Radio Script #11
Little Talks On Common Things
January 23, 1949
What a rare thing is a sense of proportion — the ability to place situations and events in right relationship. Too many adults lack the sense of relationship, whose lack is understandable and excusable in a little child. I recently heard about a little girl in Waterville who was deceived by this very lack of proportion. Her older brother told this little tot, “I ‘II help Mother with the dishes from Christmas to New Years if you will help her do them from New Years to Christmas.” Now the offer came just a little while before Christmas. To be free from dish-wi~ing for a whole week after Christmas — that would be wonderful. It just didn’t occur to her that from New Years to Christmas would be 51 weeks, all the rest of a long, long year.
How excited we get about little things that don’t matter, and how complacently we look at some of the big things which matter very much. The hard working men and women who make up the national Congress deserve our respect and support. For the most part and during most of the time they are about the country’s business, concerned with important issues of our national welfare. But not always.
Those of us who regularly read the Congressional Record know very well that there are times when Congressmen, like the rest of us, sadly lack a sense of proportion. Twenty-six columns in the Record of January 13th, at $200 a column, are filled with the bitterness of a personal quarrel between the alleged labor-hater, Clare Hoffman and the alleged management-hater, John Lesinski, both from the same state of Michigan. Mr. Hoffman accused Mr. Lesinski of calling him a “pimp of Joe Stalin”. Mr. Lesinski denied he said it. Mr. Hoffman refused to accept the denial. Other Congressmen, especially Mr. Cox of Georgia, tried to pour oil on the troubled waters, but all to no avail.
Mr. McCormack of Massachusetts, the majority leader, entered the fray, and in the thinly veiled politeness demanded by the rules of the House of Representatives, he and Mr. Hoffman hurled sarcasm at each other. Outside the halls of Congress two adults would usually settle such a controversy very quickly. They would either get together and resolve their differences, or they would go their respective ways. If it got so bad that one really slandered the other, the courts would always be open to the offended party.
Unfortunately a few Congressmen do not act as do ordinary citizens. So, in this instance, Mr. Hoffman talked on and on, indicating that, at a proper parliamentary time, he intended to offer a resolution for investigation and Congressional censuring of Mr. Lesinski. Finally Congressman Michener stood it as long as he could, and said: “Mr. Speaker, I know nothing about this occurrence. But the gentleman has now consumed the hour for which, under the rule, he was permitted to talk. He has talked. Then he buttressed that talk, as I understand, by a resolution. The rest of us would like to know just where the resolution is and what is in it.”
The Speaker of the House replied: “There is a paper lying on the desk of the Speaker. It starts by saying ‘Resolution’. The gentleman from Michigan never did offer the resolution. He said he was sending up to the Speaker’s desk, and he intended to offer, a resolution, but he did not.” Quite reasonably Congressman Michener asked, “Then the status is that the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Hoffman, sent a paper up there, and there it lies. What will become of it?” Now just consider, as an ordinary citizen, the Speaker’s reply, for this is what he said: “There is nothing before the House at this time.”
On a question of personal privilege Mr. Hoffman had talked for an hour, and when he finished, no one really knew what.it was all about, for there was nothing before the House at that time. And to get it into the Congressional Record, the taxpayers paid the printing bill of $200 a column for 26 columns. How splendid it would be if it could be said of us what Justice Wilson said of that great Chief Justice of Maine, Leslie C. Cornish, on the occasion of the latter’s funeral. “One sign of Judge Cornish’s greatness”, said Judge Wilson, “was that he knew a trifle when he saw one.”
Mark Twain once said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” This is certainly a freak winter — balmy spring days in Maine where we are supposed to have only two seasons, winter and the fourth of July; and snow for the first time in recorded history in San Diego, California. The Christmas holidays saw not enough snow for skiing in the White Mountains, but paralyzing blizzards as far south as New Mexico.
Some people say the Gulf Stream is changing, others say we are in the midst of a swing in the great weather cycle. The professional meteorologists tell us there is nothing in either explanation. Even they do not know enough about the causes of our weather. Much is still veiled in mystery . But they know much more than they did twenty. years ago. They tell us confidentially that the answer lies in the movement of air 20,000 to 40 ,·000 feet above the earth. There the air currents move at tremendous speed from west to east. The speed and the precise direction determine what goes on here. Early last fall bulges appeared in the smooth west to east flow of the upper air. That air took a wandering path, first moving northeast, then swinging down to southeast, and back again to northeast in the pattern of a huge letter S. Such movement means extreme departures from normal, and thus the northeast part of the United States got one of the warmest and wettest autumns on record.
But just why should this S movement cause such conditions? When the air currents get into that wavy pattern, they draw off the cold Alaska-Yukon polar air and leave it scattered allover the western part of the country_ As they curve through Texas and start northeastward, they drain a lot of moist, warm air from over the Gulf of Mexico and deposit it over the East. Under the pattern the area which will be warm and wet is that most influenced by the south to north swing of the huge air currents. Through the fall and thus far this winter that area has been the Northeast. The area which will be coldest and driest is the one most influenced by the north-to-south swing of the currents. That section has been the West.
