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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, July 26, 1966
Increased Altitude, Visibility Poor
Tribute to a teacher
One of his students, one of the many who sat literally or figuratively at his feet through the many years at KU, should be writing this editorial about Allen Crafton. But everybody who knew Allen was his student.
Teacher was what he mainly was, but in no formal, stuffy sense of the word. I knew Allen Crafton mainly by reputation up until about 1960. Then I began to become associated with him through work in the Lawrence Unitarian Fellowship. For two years I worked with him on committees, and sat in joyous sessions in his home. Once at our house he spent an evening delighting us with reading and singing of ballads. Another time he read aloud from Robert Benchley's hoked-up stories of the great operas. We, his unofficial students, sang as he played the piano, and we listened as he alone, or with his lovely wife Jessica, or with what we came to think of as the Crafton Players, presented plays—Christmas and Easter programs, "Father Malachy's Miracle," "Androcles and the Lion," "The Zoo Story."
He was a funny man in the best sense of the word "funny." He knew the purpose of humor, and when he used it it was in a gentle way. He seemed to lack the capacity to hurt people.
He looked at life as a humanist, and mainly he accepted people for what they are. It always seemed to me that he could cut through sham and nonsense, and he would have scoffed at pretentious words about him today.
His home was full of books, for he and Mrs. Crafton read and talked and used literature as the starting point for many discussions. In recent years Allen had come to think deeply and wonder considerably about man and religion, and he could synthesize his thinking and research and pull it together into a warm commentary that would put conventional ministers to shame.
Persons who attended Lawrence art shows in recent years saw his landscapes—the mountains and deserts and those sites of historical but also emotional meaning to him. He was a fine painter, and his painting revealed his humanity as well as did his words.
But mainly he was a man of the theater. University audiences saw his "American Medley" last year. He guided young actors and directors and playwrights. He was versed in the lore of the theater (maybe a bit impatient about certain trends in recent years, for his tastes were, perhaps, on the old-fashioned side). Others can testify better to his greatness as a teacher of the theater and the drama.
Allen Crafton loved Kansas and the Kansas past and was not ashamed to say so. Many people in this area first came to know him through his entertaining depiction of how culture came to Kansas.
How he ever found time to do everything remains the mystery. But he was like Missouri's great journalism teacher, Frank Luther Mott, whose autobiography, called "Time Enough," said that any man could find time enough to do those things that were meaningful to him.
Allen's physical vigor had diminished in recent years, but many of us envied that quick wit and exceptional mind functioning within a frail frame. He didn't get around too well, and had had to limit what he could try to do. But each year he and Jessica managed to get to the West, which they loved so much, to the mountains. It was in the mountains, on the first day of his 1966 vacation trip, that Allen Crafton died last Friday. The University of Kansas and the city of Lawrence have lost one of their most beloved men. But all of us are richer for having had him in front of us, teaching us, these many years.
— Calder M. Pickett
Professor of Journalism
The recent non-decision of the World Court has pointed out two rather major inadequacies of the United Nations and the World Court charter.
Weakness in World Court
The decision of the court was simply a rejection of jurisdiction: the court said it could not rule on the African situation, since legal jurisdiction actually rests with the League of Nations, defunct since 1946.
It would seem that the World Court has taken an easy exit from an uncomfortable situation, perhaps on a justified legal point, perhaps not. If the legal jurisdiction truly rests with the League of Nations, should not that jurisdiction be shifted to within the realm of the existing United Nations or the World Court?
WHY HAS SUCH a significant issue of international law been left in the jurisdiction of a non-existent body? Why were the necessary provisions not included in the charter of the World Court, even after the League disappeared?
Another questionable point brought to the surface by the decision of the court is the manner in which the decision was reached. The
president of the court, Sir Percy Spender, exercised his legal right to vote twice on the decision; he first voted with the side he felt was legally correct; he then voted again, as president of the court, to break the tie. What historical or legal support can be voiced to justify that practice? Is the World Court an arena in which may be displayed inequalities that are not allowed in even the lowest courts of many countries?
THIS DECISION was the first major test of the World Court. Apparently the court has established itself as a timid and ultra-cautious body, unwilling to assume judicial precedence in international cases.
The personnel of the World Court should, and certainly does, represent the finest legal ability of the major nations of the world. The legal and political bases on which the court is based apparently do not equal the excellence of its personnel. Have not the people of the world the right to expect something better from the recognized legal arbiter of international matters?
Watts, Hough-they seem similar
Bill Robinson
By Al Kuettner
CLEVELAND — (UPI)—Where was this —Watts or Hough?“
Here on Hough Avenue, which took the brunt of fire bombs in a week-long outburst of racial passion last week, the signs read "Soul brother."
Only the signs seemed to be different.
In the littered riot-seared streets of Watts in Los Angeles last year, I saw the crude signs
loomed up on store fronts: "Blood brother."
