EDITORIAL poor Joe Doakes [J The Nixon administration has again made it clear that its allegiance lies with big business and the rich. A congressional tax reform bill which would have permitted middle-income individuals to deduct 15 percent instead of the present 10 percent has been challenged by Mr. Nixon's Treasury Secretary David Kennedy. Appearing before the Senate Fi- nance Committee, Mr. Kennedy has asked that the deduction not be granted on grounds that it would give those taxpayers a ‘‘double benefit.” He asked that the average taxpayer’s deduction be raised two percent. At the same Senate hearing, he urged that corporate income tax rates be reduced two percent- age points or held at the current 52.8 percent. ~ It is no longer much of a secret that giant Amer- ican oil corporations, like many of the nation’s mil- lionaires, pay little or no income taxes whatsoever. In the United States today less than two percent of the population controls with an iron hand more than half of the nation’s wealth. With this in mind, the Nixon administration is now attempting to water down the fairly tough congressional treatment of tax loopholes. Among the other breaks, Mr. Kennedy would like to levy a paltry two percent tax on investment incomes for the benefit of those who pay little or no taxes. He suggested the same for tax exempt foun- dations, usually the property of the super-rich. The House asked for a seven and a half percent levy. Additionally, the administration has asked that House restrictions on the deductability of certain donations be dropped. Because only the rich can af- ford these donations, they are the principal bene- ficiaries of still further tax deductions. Secretary Kennedy explained to the Senate Finance Committee that the Nixon administration felt the tax reform bill as proposed by Congress was against ‘‘investment and in favor of consumption.” Financial jargon aside, he was indirectly inform- ing the Senate that investment meant the rich, and consumption meant just plain Joe Doakes. This ‘thinking closely follows the Nixon gamble that he can curb inflation by curtailing Joe Doakes’ spend- ing power with higher interest rates that Joe must pay when he buys a house, car, or appliance. The only certainty here is that old Joe keeps getting squeezed thinner while the large corporations, fi- nancial institutions and the rich keep growing fatter. “We (the administration) simply do not know enough about the future to commit ourselves’ to any larger tax cuts, Mr. Kennedy told the committee. Yet it is obvious that enough is known about power politics not to fool around with the giants of industry and finance. Secretary Kennedy did, however, make one ‘concession when lie accepted the House decision to cut the oil industry’s depletion allowance from 274 percent to 20 percent, despite President Nixon's ‘pledge to oil interests during his campaign to the contrary. It is likely that Mr. Nixon, a shrewd poli- tician indeed, realizes that of all the tax breaks which anger a more informed public, the giant tax break granted the oil companies and mineral inter- ests is the most outrageous. By eliminating this gaping loophole, the Nixon administration can claim credit for a meaningful tax reform, gain a number of “little” voters, and keep big business interests placated. The ‘“‘average’’ American taxpayer (the other 98 percent) however, might just as well resign him- self to at least another three years of the poor get- ting poorer and the rich getting richer. "= DarrasPost A non-partisan, liberal, and progressive newspaper published every Thursday morn. ing by Northeastern Newspapers Inc. from 41 Lehman Ave., Dallas, Pa. 18612. . Entered as second class matter at the post office at Dallas, Pa., under the Act of + March 3, 1869. Subscription within county, $5 a year. Out-of-county subscriptions, $5.50 a year. Call 674-7676 for subscriptions. The officers of Northeastern Newspapers Inc. are Henry H. Null 4th, president and publisher; John L. Allen, vice president, advertising; J. R. Freeman, vice presi- dent, news. : Editor, Mrs. T. M. B. Hicks; assistant editor, Doris R. Mallin; editor of the editoria page, Shawn Murphy; advertising manager, Annabell Selingo. FORTY YEARS AGO Front page box said all sub- scriptions more than a year in arrears would be cancelled. Heavy rains relieved the water shortage, replenishing wells which had started to go dry, just in time to save Dallas Water Company from an ugly situation. Maples on the Upper Road suffered from wholesale scar- ring. Eleven times in 1929 cars hit the trees. Mr. Murray con- cluded it was a hopeless propo- sition, let his mailbox lie in his front yard. A lone slot machine