Pn
c
s
E
Battalion Editorials
Page 2 FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1951
«THO^HJV|DroNlHAyE TgQjjBlKjNOUGH From WIlere ! Sit
A Choice, A New Freedom...
0
Pi
ca
oi
ov
Di
W
ac
m
st
m
sc
F!
cl
it
a
gl'
d
.A
e
o
v
/!
F
F
NE OF THE best cases of indirect de
nunciation of the present United Na
tions policy on aggression appeared in the
Profile magazine of the University of Cin
cinnati.
While The Battalion does not concur
entirely with the views expressed, they do
constitute a reasonable facsimile of the
thinking of a large segment of the Amer
ican populace today. We quote:
REMEMBER, back in 1946, during the
American-Russian occupation of Korea, it
was quite obvious to our men that the Rus
sians were up to no good. To any of the
American soldiers who had to ride through
Russian occupied territory in old, beat-up
“six-byswho saw the row on row of lend-
lease trucks stretching away to the dull
brown hills of the “Land of the Morning
Calm,” the shipping-paper still stuck to their
new windshields; who awoke at two in the
morning to the tune of Russian tanks rum
bling past their outposts; who played chess
with the Russians, drank with the Russians,
had “border incidents” with the Russians,
it was pretty plain that something was brew
ing. Many of those G.I.s who did outpost
duty on the thirty-eighth parallel in those
days of uneasy peace still remember the
hoarse cries of panicked men, the clutching
at rifles, the envisionment of days among
the barren hills and rice paddies when some
drunken soldier bellowed “The Russians are
coming” in his besotted frenzy during the
dark, silent hours of the morning, before the
scrawny Korean chickens began to crow.
And many of the G.I.s who came back
from that disease-ridden country, where the
fields reek with night-soil in the spring;
where fierce North Korean Communists
raided villages, locking up the police in their
own jails; where the whining anopheles mo
squito took a ten-percent toll of a man’s out
fit ; and where the Japanese had left their in
delible mark upon a people, will remember
that they said, “That is where it’s going to
start!” to their friends and relatives, who
pooh-poohed them, optimistically watched
the new, hopeful UN making its fitful, ideal
istic start in this countiry.
“You walked out on the League of Na-
itions, that’s why it didn’t succeed.” We
have heard that old wheeze for thirty years
, or more, and mostly from the very nations
that really undermined the organization. “It’s
all your fault,” they said, “you were the miss-
i ing prop that made the great experiment
! flop.” This time, at the close of the Second
World War, we determined that we would
, show them that we had the right spirit of
idealism: we would show them that we would
;not only join a world organization, but that
we would sponsor one; and so the UN was
Lorn, in that characteristic American “all
out” vigor.
In the background, a few small voices
cried, “Beware of foreign entanglements,”
and “Don’t forget what Monroe said;” but
they were soon labeled “Isolationists,” and
drowned out amidst the generally enthus
iastic shouts of “Peace! Peace! The world
has learned its lesson, and will have peace!
Man has at last seen the benefits to be de
rived from living at peace with his fellow-
man. The brotherhood of man! That’s the
thing. The brotherhood of man!”
Somewhere a group of men sat and plan
ned the undermining of the UN, hidden by
the rest of the world’s hysterical shouts of
joy. The group of tasteful buildings at Ge
neva were empty and useless, it remained
only for another group of buildings to be
erected and subsequently to be rendered in
effectual.
Now we have entangled ourselves thor
oughly in the tentacles of international in
trigue. We are shown, with daily increasing
emphasis, that a nation will not give up its
sovereignity for the sake of another. Here
is the crux of the matter. Will Britain stop
her trade with a nation and take up arms
against it for the sake of the general welfare
of the world? Will France send troops to
fight in a land where she has no territorial
interests? Will Holland stop trading and
fight with a nation to which she sends her
industrial products?
Certainly. Certainly the member-states
of the UN will join in concerted military ac
tion ... on paper; but when the time comes
to act, to fight, will England send more than
a token force? Will France send more than
a two-ship task force? Will Holland send
more than a hospital corps unit? We don’t
know if any other nation in the world is so
full of naive optimism as we are; but we still
have hopes, although they are not so naive as
they used to be. Day by day, like Swift’s
Gulliver, we are being divested of our open
‘Boxoffice ’ Reflects
Jingle, No Heartbeat
Texas Boy
Loses Hands,
Legs to War
Oakland, Calif., Feb. 2—W)—A
thin, quiet Texan is in Oakland
~ , Naval Hospital here, a quadruple
. .. By Herman C. Gollob amputee from the Korean theater.
