-L*-T‘ ~ SU1QCQ.__ WEDMESDAY, 21 , 1957 . GOOD EVENING EVERYBODY; { Today's flood news is heart-rending enough, but ther*e*s an encouraging note. The waters of the Ohio are receding, some cities such as ^incInnati^are^^^Lthing ? 4 /V ♦ a sight* of relief as they learn that the worst of their peril has passed. Meanwhile, the crest of the flood is rampaging along | at the rate of fran seventy-five to ninety miles a day. The Army engineers tell us it will be a week before it reaches Memphis. The big news that startled the country earlier in the day is one of the most sensational and amazing stories I've ever heard. A hundred thousand square miles of American territory to be evacuated, five hundred thousand people to be moved from their homes by the United--Sb&te-. Army, a strip fifty A miles wide on either side of the Father of Waters, to be cleared of its entire population all the way from Cairo, Illinois, to LEAD - 2 New Oi’leans? one thousand five hundred miles. Tonight's bulletins, however, take some of the edge off that breath-taking report. That titanic step is Just a possibil­ ity. There's a big "if" in the story. The army engineers have tola the President tnat they believe the levees will hold even in the face of the terrific flood crest now advancing. But if they do break, or if they even show signs of weakening, the Army will be on hand, ready to clear those one hundred thousand square miles of danger zone. Tb this end the government is planning to rush thousands of railroad cars and automobile trucks to the Mississippi Valley, The plans of the Army were announced after a consultation at the White House. One emphatic sentence in the bulletin issued by the War Department reads: "People must not become panic-strick en." Then it adds:- "What the Department needs to do now is to plan carefully for orderly evacuation when necessary." The authorities do not merely hope that it won't be nec- essary, they have a sound basis for confidence. The levee system of the Mississippi River was constructed at a cost of a billion dollars. It's the strongest thing of its kind in LEAD - 3 Officials of the Mississippi River Commission, all the way up and down the river, are watching the waters* Furthermore, every foot of the levees is continuously patrolled. They don't believe the prodigious exodus of people will be necessary. LEAD - 4 more^nan feet a't>ove fj four feeir at New -Orleans >°ci Jjsiige aj^Natjjk^rs" However, the Army will not be caught unawares. Headquarters have been established at Jackson, Mississippi, fifty miles away from the river. The commanders of the Fourth, Seventn, and Eighth Army Corps areas, are holding themselves in readiness to cooperate. TheyTve been ordered to draw up plans for the evacuation - in case. Letfs take a birdseye view of that huge inf'and sea that has so suddenly come into being in our country. More than a score of towns in four states have been emptied of their population. Under those muddy, swirling waters lies a young empire, two million acres of some of the most fertile land in the world. In Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri^ the first estimate of the damage is twenty-five million dollars. As for the death list, 4-t*u hwiu l inr tr vniteinplnta. Late this afternoon we learned that a hundred and fifty people • a 'Rut' didn! t include Louisville were known to have perished. But th a r run* lie alone, a hundred and Kentucky. And from one end of Louisvme a.Lui , LEAP - 5 fifty bodies^ taken. It is safe to say that the death roll tonight is close to three hundred, and every bulletin brings in sadder news.^ ^ Louisville is a place of terror and desolation. ihe most cheerful note in the story of that city was the entry of Uncle SamT s soldiers to relieve the men of the Louisville police force who were almost collapsing on their feet. Louisville tonight is virtually under the rule of a dictatorship, with Mayor Miller in supreme command of his own police, of National Guards, and of troops of the regular army. Food is growing scarce, and the terrors of fire and disease are ewer present. No fewer than twenty airplanes were used to land medical supplies in the stricken city. ■P-rteuw©nia—ftta*ks—fc&awAgik tho with1 a-ead From elsewhere more cheerful news comes. The Mayor of Portsmouth, Ohio, said to his people: f'The flood is lioked."