at Har- veys Lake incurred the wrath of Chief Ruth who said he wasn’t about to have such devices in operation in either Lake or Lehman Township. Lehman and Franklin Streets were in the works for. better paving, resurfacing had been done on Norton and Spring Streets. You could get a wool double blanket, large block plaid, for $7.95. Know what a double blanket is? Whole page of news from area high schools, Dallas Township, Dallas Borough, Lake Township, and Lehman. Automobiles had wide run- ning boards, an invitation to sit and discuss the state of the nation. Himmler Theatrewasshowing Abie’s Irish Rose. THIRTY YEARS AGO Scattered showers afford farmers some relief from the second long drought. With war engulfing Europe, enlistments were sought in the 109th Field Artillery. Bermuda was bare of tour- ists, war industry boomed. Mod- ified blackout and censorship were in force. Dr. Henry M. Laing Fire Department was trying to sell residents of Dallas Township on better support for the fire com- pany. Kingston Township’s new WPA-constructed $60,000 grade school was dedicated. Radio-telephone . was the latest idea in battling forest fires in the Back Mountain. Fire tower on Chestnut Ridge in- stalled apparatus, part of a network of warning signals. Grover Jones, Dallas, was the new towerman. Old Goss School deemed out- moded, Dallas Township sought to float a bond issue for con- continued on PAGE 3 ea BE Cem 4 LA ea eendie Te wins 4 THE DALLAS POST, SEPT. 25,1969 CHUM-FM: survival of best by GENE and MIRIAM GOFFIN We are not sure that a radio station like CHUM-FM could survive in the United States. This Toronto station plays acid rock, blues, jazz, pop, clas- sics and experimental. The ac- cent is on the music that today’s popular discs are derived from before they become commer- cially acute. You could hardly call CHUM- FM’s music commercial, yet it’s a commercial station and apparently makes money. The announcers (disc jockey or deejay doesn’t seem appro- priate) say what they think ; the ones we met weren't ‘phonies, yet the station survives. The stations in this country which we know of closest to it are the Pacifica Foundation stations. They are always in trouble with local righteousness committees, barely survive on listener contributions, and are pretty drab to listen to. They emphasize a lot of educational radio programs that bore rather ‘than teach. But here is a Toronto station in a field with competition so tight most stations are afraid of offending anyone. And they have sponsors along with 150,000 listeners. We met two of the announc- cers—both in their 20’s, intelli- gent and honest—the latter two off the cuff stuff by BRUCE HOPKINS THE AGE OF PSYCHEDELIC HIPPOPOTAMI When I got home from school the note was still on my door with no response. And I quote, ‘““To anyone interested in sharing this apartment: please leave your name, ad- dress and phone number so that I might get in touch with you.”’ I was beginning to panic. In two more weeks the next rent would be due. In one week I had a car payment due. In two weeks I had an insurance payment due. In the refrigera- tor I had seven eggs and two shrimp egg rolls. Plus a jar of mayonaise. Before the next rent I had one check coming. If I used that to pay the rent, I would end up with a minus twenty dollars to pay for the rest of the bills. I believe the correct term here is inflation... . And still no response con- cerning my never-ending quest for roommates. Everyone was out scouting around. I had seven girls working on the pro- ject. They were student teach- ers from Bloom, and they were telling all the other male stu- dent teachers about my pre-- dicament. So I reworded my door sign. I threw in a couple:of : underlined pleases, and the next day I began the note with; ‘Picture me writing this on my knees . . ."” w» I had made a definite de- cision. If I got no results over the weekend, I would have to ask the landlord how vio- lently he would react to my breaking the lease. My faithful parents came down for the weekend, and my mother and aunt, who lives nearby, came over and helped me scrub rugs, wax floors and clean the oven. Study in black and white of World's End State Park near Eaglesmere. And all the time this little voice kept saying, ‘‘Bruce, if you move out of this place after we've cleaned it, we're going to come back and spread dirt around again.” The little: voice was my mother’s. I had to agree. It would be dis- couraging. Saturday came and went. No roommates. Sunday came, and my parents went. Still no roommates. Okay, I'd de- ‘“Tommorrow I talk to the land- lord.” As I was crawling into bed, there was a knock at the door. It was my roommate. In fact, it