Confidential File

Mash Notes and Comments

"Dear Paul,

"Have you taken a close look in the mirror recently?

"Well, we here at the Encino Summer Playhouse have. And do you know what we saw?

"YOU — as an actor!

"Now we are prepared to offer you a deal. We'd like you to take part in our play, 'Laura,' which opens July 24 for two weeks.

"How
would you like to have your name up in lights in front of our theater?
That's a pretty exciting thought, isn't it? Just think of the comment
it would cause among your close circle of friends.

"Your first reaction is probably something like this:

" 'Aw, go on. I'm too busy writing a column and doing a TV program every day.'

"Sure, you're busy! We're all busy!

"But a true artist never thinks of that. All he can think of is the excitement of opening night —

"The
blaring overture…A quick once-over of the script to make sure you
know your lines…The butterflies in your stomach doing the
minute-waltz incha-cha-cha time…The last minute touches to your
makeup…Then, the creak of the curtain going up in all its faded
glory…And there you are — in the flesh — for all the world to see!"
(signed) Bill Dodge,Encino Summer Playhouse, 4935 Balboa Ave., Encino.
    — I'm not going on like that unless the rest of the cast does.

July 5, 1959: Ira Cockrum is arrested in the death of his grandson.

Confidential File

About a Grandpa Who Killed

Michael Gary Cockrum, a stocky little kid with blond hair and desert-brown skin, was buried yesterday.

After
14 years of being alive, he was laid to rest in Lancaster Community
Cemetery. And all the family was there to pay final respects.

All except his Grandpa Ira, who blasted Michael to eternity with his shotgun last Friday.

Grandpa Ira's in jail.

You
probably read in the papers over the week end how deputies picked him
up and booked him for murder of Mike and for injuring Mike's brother,
George Jr., 10, in a family feud over a $12 electric iron.

I read it, too, but somehow, I forgot about it until I got a call yesterday from the dead boy's father. George Cockrum
Sr. phoned me shortly after he, his wife and his three other sons,
Georgie Jr., Charles, 9, and Dennis, 4, had left the cemetery.

"About
my father killing my son that way," the 44-year-old hod carrier told
me, "I'd kind of like to straighten out some of the things that was
said."

The reports in the papers said that Cockrum, who arrived at the scene minutes after the tragedy, was restrained from attacking his father with a baseball bat.

"What
happened," he explained, "was that I did pick up that baseball bat. And
I was walking at my papa. But nobody got in my way.

"By myself, I dropped it.

"I knew, before I reached him, that if I hit him, God would punish me."

Cockrum told me that his father was a big, strong man for his 64 years.

'Pa Had a Bad Temper'

"He
drank and he had a bad temper," he said. "Pa always had a bad temper.
When I was a kid, he used to beat on my mother something awful.

"But he was an awful hard worker, and he paid the bills. My father would be good sometimes. He could be real good, too."

Then George Cockrum talked about his dead son.

"Michael was a good boy. He wasn't a tall boy. He was stocky, but there was no fat on him.

"Strange," Cockrum
recalled, "but my father always did kindly favor Michael. In fact,
Michael had been helping him work on his house until just lately, when
Michael told me he'd rather not go over there no more. Grandpa was
cussing at him too much, he said.

"I told the boy that if he didn't want to, he didn't have to.

"My
papa's been worse lately," the dead boy's father continued. "His father
— my grandpa — died two or three years ago. He grieved over that.
Then, two months ago, my mother died. That hit him. Extra hard, I
guess, 'cause of the way he treated her.

"It got so he wouldn't listen to any of us. He told me just last month, 'Georgie, if you don't watch out, something's going to happen. It's going to happen to one of your loved ones.'

'I Hope He Finds God'

"I said, 'Papa, you're sick. I'm going to take you to a doctor.' Last week I got an appointment for him. For the 10th of this month. I just got it too late."

Cockrom cleared his throat.