^And,we have optimistic reports from Wheeling, West Virginia, from Parkersburg, Point Pleasant and Huntington. £ i' om.X-i-no i nft a FOLLOW 7LOOP The main tragic irony of these floods is that is that vulnerable it is. the more advanced and more complex a civilization, the more vulnerable it is. It has been pointed out that thirty or forty the more years ago, these inundations couldn’t either have inflicted so much damage or brought in their trail so dire a threat of peril today, and that is the speed and facility of communication. For instance, one of the evils facing Louisville was a lack of sufficient policemen. Mayor Miller expressed that need on the radio this morning, and within a few hours cops from Philadelphia and Boston were on the scene helping the Louisville force to keep order. American Airlines took three of their biggest passenger flagships off their regular runs, filled them with officers, two planesiux j .rum r-------- ------- SrfB in less than no time Mayor Miller of Louisville had sixty- three extra cops at his disposal. to corne. On the other hand, one big advantage stands out -v, -! wc Hairp also been called upon Airline passenger ships have aiso to evacuate ref ugees, "The stewardesses of the sky transports^ FOLLOW FLOOD - 2 all of whom are accomplished and experienced nurses, are helping the staffs of the hospitals^ oo^oiallTT thrr'nTiniiageway hospitals ^ere*'a thowwmftd weuwded.--o.ad Gi«ie» jni) tiiVuru rnrr of- Perhaps the most curious assignment of xh a transport pilot was taking two thousand pairs of rubber boots from Chicago to Louisville and Cairo. STRIKE On the strike front today, inti nf TTn1~tilTTw Trit ~ in>dri Ten General Motors plants, Chevrolet factories in Michigan and Indiana, reopened «**■”’'* with forty thousand men going back to work. It was aecoroplished without disorder though large numbers of union pickets surrounded the plants.V^Governor Murphy of Michigan took every precaution ^ oAxxJU r to xxx prevent any outbreak of violence^ There v»ere the makings of a fine scrap outside the Cadillac plant In Detroit. No fewer than a thousand pickets of the automobile workers were marshalled around it and they succeeded In preventing the executives and office workers from going Inside. The officials had a strong In order to force of cops on foot and^horsebaek.sac= * prevent casualties the police towed away softer cars , rials and office employees, carrying company officiais work at the Chevrolet plants The men who returned to greatest relief,even gaiety. Seneral tomorrow they would have appeared to do so with the Motors execut’ s said that by this time one hundred tuad twenty fivo the time clock again* thousand of their people punching m. STRIKE - 2 Some hope for a solution of this troublesome problem came from the United States Department of Labor today. Secretary Perkins had a long mamc conference with John L* Lewis and other members of the Qommittee for Industrial.Organization. After It was over she said she had a new nlan whl‘ * she believed would end the strike. She wouidn*! say what it was at present. Perhaps she will tell us the details later. The guess in Washington is that Madame Perkins is going to ask Congress for special legislation giving her emergency powers to intervene and deal with this crisis. As for General Motors, its executives issued another and a still stronger statement, an appeal to the#® employees: "We dem nd onr rights to be protected against a small minority", said lisfc Alfred P. Sloan, "a minority who h-ve xt seized our plants and are holding them for ransom. ¥feta-mincrrity 7 u he- ©ontinned, “have tT'en frorr^ns'the'Trrivi-l-ege-of-working. he—add-ed , "-do not - be-a fre^ and-do ao t-be-ffti^le^d^^enora 1, Motors-^i 11—never G.et yeu down. Yun hnV® tn b-ibute ta in a Gaueralr-Mobbr^laHb,^ AIR TiW A nev; cevtce to help the pilots of the big transport ships; perfected at the Washington Institute of Technology* They call it the "Air Track", and it is believed that this will materially reduce the possibility of crack-ups when planes are landing, a help for blind flying, particularly blind landing. The apparatus send out a curved radio beam. This, they say, will give the pilot what they call a sloping track down which he can fly his plane along the gravity road to each air­ port, Meanwhile, another radio beam guides him from the side so that he lands directly In the middle of the field. Test pilots have been trying out this device for several months in Washington. According to the records, they achieved successful