T 0 READ Boxoffice, a weekly magazine published by Ben ™2™o f Sa^AntonTo^ 11 ^
•*- Skylen for the benefit of nationwide exhibitors, is to gain R ein j nger i ost his right leg- above
an even keener understanding of the stupid, drooling com- the knee, the left leg below the
mercialism in Hollywood that has rendered movies, for the knee and all ten fingers,
most part, paragons of banality. He was neither bitter nor opti-
Modestly subtitled “the pulse of the motion picture in- mistic.
dustry,” Boxoffice reflects not the aesthetic heartbeat of
sincere creative artists, but the jolly jingle of profits that
swell the cash-registers of shrewd show-businessmen. It is
concerned with the saleable aspects of pictures, their “public
appeal” and the means of exploiting it.
The puerile “appeal” of the q
average film suggests that Holly
wood’s ruling- hierarchy is catering dm Scotch brogue being hard to
From the City Desk . . .
Big Profits Forecast
From BAFB Personnel
. . . By Joel Austin
C ONGRATULATIONS businessmen of Bryan.
The time and effort you put forth toward the reactiva- bitor'credo and Xaraetem MaTwe
tion of Bryan Air Force Base has paid off.
“It depends on how it all turns
out,” he said, with a soft Texas
accent. "I have a future. It will
take time but I’ll be O.K.”
Reininger, a marine corps reserv
ist, was caught in the beginning of
the retreat from Chanhjin Reser
voir.
He was a machine gunner right
to a public of backward tots. Box” understand. When will they bring “P against the Red lines. On the
rvffiVn ic, uioCani- uri+v, Aowk/wont Lassie back to this country? MGM v ? as npuied the gun was
is passing up a good thing here.” f rozen > jamming the automatic
We don’t blame F. M. or his g ea ri and he was firing one shell
patrons a bit for squawking about at a t‘ me -
dogs w r ho bark in a Scotch brogue. “Two of them (enemy) suddenly
Goodness knows, we think the jumped up,” he said. “One of them
world of Lassie and her intellect, had a burp gun. I got one with
but this Scotch accent gimmick is the machine gun and a buddy took
a trifle snobbish. Who does Lassie care of the other one.
think she is, Orson Welles? The “But another guy got pretty
sooner she barks so that we can close with grenades.”
understand her, the better. The blond Texan got two gren-
And we admire the sentiment ades in the legs,
which F. M. so amply displays in He told of the bitter 20 to 20
his request that Lassie come
home. We, too, have missed the
valiant canine. Besides, she is
too refined to be subjected to the
shrill, coarse wail of bagpipes.
But we must laugh loud and long
at F. M.’s naive lack of faith in
MGM’s business perspicacity. Come Reininger.
now, F. M., who ever heard of He was flown out of Korea twi
office is blatant with flamboyant
enticement from studios which sing
of new productions purged of or
iginality and chock-full of the
hackneyed nonsense so dear to the
hearts of us idjuts, the public.
It is tragic and criminal that
a medium with such vast poten
tialities as a legitimate art form
has been desecrated by the Pro
ducer - Exhibitor vandal who
gauges his films to a low pitch
of mediocrity because he is un
able to distinguish between his
own materialistic, short-pants
mentality and actual public taste.
•
In recent Boxoffice editorial,
publisher Skylen employing the
brisk and amiable insincerity char
acteristic of a high-powered sales
man, gave eloquent voice—in prose
and poetry—to the Producer-Exhi
degrees below zero weather as he
spent three days in the back of
a jeep trailer, covered only with
his fighting clothes and a blan
ket.
“There was just no damn time to
treat any of the wounded,” said
i'i
quote:
Uncle Leo passing
thing?
up a good
days after he got to
then was flown to tin
a hospital
; U
)ital and
S. Jan. 27.
The harvest will be yours to reap with the additional
This is a business of good
3,500 Air Force personnel and their families soon to be here. c ' heer - The t'c are ways of stimulat
ing business. Let’s be realistic and
Many of those people will need homes, food, clothes, and optimistic. Battles aren’t won by
all the necessities of life which any good businessman will be thinking and talking defeat. Movies
glad to provide have much to offer the public. They
__ _ _ ^ You can be thankful Bryan is suitably located for flight can iif e . Let’s tell the public. For
T"" 0 ' "r/" 1 'T"?* ^"7 training and equally proud your voice in Washington was the new year let’s resolve to:
taith in human natuie, until, and this must with so many people scheduled to be here for the simr a snne-of n-nori chccr
be our only saving features: we do not trust nex t few years, merchants can feel relatively secure that
any one, and proceed with the utmost cau- business will be the same with a probable large increase in
tion in international affairs, being careful to sight.
