Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 4 December 1937 — Page 9

Vagabond

From Indiana — Ernie Pyle

Old-Timer, 73 Years on Comstock, | Piloted Gen. Grant Up Mine Shaft:

# ® Traveler Admires L M . T | raveiler mires ong emory | é& evisS i Oo i

IRGINIA CITY, Nev., Dec. 4. —There’s an | old whitish house on a sort of ledge in | the hillside on the upper edge of Virginia | City. There is a white fence around it, and a

gate with an old-fashioned latch. An oldish man in overalls comes out and shakes your hand. He is small and a little stooped. He is Jimmy Stoddard, 84. He is the Comstock’ | only living bridge between the far | past and the present. He has been | on the Comstock for 73 years. Jimmy Stoddard arrived here with his parents from New York in 1864. He was 11 then. He went to work in the Comstock when he was 13, and there he worked until he was 71. Fifty-eight years in the mines, right beneath Virginia City. He doesn’t recall that he ever saw ‘Mark Twain; he does remember seeing many a man hanging from the beams of the shaft houses in the old days. He says he ran the cage that brought Gen. Grant up from the mines on his visit here in "78. He says

Mr. Pyle

in the boom days miners on their way to work would slip an order for stock under the bank door, and | when they came out of the earth that evening they'd be $500 richer, just by speculation; and then they'd go to San Francisco and spend it all. He was one of them. One old fellow told me that although Mark Twain Is known as a humorist nobody around Virginia City ever saw him smile. This old man remembers him well, even refers to him as “Sam.” He says Mark Twain used to stand all the time in the dcorway of the Enterprise Building and spit tobacco juice onto the steps of the adjoining doctor's office,

He's Really Got a Long Memory Before parting, I asked the old man his age, and he told me. When I got home I figured back on the dates—and discovered that this old man wasn't even born till a year after Mark Twain left Virginia City forever. That's the kind of memory I admire. Today not a single descendant of the Comstock’s great bonanza kings has any financial holdings in

the remnénts of the Comstock. They have taken other courses. Clarence Mackay of Postal Telegraph, whose father was the king of kings of the Comstock, comes back every few years. He always goes into the Catholic church and says a prayer in memory of his parents. But the second generation, they say, has no interest in Virginia City. In fact, some of them are

quite, quite ashamed of the roughness of their grandfathers, | I was told of one incident that happened not | long ago. The grandson of one of the bonanza Kings | showed up with his bride. A pleased old-timer vol- | unteered to show them around. { So he steered the couple out past the edge of | mn, up a little gulch, and then stopped and said, emotion which was filling him: “Right there is the spot where vour grandfather | staked his first claim.” And the rich grandson said, gorgeous from here?” And the old-timer turned down the gulch and J left them there,

My Diary

By Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt |

Yellow Elephant and Calico Donkey | Prove Attractive Christmas Gifts. |

YDE PARK, N. Y., Friday—I attended the meeting of the Chi Omega National Achievement

Award Committee, which is considering the decision for its award this year. It always interests me to see how many people are really worthy of this award, for. as I go through my daily rounds. I almost forget what really fine things many women are doing. We take their good work for granted without voicing or thinking about the appreciation which should be rs. But when we sit down to discuss outstanding people in different fields, then there are more people than can possibly be considered. This always gives | me a glow of pride | I visited a toy store the other day, which has seriously taken to the idea that military toys should not be displayed. I found a number of things to take back for Christmas stockings. I also found some at the sale for the blind. { There was a yellow elephant with green eyes and a red and white calico donkey at this sale. Both of them had such delicious expressions, I was tempted to take them for grown-ups and not for children.

Women Have Place in Home Designing

The other day I said there was a new profession | open to women if we were going into a big building | campaign, particularly buildings for people with moderate incomes. I seem to have hurt the feelings of a number of architects. I had no intention of belittling their profession. I think we have very remarkable people in that profession with great taste, ability and training. I only pointed out one little phase of the work which seems to m~ particularly adapted to a woman. It is visualizing the interior of a room when furniture is placed in it in different arrangements, and therefore assisting in the placing of lights, base plugs, doors | and windows from the standpoint of the place as being lived in and not from the architectural point of view alone. There are practical little things in housekeeping which no man really understands and which are particularly important to people who do a good deal of their own housekeeping. I think more and more of us are going to do, certain household things for ourselves in the future, so it is well for us all to see that the practical side of life has its place in new housing.

