PAGE FOUR
EDITORIAL
‘““what’s the matter
with kids today?’’
“Kids...” the song from a popular Broadway
show goes, “Why can’t they be like we were, per-
fect in every way . . . oh what’s the matter with kids
today?”
The lyricist who wrote those words should
come to Dallas.
He’d find kids who are as perfect as we ever
were, kids who are working their hearts out for the
Library Auction.
Their ages range from pre-school to young
adult, and they’ve taken on tasks that astound their
elders. They're planning and operating booths
traditionally staffed by adults; they're selling
chances; they're providing much-needed man
power in carrying, carting, lugging and dragging
anything that needs to be carried, carted, lugged or
dragged from one place to another; they're acting
as liaison agents between committee chairmen and
committee members. In short, theyre doing
everything they’re asked to do and then some.
Everyone has favorite stories to tell of the
youngsters’ willingness to help out.
“Would you like to come swimming?’ one
mother asked a 10-year old boy last week. “No
thanks,” was the reply, ‘I've got to get down to the
Auction barn to help out.”
And barn supervisor Bill Moss says they do
help—really.
“When we were rearranging new goods,’ Bill
recalls, ‘‘this one little fella kept giving me so many
good ideas on how to do it I thought I was working
with a midget! I couldn’t believe it when he told me
he was only six!”
Girl Scouts of Troop 712 are staffing the plant
booth; members of the Rotaract Club are manning
the fun booth; Boy Scout Troop 232 is supplying the
auction runners; Key Club members have been
working for weeks on solicitation of goods and re-
cently spent hours erecting the booth frames;
youthful queen candidates have been busy selling
chances on the electronic stove; junior and senior
high school students have signed up to work at the
book booth and antiques table. The list goes on and
on.
Who can doubt it: Our hard-working kids are
the un-sung heroes of the Library Auction.
in time of need
To truly appreciate the top-notch work per-
formed by members of the Dr. Henry M. Laing Fire
Company and the Dallas Ambulance Association,
one must see them in action. We had a chance to do
just that one day last week when two cars collided
on a busy Dallas highway, and we were greatly im-
pressed.
The fire sirens howled shortly after noon, and
cars with frantically blinking headlights were soon
racing down the streets of Dallas carrying
volunteer fire fighters and ambulance crew
members to the scene of the wreck. Skilled am-
vuiance workers gently lifted the injured persons °
into the Dallas ambulance and transported them to
Nesbitt Hospital, offering expert first aid enroute.
At the scene, traffic was held up and had to be
guided around the damaged automobiles to avoid
dangerous jamming; assistant fire chief Bill Berti
jumped to the job and soon had the snarled traffic
moving smoothly. The wrecked cars had to be
dragged from the highway; volunteers worked with
the wrecking crews to see that this was done
promptly and efficiently. When it was all over, the
volunteer firemen drifted back to work, relieved
that—despite their preparedness—there had been
no need for their services.
The second and final letter of solicitation for
both the fire company and the ambulance associa-
tion will be mailed J uly 15 to Dallas residents who
have not yet contributed to the support of these
volunteer units. If you are among those who have
not responded to the earlier request, don’t wait any
longer—your donation, large or small, is needed to
maintain these organizations.
THE DALLAS POST, JULY 9, 1970
thissa
'n thatta -
by The Gaffer
When I was a lad in the fair borough of
Greensburg (now a third-class city with lots
of traffic lights and parking meters) I learned
to read.
I don’t remember that there was much
difficulty about it, probably because I had
comprehended that there was much to know
about a world in which I found myself and
reading was a good way to enlightenment.
I recall clearly that the first printed sen-
tence I learned to identify was ‘Willy Has A
Slate’’ and the second one was ‘‘Has Willy A
Slate?” It seemed kind of silly to ask the sec-
ond question right after stating badly that
Willy did have a slate, but I suppose the idea
was to get declarative and interrogative sen-
tences into the young mind as quickly as pos-
sible.
Well, I took to reading like a hippy takes
to a mustache and before you could say ‘Zip
Code” I was reading just about anything
printed I could comprehend. That is, if it
seemed to hold a little interest.
