed two more Republican votes in the Senate for some war program, and for the reconstruction days he anticipated The only way to get those two votes was to create another state Nevada was then a territory. So, since both sides were now willing, they just wired the state constitution to Washington and Nevada pecame a state, The year was 1864.

Here's One by Mark Twain

Here's another Nevada story told by Mark Twain: In days when money was plentiful, the U. S. Sanitary Commission was formed and funds were asked for wounded Union soldiers here was a mayoralty election in the town of Austin, east of Virginia City. The two candidates agreed that the winner should give the loser a 50pound sack of flour. : Well, the defeated candidate carried the sack two miles home, then, auctioned it off for $250 for the Sanitary Fund. Virginia City couldn't let a thing like that pass. It sent a telegram to Austin saying, “Fetch along your sack of flour!” : Thirty-six hours later in the course of two wild davs and nights of frenzied generosity, that sack of flour was sold in Virginia City, Gold Hill, Dayton and Silver City to the tune of $40,000. The sack was later sold and resold in Carson City, San Francisco, St. Louis and the Eastern cities, and wound up with the total of $150,000, or $3000 a pound! That's how things went when all was bonanza.

My Diary

By Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt

Seven Families Fight to Wrest

Living From Homestead Project.

EW YORK, Tuesday—The courage of human beings seems to me something beyond price. Yesterday, in the homestead for which the steel companies are putting up the money and for which the American Friends Service Committee is providing management, I saw a group of women and their children in a little frame house with an open fire on the hearth. They were preparing old rags and cutting up old stockings to make rugs for their future homes. Seven families are now living on this project in chicken houses. One family, with six children, has a little brooder house next to the chicken house. In the brooder house four boys sleep. The little coal stove goes out at night.

spread out. It must take character to do one's lessons on a cold winter evening! The foundations for the house are built. it will mean to have a five or six-room house and some land on which to grow foodstuffs can only be imagined by seeing present conditions. The mines in this region vary. Many of the men work only two or three days a week. Idleness and a mounting grocery bill are not good preparations for a contented mind. A place of their own where they can work in their spare time will solve many of their problems. ‘

Gives Book to Peace Advocat

As we drove away there were invitations to come back to see them again. These certainly found an echo in my heart, for I want to see that particular spot when the houses are up. At the homestead we parted from Mrs. Cromwell and Miss Paschall, who went to Pittsburgh to fly back to their home. Mrs. Scheider and I went to Greensburg to take the train to New York. We had expected to take the night train from Pittsburgh, but found we could make this train which got us in rather late last night. I went to the sale for the blind at 12:30, and after lunch I presented a copy of my small book on peace to Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, to whom I dedicated it. I feel many of us owe our interest in world peace to her more than to any other woman.

New Books Today

Public Library Presents—

FTER debating the relative advantages of raising hens or becoming an author, Miss Buncle chose the latter as the easier way to augment her failing dividends, thereby precipitating a crisis. For when she decided to write her book all she knew to write about, being confessedly without imagination, was a detailed account of life in her own quiet English village. This she did most efficiently, and the book was an instant success.

a tide of indignation arose which threatened to engulf the excited Miss Buncle, known anonymously as John Smith. A second book was necessary happened after the betrayed village had read the first. And Miss Buncle . well, she had beautiful eyes, and her publisher was a rather susceptible bachelor who managed to work out a surprise ending for the harassed John Smith which was eminently satisfactory to Miss Buncle as well. All of these complications make up the gay little volume, MISS BUNCLE’'S BOOK (Farrar) by D. E. Stevenson.

to explain what

* &" 8

HE amazing versaulity of genius is exemplified in |

THE MAKING OF A SCIENTIST by Dr. Raymond L. Ditmars in “a scientist’s good times and some of his disappointments.” He lists his major disappointments:

(Macmillan)

Mt. Lassen—and missing the engines pumping during the fire at Quinn's Livery Stable.” The “good times” point even more emphatically to his varied interests. His authority in herpetology is supreme, he js a deep student of history, he was once a court feporter, and he went to a night school to learn how to tear down, and put together again, his first second-hand automobile, - All through the book one feels that Dr. Ditmars has the young would-be-scientist in mind, that his chapters on snow storms, volcanoes, hurricanes, monkeys, and collecting trips, point an unwritten moral. Let the boy alone, let him probe for himself into all of these wonders; let him find as I have a wider, more varied world.

| |

The only other furniture is | a table with an oil lamp where the boys’ work is

What

When it fell, however, into the hands of her | friends and neighbors and they found all of their family skeletons exposed to a delighted reading public, |

book about a |

“The | failure to catch a big bushmaster in Panama; missing | the Palm Beach hurricane; missing an eruption of |

"The Indianapolis Times

Television

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1937

Lures Scientists

(First of a Series)

By Norman Siegel

ELEVISION, the problem child of 20th Century creative genius, is still eluding its masters in a perplexing game of “hide and seek” that will continue for a long

time to come.