New Books Today

Public Library Presents—

DELIGHTFULLY informal, impressionistic view of a great city, PITTSBURGH, by Leland D. Baldwin (University of Pittsburgh Press) covers the period from the mapping of the terrain, the building of old Ft. Duquesne and the bitter strife between Great Britain and France for possession of the rich Ohio Valley, through the Civil War days, with brief added mention of the amazing industrial and cultural development of the “Smoky City” since 1865. Colorful pictures appear of the British and French troops, and the gaudily painted and feathered and savagely cruel Indians of many nations; of the “‘department stores of the rivers’—boats equipped with shelves and counters and merchandise often attractively and ingeniously arranged, each flying a calico flag and announcing its presence to buyers along the panks by blasts on a tin horn; of streets deep with mud and teeming with stray hogs and other animals which, up to 1860, roamed unhindered. Pictures are drawn also of the visits of Lafayette, Anthony Trollope and other notables, of the balls on lower Penn St. where “pyramids of macaroons, buttressed with

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bariey sugar,” reached almost to the chandeliers; of the founding of churches, theaters, newspapers, and vast business enterprises, of the much used ‘“‘undergreund railway” and the stormy temperance movement. 2 8 2 | HRISTINE was dead; and in her death she | achieved her final and greatest victory. The peo- | ple who gathered in her perfect home to do her homage were brilliant evidence of her hard won entree into society. “Apotheosis,” the story which tells of this final victory, is one of the more sophisticated in Vincent Sheean’s collection, THE PIECES OF A FAN (Doubleday). In these stories, he has assembled a group of interesting people against varied backgrounds and in dramatic situations. His characters range from Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour to the overworked little who inherited. $500.

Programs Analyzed

(Fourth of a Series)

By Norman Siegel LTHOUGH television is still a scientific infant, it has outgrown its swaddling clothes. By the time it reaches the American home it will be wearing long trousers. For, from a program standpoint, television will have to be a finished product before it will receive public approval. Sound radio had no competing medium when it was launched. The movies were silent. The early possessors of small crystal sets were thrilled to get anything, even an off-key piano solo. The idea of hearing something transmitted from a distant point was enough of an inducement to start a new entertainment field and a giant industry. However, in motion pictures and sound broadcasting, television is faced with two competitive mediums. It will have to equal or

surpass them to interest the public in wanting to purchase sets to see it. Television will not be able to go through the growing stage that radio did. Its programs will have to be as good from the very start as present-day radio programs, which had 15 years to develop. But for the movies, television would have been a household institution today, according to Gilbert Seldes, recently appointed television program director of the Columbia network. The jump from sound to sight in radio would have been quicker, he believes.

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ESPITE the fact that television is being held up from a program standpoint because of sound radio and movies, the group of men working to bring it into the open agrees it will not replace

| those two mediums when it finally

arrives, but will supplement them. Television will be strictly a home medium, they contend. It will not be able to produce the elaborate shows people obtain on the screen. Lenox R. Lohr, president of the National Broadcasting Co., says it will be another medium for leisure time. How time? Sight broadcasting has three types of programs at its com-mand-—studio, films and outdoor events. Music, which is the backbone of sound broadcasting, will not play the important part in television that it does in its present radio field. It will furnish the background to the action on the “kinescope” stage. The experts don’t believe anybody will want to sit and watch an orchestra play for 30 or 60 minutes. Neither will the audience be interested in viewing a soloist for a long period of time. They'll look at the artist three or four times and then become disinterested in the figure on the screen. So music, the great time filler of radio, will only be incidental in television.

will television fill that

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TT staged radio program offers a number of problems. NBC program experts do not believe there is a big enough supply of talent or writers to produce any great number of studio television programs. Sound radio is having a difficult time finding new material and artists, and television will burn up a great deal more talent than sound. So the studio program will only occupy a small part of the television day. The broadcast of motion picture features will not be as great a television factor as the public expects. If all the studios in Hollywood today concentrated on noth-

