The Press: Slow Boat to China

Scripps-Howard’s wisecracking, globetrotting Fred Sparks, 42, was lolling on a New Jersey beach when his office put through an urgent call: get to Hong Kong and be ready to enter Red China. Sparks normally wears a toupee over thinning hair, but he had just shaved his scalp for a cool vacation, and the toupee had nothing to cling to. So Fire-Horse Sparks rushed off without it, had a hair-curling time persuading Hong Kong immigration officials that he was really the fur-bearing man pictured on his passport. Snorted Sparks last week: “I don’t see now why I was in such a hurry.” Indeed, it looked as if Sparks’s hair would have plenty of time to grow back before he and a dozen other newsmen, comfortably beached in Hong Kong, would actually get into China.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette suggested that the waiting correspondents could well sing the new ditty, I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles. Cabled the Chicago Daily News’s Keyes Beech from Hong Kong: “In the opinion of the correspondents, the Dulles statement authorizing them to travel to China (TIME, Sept. 2) was deliberately and provocatively contrived to leave the Reds no choice but to refuse.” At his regular news conference, Secretary of State Dulles said that the U.S. would “consider on its merits” any application by a Chinese newsman to enter the U.S. To some, this seemed that he was backtracking from the position that no reciprocal visas would be granted to Communist Chinese journalists. But at week’s end Dulles’ words had produced no change in the situation.

To his 19 papers, Newsman Fred Sparks cabled an open letter to Dictator Mao Tse-tung, plaintively seeking entry: “I am a worker, not a capitalist . . . I am in trouble because of my expense account . . . If I go back home now without completing my assignment to cover Inside Communist China, the treasurer, a real wicked capitalist, will always associate me with a terrible, useless cost.”