Coral Gables Historical Archive
Coral Gables Riviera
Friday, March 6, 1942, page 6 (of 8)
The page
The text of this pageRead by computer from the scan, so some words may be wrong. The page picture is the original.
CORAL GABLES RIVIERA
AN INDEPENDENT COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER Published every Friday by the Miami Riviera Publishing Co., 306 Coral Way, Coral Gables, Fla. Established January, 1926 Combined with the Dade County and Coconut Grove Times, 1929. ALBERT E. HARUM President and Publisher JAMES B. MOORE Managing Editor Mailing Address, P. O. Box 704 Telephone 4-1634 Member, Florida Press Association National Editorial Association Represented in the National Advertising Field by the American Press Association, New York City SUBSCRIPTION RATES Six Months $1.25 One Year $2.00 Out of Town $3.00 Entered as second class matter May 21, 1926, at the Postoffice at Miami, Florida, under Act of March 3, 1879.
Keep 'Em Rolling
We wonder how many of us realize, when we park overtime in front of a Gables store, that we are preventing that businessman from making much needed dollars. Seems a bit far fetched, doesn't it? Nevertheless it's true. Let's take a grocery store, for example. Mrs. Jones has decided to go there to do her shopping. She pulls up in front of the place, but finds every parking place taken. So, instead of driving around the block several times, hoping to find a vacant space, she drives off and does her business elsewhere. This is true with any business. Everytime we are thoughtless and leave our car parked over the time limit, we are costing some merchant several sales. In times like these, when working together is so essential and every sale means so much to the businessman, we should all be a little more thoughtful about our parking. Let's apply one of the wartime slogans to our cars and the parking problem and "Keep 'Em Rolling".
Now's The Time
With costs of living and taxes rising, home owners seem to have found the necessary motive to apply for their homestead exemption earlier than ever before, according to Gerald A. Bowen, city tax assessor. Out of a possible 1850 owners who should apply for exemption in 1942, 1789 already have made application at city hall. In addition, 60 new owners of formerly exempt homes have applied. Deadline for filing for homestead exemption is April 1, Bowen's office serves as a constant reminder of this fact, sending out cards to the prospects. Two such cards have been mailed since Jan. 1, and a third may be sent to the remaining laggers before April 1. Of the 1665 applicants in 1941, all but 238 have filed their claims. In the group of new applicants are 82 old houses not previously receiving exemption, and 67 new homes, built during the past year. Homestead exemption can save up to $70 a year for a home owner. Bowen said that any resident who wishes information on his eligibility or on other matters may call 4-6550.
It's Not Too Late
Gables voters, who put off registering while the books were in the precincts, still have the opportunity to inscribe their names but now have the inconvenience of a trip into Miami. The books have been in the precincts since February 2nd, affording all an opportunity to register right in their own neighborhoods. At 5 p.m. Monday, the books were returned to the office of Carl Holmer, supervisor of registrations, in the courthouse. The books will be open for additional registrations in that office on the 11th floor of the courthouse daily until April 18. The office will open each day at 8:30 a.m. At this time, when the blood is being shed for the right to live the democratic way, there should be little need to point out the necessity of registering. The right to vote is held sacred by millions of Americans, who are willing to give their lives that it be preserved. Yet there are some, who, because of the little inconvenience it causes, have neglected to register. If you are in this category, by all means find time to take that trip to the courthouse. There is no charge connected with the registration. It will take but a few moments of your time. Show the men on the battlefronts that we appreciate what they are doing by taking the first step in exercising your right of franchise.