"If
anybody was to ask me how I feel about my father, I'd have to say that
I feel sorry for him. I hope and pray that he gets down on his knees
and finds God. I hope God helps him, because I know he's a sick man.

"I love my father. I loved my boy. He thought a lot of that boy, too.

"Tomorrow," George Cockrum
told me, "they'll be bringing him back here to Lancaster for his trial.
I haven't seen him, but I hear he's been asking for cigarettes. I'm
taking him a few, I guess.

"But what I don't know," he added, "I just don't know why he done me this way."

Confidential File

How Secrets Filter From Me to Kozlov

WASHINGTON, July 8 — Allowing Soviet Deputy Premier Kozlov
to visit the University of California's radiation laboratory at
Berkeley has been called "soft-headed nonsense" by Rep. Lipscomb (R-Los
Angeles).

Rep.
Lipscomb makes a good propaganda point in this Washington report, but
as sometimes happens, the story is wrong. Newsmen DID tag along with Koslov.

He raises a point, though, that shouldn't go unanswered.

Should U.S. reporters be trusted with a lot of top-secret information? Or is a little knowledge a dangerous thing?

I'm
not speaking for all of us American newsmen. Just for me. But the way I
look at it, Rep. Lipscomb should keep his nose out of our private
battles with the State Department.

If [Secretary of State Christian A.] Herter's
hired hands want to show our nuclear secrets to the Russians and bar
the door to us reporters, I say they've got their reasons. They
probably figure that if they let us in and deny admission to Kozlov, the Kremlin would find out soon enough, anyway.

Take me, for instance. Suppose I were admitted into the radiation lab at Berkeley as a newsman.

I'd come home that evening and my wife would say, "What happened at the office today?"

"I'm beat," I'd tell her.

"What'd you do?" she would press.

"Nothing."

"Nothing," she'd snort.

She would keep it up a while longer, and finally I'd blurt out: "If you must know, I was at Berkeley inspecting a double meglacyclotron atom smasher with powerglide. But it's top secret."

Early the next morning the dry cleaning man would come by for his weekly pickup. She would hand him my suit.

"He looks a little baggy in the knees this week," the cleaning man would say.

Had to Get on Knees

My wife would nod. "He was out at Berkeley inspecting a top-secret double meglacyclotron atom smasher with powerglide. And I guess he had to get on his knees to get a good look."

The cleaning man would tell it to his cousin Sandra, who plays bass viol with Phil Spitainy's All-Girl Orchestra. And, on a one-nighter
in Sioux City, Sandra would tell a stage-door Johnny who dates her
because he digs bass viol, that her cousin, the cleaning man in L.A.,
has a customer who saw a top-secret double meglacyclotron atom smasher with powerglide.

The
stage-door Johnny, a salesman who travels in ladies cut-rate lingerie,
would casually let it drop to the buyer at John Wanamaker in Philadelphia
, who would put it in an air-mail letter to his aging mother in the
Bronx, whose sister Jennie has an unmarried daughter, Sophie, who rooms
with a girl named Tanya who is a waitress at the Russian Tea Room
opposite Carnegie Hall on 57th Street in New York.

During the
post-lunchtime lull, Tanya would confide to another waitress that her
roommate's mother's sister's son at John Wanamaker knows a salesman who
dates a bass viol player with Phil Spitainy whose cousin, a cleaning man, has a customer who saw a top-secret double meglacyclotron atom smasher with powerglide.

Cloak, Complete With Dagger

She would be overheard by a girl with muscular calves and an almost imperceptible mustache who has a 10-minute glass-of-tea break from rehearsals of the Bolshot ballet next door.

Now, this girl is not really a ballerina. She's a fink for Anastas Mikoyan. And she would promptly send him a coded letter.

A few days later, at the regular 9 a.m. sales conference of the deputy premier in the Kremlin, Anastas would take Kozlev aside and smugly ask: "You just got back. Do you know about their double meglacyclotron atom smasher with powerglide?"