Television is here and yet it isn’t here.

Television

could be launched before the eyes of a public serious and anxious to see it tomorrow and yet it couldn’t, for it may be years before the art of sight and sound will be linked together for radio entertainment. The problem child has been thoroughly diagnosed

by the scientific and financial doctors of radio.

They

know what they must do to make it a normal everyday scientific fact, but they still don’t know how to fulfill their

prescription.

It is a formula that will eventually be com-

pounded in the technical laboratory, radio studio and business office, for the problems of television today are

not confined to any single department of radio. And for that reason television will not be an overnight discovery. What are these problems facing the men who will eventually give us television? How can they be solved ? Who can solve them? And when? In search of answers to those questions this writer has visited the leading television laboratories of the country and has spoken to the men who will eventually give us this new form of home entertainment.

" n ” ITHIN the last few weeks we have seen nearly all there is to see of television at the Radio Corp. of America's experimental laboratories in Camden,

N. J., and the National Broadcasting Co.'s test studio in Radio City. We have talked to David Sarnoff, president of RCA, Lenox R. Lohr, president of NBC;"C. W. Farrier, NBC television co-ordinator; O. B. Hanson, NBC chief engineer; E. W, Engstrom, brilliant young RCA television engineer, and Gilbert Seldes, who will be in charge of producing television programs for Columbia when it again resumes its experiments next year.

Each presented a different approach to the important problem. Yet all of these television experts agreed that before television can become an accepted fact in this

country three problems must be solved. They are: 1, Technical; 2, Program; 3, Financial. Much progress has been made in the technical field to date. In fact, from a technical standpoint television is practically ready for general service. Little progress has been made in the development of programs to keep the television eye busy. The experiments that Columbia conducted back in 1931 and 1932 and NBC during the past six months have shown how much more there still is to be done in this branch of television. n ” un O progress has been made in setting up a financial structure to pay for a national system of television broadcasting. And since radio is operated on a commercial basis in this country, this is the most important problem of all facing television today. Who will foot the bill? Eventually the public will, through the purchase of sets and products advertised by sponsors of the service. But where will the needed millions come from to start the service? With the market humptydumptying as it has the past few months, anybody certainly would have had a hard time raising financial backing for television. The business executives we spoke to look for the system to operate on a deficit for five years or more after it gets started. And who will assume that burden is the most baffling question in television today.

Television service requires the creation of a system, not merely the commercial development of apparatus, Mr. Sarnoff points out. The cost of that system is undetermined at this time because nobody knows whether that system will be a network of stations, comparable to the sound radio chains of today, or a few large stations in urban areas of 100,000 or more, servicing only a small physical portion of the country. Mr. Sarnoff believes that to be successful television will. have to be a netwerk proposition. Since the present useful range of television signals is around 40 miles, the creation of even limited networks, with connection by coaxial cable or radio relay, according to Mr. Sarnoff, is a financial undertaking nobody wants to risk today, even if television were here technically and programatically.

” n 5

OW about Government subsidy, which has made public demonstrations of television possible in England? The experts agree that Government financial backing would hasten television by elimination of the hazards of operation cost. But they don’t want Government subsidy as such, for it would mean taking television out of the hands of private enterprise and killing the goose that may some day produce the golden egg of a new prosperity.

Entered at Postoffice,

Here are the men who have their eye (and brains) on the “magic eye” of radio broadcasting. Lenox R. Lohr, president of NBC, upper left; David Sarnoff, president of RCA, upper right; O. B. Hanson, chief engineer of NBC, lower left: C. W. Farrier, NBC television co - ordinator, lower right. In the center is a test television program being broadcast from an NBC studio. Note the huge cooling outlets in the ceiling and overhead microphone.