consider our welfare alone, above all else; be- We marvel at the way this reactivation program has
come almost wholly, if not totally, selfish in been accepted by our neighbors of only a few miles away.
the interest of saving our own skins. , The first response was in the form of a protest to the sSIwe™ Xh SS
rent increases. The protest was directed to Congressman aspersions on the equine intelli-
No, we are not “Isolationist,” we only Olin Teague who warned Bryanites that unless they could gence. Skylen’s words suggest
want to know how long the United States is stabilize rent prices and offer all possible cooperation to the rather the sense of an ass, the
going to handcuff itself to a debating-so- Air Force, the air base would be moved elsewhere.
The warning had its sting. It came at a time when some
good could be done.
Sing a song of good cheer,
Sell our pictures to the sky,
Put forth our best showman
ship
And build our grosses high!”
As a crowning effect, this ex
hortation was accompanied by the
heading, “Good horse sense from
ciety, composed of weak-kneed, appeasement-
minded bankrupts. There is a choice: either
we abandon the United Nations and strike
out on our own, or we take an autocratic lead
How About Credit Where It’s Due?
. ,,, ... ... , Regardless of what other complications might arise,
in that organization until such time as it don’t you think it’s time a little credit was given.where credit
learns to act together toward a purpose com- j s due?
mensurate with its name. There’s a little matter of 7,000 students at A&M who
greed and crude cunning of a wolf.
Beneath the shallow, platitudinous
odes there lies the suggestion of
lip-service. The suspicion is qual
ified in his infantile, goody-goody
hymn to avarice.
We fear that publisher Skylen
is not so concerned with the
public zeal and the prestige of
films as he is with the height
of his grosses.
In either case, it is obvious, from where bave been he / e for a lon S t” 16 and will continue to inhabit f ">” sk >' l “' 5
news tidbits about the ad
vertising machinations of flicker-
flash impresarios, current activ-
, . . the campus for many years to come. These people are per
we sit, that America must again engage in manen t residents of this area—maybe only for four years—
an all-out war. As long as there are men who but there is, always someone to take their place when they ities of various production com
are willing to sacrifice other men’s lives on leave. panics, popularity ratings of cur-
the altar of their ambitions, we shall be fore- For the person who would take the “what if” attitude,
ed to fight; but must have freedom to battle & should be interesting to view this subject from another tic bait-lines_to be used in news-
for our way of life. There were once four s ^ an dP°i n t-
What if A&M had been placed two miles from the small
old rural community of Calvert some 30 miles north of Bryan.
We would wonder if those people would be gracious
enough to encourage business from the students who were
helping their city outgrow the many other farm towns of
this area.
Maybe they would provide recreational facilities, stim
ulate good common meeting ground where the boys of this
all-male institution could meet girls to have good, clean fun.
Would Calvert Pay Dividends?
Do you think the people of Calvert would have showed
A&M students how much they appreciated their business , _ .. .
rather than treat the boys as strangers when they wish to th pSTLSS
become mends ? 0 r failure.
Businesses that don’t pay dividends have trouble keep
ing stockholders satisfied. But the stockholder may with
draw from the business when he deems it desirable—just
by selling his stock.
freedoms—there is now a fifth: the FREE
DOM TO FIGHT.
Las Vegas (Nev.) Review-Journal:
“Single business girl ivants small
apartment convenient to strip.”
Jersey City Jersey Journal: “Wo
man wanted as housekeeper; no
clothing.”
Cottage Grove (Ore.) Sentinel:
“Lost—Black pocketbook ivith old
1st Natl. Bank on it.”
paper ads, Boxoffice contains a
honey little feature entitled “The
Exhibitor Has His Say.”
Here, theatre owners review
movies in the light of audience
reaction and gate receipts. This
may not make for valid criticism,
but comments such as “I broke
even on it” and “business was
poor” furnish discerning readers
an insight into the delicate tastes
and sensibilities prevalent in
show business.
And there are precious mom
ents of high comedy on those oc
casions when the creative artist
crops out in our public servant,
the exhibitor, and he feels the
The Battalion
Lawrence Sullivan Ross, Founder of Aggie Traditions
"Soldier, Statesman, Knightly Gentleman”
lollegf
five times a week during the regular school year. During the summer terms, The Battalion is published
four times a week, and during examination and vacation periods, twice a week. Days of publication are
Monday through Friday for the regular school year, Tuesday through Friday during the summer terms,
and Tuesday and Thursday during vacation and examination periods. Subscription rates $6.00 per year
or $.50 per month. Advertising rates furnished on request.