Little could be said for our household li-
brary. There was a reasonably good encyclo-
pedia and dictionary; the complete works of
Hawthorne and Thackeray and Dickens;
Stoddard’s Lectures, a shelf of International
Textbook Co. volumes on coal mining and the
rest of it was pretty much classifiable as mis-
cellaneous.
When I visited my grandparents in Allen-
town, there were a great many shelves of
books and I would spend much of a summer,
flat on my stomach reading Ridpath’s History
of The World. This work had colored illustra-
tions, of which I clearly remember an Aztec
high priest holding aloft the bleeding heart of
a sacrificial victim while standing atop a
pyramid with thousands of the faithful
gathered in the distance.
This picture would give me bad dreams
for a while, but I always returned to it and
finally got to the point that I had taken in
every detail and was surfeited to the extent
that my dreams were no longer invaded by it.
I guess that proves something or other;
for instance, that one gets used to the sight
and presence of evil; still, I never got to the
point where I condoned that high priest, just
to the point that it stopped terrifying me. I
learned to face evil without fear, but I didn’t
forget how to recognize it.
The then borough had no public library
and the only one to which I had access was
operated by the First Presbyterian Sunday
School. It was in the basement of a church,
torn down many years since, and consisted of
a small room with a few shelves of books,
safely guarded behind glass panes, where
they could be seen but not touched. Between
the panes was a small window, where the li-
brarian could be found immediately after
Sunday School ended. I don’t remember any
door and I never have been able to figure out
how that Sunday morning librarian got in
there.
Anyhow, they were the dullest lot of books
ever assembled, mostly treating of Presby-
terian doctrine and I never gave the place
much of my patronage. I was interested in the
doings of the Rover Boys, Tom Swift and the
Motor Boys, who drove a fictional automobile
right across the plains long before the trip
was made by a real live automobile and crew.
I guess this was primitive science fiction, al-
though Jules Verne antedated them by some
years. The Presbyterians didn’t think much
of such folderol and didn’t put these volumes
in their closely guarded shelves.
{t was a good introduction to reading and
I followed it up with the works of Washington
Irving, by which time I had aged sufficiently
to leave the halls of Greensburg High School.
When I had matriculated at college, I
finally came upon a real library and I certain-
ly was ready to appreciate it. Despite other
demands on my time in those days of Flaming
Youth, I used that library mostly for pure en-
joyment, although I inevitably picked up a lot
of information, some of it useful.
The children and youth of today are much
better served in the matter of books and li-
braries and I am pretty sure that the ones who
like to read are well aware of it. Recently I
spent some time at the Back Mountain Mem-
orial Library, around the hour that the kids
were coming from school and using the
library facilities on their way homward.
It was fun, because I was able to visualize
myself with one leg of my knickerbockers
hanging down, due to a broken buckle, with
pockets full of assorted trivia and with noth-
ing on my mind, except getting a certain book
from the school shelves before somebody else
got it and reflecting that 25 years ago, the
Back Mountain community didn’t even have a
library of this sort. The people who have
made this all possible and are continuing
their support probably know all of this as well
as I do.
Pretty nearly everybody is library-
minded.
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SATE EERE
Jottings...
by Jane Wildoner
Pollution is never a very pretty subject to
talk about, much less to do something about.
But neither is it a pretty subject to see, smell,
taste, step in, absorb or hear (noise is a form
of pollution too, isn’t it?).
We who are fortunate enough to live far
enough away from the points of maximum
pollution saturation seem to have a more
acute awareness of its curse, but we, too, are
guilty of fouling our once beautiful nests. In
our grasp for the almighty dollar and our
haste to grab a piece of the grandeur to brag
about while the grabbing is still good, we sure
we kill our grandchildren
do a lot of messing up! We are messing up to
the point where we are committing unpre-
meditated murder, involuntary man-
slaughter, negligent homicide and suicide!
In many current hassles over what some
folks—daring to have the intestial fortitude—
declare is raw sewage and others—reluctant
to mar their images of ‘friends of the
people”’—tend to sweep under the carpet, we
are hurting ourselves and killing our grand-
children. Maybe it’s the definition of ‘raw
sewage’ that we don’t see eye to eye on.