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ing but television films, they could turn out only about three hours of program material a day. However, the studios aren't going to do that and theyre not going to turn over their super colossal feature productions for a simultaneous nation-wide showing in periods of 90 minutes, The average cost of a motion picture spectacle is $3000 a minute. So television won't turn out shows on its studio stages to compete with feature movies. Tests conducted with film show that the sound is not as good on the air as that picked up in the studio. However, film will be used. It will be radio made and will consist mainly of motion pictures of public events to be rebroadcast at night for those “viewers’ who couldn't be present to watch the actual television broadcast of the event, 2 » » HESE movies can be made in the studio as the event is brought in on the end of the “kinescope” screen tube. The motion picture will be the electrical

transcription of television. Having checked out studio shows, music and movies, we have the outdoor broadcast of public events left. All the experts seem to agree that this will prove to be the best program medium in television. No production problems such as are associated with other types of programs are involved in this type of broadcast. Football games, parades, mass meetings, street actions and many other outdoor events will be the Hollywood Hotels, Jack Bennys,

Side Glances=By Clark

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"Next is the hardest on the list. Something for my husband to give me that, will please him." A oni aa

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Rudy Vallees, Eddie Cantors and Charlie McCarthys, so to speak, of television. Mr. Lohr and C. W. Farrier, NBC television co-ordinator, look

Television on the air. Helen Hayes, noted stage and screen actress, in a dramatic moment before the camera, center. A picture of Betty Goodwin, NBC television announcer, as it appears on the screen of the “kinescope” tube in a receiving set, is shown at upper right. Three engineers at work in the television control room with the man in the middle co-ordinating the action picked up by the three cameras, are shown below.

for television to be a great boon to educational broadcasting. “It will open a new illustrated lecture field,” Mr. Farrier states. “The biology lecturer for example, will be able to let his Hjjence peep through the mic®scope themselves to explore the hidden worlds of which he is talking.” Experiments in the program end of television conducted by Columbia from 1931 to 1932 and by NBC during the past year revealed that more studio space is needed; more

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rehearsal time is necessary due to the fact that lines will have to be memorized and not read; actors can’t work long in the great amount of light necessary for a reasonably clear pickup; a new technique of stage setting must be developed. Improvement in the sensitivity of the “iconoscope” tube used in the television camera will reduce the amount of artificial light needed and permit better focusing because the lens of the camera won't have to be opened so wide and permit more freedom of stage action. At present the television camera can pick up only action involving three people. O. B. Hanson, NBC's chief engineer, says these improvements are rapidly being made. Each new tube is better than the one before. He believes that within six months they will be equal to supersensitive film. ” ” » HE problem of make-up rapidly is being simplified and eventually will be the same as that used in the movies. Originally a black lipstick was needed to give the television siren a pair of kiss able lips, which really weren't so kissable to the television actor who had to absorb the black stuff. Now a brownish-purple solution is used and the British have perfected a red lipstick that will work in television. Still another problem is the audience itself. What will the tele vision “viewer” be like? Sound radio doesn't require the undivided attention of its audience. The housewife, for example, can turn on the radio and still go about her housework. Television will require undivided attention. How long will the “viewer” give it that? At present an hour televie sion show is a strain on the eyes. In general these are the program problems to be solved before television can be practical. Television in its present state is not up to the standard the public will demand. Until it has reached that point those in charge of its development do not believe it will be practical for public service,

NEXT « Television in Great Britain where it is being broadcast to the public on a daily schedule.

Total of 21 Lynchings Reported.in

Indiana From

‘By L.A. INCE Jan. 1, 1882, 21 Iynchings | have occurred in the State of | Indiana, according to Editorial Research Reports. Ten of the vic(tims were white persons and 11 | Negroes, the Reports said. Indiana | Library officials said that although | [no records are available, they i | lieved the total to be higher. These figures were submitted in | connection with the proposed Fed- | eral Antilynching Law now being pressed by Senator VanNuys (D. Ind) in the special session of the United States Congress. The origin of the word “lynching” generally is traced to an extra legal | court presided over by Charles Lynch, a justice of the peace, in Bedford County, Virginia, during the Revolution. Lynch's court undertook to punish all types of law= breakers, many unreachable by more formal legal processes of that day.