blind landings time after time without fa^l. On each occasion their wheels touched ground within a few feet of the same spot. still, mechanism or no mechanism everybody connected with aviation will tell you that the most Important thing is the skill and experience of the pilots. nothing like experience. And that After all, there*s ATR TRACK - 2 seems to have inspired Neel Enslen with a thought. Am I right Neel? "You're right, Lowell, there is nothing like experience. For instance take the experience of more than twelve hundred motorists who made the mystery gasoline test. These motorists used a total of fifty-four other gaso­ lines, yet, when they tested Blue Sunoco, more than nine out of every ten found from experience that Blue Sunoco improved the performance of their cars. Mr, Motorist, why don't you test a tankful? That's all - and here’s Lowell Thomas:- KAISER On a baronial estate at Doom, in Holland, snow lies deep upon the ground and a heavy freeze keeps all but the most energetic indoors. That puts a crimp into the celebration that otherwise would have taken place at Doom, For today is the Seventy-Eighth Birthday of Wilhelm Hohen^ollern, former Kaiser of Germany. S hmmxkkhxsxxx Some weeks ago nm contracted influenza, which was A followed by a cough. As a result of that, the axsem imperial wood-chouper of Doom was ordered by the doctors to lay off his favorite exercise and take it easy around the ■ f ireplace. His birthday last year was almost as glittering as it used to be when it v/as, celebrated at Potsdam or the imperial castle Tf f\ & .Berlin. A throne was erected in the largest reception room at A 1 Doom and there friends and former potentates, in court dress, made their obeisances before the erstwhile warlord. Today there was no pomp or ceremony, no court dresses, no she. The a.ed wood-chopper received a few friends informally, J of rose bushes to be planted 4 who brought -gifts consisting mostly j ^ -4$ * l! j ttbbett you may have observed that the law sometimes worked in a mysterious way its wonders to perform. There.was tx an accident on the s tags of the Mmtztaq,. Metropolitan Opera House at a rehearsal^-yeeterday-a-Pternnruw- ..it. wee a rehearsai for the fight secne in the rev/ opera Caponsacchl. Lawrence Tibhett who plays "the part of the villain was weilding a dagger which he is supposed to fclunge into the hear of the junx hero. The hero was being played by a veteran chorus singer of the Metropolitan, Joseph Sterzini. The xeuKXiwxftfeu scene had been rehearsed forty times* But yesterday the dagger in the hands of Tibbett made a slight wound in the right hand of it*. Sterzini *ho istdira incidentally was an old of Mv>. TibbettTs. ^--*3 ------- —w nothing, le^s go on with the rehearsal•,, W* Tibbett^ "Nothing of the sort. Your hand ± xxm * has got be treated immediately.” He was taken to a hospital^and three hours later he-died. This dismal accident had occurred in the fuU *iel" ot many I>eoI>le, an Assistant District TIBBETT Attorney and eleven New York detectives to investigate the Ccxse. The risurict Attorney's office even made plans for an elaborate re-enactment of the scene. Late this afternoon a post mortem made plain the fact that Mr. Sterzini had died of heart disease. The slight wound inflicted upon his hand in no way responsible for his death. So the District Attorney's office cancelled its plans for the re-enactment of the rehearsal. WALK.KR. I heard a couple of Jimmy Walker stories today. Recently returned from abroad, Jimmy was the Fall Guy at a luncheon of the Circus Gaints and Sinners^ I was seated with Freddy Benham, founder of that hilarious outfit, while Tex O’Rourke knciAft ii. told how the late Mayor while in London, had learned to wear a montFcle, Jimmy, who is a fight fee, and the author of the Walker Boxing Act in hew York State, went to some bouts at the national Sporting Club in London, ««<* Ih the party was the Prince of V, ales, just be f o r e he bee a me K ing , and not s o ±x rmsy 1 ong before he abdicated. In such royal company, Jimmy f*£r.cniags* was wearing an eye-glass^a most British monocle screwed in one eye# One of the fights was % slam-bang, rip-rpar,^when the knock-out came, Jimmy nearly collapsed with eKcitement. The Prince of Wales turned to hina with kindly solicitude. "I say old chapt" he inquired, "hadn‘t you ever seen anything like that before? "Oh yes," Jimmy replied, "but I never swallowed a monocle before.11