was both of my roommates. We talked about rent and so forth, and I asked them when they wanted to move in. They wanted to move in then. At midnight. And they did. In fact they moved in until 2 a.m. Monday morning. As I was about to go to bed, it sud- denly occurred to me that we had to have a bathroom sched- ule. As they were both student teachers, we’d all be getting up at about the same time. It was easy. Daws had a half hour drive to school so he was up first and in the bathroom. Jack had a five minute drive so he was last in the head. I was the middle man. Sounded great, right? Except the half hour drive overslept half an hour and screwed up the whole schedule. A day or two later we were all settled. I stopped up at the seven-gir} apartment to tell them about my riew boarders. The first thing I saw when I walked into their apartment was this huge hippopotamus on the floor. Yeah, no kidding. There was this huge hippopota- mus right in the middle of the floor. Well, not a real hippo, but a picture. See, one of the girls teaches elementary kids, and the next day she was going to tell a story about a hippo who was sad because he was gray, and he wanted to be psyche- delic. So his little friend painted him all sorts of colors and he yelled, « “Hip hip, hooray!” See, they were first graders. It made me feel kind of glad that I was teaching high school, you know? Anyway, in addition to see- ing a psychedelic hippopota- mus, I picked up another room- .mate. I mean it’s either feast or famine. Oh, in case you're worrying or anything, the extra roommie is not one of the seven girls. No, it was another guy who happened to be visiting at the hippopotamus’s apartment, and whom I graduated with from Bloom. My roommates are rather unusual. For example, the other night Jack pulled a package out of the refrigera- tor and asked me what those things in the package were. They just happened to be the shrimp egg rolls that I really wasn’t too passionate about. But Jack said he really liked them. He had had one earlier. “Did you cook it?’’ I asked. “No,” he said, “was 1 supposed too?’’ It’s not 'so bad that he didn’t cook it, but then he had to add, ‘“You know, I . thought it was an apple tart.” It was then that I decided the time had come to go to bed. Right to Write Policy A number of excellent letters have been received on the sub- ject of bus transportation of Dallas school system students. The Dallas Post would like to print them, but the letters are unsigned. “Concerned parent,’ or ‘‘Out- raged citizen,” or an array of initials is not enough. If a com- munication represents a per- son’s honest opinion, he should stand behind that opinion. He will usually find he has plenty of company. attributes not usually found in radio station announcers. Rainer (pronounced and often misspelled Reiner) Schwarz was born in Germany and ‘brought to Canada by his par- ents 12 years ago. Somehow he never applied for citizenship, but he is Canadian all but officially. To him, Can- ada is a ‘‘home.”’ It is also more than that: “I think I would be up here if I were an American,” he said, even though he maintains the treatment of hippie-types in Canada is about the same as in the United States. He would know. With nearly shoulder length hair, a beard and mustache, and sandals, Rainer fits into that category. The night before he had met some people and they talked for 18 hours— until he had to go on the air again. He doesn’t waste an opportunity for a good dis- cussion by going to sleep. Rainer apologized several times for being dull-witted from lack of sleep, but we found him articulate. We asked him about Canadian police, after discovering at the National Exhibition that a num- ber of Canadians felt their po- lice far superior to ours. “Toronto police are mild, compared to anything I've seen in the states—or Montreal.” Perhaps the French heritage in Montreal has created a more authoritarian police. Rainer explained that in Can- ada the people and police un- derstand each other and, thusly, are able to better get along. After Rainer’s show Tim Thomas has a five-hour shift. He didn’t like it when we told him he looked like a young John Wilkes Booth, but he does. Like Booth, Thomas comes from an old American family— an ancestor was in Washing- ton’s cabinet. A native of Lynchburg, Va., Tim decided last year to move to Canada and become a citizen. Tim was more articulate on Canada’s identity than anyone else to whom we spoke; he had consciously made the decision to be ‘a Canadian, rather than being born in there. He had been a supporter of Gene McCarthy, but unlike many McCarthy people, he had a realistic view of politics. Tim knew McCarthy wasn’t popular