Daily hansan
56th Year, No. 84
LAWRENCE, KANSAS
Tuesday, Feb. 10, 1959
Tornado Rips St. Louis; Local Accidents High
Slippery sidewalks and icy roads were responsible for a minor accident. one reported injury, and many strained muscles yesterday.
A two-car accident at 13th and Oread streets, involving cars driven by Gerhard Zuther, instructor of English, and Carolyn Riech, Independence, Mo., senior, caused $100 damage. KU police reported.
Thomas Gale, instructor of history, received first aid from campus police for a cut he sustained on his right hand in a fall on the ice on the 14th Street hill.
Bulletin
An early-season tornado hit southern Ohio today, injuring five persons and damaging several buildings.
But if Kansas weather was bad Missouri weather was terrible.
The Kansas Highway Department said most roads in Kansas are slick and hazardous and advised against unnecessary driving.
A "sleeper" tornado which raked the northwest side of St. Louis early today brought a mounting toll of casualties in that area. At least 300 were injured and the total of 21 dead is expected to rise.
The city's central section, only a mile from the downtown area, was the hardest hit. A 50-block-square area in this section was blocked off by police to search for more possible victims and persons trapped.
Weather
Clear to partly cloudy tonight. Wednesday increasing cloudiness followed by snow beginning extreme west during afternoon possibly mixed with rain southwest portion. Continued cold this afternoon. Colder east tonight. Not so cold Wednesday. Low tonight 5 to 15. High Wednesday 25 to 35.
Press
Dolph Simons
J-World Editor Receives Award
Dolph Simons, editor and publisher of the Lawrence Daily JournalWorld, today became the 1959 recipient of the William Allen White award for journalistic merit.
The award is given each year to a Kansas newspaperman who exemplifies the William Allen White ideals in journalism and in service to his profession and community.
Rolla Clymer, editor of the El Dorado Times and a past president of the William Allen White Foundation, presented the award.
"His editorial expositions are gracefully done in the best Kansas tradition—clear, logical and bolstered with fact," Mr. Clymer said. "He adheres to his opinions and sounds his conclusions with unwavering firmness. In any discussion, he never fails to stand up and be counted."
"The poet today is the hostage of the intellectual which is a synonym for critic" he said.
The selection of Simons, the sixth
To the modern critic, the poem is only a stepping stone to an abstraction of higher ideas. This way of dealing with poetry has forced
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Mr. Shapiro called himself a "low brow, high brow," and laughingly commented the intellectual cannot express anything without thinking about it.
Poet Karl Shapiro Criticizes Critics
"As a critic I live in a Salvador Dali world and as a poet I live in Lincoln, Neb." he observed.
By Saundra Hayn
Karl Shapiro, Palitzer Prize-
winning poet, attacked modern
critics yesterday and said we are
living in an age of criticism.
Speaking as both a critic and a poet, Mr. Shapiro said the life of the critic has long since taken the place of the life of the poet."
Mr. Shapiro, professor of English at the University of Nebraska, gave a University Lecture audience a picture of today's American poetry hopelessly entangled in a maze of criticism. He described the modern critic as a person who cared about literature only as a bone of contention.
"The absence of judgment in modern criticism is beyond belief," he stated.
Honors
He also said that literary textbooks have probably done more to warp the intellectual judgment of students than have all the comic books of the 20th century.
Mr. Shapiro said the lines in poems should be accepted just as they are. They mean exactly what they say and no one should try to give the dictionary meaning to fit the poet's meaning for that word.
poets into hiding, Mr. Shapiro continued.
"The poet uses words in spite of their meaning and in spite of the memory," he said. The language of poetry is the language of becoming, not that found in the dictionary, which Shapiro describes as "a fine piece of science fiction."
Mr. Shapiro encouraged English professors to use better literary judgment when they deal with poetry in the classroom.
Mr. Shapiro called T. S. Eliot a typical modern critic.
"It is Eliot's terminology and his sincerity in his terminology that has made him famous in this age of catchwords." Mr. Shaniro quipped.
What is the remedy for the modern critic and the dilemma he has created? As Mr. Shapiro sees it, the cure is the creation of new poetry toward art and not directed toward the criticism.