= ” ” T™ organizations now make annual compilations of lynchings, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. | ha all such statistics are somewhat unreliable is attested by the |

A WOMAN'S VIEW

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson

Jot about the time we begin to | feel that sufficient sentiment has been aroused over the plight of Job- | less young people, we discover a new | organization called the Foundation for Americans of Mature Age. Purpose, to stir up public opinion | against the ruthless treatment now | | received by the middle-aged men | and women in industry; founder and president, Mrs. Agatha Ward; | offices, Washington, D. C. The I'oundation reports that dis | crimination against the middle-aged | has assumed the proportions of a | social problem, and few are prepared to dispute it. Viewed from any angle, there is something wrong in a country where the faithful serv- | ant is turned off because he has | had 45 birthdays. Certainly no social system is a good one that does not take into consideration the welfare of all its people. The nation run by its youth dlone would probably dash daringly into every danger, while that one managed only by the middle-aged might come to stand still because of an excéss of caution. However, as things look .now, the Foundation has a full-sized job ahead of it. You see, it is starting its efforts in an era when youth is in the saddle and riding hard. Something more than industrial custom will have to be changed be= fore middle age regains its prestige. The soul of America must undergo a transformation with the reaffir-

1882 to 1937

fact that Tuskegee totals are invariably smaller than those reported by the N. A. A. C. P. Two factors, which counter-bal« ance one another to some extent, figure in the potential inaccuracy of such statistics. One is that deaths sometime attributed to lynchings may actually have followed bona fide attempts at escape. On the other hand, many genuine lynchings probably do not find their way into the records. On the basis of the most conservative available data, 2679 individuals lost their lives through “lynch law” in the United States from Jan. 1, 1882, through Sept. 30, 1937. Of these, 700 were white persons, 2979 were Negroes. No lynchings ever have occurred, according to these records, in the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont, and 10 other states have records that are almost clean: Delaware, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Utah and Wisconsin.

# 8 o EARLY three-quarters of all A lynchings (72.3 per cent) have occurred in eight states. Mississippi

tops the list with 485 recorded lynchings. In order, come Georgia, 469; Texas, 354; Louisiana, 348; Alabama, 305; Florida, 248; Arkasas, 241; Tennessee, 210. Far more Negroes than whites have been lynched in the South, but in the West and Midwest the situation is reversed. Negroes comprised only 124 per cent of the 257 indi viduals lynched in 17 states, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. The six years, 1882-1887, inclusive, witnessed 752 lynchings, or 20.4 per cent of the 55-year total. The 15year period, 1922-1937 inclusive, brought only 304 such crimes, or 8.2 per cent of the total. The “high” year was 1883, with 158 lynchings, and 1933 was “low” with only eight. Nine lynchings were recorded in 1935, and seven through Sept. 30, 1937. All the victims in the last two years were Negroes, and the 16 lynchings occurred in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Jasper—By Frank Owen

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Second Section

PAGE 9

Qur Town

By Anton Scherrer

Quaint Customs of Dray Drivers Had Several Useful Points, Too; As, for Instance, the Blue Gate,

HEN all is said and done, the dray drivers were the backbone of the South Side. Fifty years ago when I was a hoy, they did all the hauling around here for the

wholesale houses—for men like Charlie

Mayer and Louis Holweg and Henry Severin, to mene tion only a few. Business must have been pretty good in those days, because I can’t remember that the dray drivers ever had time to take a vacation. They never laid off, either, on account of snow or rain, and lit tle things like that.

As a rule, the dray drivers had their stables back of their homes, and they always made it their business, I remember, to give the horses their supper before they went to see about their own. They usually had two horses, but most of them worked only one at a time. For looks, the horses couldn't compare with those in the stable of Mr. Schmidt's brewery, but even so they had their points. At any rate, it always struck me that the dray drivers’ horses knew a lot more about side stepping the mud holes in the streets. Mr, Schmidt's horses, like some people I know, went down the street with an air that everything, including mud holes, ought to scatter at their approach. I never got to know the dray drivers as well as I should have liked, but I remember their Kids. They went to School No. 6 and raised cain the way the rest of us did. They did the same with the English language, and peppered their speech with funny little expressions, some of which you hear even to this day, It was nothing, for instance, for a dray driver's kid to say: “I can play with you when the work is all,” meaning, of course, that he was prepared to play after his chores were done,