enough to win the Dem- ocratic nomination, but what alienated him. from American politics was because the Demo- crats wouldn't give McCarthy a fair or democratic hearing at the convention. ‘Canada’s keeping its ethical integrity,” Tim said. There’s lots of support for American draft dodgers and deserters, though most of them find it hard to get a job because “they’re freaky.” Long hair, etc., are the rea- sons they aren’t hired, not be- cause they avoid the American military. By protecting these Ameri- cans, Canadians ‘‘are support- ing the integrity of their coun- try against the United States,” he explained. ‘‘Canada’s a lot of things the States have tried to be,” but the U.S. “falls short” of these ‘goals, Tim went on. Free speech is severely cir- : cumscribed in America. CHUM- FM was Tim's example—it wouldn’t be tolerated, even in New York City. In Canada the official board watching over communications loves CHUM- FM because it’s different. The American FCC, conversely, seems to prefer American com- munications’ mediocrity. Canada has the advantage of watching American mistakes and learning from them. Tim’s example was American urban expressways. Before they're built, they’re obsolete; Canadi- ans are avoiding these mistakes. There is less pressure on people in Canada: ‘‘Nobody’s scared ; nobody’s worried.” He compared Canda to Florida. Floridians know there will al- ways be a sun, and thus, always aFlorida. Canadians know there will always be a Canada, and instead of worrying whether they will survive, they go about the business of living. America, he went on, is al- ° ways going crazy to change things, but never changes any- thing. We are too impatient; before anything is given a chance to work, we decide it doesn’t work, dismantle it, and start over again. Agreeing withsomewhatmore conservative Canadians, Tim explained that those people are more likely to think things out. Canadians don’t want to talk about the ‘‘socio-politico- economic bases’’ of everything. You never hear them dis- cussing ‘‘legislation.”” Ameri- cans are uptight about politics, “but Canadians take politics in stride, Tim added, along with most other things. : From by HIX As time goes whizzing by, I sometimes wonder what people mean when the deplore the passing of ‘‘The good old days.” Do they mean that they want to return to the days when diptheria stalked the land, or scarlet fever was feared as sure death, or polio crippled the children, or men bled to death while they were being taken to the doctor in jolting farm wag- ons? Do they want to go without electricity for power and light? give up their cars? return to a dollar a day income? step out- side on a zero night instead of enjoying the comfort of in- door plumbing? : The simple life sounds so appealing in retrospect, such a welcome refief from present day pressures. A forgotten era where the air was always pure, when robins sang in the or- chard, when sleighbells tinkled on the frosty air, when kitchen stoves crackled with the heat, when milk pails clattered on the flagstoned floor, when children were silent before their elders, when the one- room school, located in the exact center of a circle, threw out small paths in all directions, each path exactly five miles long and ending in a farm- house where water pitchers with a skim of ice in each chilly bedroom invited the morning ablutions. Anyhow, that’s how they tell it. My own personal opinion, after talking with some of the oldsters and recalling tales by progenitors now laid to rest, is that the skim .of ice in the pit- cher was disregarded in favor of a quick dash down the stairs, and a quick wash in the basin filled from a steaming kettle on the kitchen stove. And that the five-mile walk to school usually shrank to a one-mile walk, taken on the dead gallop and shared by friends from the neighboring houses. The yellow school bus came later, much later. The school room became unpleas- antly freighted as soon as the small pupils started to warm up, for the Saturday night bath was the rule, and any further subjecting of the anat- omy to soap and water would have been considered positively indecent. Debunking the good old days is unprofitable. It ranks along with admitting that your par- ents might not have known all the answers, and that you yourself might have been a problem child in your teens. There was a fair return of the good old days in the thirties, when prices plummeted during the depths of the depression, and there was no work to be had. When sheets could be bought for 75 cents apiece, and a rolled rib roast was fifteen cents a Guest editorials A column reprinting edi- torialsfromother weekly newspapersin the