The Living Room Front

In Gushing, Okla. (pop. 8,396) one evening last week, Clarence Jones and his wife dropped in to see their married daughter, Mrs. Joe L. Davis. Everybody was interested in the new television set the Davises had bought five days earlier.

At 10:15 p.m. Tulsa's station KOTV telecast a ten-minute program called Telenews-Daily, which the station had bought from Telenews Productions, Inc. of New York City. The Joneses sat up expectantly when they heard the announcer say: "Two wounded men from Oklahoma." They moved closer to the TV set and watched the camera pan to a close-up shot of a wounded U.S. soldier sitting on a stretcher. Mr. & Mrs. Jones stared incredulously. The soldier on the stretcher was their son, Sergeant 1st class Lowell Jones, 29, a World War II veteran who went to Japan last January.

It was probably the first time that war had moved so close into the U.S. living room.. Mr. & Mrs. Jones said they saw their son's face, noted that he was wearing his square ring set with a black stone. They watched as he was raised on the stretcher to take a piece of food or chocolate somebody offered him. He was wearing a T-shirt, they reported, and was not wounded above the waist, as far as they could tell, but he was covered from the waist down by a blanket.

Officials at KOTV said that they knew nothing about the film's origin. Telenews officials in New York explained that the film was made by piecing together shots taken in Korea and Japan by cameramen accredited to General MacArthur.

At week's end the Defense Department had not officially notified the Jones family that Lowell had been wounded. The shot of Lowell on TV raised the question of whether TV and newsreel companies ought to take pictures of wounded U.S. fighters before the men's families are given official notification. To any family, official notification of a casualty is grim business, but accidental notification can be grimmer still.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.