Foundation Re-Elects
All officers of the William Allen White Foundation were re-elected to serve a second year today at the annual meeting of the Foundation's trustees in Flint Hall.
The officers are Dwight Payton, publisher of The Overbrook Citizen, president; Dolph Simons, publisher of The Lawrence Journal-World, first vice president; Whitley Austin, editor of The Salina Journal, second vice president; E. W. Johnson, publisher of The Chanute Tribune, third vice president; Keith L. Nitcher, University of Kansas comptroller, treasurer; and Burton W. Marvin, dean of the William Allen White School of Journalism and Public Information, director.
The men were elected to their positions at the 1958 meeting, and re-election to a second term has become traditional.
Two new Foundation programs were approved by the board:
1. The president and director were instructed to make plans for a William Allen White Seminar on Current Affairs, which will be held at the University. It will cover problems and subjects of current
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Hibbs, Simons Hibbs Sees Job As Public Trust
A man who was graduated from the University of Kansas 35 years ago returned today to speak in Fraser Theater, where he once listened as a student.
Ben Hibbs, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, received the William Allen White Foundation's second annual national certificate of journalistic merit from Dwight Payton, president of the Foundation.
He delivered the tenth annual William Allen White Lecture after receiving his award.
"The first principle of magazine publishing is to regard publishing as a responsibility to the public and not simply as a money-making enterprise," Mr. Hibbs said.
"If and when that rising curve of circulation becomes the primary objective of editing, we are in trouble—deep trouble. We editors simply must not become so bemused by the numbers game that we forget our responsibilities to our fellow Americans."
Although he predicted a bright future for magazines, Mr. Hilbs said.
Post Editor Had Doubts About Leaving Kansas
Ben Hibbs, affable editor of the Saturday Evening Post, said he had some misgivings when he left his native state, Kansas, and ventured east.
Some of his doubts might have come when he read an editorial in the Leavenworth Times in 1929 which said: "Ben Hibbs, a young editor of great promise, is allowing himself to be swallowed up by the greedy eastern press."
Mr. Hibbs was then 27 and managing editor of the Arkansas City Daily Traveler. His first magazine job was reading "junky manuscripts."
"It was a dreary job and I hated my work." Hibbs said.
"After a few months I got a wire from my old boss, Oscar Stauffer, who was just then beginning to build up his chain of Kansas newspaners," he said.
"I think I'm going to buy the Wichita Eagle tomorrow," he told me. He asked me if I would come back to be his editor if he bought it."
"You bet your boots," Mr. Hibbs replied.
Three days later he received a letter from Mr. Stauffer saying the purchase had not gone through.
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"Those magazines which want a future must cleave to certain basic principles which have never been outmoded, and never will be, by all the violent changes which sweep through the publishing industry with each new generation.
Must Remain Honest
"As long as people want something to read, there will be a continuing place in their lives for the magazines—provided the magazines are honestly and intelligently edited."
In accepting the journalistic merit award. Mr. Hibbs said;
"I think this is the greatest honor which my native state could bestow upon me. The happiness I feel on this occasion is underscored by the fact that the citation was given in the name of the Kansan I revere above all others, Bill White of Emporia."
Mr. Hibbs said William Allen White made himself heard around the world.
"He was living proof—and in this there was infinite hope for all of us—that it is not the size of the job, but the size of the man, that counts."
Cites Collier's Downfall
Mr. Hibbs blamed a lack of editorial independence for the recent downfall of the Crowell Company, publisher of Collier's, Woman's Home Companion and American magazine.
"Things were done editorially by these magazines to attract advertising—always a vain procedure and in the end usually a fatal mistake," Mr. Hilbs said.
He explained that editorial independence was abandoned at the Crowell company long before the final collapse of the publications themselves two years ago.
A basic principle of editing mentioned by Mr. Hibbs is the necessity for dealing with dangerous material.
I mean material which may bring
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THE ICEMAN COMETH—And he left a little too much ice for this tree near Flint Hall. Many trees and shrubs on the campus broke under the
weight of the ice which coated the city after Monday night's freak thunderstorm in freezing temperatures. More ice and snow are forecast.