Feb. 14, 1958

Samuel K. Terry of Ocean Park has been a shortwave radio addict for many years.

During
World War II, he used to listen to Tokyo Rose lying about how many
American ships the Japanese navy sank each day. He had three sons in
the service.

He has continued to derive great pleasure bringing
in "distance" on his seven-band Zenith. He gets the Voice of Spain from
Madrid, Moscow, BBC from Melbourne, Big Ben in London giving Greenwich
meridian time, news from Montreal and police calls from Houston, Tulsa
and Cincinnati.

He was listening to a Chinese opera about a week
ago when a loud droning noise assailed his ears. It lasted about three
minutes and repeated in an hour and 20 minutes.

HE ATTRIBUTED it to the Geiger counter in the U.S. satellite Explorer and deplored what he considered the end of peaceful radio listening.

Sam,
old boy, apparently you were felled by the long arm of coincidence.
Other air eavesdroppers say it isn’t so. The signals from the Explorer
are so weak onlysuper-sensitive receivers can hear them.

Best guess of experienced shortwavers is that Sam caught some of the disturbance caused by the recent aurora borealis
or has local interference such as a faulty power transformer or that it
was just the Russians, as usual, jamming the Voice of America.

Sam, let’s be nice to the Explorer, it’s the only one we have.

JOHN BEEKMAN, former Daily News horse picker, is now public relations director for the Los Alamitos racetrack and general manager of a couple of subsidiary enterprises, a nine-hole golf course and a restaurant.

The
opening of the restaurant was set for a recent Saturday. Shortly before
post time, John was certain he had thought of everything–from spoons
to salad dressing.

Then Friday at 11 p.m., his boss, Frank
Vessels, asked if he’d fueled the cash registers with money. He hadn’t.
As a newspaperman, he was so accustomed to getting along withou money
he’d forgotten about it.

So the place opened the next morning
bankrolled only with the $8 John had in his pocket and what he could
scrounge from the help. However, by assigning a messenger to run back
and forth to nearby merchants and the post office he muddled through.

WITH THE USUAL journalistic irreverences, John V. Horner was recently inaugurated as president of the National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

To solemnize the occasion, a special four-page edition of Horner’s paper, the Star, was printed with the inevitable cartoon of Jack Horner thumbing a plum out of his Christmas pie. It reported that John Daly
was emcee, that Richard Nixon administered the oath of office and that
Gina Lollobrigida, who was there, measures up well to the acclaim which
has been heaped upon her."

The edition also had congratulatory letters from Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

Ike’s
message, on White House stationery, stated in part, "While I am
confident that your administration will be highly successful, I feel I
must warn you that as president you undoubtedly will be faced … with
a few problems. Your constituency will want to know, among other
things, will the Press Club’s budget be precariously in balance? Will
you have to resort to increased taxes? If so, why? … Do you expect to
hold ‘summit’ meetings with your counterparts in Paris, London, Moscow?
If so, where? These are some of the easier questions. There are more,
much more difficult. For example, would you turn in your suit if you
contact Asian flu? … My best of luck to you."

SIGN ON A Volkswagen in Beverly Hills: "Made in Africa by Aunts (mine)."