A daily look at some of The News & Observer headlines on this date in past years.
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In 1951, Raleigh City Manager H.W. Carper announced that he and Director of Public Utilities E.M. Johnson had decided to look into the advisability of adding fluoride to the city’s water supply.
The State Board of Health had recommended the chemicals as a means of preventing tooth decay. Dr. Earnest A. Branch told the City Council that fluorides were harmless, odorless and tasteless. “All I’m interested in is preventing this,” he said as he placed an “exact replica” of a child’s teeth on the council table. The teeth, The N&O reported, were yellow and pitted with cavities.
The council told Carper and Johnson to meet with the board of health and return with a recommendation.
Even though Robert Kennedy Jr. was not yet U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, fluoride became a national controversy, with some conspiracy theorists positing that it was a communist plot. The fluoride scare provided inspiration for parody in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove.” Spoiler alert: Gen. Jack Ripper, played by George C. Scott, starts a nuclear war to stop a communist plot to “sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” with fluoridated water as the agent of our destruction.
The City Council voted 10-2 to impose “the most significant limit on development in the city’s history” after about 50 people spoke in favor of a six-month halt to new construction permits.
“They spoke of a sky turned red from light pollution,” The N&O reported, “of a freeway turned into a parking lot at rush hour, of an increase in days when air quality hit dangerous levels.”
The vote set aside a swath of land 2 miles wide and 8 miles long from Research Triangle Park to the Orange County line that became off limits to any development that would add more than 150 cars to the roads at rush hour.
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Some might say they should have set aside more land for a longer time.
It was a small story, but it was still front-page news when the North Carolina State Highway Patrol added its first-ever Black trooper. Charles Harrell Johnson, 23, of Durham, was one of 11 new troopers sworn in for admission to the patrol school in Chapel Hill.
For those of you who thought partisan shenanigans had no place in history, a headline on the front page of The N&O 100 years ago today alerted readers that “North Carolina Republicans Avoid All Mention of Party.”
“The name of the Republican Party has been eliminated entirely in literature which is being sent out in an effort to secure audiences for Johnson L. Hayes, Republican nominee for the United States Senate,” The N&O revealed.
Hayes was not only the candidate but also the head of the state party and a member of the Republican National Committee.
Why would a Republican hide his label in North Carolina? At the time, NC was solid blue having never forgiven Republican President Abraham Lincoln.
Hayes lost the election to Democratic incumbent Sen. Lee Slater Overman, who was reelected to a fifth term.
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