The Associated Press is entitled exclusively to the use for republication of all news dispatches cred
ited to it or not otherwise credited in the paper and local news of spontaneous origin published herein.
Rights of republication of all other matter herein are also reserved.
Entered as second-class matter at Post
Office at College Station, Texas, under
the Act of Congress of March 3, 1870.
Member of
The Associated Press
Represented nationally by National Ad
vertising Service Inc., at New York City,
Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Aggies have no stock to sell.
They are to continue contributing
to the prosperity of Bryan with
the few dividends, if any, that are
declared by Bryan merchants.
Be jubiliant people of Bryan,
but be thankful. Be thankful that
when such prosperous war times
are not at hand, A&M is still in
College Station with thousands of
students who spend money in your
town every day. Not because they
want to, but because there is no
place else to take their business
when it can’t be done in College
Station.
CS Schools To
: Re-Open Monday
DAVE COSLETT, CLAYTON L. SELPH.
Co-Editors
John Whitmore, Managing Editor
Bob Hughson Campus Editor
Today’s Issue
John Whitmore
Bob Hughson
Ralph Gorman....
Joel Austin
Campus News Editor
... Sports News Editor
— City News Editor
Monday morning at 8 approxi
mately 1100 students of the A&M
Consolidated School District will
City Editor once more return to school.
Supt. Les Richardson said yes
terday the four day icy holiday is
over and students and teachers will
once more resume class chores. He
added that he felt sure all students
were looking forward to returning
to their studies.
Managing Editor
..Editorialist*
T. M. Fontaine, Carter Phillips
Sid Abernathy Campus News Editoi
Bob Hughson, Andy Anderson, George Charlton, Tom
Rountree, Allen Pengelley, Leon McClellan, Wayne
Davis, Bob Venable, Bill Streich, Norman Blahuta,
John Hildebrand, Bryan Spencer, Ray Williams,
Edward Holder, Richard Ewing News and Feature Writers
Curtis Edwards Church Editor
Roger Coslett .PipeSmolasg Contest Manager
Vivian Castleberry , Women’s Editor
Ralph Gorman, Fred Walker, Chuck Neighbors,
Jimmy Ashlock, Ray. Holbrook, Joe Blan
chette, Pat LeBlanc, Dale Dowell, Jimmy
Curtis, Dowell Peterson, and Joe Hollis. .Sports News Staff
Sam Molinary Chief Photographer
Autrey Frederick...... Advertising Manager
Russell Hagens. Frank Thurmond Advertising Representatives
Herman C. Gollob— ^ - A mu amenta Editor
Bible Verse
Happy is that people, that is in
such a case: yea, happy is that
people,, whose God is the Lord.
—Psalms 144:15
Take, for example, F. M.’s with
ering analysis of “Hills of Home:”
“This is a good Lassie picture, but
there were plenty of squawks about
Mail Us Your. . .
CLASSIFIED AD
GRADUATING SENIORS! Use Classified Ads to
sell your uniforms, boots, surplus furniture, books
and other items which you will no longer need.
Through one classified ad you contact 10,000 readers
of The Battalion.
USE THE HANDY
COUPON BELOW!
Rates: 3c per word, or 60c per column-
inch. Minimum charge is 25c.
CLASSIFIED AD
START AD ON
STOP AD ON ....
Insert Following Ad:
□ Payment Enclosed.
□ Send me a bill.
Name
Address
City
State
Phone No.
(Please Type or Print)
W
LI’L ABNER
They’re Off
By A1 Capp
YOU GOT TWICE- AS MANY ARMS
AN'LEGS AS HE HAS, OCTOPUS??
you. cant lose rr- but- he <
MIGHT try SOME DIRTY TRICK-
SO, KEEP ALL POUR OF YOURj-R
MERELH TWIST ONE O'MS OWN
ARMS AROUND ONE O'MS OWN
NECKS-SO THAT ONE HALF O'7H
OCTOPUS MLL STRANGLE TH
OTHER HALF TO DEATH. IN
FRONT O'10.000 WITNESSES??-
IjVL ABNER
WroWrE I,THE UNDIFFITTED BULL OF THE
jqaALKANS.GOTA FUNNY FILLING ABOUT
--y THIS BOUT/T-
A Marriage Has Been Arranged
AS* CONW1NCEO ^
By A1 Capp