Why the currents take this wavy form in the first place, why the bulges appear, the weathermen do not find it easy to explain. But at least it isn’t quite fair to say that everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything about it. The experts of the U. S. Weather Bureau are W01:lking constantly, not only with the old time method of reports from widely distributed stations, but also with the newer methods of radar-tracked balloons and complicated recording devices. Every year that goes by, these patient workers are adding to man’s store of knowledge about that common but very important thing, weather.
In the important matter of properly staffing our schools and adequately paying the teachers there is likely to be a lot of emotional argument. We have already mentioned the matter on this program, calling attention to a few pertinent facts. Tonight we are presenting no argument; we have no intent of pulling at your heart-strings in behalf of the teachers. We prefer rather that you look at a few more cold, hard facts. That our boys and girls have been the victims of too much incompetent and sub-standard teaching since 1942 is shown by the fact that in the fall of 1947, 122,000 persons were teaching on temporary certificates because they could not qualify for regular certification. This fall the number had been reduced by only 15,000. There are still 107,000 unprepared, emergency teachers at work in the nation’s schools.
Maine’s place in this picture is far from enviable. A year ago our State Department reported 500 of these sub-standard, emergency teachers. This year the Department reports exactly the same number. During the year we have made no gain at all.
We have made a gain in the average pay of teachers. In 1947-48 it was $1,979. It is now $2,200. This places us 37th among the 48 states. We used to say Maine stands with the deep South in support of education. We can no longer claim even that. In Virginia, West Virginia, Louisiana, Florida and Texas the average pay of teachers is higher than it is in Maine. It is not only such wealthy states as New York and California that pay teachers well. Utah, Nevada, Texas and Arizona all pay a minimum salary more than twice the teachers’ minimum in Maine. The maximum in Maine for classroom teachers, exclusive of principals or other administrators, is $3,500. In Minnesota that maximum is $5,300; in Montana it is $4,500; and in North Dakota it is $6,500.
Even now, before the increased birth rate of the war years has caught up with the schools, there is still a shortage of teachers. The situation has recently grown better in the high schools, to which former teachers have returned in rising numbers. Yet most of the country, including Maine, reports that even in the high schools the shortage still exists. Only such high-salaried states as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maryland and California report all high school positions ·filled with fully-trained, competent teachers.
It is in the elementary schools, in the grades below high school, that the situation is really alarming. The wealthy state of New York reports a shortage of 2,380 elementary teachers; Pennsylvania lacks 3,000; Virginia needs 4,500; South Carolina can use 6,000. And here in Maine, with less than a million people in our whole population, we have a shortage of 1,600 trained teachers for our boys and girls in the grade schools.
I fear I have muddled your heads with figures, but I hope the main point is clear. In our failure to give adequate financial support to education, we are taking it out of our boys and girls. It is not we adults, it is the next generation that suffers. If we want to turn our nation over to the foes of democracy, the surest way to do it is to forget our schools.
Each week we try to mention at least one of the old-time things. Do you city folks remember when they used to bank up the house for the winter? My listeners in the country still do it. What do they use for banking? Various materials, but I am told that sawdust is still the most common. Now I want to know how many of you ever saw bark tan used in that way. That is what everyone used in the Maine vi1lage where I spent my boyhood. One of the town’s principal industries was a tannery, to which the farmers annually hauled hundreds of cords of hemlock bark. The bark was ground, its juices were used in the tanning process, and the waste pulp, which everyone called “the tan”, was thrown out just as sawduct is from a sawmi11. That tan made excellent banking for those furnace-less houses against the co1d blasts from the White Mountains. And what cool, soft stuff it was to walk in barefoot through the tannery yard in mid-summer!
Heroism often consists in simply doing one’s duty. The tragic stories of aircrash landings, like that of the Yale students in Seattle at New Year’s, makes such mournful reading that it is refreshing and inspiring to hear the story of Sgt. Robert Lee Hodgkiss of the 82d Airborne Division. That Division of the Air Corps, with its famous paratroopers, had already won much renown. As the big “flying box-car”, the C-82, flew over North Carolina, something went wrong. Sgt. Hodgkiss, who had jumped in combat in Sicily, Italy, and Normandy, heard the jtnnp bell ring. There was no time to check harness or parachutes. He could only shout “Stand up, hook up, jump”. Then he calmly waited while 36 men left the doors of the plane at an altitude already dangerously low. It was simply the sergeant’s duty, as jump-master, to be the last man out of the plane.
But at times like these, it is a splendid thing just to do one’s duty. When it came the sergeant’s turn to jump, it was too late. The plane was too near the ground. He could only sit down, brace himself for the worst, and say “This is it. What of my wife and child?” unexpectedly this incident had a happy ending. Sgt. Hodgkiss did not die. He escaped unhurt, and every one of the 36 men in his charge landed safely. Was the sergeant a hero; was he a brave man? He did just what was expected of him.
Year: 1949