Coulee City dispatch. [volume] (Coulee City, Wash.) 19??-19??, 1937-05-13

WHO'S NEWS
THIS WEEK..
By lemuel f. Parton

Spanish Onion Peddler's Epic
Story Is Recounted

NEW YORK.-As an timer
~ ant onion peddler, Juan
March used to. tie up his daily
earnings in his shirt-tail. He
pretty nearly had Spain that
way, too, at the start of his war
against the republic, which he
bankrolls and more or less per-
sonally conducts from Rome,
where, according to today's dis
patches, he is now in residence.
Foreign correspondents put the
finger on Mr.. March as the
main financial spark plug of the
war, both in it's origin and con-
tinuance.
Blasco 1banez is pretty tame
reading after even q cursory look
at Senior March's career He is a
financial genius, nj of the richest
men in the world, who never saw
the inside of a schoolhouse-that is,
as a pupil. At. the age Of forty, he
had a string of twelve banks, steam
ship lines, newspapers, beautiful
estates and Hispana cars, and he
couldn't read or write a word-al-
ways signing his lame with a big
x.
Born in the Island Of M~ajorca, Of
desperately poor parents, he was a
sack carrier in a corr merchants
shop, and then an itinerant peddler.
His parents were members of an
obscure Jewish sect known as "Chu-
etas." He went to Africa, as a la
bOrer, and became a grower of to-
baccO.
In the years that followed, Juan
March was trailed, jailed, bounded
and prosecuted by national and in
ternational police around the Medi-
terranean as a smuggler.
His biographers say that, if the
international struggle for control of
the Mediterranean should eventual
ly require a more detailed knowl-
edge Of coves and inlets than Italian
naval maps now supply, Senior
March al supply it. He has per-
sonally explored them in the dark
of the moon, say current news ac-
counts, and could smell his way in
to any of them blindfolded.
The money rolled in. In the post
war years, Senior March was back
in Spain, investing many millions
in vast areas Of land which made
him one of Spain's most imposing
grandces, travelling with an entour-
age of generals and f1unkies in His
pana limousines. His was the build
up of Primo de Rivera as dictator.
Quite a few years before the over
throw of Alfonso, the drive for the
breakup Of big land holdings was
gaining momentum, and Senior
March, combating it, became the
most powerful and resourceful con-
tender for fascism in Spain.
The republic jailed him for eight
e months. Details of his release
r obscure, but, when the jail doors
swung outward, the real troubles oil
the republic began. According to
dispatches of last August and Sep.
TENDER, Senior March's bank in
Palma, on Majorca, was the fnan-
cial handspring of revolution, and
Palma was the entrepot not only
of planes, cannon and munitions but
of the African Riffs, being landed
on a coast which he knew from
Gibraltar to Istanbul.
A lot of blood has flowed under
the bridge since he peddled onions,
but, at ~fifty-seven, there probably
isn't an onion or a cannon peddled
around the Mediterranean that he
doesn't know about.
LOw-Down on Kipling.
FREDERIC F. VAN DE WATER,
! a good reporter who became ar
author, snapped into the old-time
routine when he saw that Kipling
story lying around loose in Vermont.
His published account of why Kip.
ling left America, after his thunder.
AllS AOW Will LID VI .1ll-1dWj
looks like the Freudian key to the
poets ~impassioned dislike for this
country.
That passage in his memoirs
about the hallowed peace of Can.
ada and the hell-hole just over ar
invisible line seems to require some
such explanation. His rancor, ir
this connection, always has suggest.
ed some most unhappy experience
here. Mr.. Van De Water fills us
in, and the story is still good after
forty years. One can be more char.
table toward Kipling, after learn.
ing Of his troubles with the report.
Mi. Van De Water is a good
choice to cover the literary beat,
He is a grandson Of Marion Har.
land, the novelist, who was Mary
Virginia Halves Terhune. Her chill.