However, there is a rorm of Government subsidy that would be extremely welcomed by the television crowd. It is subsidy through the purchase of television equipment by the Government for experimental purposes. In a number of foreign countries—England, France, Germany, Russia and Japan—the military is experimenting with television for defense purposes. ” o b-4 T present the United States is not doing anything with television from a military standpoint. However, should the Government decide to do it, the purchase of transmitters and sets would pour more money into commercial channels for television development, The commercial enterprises also would benefit from whatever Government engineers developed and television still wouldn't be Government operated as it would be through an out-and-out subsidy. ® As one executive put it, “When the Government buys a 40-million- | | llness dollar battleship, you wouldn't call | that subsidy of the steel industry, | "J ORONTO. Dec. 1—Long and serious illness will not turn a

but it certainly helps.” Sige ; Between 10 Ya and 20 mil- | normal child into a problem child,

lion dollars has been spent in this | concludes, Dr. W. Wray Barra-

sense of the word is old. Television entertainment is still to come, n » ” R. FRANK CONRAD, assistant chief engineer of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co., whose early experiments led to the establishment of a sound broadcasting system in this country, predicted that it will be 10 years before television will approximate radio as we know it today. Many such predictions have been made in the past 10 years since the first public demonstration of television in this country. Television has been here every year in those 10 years, according to the predictors, yet today Dr. Conrad says it is still 10 years away. In the articles to come in this television roundup, we will tell you what actually is here.

NEXT~—The history of television from Herbert Hoover to 1937 amateur set builders.

as Second-Class Matter Indianapolis, Ind.

Our Town

countrv on television work. Ac- | clough of the University of Toronto cording to Mr. Lohr, television | Even children suffering from mas- | today is relatively where sound |sive body burns, who must go radio was in 1917. which was through initial shock, excruciating nearly 10 years before the first |pain and a long period of convales- | big broadcasting network was | cence, retain their humor and apformed. Television in the technical pear happy.

Side Glances—By Clark

A WOMAN'S VIEW

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson | DEPARTMENT store in Mem-

phis set up a matriarchy for | |a day by turning the entire estab- |

| | lishment over to the women to run, land such a swell time was had by {all that the event is to be an an- | nual one.

This is a grand idea in merchan- |

| dising, not only because it gives the

| men a vacation, but because it will | of | women as well as their sense of re- |

increase the self-confidence sponsibility for the success of the whole concern.

Later on there ought to be a

petticoat brigade. I daresay that when evening came many would have changed their ideas of the value of women in industry. Certainly both groups would profit. There is always the tendency to whine about our jobs. believe nobody works so hard as we do, and that no one is so little appreciated. For this reason we might be purged of some of our self-pity if we were obliged to take a turn at another daily stint. And how we wish the shoppers had to spend a day behind the counters serving people, listening to the complainers, having to take “back returned articles, waiting for some woman to decide whether she wanted a red-bordered handkerchief or one with blue polka dots. If this turnabout could happen once every six months in every community, social justice as well as

business would pick up. a

Jasper—By Frank Owen

2 COOKING DEMONSTRATION

Ta FREE SAMPLES /

MAAF ARAMA

We all

FREER SAMPLES!

(i Ze

— -~

Copr. 1937 by United Peature

a Sa

"Jasper, make your guests ease up on the food—they're starting to complain!"

Second Section

PAGE 13

By Anton Scherrer

Triumph Church Here Looks Same as Day King Smith Set Out to Africa; Story of Fatal Feast Is Retold.

HE other day 1 went to have a look at Triumph Church at the southeast corner of 12th St. and Senate Ave. Except for the cornerstone, which needs cleaning, the church looks just the way it did the day the Lord called on Elder Elias Dempsey Smith and commanded him to be King of Ethiopia. Elder Smith, a fine gentlemen with deep-set, sphinx-like eyes, came to Indianapolis by way of Louisiana. I don't know just when he came, but 20 years or so ago he was one of the landmarks around here. At that time he was head of Triumph Church with headquarters in Indianapolis. He looked the part, too, and always wore an immaculate clerical collar, which, somehow, had a way of enhancing his dark complexion. He wore a clerical vest, too, and it always had me guessing because I never could figure out just how he got into it. It didn’t appear to have any buttons. Elder Smith had every right to be head of the church because he was the one who started it. Forty years ago, so runs the story, Elder Smith received a call to do the good work. He was still in Louisiana at the time and did the job so well that five years later, in 1902, he got a second call, This time Triumph Church was the result. He established branches all over the country. The one in Indianapolis had its first heme at 750 Indiana Ave. May 7, 1915, was Elder Smith's big day, however. That was the day the Lord asked him to be King of Ethiopia. All these facts are recorded on the cornerstone of Triumph Church if vou take the trouble of digging them out. Twenty years ago, however, you didn’t have to see the cornerstone to get the facts. They were known all over Indianapolis because Elder Smith's business cards carried the data. His picture, too. He sold the cards for 15 cents each.

