Scorecard

A QUESTION OF PRIVACY

A few weeks ago the Chicago Park District canceled the lease of the Burnham Park Yacht Club, one of seven yacht clubs in the Chicago area which operate on Park District property without paying rent, for refusing to admit two Negroes to membership. After cancellation of the lease the club reversed itself and the board voted unanimously to accept Theodore A. Jones, general manager of the Supreme Life Insurance Company, and Dr. William Walker, thereby all but insuring that the Park District will renew the lease the next time it meets. But that, alas, is not the happy ending to the story.

The Lake Michigan Yachting Association now is expected to take action against the Burnham Park Club. It cannot oust the club without a unanimous vote of the membership. It is assumed that the association will change its bylaws and then oust Burnham. Ouster would mean that Burnham Park members could not check into any club harbor belonging to LMYA, enter races on the lake or enjoy any other of the reciprocal privileges of the participating clubs.

"It would really be a simple matter for expulsion," said H. F. MacNeil, chairman of the LMYA membership committee. "Any recognized yacht club can become a member of our organization but it must be a voluntary association of persons. Why, this decision means that you can't even hold a Sunday school picnic without inviting people of other faiths. This violates the personal liberties of anyone who has a boat."

It doesn't, really. The clubs are not so private as they pretend. They get their fun from rent-free, tax-supported property, to whose support Chicago's 850,000 Negroes contribute.

FOGGY DAY IN FRISCO TOWN

The weather hasn't been exactly sporting in San Francisco this year. In January the Bing Crosby golf tournament was snowed out. The winds whistled as usual through Candlestick Park throughout the baseball season and in July the mean temperature (51°) was the lowest for the month in 41 years. The floods that delayed the World Series were October's worst in 51 years. Last week race fans at Golden Gate Fields were betting on races they could not see. Dense fog shrouded the track for the first five races and in four of these only the finish line was visible. The race caller had to wait for a telephone call from the starting gate to announce "They're off!"

None of this sounds like the sort of thing that would happen in San Francisco. Maybe it didn't; maybe it all happened in that other town that San Franciscans hate—the one called Frisco.