WALTER LIPPMANN
(Continued from Page 1) of detaching himself from friends who are not equal to their task. Mr. Churchill is not removable as is Mr. Roosevelt, but he is certainly indispensable to his country and to the cause of the United Nations. Mr. Churchill has reorganized his government. The time has come when Mr. Roosevelt should cease to fight his delaying actions against reform and should reconstruct his Administration. There is little doubt as to what is wrong with his Administration, and once it is clearly recognized, the remedies can be applied. The trouble is in the Cabinet, which, with certain notable exceptions, is too weak to advise the President in matters of policy and too weak to enforce policy upon the bureaucracy and the pressure groups. There is a large dangerous gap between the President, who must make the great final decisions, and the departments, bureaus and agencies which are supposed to execute them. This gap ought to be filled by Cabinet officers who are able to talk back to the President and are able to control their subordinates and the special interests-political and economic-with which they have to deal. For without a cabinet of this quality the President will make his decisions, so to speak, in the air; that is, without true advice about what is needed and what can be done, and the actual execution of policy will be at the mercy of bureau chiefs and of pressure groups. There are some men of genuine cabinet stature in the Administration today, and no blanket indictment can or should be drawn. There is Secretary Stimson, to name the most obvious. There is Mr. Nelson. There is Mr. Leon Henderson. There are some others who get along with their work and are not bottlenecks in the conduct of the war. But there is no disguising the fact and the times are much too serious to trifle with it, that in some departments which are essential to the prosecution of the war there is grave weakness at the top, due in some cases to the inadequacy of the man himself, and in some, it may be to the President's failure to let him exercise his proper responsibilities and powers. It is a disagreeable business to point to weakness of this sort. But there are many disagreeable duties to be done now, and a frank and cold detachment from personal considerations is in these circumstances perhaps the truest kindness. The sections of the war establishment where constructive and reorganizing will have, I believe, to be undertaken are those concerned with labor, commerce, shipping, state and Navy. There are the sections in which for one reason and another there has been no full conversion of the personnel and of their procedure to war work. We shall not be able to mobilize the energy of the country completely or to share the powers we have at its maximum effectiveness until the conversion has been carried out. The full case for a new Secretary of Labor is to be found in the careful, judicious, but devastating exposition of war labor policy made last week by Dr. Leiserson of the National Labor Relations Board. The record, as he exposed it, shows that the President has never had an adviser on labor policy who made clear to him the controlling principles of the problem. At this strong change in shoe leather the advice that would protect him against improvisations which work so badly that labor relations are in an extremely confused condition. Nor does it make any sense to have a Secretary of Labor who, at a time when everything depends upon what labor can produce, plays no leading part in labor affairs. Miss Perkins is an admirable woman and a fine public servant. Her usefulness ought not to be destroyed by keeping her in a post she is unable to fill. The situation in regard to the Department of Commerce and in regard to shipping is not so clear. But there is little doubt that our position in the strategic raw materials is poorer that it needed to be if the obvious warning signals had been heeded by Secretary Jones, and if he had not judged the national interest by peace-time commercial standards. If no change of personalities is called for, there is certainly needed urgently convincing evidence of a change of mind and habit. What Secretary Jones has had to say about rubber is hardly evidence of any adjustment of his mind to the realities of the war. The situation in merchant shipping needs to be scrutinized much more thoroughly than it has been. The shipbuilding program has had a good press. I doubt whether those who really know the facts think it deserves it. A good entering wedge for the inquiry would be to find out what happened to the "sea otter" in the Bureaus of the Navy Department and of the Maritime Commission. The inquiry would be enlightening in view of the fact that the "sea otter" cargo ships do not require the kind of machinery, for lack of which so many ships that have been "launched" are still tied up to the fitting docks. The inquiry would also be useful because it would almost certainly throw some light upon the radical question of whether the President himself, or the Secretary of the Navy, or the line officers of the Navy, are really able to make headway against the Navy Department bureaus. This is a critical matter, involving much greater issues than the "sea otter" involving indeed the very efficiency of the Navy itself. For the question is whether the older crust of custom and seniority can be broken through to let new ability rise more quickly to the top. At the head of the State Department there are two remarkable men-Mr. Hull one of the exemplary characters in our public life and Mr. Welles, a diplomat of unusual energy, clarity, and experience. But, whatever the reason for it, the fact is that they have not been able to fill certain of our most critical foreign posts with men who are even remotely competent, nor none of their own bureaus with men equal to their grave responsibilities. Nor have they been able to impose upon the department and upon the foreign service anything like the discipline and the alertness, and the freedom from personal and bureaucratic jealousies, which the nation needs and has a right to expect. In all these places the basic trouble is the same: either the men nominally responsible are not strong enough, or if they are strong enough, they are denied their full responsibility and power by the White House. How long it will take to change these things depends upon the intensity and, no less, upon the accuracy of public criticism. Mr. Churchill's government has been reconstructed in a fortnight. Why in the name of common sense should it take any longer to do the same thing here?