King Departs for Realm

In 1920 King Smith actually got started for Ethiopia. He took his ranking bishop, Elder Barber, with him and handed him the title of Sub-King. Eventually they arrived in Addis Ababa and announced themselves as missionaries. They made a speciality of praying for the sick and infirm and apparently had success, because right after that King Smith made a regular practice of preaching on the text, “If a man keep my saying he shall never see death.” That's where he made his mistake. As a result of his preaching the natives sort of got the idea that King Smith had a charmed life, and the news finally got around to Empress Zauditu whose crown prince was Haile Selassie, known at the time as Ras Tafari. Well, one day King Smith and Sub-King Barber received invitations from Empress Zauditu to partake of a royal feast, and of course they went. It was the worst thing they could have done, because after the feast King Smith died of slow poison. Nobody knows what, if anything, Zauditu had to do with it. King Smith's body was buried in Ethiopia, and it is still there for all I know. Sub-King Barber lived to tell the tale, however,

Mr. Scherrer

When he returned to America he said he ate every-

thing the King did, so it couldn't have been that. It turns out, though, that King Smith was thirstier than the Sub-King, and tasted both the drinks served that day. One of the drinks. said the SubKing, was a wine; the other a mixture of water and bicarbonate of soda which has always enjoyed a reputation of aiding the digestion.

Jane Jordan— Ideal Man Must Take Responsibility

Of Marriage Seriously, Says Jane. D> JANE JORDAN-—I am a girl 22 years old. I left home in 1934 to qualify myself for a business career. This is my third year at the university. This spring I met a very likeable man from another state, The first evening I met him he explained he was a married man and the father of two children, He made it very plain that he was happily married, but I simply couldn't see how this was possible since he wasn't true to his wife. His gposition takes him to his always welcome home only two days a week; the rest is spent in my city. Why I go with him I do not know. He is a perfect gentle=man, aged 31, and always takes me to the most respectable places. J tell him that I have everything to lose and nothing to gain. He admits that he thinks too much of me for his own good. I already know your answer, and also know you are quite right, but would like your advice on the most appropriate words to be used in bidding him farewell, for my conscience will net bear this burden any longer. He could be my ideal. Some day I hope to meet his twin who is une married, KITTY.

Answer—In point of fact the man isn’t your idea) at all. He is too unreliable. If you were his wife or the wife of a man like him, you'd never have any feeling of security wher he was out of your sight. His personal charm has blinded you to the fact that he is not what you want in a husband. It is quite possible for a man to be in love with his wife and yet enjoy the company of other women. Such men do not make good husbands unless they learn to give up their lesser desires in favor of more important issues. He who expects to have every wish gratified without regard for the feelings of others is still in the nursery stage of development. It should not be hard for you to tell this young man exactly how you feel, particularly after you face the fact that your ideal man is one who takes his responsibilities more seriously and is able to make sacrifices for that which he values most highly,

” ” un

Dear Jane Jordan—What do you think of the women of today about 50 years old who hang around the beer taverns? Some of them have reared a family; maybe all their children are marr’ sme of them still have young sons and daughters at home. Do you think it a good example to set before the young folks of today? What do they go to such places for? A MOTHER.

Answer—I suppose they go because they lead moe notonous lives at home and have a craving for pleasure What I think of them depends upon how they behave after they get there. Your choice of the words “hang around” paints an unpleasant picture. To stop in a tavern for a bite to eat with convivial friends is not revolting, but to “hang around” any public place carries implications which are objectionable. Only a vast emptiness at home could drive a woman to “hang around” any other place. JANE JORDAN.

Put your problems in a letter to Jane Jordan who will answer your questions in this column daily.

Walter O'Keefe —

ARIS, Dec. 1—The present administration in France has been having its embarrassments. So to distract the voters they staged a political comedy starring the Ku-Klux Klan, Over here they call them “the Cagoulards,” and the boys with the hoods were caught smuggling in munitions, The Kluxers even had a leading man for this romance in the person of a duke who was waiting in the wings in Switzerland. At the close of the act this stooge was supposed to come on stage and be crowned king of France. The way the “king business” is these days he'd have to have We Palace ude into a trailer Ra quick getaway. just roared at