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Show s MU.LAHD COUNTY CMKUN1CLK Delta, Utah. Thur. May 23, 1957. GIVING OUR WORLD THE Once Over s . By Dick Morrison THE MIHACLE OF 1927 The morning of Sunday, May 22, 1927, was clear and beautiful. As had become our habit on such fine Sundays, we got into our car and drove in to Delta from our Sugar-ville Sugar-ville farm. The three of us, that is, mom, dad, and I, for Ralph was then In Hollywood, about to graduate grad-uate from the Fairfax High School. We stopped at Mercer's Drug store and picked up our Sunday paper. The news that morning was sensational sen-sational Late Saturday night editions, edi-tions, and Sunday morning papers everywhere, were playing up one exploit almost to the exclusion of everything else. It was, hy that time ,the one thing everyone was talking about. Lindberg had made it his solo flight from New York to Paris. That was just thirty years ago this week, not a very long time in memory, as it seems in the freshness of recollection, yet a veritable aye when viewed In the light of all that has happened In the world since that day. Lindbergh's first flight Is not for gotten. What is forgotten, or near ly so, It seems, is the world we were living in, in 1927. It was world that included things both good and bad, and let no critic of the roaring twenties tell you that all the changes that have been wrought since then have been for the better. For all the evils of those days, and there were They're ailtmck. . . Chevy's handsome, hard-working pickups ! With hefty steel-muscled truck chassis and high-capacity bodies! With the industry's shortest stroke V8 or the 6 most famous for economyl With the latest in cab comfort de luxe features at no extra costl Most popular half tonner rr.. .. My M J''' "fw ' ' i" ' Jjri""" " """''""''''"' "' ' J""v" ' iih7 raw. y:zzz, '' '' - ' i - 'zzzztzz fe -t . 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Super Permalub saves gasoline up to two gallons in a tankhil. , I i Or," ii Im .mi Tiii For greatest '; .) motoring pleasure : it You expect more from Utoco ,.. ; and you get it 1 witf. Aco ) W 4 (Indeed, evils In existence then as huw, me irum is mat, couia we but be transferred backward in time to live again as we did in the twenties, we would be amazed amaz-ed at the ease, the simplicity of life. Prosperity was general, and widely diffused. Radio was just catching on: roads were beine gravelled; Calvin Coolidge was President :the -war had been won: nine years before, the world was safe for democracy, and the federal fed-eral debt was "being paid off, year by year. None but the very rich were called upon to Day Income taxes; sales taxes had yet to be dreamed up; still In the future were the stock market boom of 1928 and 1929 and the subsequent crash which touched off the de pression. The car in which we drove to town .that morning was only six months old, a model T Ford sedan, se-dan, complete with a starter, bal loon tires, size 29 x 4.40. and droD center wire wheels. Other people then were dnvine Chevrolet's. Buick 4's, Dodges, Stars, and Maxwells. Max-wells. Life was good, endless peace was taken for granted, new wonders of scientific progress were being announced almost daily, in every field medicine, transportation, trans-portation, communication, the world wor-ld was almost too rosy. Perhaps in some measure, the very evils of the twenties grew out of, an3 could be attributed to, the attitudes at-titudes of a people feeling too fiea from care too secure in the assumption as-sumption that endless peace, progress, pro-gress, and prosperity were assured forever. Yes. much that was life in those days is forgotten. But Lindbergh's flight, in his Spirit of Saint Louis Is not forgotten. Strange, how so much of later history the stock market crash, the years of depression, and WPA .and Roosevelt; Roose-velt; the years of World War II, and of Harry Truman, and the Korean War; all seem to have mov ed Into the past, while the flight from New York to Paris, which so captivated the minds of people all over the world, stays fresh in our minds. There was something about the way the news hit. Frederick Lewis Allen described that in his book. "Only Yesterday,' 'in which he retold re-told the story of the twenties while It was still all fresh In mind. He wrote. "No sooner had the word been flashed along the wires that Lindbergh Lind-bergh had started than the whole population of the country became united in the exaltion of a common com-mon emotion. Young and old, rich and poor, farmer and stockholder, fundamentalist and skeptic, highbrow high-brow and lowbrow, all with one accord fastened their hopes upon the young man In the Spirit of Saint Louis. To give a single in stance of the Intensity of their mood: at the Yankee Stadium In New York, where the Maloney-Sharkey Maloney-Sharkey fight was held on the evening ol the 20th, forty-thousand hard-boiled boxing ftns stood with bared heads In impressive silence when the announcer asked them to pray for Lindbergh. The next day came the successive reports re-ports of Lindbergh's success he had reached the Irish coast, he was crossing over England, he was over the Channel, he had landed at Le Bourget to be enthusiastically enthusiastical-ly mobbed by a vast crowd of Frenchmen and the American i for It. At any rate, his re-enact people went almost mad with joy'ment of the New York to Paris and relief. And when the reports of Lindbergh's first few days In Paris showed that he was behaving with charming modesty and courtesy, court-esy, millions of his countrymen took him to their hearts as they had taken no other human 'being in living memory. "Every record for mass excitement excite-ment and mass enthusiasm in the age of ballyhoo was smashed during dur-ing the next few weeks. Nothing seemed to matter, either to the newspapers or the