The One Magic Carpet
BY BROWN U.S. PRODUCTION POWER JAPAN
OUR TOWN
by Jim Moore During the recent cold weather, Coral Gables residents used about $400 worth of waste paper starting fires in their fireplaces! Ordinarily, we wouldn't pay much attention to the amount of paper used to start fires in the community. As a matter of fact, under ordinary circumstance, it would be almost impossible to arrive at such a figure. However, with the war putting waste paper at a premium, $400 worth of scrap paper going up a chimney takes on a little importance. Since the last of October, the city has salvaged $1006.95 worth of scrap paper at the municipal incinerator. This has gone into the making of new paper and the relieving of the shortage brought on by the defense effort. It should be emphasized right here that in Coral Gables no special effort is necessary to save waste paper. All you have to do is to toss it in with your regular garbage and trash and your job is done. When the garbage truck picks it up, it is hauled to the incinerator and carefully sorted before being consigned to the fires. Every bit of paper is removed, even crumpled cigarette packages and the paper you use to wrap up the garbage. This is put into a baler, compressed into blocks and sold to the paper salvage company for $9.50 a ton. Of late there seems to have been some misunderstanding about paper salvage in Coral Gables. This office has had many calls from housewives, asking whom to call to pick up the paper; whether it must be tied up in bundles, etc., etc. Again we emphasize-don't do anything but follow your usual procedure. Just toss it in the trash can and the City does the rest. It might be interesting to reveal how we determined how much paper was used in lighting fires during cold weather. When the paper salvage was started late in October, the waste for that month was sold for $43.81. November, the first complete month of salvage operations, netted $280.88. By the end of December, a new peak of $375.48 was reached. Ordinarily, January and February should have topped those figures again, but along came cold weather and fires began glowing on Gables hearths. In January the figure took a steep drop to $167.27 and another in February to $166.49, both figures approximately $200 each under the normal expectancy or a total of $400 that went up the flue. This spring and summer, when hearthstones remain cold, the paper salvage is expected to top all winter figures. Already, the extra negro laborer at the incinerator has picked out about 108 tons of paper from the refuse thus justifying his small wage many times over. City Manager George Shaw explains that if a large enough amount of heavy corrugated cardboard was received, that this could be baled separately and a higher price gotten, but that to date, everybody seems to be hanging on to their boxes and other heavy papers. This paper is more valuable because it is composed of pure pulp and chalk filler and sizing have been omitted. Thus, it is almost 100 per cent salvageable. White and fancy papers have been treated with such fillers, which must be removed by chemical process before the pulp can be extracted. Nevertheless, the city wants every kind of paper and puts it all to good use. So the next time you start a fire, try to rely on Boy Scout tactics and don't use a whole newspaper to get it blazing. One sheet is usually sufficient to start a fatty pine fire roaring, if kindling wood is used. Let's not send another $200 in paper up the chimney during March.
Mark Sullivan
There are two definite, cheering developments. One is the stuff rolling out of the factories. The President in his speech Monday night really understated it. Every important war material, including ships, is coming out of the mills and yards at a pace greater than was anticipated-hence more than enough to meet the immense program for this year and next which Mr. Roosevelt laid before the opening session of Congress last month. If there is a possible exception it is the bigger planes. These lag behind tanks and some other forms of war materials. But planes lag behind only because the others are so far ahead of the program. As to planes and everything else the pace today is faster than enough to meet the program. That program, when the President laid it down on Jan. 6, was called by some fantastic. Today it is in sight of fulfillment. If the program is not met it will be because of unforeseen conditions arising in the future. The fulfillment that is in sight, if not interrupted, will actually turn out to be far more than fulfillment. For once a process of this kind gets headway it gathers momentum which carries it beyond early expectations. How did this come about? One reason is, the American system of factory mass production at last given a chance. To achieve factory mass production, certain conditions are necessary. One is agreement upon a model-and agreement not to change the model. This condition now exists generally. For more than two years, before the defense program got into the factories, and while it was still in the hands of Washington, Washington kept changing the models. To this no blame attaches. The technical men at Washington, watching the war abroad, saw defects arise in existing planes and other war materials. They saw improvements made by practically all the countries in the war. That our technical men should take advantage of these improvements was necessary; that they should try to devise even greater improvements of their own was desirable. It was not merely a matter of more planes, it was also a matter of better planes. But all this led to constant changes in design. It distracted the factory managers. Orders were given in comparatively small lots, and even when planes were going through the factories changes were made in blueprints. Mass production was impossible. There are other reasons. Preceding Pearl Harbor there were countless strikes; since Pearl Harbor, there have been few. Also, throughout the early period, some labor leaders wished to bring about a fundamental change wished to get for themselves a voice equal to that of management in the conduct of industry. The economic, social and ultimate political aspects of that need not be discussed now. Even if a new way of conducting industry were known to be better than the old, making the change would, at the very least, cause delay. Mere agitation for it caused delay. Apparently the agitation is now abandoned. Whatever the defects of the old way it works-and now it is given a chance to work. To feel cheer over the production of war materials may lead to unfortunate complacency. War materials pouring out of the factories is one thing; war materials on the battle front is another. Between the two are many hurdles. There is a monstrous hurdle of distance. To carry war material from any American port to practically any of its destinations is a two-month trip for a cargo vessel, four months for the round trip, as President Roosevelt pointed out Monday night. There is the further problem of judgment in determining which shall be the destination for a given tank, or gun, or plane-whether to Australia, or to China, or to Russia or to North Africa, or elsewhere. There are immense and intricate problems of coordination. For these problems, we can hope, we have the talent to can find it. That the materials are being made is the first step, it is going satisfactorily, and that is cheering. Another cheering development is that apparently a real effort will be made to prevent inflation. Two of the great potential causes of inflation have always been increase in price of farm crops, which means increase in cost of living, and increase in wage rates. These two, if left unrestrained, would bring inflation automatically. Increase in cost of living would lead to increase of wage rates, and increase of wage rates would in turn lead to increase in cost of living; the two together would work in an upward spiral. Against both, apparently, the Administration is willing to be firm. The new War Labor Board has announced a policy of at least partial restraint of rising rates. And the Secretary of Agriculture, Claude A. Wickard, with the Price Administrator, Leon Henderson, have set themselves against further increase in prices of farm crops. Both actions were indorsed by President Roosevelt when he said, as spokesman for all the people: "We shall not demand special gains for any one group or occupation." That is affirmation of the will to prevent inflation. If sustained, the other preventives can be managed. (Copyright, 1942, New York Tribune, Inc.)