Old-Country Expressions Served Here

The dray drivers’ kids talked like that because they were brought up to speak German at home, When it came time to speak English at school, they couldn’t help thinking in German. Some of the exe pressions were so superior to English that the rest of us adopted them, which is why this column is sometimes as quaint as it is, At any rate, we accepted their way of talking as a matter of course, just as we did the other customs brought from the Old Country. One of the funniest customs, I remember, was that of the dray driver who lived on Union St. A white picket fence surrounded his property, and I mention it because it is essential to the story. The dray driver had two lovely daughters; one 14 years old, the other approaching 18; and it was one of the prettiest sights of the South Side to see them pute tering among the flowers on their side of the fence, Well, one day we were dumfounded to see a gate painted blue in the dray driver's white fence. On investigation it turned out that it was the dray driver's way of announcing that he had a marriageable daughter inside. Sure, the girl had turned 18 over night. I don't expect you to believe it, but I'm telling you that the blue gate worked as well in Ine dianapolis as it did in Germany. Inside of two

Mr. Scherrer

married. After that the dray driver painted his gate white again.

It stayed white four years, and then one day it was blue again. This time it worked even better, because six months after that the dray driver's sece ond daughter got married. For good, too.

Jane Jordan—

Don't Expect Miracle as Solution

To Problem of Love, Girl Advised.

Dts JANE JORDAN-I am a young girl of 20, About a year ago I fell in love with a man several

years my senior. I am crazy about him but I think he only likes me as a friend. My mother and brother do not like him. He tells me to meet him. I do so. Some times he is there and sometimes he is not. When we meet he talks to me but does not come to see me, The only fault my mother finds with him is that he never comes to the house to see me. How can I make my mother and brother like him and make him feel toward me more than a friend? H. D,

Answer—How can the sun be made to rise in the west and set in the east? How can black be made white and wrong be made right? These questions are Just as unreasonable as yours. Your mother and

brother are right in questioning the man’s motives in meeting you at odd places instead of calling on you in your own home. Worst of all, he isn’t reliable enough even to keep these casual appointments. At 20 years a girl should have learned to face facts. The fact here is that the man isn’t much interested in you. Instead of accepting what is obvious and looking elsewhere for masculine companionship, you hope for a miracle, In other words there is a magical twist to your thinking. Like a child you want to change reality to suit yourself, or to have a fairy godmother change it for you. In life we have certain materials to work with, Some are as tough and unyielding as the stone from which a sculptor carves his figures. He does not ask for a more pliable substance, but does his best with what he has. Likewise, in molding our lives, we must recognize the laws and facts with which we are faced, They cannot be changed but must be used “as is.”

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Dear Jane Jordan—Contrary to J. B. P.’s letter regarding “the advice you put out,” I want to cone gratulate you. Furthermore, I have a piece to speak regarding his reference to daughters of truckdrivers and scrubwomen. I feel sorry for any person who is narrowminded enough to look down on these people just because some of them are unfortunate, or because they do not have a soft-collared job. One's earning capacity does not spell character. Usually a scrubwoman is a widow who has children to supe port and cannot find other work to do. Truckdrivers are instrumental in keeping the wheels of commerce turning and above all, neither they nor scrubwomen are afraid of hard work. I say three cheers for the daughters of truckdrivers and scrube womuon because they have grown up around hard work and will come nearer to getting some place than those whose ancestors had to make their living for them. CLARA.

Answer—-My chief objection to J. B. P.'s letter was that instead of finding fault with my views which he had every right to do, he simply fell back on pere sonal invective which, of course, weakens his case, 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. 4—In Budapest and Vienna today the newspapers made much of the feat of Max Nohl of Milwaukee, who descended 420 feet into Lake Miche igdn in a new type of diving suit, It must drive brokers crazy on 700,000-share days like last Wednesday when they had to sit there watche ing the ticker tape move in slow motion. You would think that Europe had enough troubles

of its own without

but Wall Street is stil tron

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months, the girl had a beau; inside of a year she was :

watching the rout of “economia

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