people who read them, but Lindbergh and his story. On the day the flight was completed, the Washington Star sold 16,000 extra copies; the St. Louis Post Dispatch, 40,000; the New York Evening World, 114,000. Lindbergh was commissioned Colonel, and received the Distinguished Distin-guished Flying Cross, the Congressional Congres-sional Medar of Honor, and so many foreign decorations and hon-the hon-the list would be a weary task. He was offered two and a half million dollars for a tour of the world by air, and $700,000 to appear ap-pear In the films; his signature was sold for $1,600; and so on. Pausing to remind us that there was little practical advantage in the flight, that it was little but a daring stunt flight, even though the longest up to that time, Allen went on to ask, "Why, then, this Idolization of Lindbergh?" and he answered: "The explanation is simple. A disillusioned nation fed on cheap heroics and scandal and crime was revolting against the low estimate of human nature which it had' allowed al-lowed itself to entertain. For years the American people had been spiritually starved. Something that people needed w?s misvn? from their lives And all et ence Lnd't?.eh p-ev'dei Pr'p,r,":i, "h'valrv. fp'f-dei.'cation. here thev were embodied in a mcSe'i Ga!hPd for a gene-a'i'.n wh:?h had forsworn Gt'ahnds. Lirdr-nah did not accept the moving-pfcture offers that came his way. he did not sell testimonials, did not get himself involved in scandal Is it anv wonder that the public's receotion of him took on the as pects of a vast religious revival?" Well, the flight made thirty years ago this week did arouse the American people as nothing before or since. It did serve to dramatize the progress of power flight, which is now in its 54th year, and the people have never, really, gotten over it. The romance remains, and now, In 1957, it is being brought to life again in one of the best motion pictures of the year. The movie, The Spirit Of Saint Louis, brings it all back, as if it had taken place only yesterday. In Salt Lake recently, I made it a point to see it, and I can tell you, if there's an ounce of flying blood In your veins, and especially if you are somewhere near the same age as the Wright Bros, first air plane, you'll love it. James Ste wart, in the role of Lindbergh, does a fine job of acting. In fact, Stewart Ste-wart deserves to be rated very near the top among our movie actors, not only for this role, but for many. It isn't that he has the CWrrhi to avrallnnt The movie Is as faithful to the story told in Lindbergh's own book of the same name as a movie can reasonably be. Changes are chiefly chief-ly in emphasis In the Interest of pictorial necessity; the flight across the Atlantic provides the big scene. The Ryan monoplane, which was re-created with fine accuracy fqr the movie shots, is not so different from the little planes that have been flown locally local-ly but that a lot of Delta people who have done some private flying will be able to "identify" themselves them-selves with the pilot. They'll find themselves trying to lift themselves them-selves out of their seats when it seems as if the heavily fueled plane may not be able to get off the muddy runway at Curtiss Field, in the murky morning air, and they'll know the feeling of sustained sustain-ed suspense through the duration of the flight. They'll know the fear of the- last moments when the pilot finds he must make a blind landing at night on a field he has never seen before. The movie version has the pilot crying out, "God help me", just before the landing at Le Bourget. Try as I would, I couldn't find these words in the book, and I feel that a movie producer has no business inserting such words on his own volition. Since the movie was made with Lindbergh's cooperation, cooper-ation, he may have OK'd them. He was not of an irreverent nature. His earlier book, Of Flight And Life, held unmistakable spiritual and religious overtones. So we can perhaps let them stand. One thing both book and movie make clear. The success of the flight rested on both good manage ment, and good luck. Lindbergh showed rare qualities of judgment in many decisions pertaining to the design and equipment of his airplane, the construction of which he personally supervised at the Ryan works in San Diego. Yet even with the best of management, a little bad luck could have wrecked wreck-ed the project. And one element of what appears ap-pears very poor management was in his failing to take all precautions precaut-ions necessary to assure a good night's sleep the night before starting. Actually, he got only a few moments fitful sleep that night, so he was without sleep more than sixty hours by the time he landed In Paris. The thirty-three hours of the flight should have been tough enough to make without with-out sleep, let alone nearly twice that much. However, it is a matter of Jiistory that the landing in Paris was made successfully, and what happened after that proved the flight the greatest peacetime personal per-sonal adventure of the century. So, with that we'll close these reminiscences pertaining to that flight of May 20 and 21, 1957. The intervening thirty years, since the day we drove the new model T to town and read the news of it in the Sunday paper, have, indeed, passed pass-ed so very swiftly. Freeing Of The Waters Heavy rains over the weekend, with threatening skies Monday ures. He hasn't. Fact is, he's rather ng; Eve" tfV'mS 1 homely. And the lack of any stereo f0Uth' does" 1 that typed handsomeness is to his ad- know enough s enough? vantage. He Beems the better actor Continued on next page Old Fashioned STRAIGHT WHISKY I j y Every drop " MfcT ' t 1 "' iy?-' " 1 -A in t -f' UTAH Oil REFINING COMPANY Treat yourself to something "DE LUXE" IE1H0SE DELUXE STRAIGHT VHISKY. 86 PROOF. 7 YEARS OLD. MELROSE DISTILLERS CO, K Y. |