HE'S TELLING You
DOWN BEAT-Johnny Wood, ardent Gables cyclist from 'way back, always keeps one step ahead of the times. When the tire rationing program was launched, Johnny had already been riding his bicycle through the shady lanes of the Gables. Last Sunday we saw Johnny riding along South Greenway Drive on his bike. From somewhere came the strains of a Cuban rhumba. As the tempo of the rhumba gradually increased the downbeat of Senor Wood's legs on the pedals became faster and faster. Last we saw of Johnny he was heading for Hialeah to enter his steed in the fourth race, the radio in his market basket setting the pace. MILLIONS FOR DEFENSE-Many of the entrants in the horse show which John Gazlay presented last week were launched on a career of collecting ribbons, cup, etc., all as a result of the show. Mr. Gazlay presented the awards in the form of defense stamps. Now, according to most of the winners, they just can't help fill up the books, and by that time, Mr. Gazlay hopes, they won't be able to stop buying. ALIBI-Harold Parrott is constantly being surprised at the weird and blase alibis offered by young Toddy Parrott. Last week Toddy ran into the house and told his father about the speeder on the road while riding on the handlebars of his friend's bicycle. "It was going about-about-about 100 miles an hour," he told his father. "Did you keep up with it?" asked Mr. Parrott. "Nah, it was going in another direction," explained Toddy. MITCHELLIAN-At a tea at the home of Mrs. Arthur Weiland last week two well-known Gables guests were discussing the war and the possibility of the Japs or Nazis bringing it down here. "Why honey," said one, "you just know you can come up to see me in Georgia though I know you'd never find my house." "Oh," said the second, "it's one of those places you can't find until you've read 'Gone With the Wind'?" DOUBLE CHECK-The American Legion, in another move to make the RAF boys feel at home in Coral Gables, recently passed out invitations to the Legion Tap Room which included a beer on the Legion. Legionnaires were amazed that more of the beer stubs were not turned in, though the RAF boys accepted the invitation to the tap room. Investigation revealed that most of the British lads had put the beer checks in their scrap books to show the boys back home.
Book Briefs
Highbrowbrow and Other Sketches By S. Jay Kaufman REVIEWED BY LOUISE LEYDEN Writing sport plays that require but a minimum of scenery, short dialogue, swift-moving, and needing only spot-lights for lighting effects, is no mean task; that is, if the plays themselves are kept at the peak of entertainment level and are spiked with living characters. Yet, S. Jay Kaufman has achieved this triple objective in his recent collection of eight, humorous brief plays which he likes to call sketches but which take their real title from the first play in the book. In a foreword the author states that his first theme for a play was "Without Scenery", which he later discarded in favor of the present one. To this reviewer, "Without Scenery" appears the far more appropriate one. There are seventeen plays in the book. Each is interesting and holds the reader until the very end. These are various settings, mainly in America and the characters are drawn from many walks of life. The author has delved deeply into the vast store of experiences gained in his many travels over Europe and America. He has put life and zest into the characters he has created. They are real, true-to-type people who are deftly faceted and shine brightly though the span of each be but a few minutes. Whether read or produced on the stage, this collection of short plays furnishes real diversion and entertainment, fulfilling a special mission these dark, uncertain days.