world. (From- WNEP-TV, Avoca) The Luzerne County Com- missioners have taken the lead in the fight to keep garbage from Philadelphia and other metropolitan areas from being dumped in the open strip mine pits of Northeastern Pennsyl- vania. An ordinance passed at the meeting of the commissioners prohibits the importation of trash, refuse, or other solid wastes from points outside Lu- zerne County for disposal with- in the county. Commissioner Edmund Wide- man, who has been very active in the fight to prevent the ° dumping of garbage, said the measure was a precaution against air, soil, or water pol- lution in the county. The ordinance probably will be used as a model for most of the other counties that would be damaged by the plan, with one exception. 5 The majority commissioners from Lackawanna County have displayed an alarming lack of _ interest in an effort to stop the dumping. At a recent meeting called by a group of interested officials from Northeastern Pennsyl- vania, commissioners from 10 counties were invited to be present to coordinate a plan to halt the garbage dumping. Nine counties responded or sent rep- resentatives. The absent county was Lackawanna. What is the reason for the footdragging in Lackawanna County? Pillar To Post pound, no bones, no waste. When it was not a question of keeping up with the Joneses if a family had a good income, but of living down to the Smiths to avoid embarrass- ment. The good old days. When school teachers were paid a minimal salary. In the late nineties it was $28 a month to start, with $35 the goal. Doctors got fifty cents for an office call, one dollar for a house call—maybe. Flies accumulated around the barnyard and the festering manure piles, and drowned in the milk. The ‘‘second summer’ jgas the crucial time in a bay's life. If he lived through the ‘‘second summer’ he was well on his way. Flies were dis- regarded as acts of God, no possible connection between their filthy little feet and dis- ease. § The good old days. Who wants them back? The very people who deplore the passing of the good old days are the ones who are in the market for the latest thing in colored television sets and who complain when the mail delivery is a little late. Their greatgrandfathers used to gather at the post office, warming their hands at the potbellied stove, waiting for the mail to be distributed, and re-telling the latest gossip. The women stayed at home, polishing the lamp chimneys with crumpled newspaper to remove the soot, scrubbing the, family wash on the family washboard, grinding it through a hand operated wringer. I've heard from one old- ster that his grandmother didn’t even have a washboard, she scrubbed the garments against her arm until the skin was raw under the harsh touch of the yellow laundry soap.: Grand- paw, it seemed, wasn’t about to invest in any labor savings devices until they had been 5 fected, though he had bougjgt himself a new-fangled plougi% Ah yes, the good old days. The good old days are here and now. Great-grandchildren will look back upon this era with nostalgia, the days when men could not reach any far- ther than the moon, deprived of the wonders of landing on Mars and Venus and hurtling them-' selves in a state of suspended animation toward the farther galaxies. The Right To Write To THE POST: : ® I was shocked and diomayedd when on Thursday evening I read your editorial in favor of gun control legislation. Because of the intelligence shown in t J past I was greatly surprised¥ that you took such an unreal- istic stand. : There are many laws to con- trol many things, liquor, nar- cotics, automobiles, etc. We all are aware that none of this legislation in any way stops the illegal use or abuse of the objects at which it is aimed. It is surprising and unreal- istic to expect that legislation to control the use of firearms would in any way inhibit the law breaker. Even the most ardent advocates of confisca- tion admit that even this drastic step would only serve to cut - down the accidental killings by firearms. It would in no way stop the criminal from obtain- ing firearms nor would it com- pletely stop accidental deaths. For many of the accidental deaths with firearms happen ‘with police and armed service personnel. No matter how difficult our misinformed legislators would make it for honest people to own or use firearms it would, at the very best, (and that is the confiscation of privately owned firearms) only cut down on a small percentage of deaths. It may be a very tired but a very true cliche that states “Guns do not kill, people do!’ JOHN P. SCHRAY 135 Beach St. Shavertown ¥ 5 8 4 St i eal wn Un ur on = + eR ed Fe
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers