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University Daily Kansan Monday, March 2, 1964
Rock Chalk
Let's see: 80 rehearsal hours times 20 people in each of eight houses, plus a couple of months work by 40 staff members, plus innumerable hours spent writing scripts, painting scenery, sewing costumes, and building props—not to mention three performance hours times how ever many thousands of people were in the audience.
Was the time wasted?
ROCK CHALK REVUE, they say, is bigger and better than ever. A notable example was the winning skit, the Sigma Chi-Gamma Phi Beta production of "All's Not in Vein." Spoofing the staff and operation of Watkins Hospital, a wierd assortment of vampires, insurance salesmen, and bat boys provided an entertaining combination of script, dancing, special effects, good acting, and scenewry.
The skit's climax, the organ-accompanied "Hymn to Dean Emily," reached hilarious proportions with the lowering of a mock Cleopatra billboard, complete with Wescoe-Harrison, Alderson-Burton, and Taylor-Taylor characters.
The three others skits, however, completely lacerated their legends. In second place was the Phi Kappa Psi-Delta Delta Delta skit, "Alewdwin and His Magic Pot." An Arabion version of "How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying," the skit ruined outstanding sets, costumes, and dancing with some very crude jokes.
The Kappa Sigma-Delta Gamma skit portrayed a modern-day Faust who sells his soul to become Playboy's Hugh Hefner. The ensuing angel-devil struggle for Faust ends appropriately with the whole Playboy Club going to Hell.
STUDENT BODY president Robin Hood and alumni president Sheriff of Nottingham cavorted at Sherwood University in the Alpha Tau Omega-Chi Omega production. Amateurish choreography, costumes, and acting put this first skit last.
In between acts was a painfully poor serial slamming faith healers and Campus Crusade. Listening to the audience titter and watching the blue velvet curtain would have been more entertaining.
—Margaret Hughes
A New Hero
Cassius Clay's big moment in life must have come after the Liston fight when he had the sports writers crammed into his dressing room.
The writers had not given Clay a chance to go more than six rounds against Liston.
So Cassius babbled in his high-pitched voice like a high school mugger after bloodying the nose of a stuck-up classmate.
At one point he tried to lead the sports writers in a cheer for Cassius Clay. "Who's the greatest?! Who's the greatest?!!" he chanted, trying to cow the reporters into answering: "Cassius, Cassius."
Thanks for small favors, the reporters didn't answer. In the radio broadcast of the press conference, one writer was heard to snap disgustedly: "What the hell is going on here?"
Wittingly or unwittingly, the reporter had summed up the feelings of a lot of boxing fans.
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A sport that was once followed avidly by Americans has become almost unrecognizable.
A string of undistinguished, non-fighting champions has made boxing a minor sport.
Not only does it look dirty—which it probably always has been—but it is downright uninteresting, despite Clay's poetry (his showmanship is on the level of Gorgeous George, Fra Farmer Brown, and Ivan the Terrible).
When I get old enough to use the phrase "When I was a kid," I'll sit down with someone and say, When I was a kid, there were dramatic fights and great champions.
I'll recall the night Joe Louis was forced to try a comeback against Ezzard Charles because of money trouble. The Bomber got beat bad, but he gave a real thrill to a kid and his brother in Kansas who huddled by a radio that night.
I'll not forget Joe Wolcott briefly holding the crown for which he had struggled so long, and the great Marciano who finally retired because he could find no one else to beat.
Archie Moore will be remembered as a legend in his own time, and Sugar Ray Robinson as incomparably classy.
Rocky Graziano will get mention for his fights and the biographical movie "Someone Up There Likes Me," which caught the fancy of American youth.
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The monologue will end in the mid-fifties, for after that came a crew of incomparably inspired fighters—Floyd Patterson, Pete Rademacher (an amateur who challenged for the heavyweight crown), Ingemar Johanssen (whose biggest victories came with the ladies), and, of course, Clay and Liston.
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Clay's victory is especially discouraging, because Liston had previously appeared to be an outstanding boxer and a legitimate champion.
Clay talked his way into the fight. The fact that he won made it, in a way, all the more absurd.
The sports writer who blurted, "What the hell is going on here?" stands as the real hero of the affair.
Tom Coffman
Reds and 'Fellow Travelers': Food for Congressman Nixon
Bv Mike Miller
When Richard Nixon was discharged from the Navy in 1946, the congressman from California's 12th district was Jerry Voorhis, a democrat whom the Republicans had been trying to unseat for a decade.
(Second of a three-part series.)
While in his youth, Voorhis had been registered as a socialist. He was a political evangelist and idealist who drifted into politics in the wake of Upton Sinclair's "End Poverty in California" movement.
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENTS called him "the best Congressman west of the Mississippi" and California bankers and oilmen called him the worst.
Republican businessmen in the area formed a Committee of One Hundred to find a candidate who might be able to beat Voorhis. One of the names which came up was Richard Nixon. Nixon was contacted and asked two questions: Was he a Republican and was he available?
Nixon replied, "I guess I'm a Republican, I voted for Dewey in 1944." to the first question.
When he was interviewed by the committee, he said he recognized two schools of thought about the nature of the American system:
"YES, I'M very much available," was his reply to the latter question.
"One advocated by the New Deal is government control in regulating our lives. The other called for individual freedoms and all that initiative can produce. I hold with the latter viewpoint. I will be prepared to put on an aggressive campaign on a platform of progressive liberalism designed to return this district to the Republican party."
TEN YEARS later, then Vice-President Nixon said, "Communism was not the issue at any time in the '46 campaign."
A look at the campaign of 1946 cast doubt on this statement. Nixon and his associates referred to the "PAC (Political Action Committee) candidate and his Communist friends," although PAC did not endorse Voorhis.
One of the leaflets said, "A vote for Nixon is a vote against socialization of free American institutions, against the Political Action Committee, its Communist principles and its gigantic slush fund. Basically, the issue to be settled in this election is conflict between political philosophies. The present Congressman from this district has consistently supported the socialization of free American institutions."
Voorhis' most important piece of legislation in Congress was an anti-Communist bill which required any organization controlled by a foreign government to register with the Department of Justice.
NIXON, WHO HAD won acclaim as a high school debater, challenged Voorhis to a debate. Unlike in another debate which Nixon undertook 14 years later, he was the clear victor in the five-nart debate.
His attacks upon Voorhis put the Democrats on the defensive throughout most of the time.
1950, Nixon ran for the Senate against Mrs. He leen Gahagan Douglas, a liberal New Dealer who was openly hostile on the tidelands and other oil issues close to wealthy Californians.
Nixon was elected to the House by a landslide. He was re-elected in 1948.
His campaign managers told him he had to appeal to Democrats to help him win. So he didn't attack the Democratic party, but referred to the opposition as a supporter of the socialistic program running on the Democratic ticket."
wing congressman. Vito Marcantonio of New York. Mrs. Douglas voted 353 times like Marcantonio
THE RIGHT-WING Nixon campaign was given fodder when Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin launched his shrill crusade against "Communists in government." The outbreak of the Korean War also helped Nixon's campaign when he used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably.
He attacked Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the State Department for appeasing communism.
MRS. DOUGLAS was described by the Communists as "a capitalistic war-monger." She earned distinction in the House Foreign Affairs Committee for her active support of anti-Communist measures.
Nixon linked Mrs. Douglas' voting record with that of ultra-left-
Much of the correlation between Mrs. Douglas' voting record and that of Marcantonio was due to the fact that both voted as Democrats most of the time although Marcantonio was not elected as a Democrat.
After a bitterly fought campaign, Nixon defeated Mrs. Douglas by a substantial margin.
Mrs. Douglas described Nixon as "a flaming reactionary beside whom Bob Taft is a flaming liberal."
In his six years in Congress, Nixon compiled a record generally conservative on domestic issues and internationalist in foreign affairs.
AS A FRESHMAN legislator, he became a member of the powerful House Education and Labor Committee and the Committee on Un-American Activities.
It was in the latter committee where he became most widely known. Politically, the climax of Nixon's career in the House was the Alger Hiss affair. He was credited with a major role in the committee's investigation of Hiss which led to Hiss' conviction for perjury in 1950.
He supported the Taft-Hartley labor act in 1947, a conservative piece of legislation.
He was the co-author of the Mundt-Nixon bill of 1948, which dealt with the control of Communists. The bill called for the registration of Communists, identification of the sources of all printed and broadcast material issued by Communist front organizations; denied passports to Communist party members; denied federal employment to members of Communist front organizations; brought deportation proceedings against aliens convicted of Communist activity; increased the penalty for peace-time espionage to a $10,000 fine and a maximum of 10 years in prison and created a subversive activities control board which upon application by the attorney general would determine whether an organization was a Communist front group or a Communist action group.
WHILE IN the House, he was appointed to a committee to study the problem of overseas relief and
rehabilitation and went on a factfinding tour with the committee in 1947.
"He described himself as a chancetaker in foreign affairs. "I would take chances for peace and become more internationalistic," he said.
In the 19 months he was in the Senate, Nixon struck out aggressively on behalf of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's Korean strategy of settling for nothing less than unconditional surrender. He proposed a resolution that Truman reinstate MacArthur after the President had removed him from command in 1950.
Nixon also led an unsuccessful drive to block public housing, demanded the resignations of the chairmen of both political parties and thus identified himself as a foe of corruption in government, and joined the Congressional majority which overrode President Truman's veto of the McCarran-Walter immigration and nationality act of 1952.
In reference to the removal of MacArthur, Nixon said, "The only possible explanation of the President's action is that he felt it was necessary to get rid of MacArthur so that Acheson would be free to make a deal with the Chinese Communists along the lines proposed by the British."
HE CALLED for a new policy in the Far East which included military strength, a strong economy, including price controls, rationing and wage controls, and finally a policy of foreign alliances. He told the Women's National Republican Club in New York that the United Nations should intervene in Korea or face the prospect that the United States would get out.
A CONTEMPORARY assessment of Nixon's contribution in the Senate came from a poll of political scientists conducted by Dr. B. L. Johnson of Denver and Dr. W. E. Butt of Pennsylvania, in the early 1950's.
William S. White, a conservative Washington columnist, described Nixon's record in the Senate as "even more lacking in distinction than his record in the House."
In the poll, legislative specialists in the American Political Science Association rated senators on domestic and foreign attitudes, legislative ability, intellectual ability and personal integrity.
Nixon ranked number 71 out of the 96 Senators. Paul Douglas of Illinois ranked first and Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin came in 96th.
"They Have This Wild Idea That The House Of Representatives Should Be Representative"