They meant the same — Negro
For 76 Years, KU's Official Student Newspaper
KANSAN TELEPHONE NUMBERS
Summer Session Kansan
Newsroom—UN 4-3646 Business Office—UN 4-3198
The Summer Session Kansan, student newspaper at The University of Kansas, is represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York, N.Y. The summer session is open to all students and does not class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan.; every Tuesday and Friday from the Summer Session except University holidays and examination periods. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised in the Summer Session are offered to all students without regard to color, creed, or national origin.
ownership. Don't burn this one.
In both cities, the appeal proved
effective.
Cleveland got only a taste of the devastation that scarred Watts. You wondered what hand of fate had kept it from being worse. All the elements were here.
The opinions expressed in the editorial column are those of the students whose names are signed to them. Guest editorial views are not necessarily the same. Any opinions expressed in the Summer Session Kansan are not necessarily those of The University of Kansas Administration or the State Board of Regents.
Some businesses were destroyed here, too, but they seemed to be second targets. The main enemy of the firebombers was a batch of old apartment buildings and other dwellings that have been abandoned and marked for eventual destruction under an urban renewal program.
The mobs that touched off the Watts riot aimed at the business section.
You see them scattered all through the Hough district, gaunt and empty, their windows smashed out by vandals.
HERBLOCK THE WASHINGTON POST
BOOK REVIEWS
By United Press International
FLYING SAUCERS—SERIOUS BUSINESS by Frank Edwards (Lyle Stuart, $5.75). Edwards, a serious, painstaking newsman and radio commentator, has been studying Unidentified Flying Objects since 1849. He believes that UFOs are real, intelligently guided, scientific beyond our most advanced knowledge—and about to land on earth.
Edwards makes a case that UFOs date back to earliest Biblical times—the flaming chariots and heavenly visitors of the Scriptures—and have been coming into our atmosphere with frequency increasing to an alltime high in late 1965.
He suggests explanations to many mysteries: the otherwise inexplicable crash of various earthly aircraft; the "buzzing" of U. S. and Soviet satellites sent into space; strange manifestations on the moon which indicate that orb is a UFO base and the first man to land will not be there alone; and the possibility that last fall's gigantic electrical blackout of the northeastern United States, as well as several other such blackouts, were caused directly by UFOS.
SURGEON. U.S.A., by Frank G.
Slaughter (Doubleday $5.95): A novel chronicling the World War II adventures of Maj. (later Col.)
Bruce Graham, a brilliant surgeon who chose to volunteer for army duty.
Graham temporarily abandoned a promising career in surgical research at a famous medical center in Baltimore (here called "Lakewood") to enter the army, where he distinguished himself as the commander of a hospital ship.
Politics raises its ugly head from time to time. Graham takes time off from his medical duties to confound an unscrupulous congressional communist-hunter and to disrupt a conservative organization named for the first U.S. casualty of World War II.
And then, of course, there are the ladies; beautiful Janet Josselyn, senator's daughter and USO star; and haunting Shane McLoon, journalism's Miss Ernie Pyle. Sisters under the skin, of course, but which twin gets the Graham?
No one can touch Slaughter in making surgery come alive for the layman. The medical sequences of "Surgeon, U. S. A." are informative and absorbing enough
to capture the reader who is not qualified even to administer an aspirin tablet.
EXECUTIVES UNDER FIRE,
by Chester Burger (Macmillan
$5.95): Apparently things are
tough all over, and being in the
executive suite with your name
on the door isn't all it's cracked
up to be.
That seems to be the main message conveyed in this book which consists of tape-recorded interviews with the men who make the decisions in business, the military, the university and other situations. The few women who reach executive status have special problems.
It seems that in the arenas of high position, power and big pay, the competitive drives are intensified, spurred by ambition and greed, and the casualties high.
Many of the woes of the people who wind the stem, are due to the fact that they are square pegs in round holes and often enough are not equal to the jobs for which they are paid so handsomely.
The author of the book is a management consultant well acquainted with the types who can manage and those,who can't.
THE ACHIEVEMENT OF WILLIAM FAULKNER, by Michael Millgate (Random House $6): A British look at the works of William Faulkner. Now professor of English at York University, Toronto, Millgate has critically analyzed all the novels and short stories. There is an introductory chapter narrating and documenting Faulkner's literary career with emphasis on what, when and why he wrote as he did.
Millgate concludes that Faulkner, if he must be related to some other literary great, must be compared to Dickens "whom Faulkner most resembles in the sheer quantity and consistent quality of his achievement, and it is alongside Dickens, the greatest of the English novelists, that Faulkner must ultimately be ranked."
Against capitol fund
WASHINGTON — (UPI) — A Senate subcommittee proposed yesterday that Congress cut off the cash for a controversial $34 million proposal to extend the west front of the Capitol.