Maybe we figure that after sewage is run
through a septic tank it has been “treated”
and therefore is clean, harmless, fit for kids
the right to write
a meeting in New Delhi
To THE POST:
I thought you might be interested in the
following coincidence relating to your article
about Mr. Daniel P. Oleksiw in the June 17
Post: 3 rea Bn Ang
When he arrived in New Delhi, India, our
granddaughter, Molly Nicoll of Smith
College, Northampton, Mass., and Arlington,
Va., was staying with the family of the man
he was replacing. They had an official recep-
tion to introduce Mr. Oleksiw and when Molly
came to him she asked him where in the
States he was from. He answered, ‘“‘Wilkes-
Barre, Pa.” She said there was a huge crowd
and they were hurrying the line along, so she
just pointed to herself and said, “Dallas, Pa.”
He said that ‘‘back there is where I really
come from.”
She said they had a talk together later,
and it was certainly a treat to meet that big,
handsome, nice AMERICAN man.
Molly is the daughter of William Nicoll
and the former Cnythia Poad of Dallas Town-
ship. They have a summer home here and
since babyhood Molly has spent a lot of time
with us. ;
She spent her junior college year at the
Univerity of the Philippines and had a round-
the-world trip from San Francisco to Japan,
Taiwan, Hawaii, the Philippines and home
through various countries including Thailand,
India, Hong Kong, Greece, Isle of Cyprus,
Italy, Spain, London to New York City.
MRS. S. H. Poad
East Dallas
Miss Williamson
To THE POST:
We did not know of the passing of Miss
Helen C. Williamson until we read it in The
Dallas Post. Thank you very much. for print-
ing it.
Just in case her friends and cousins
around Dallas would like to know the details .
of her funeral, I received the following infor-
mation from Lycoming House where she had
been living and where she died:
Miss Williamson died peacefully in her
sleep May 31. The funeral was conducted
June 3 in Germantown by the Rev. Gordon L.
Roberts of Westside Presbyterian Church, of
which Helen was a member.
The Story League has a memorial for
Miss Williamson, and I enclose a gift for the
Back Mountain Library in her memory.
She received her Masters in Education
from the University of Chicago, and trained
teachers for that city. Later she taught in
Shavertown and in Philadelphia public
schools and for the Society of Friends.
"Her music teacher as a young girl was -
Mrs. Ethel M. Olver, late of Trucksville.
With her father she enjoyed camping
trips in Arizona and saw pioneer life.
One of her greatest enjoyments was her
yearly trip to the Back Mountain to attend
family reunions such as the Montross re-
union, and to see her relatives and friends.
She was secretary for the Montross reunion.
HELEN REYNOLDS CONRAD
6312 Arlingham Road
Flourtown, Pa.
(formerly of Trucksville)
lon second thought :
nod, gaze, continue coolly
by Shawn Murphy
I've always prided myself on the way I
greet celebrities. Not for me the swooning and
oogling of teeny-boppers; not for me the
ridiculous clamber for an autograph ‘for my
daughter, of course.”” No indeed. Whenever I
meet a celebrity I nod my head ever so
slightly, gaze coolly into his eyes, and con-
tinue calmly on my way.
As I'say, I've always prided myself on the
way I greet celebrities. Of course, I've never
actually met any, but I've always known
exactly how I'd act when the time came.
Calm. Cool. Collected.
So last week when we were in New York
City to fetch the Fresh Air Fund kids I had re-
viewed my celebrity-greeting policy and was
all set for any and all comer. Liz Taylor? I'd
simply check out her diamond (was it really
as huge as it looked on the Emmy awards
show?), nod, gaze goolly into her eyes, and
continue on my way. Rock Hudson? Again—
nod, gaze, continue coolly.
When we learned that seven or eight
tickets were still available for ‘‘Company,” a
new musical comedy about which my friend
had read agreat dealand I had read nothing,
we raced on increasingly blistered feet from
our hotel on W. 44th St. to the theater on W.
52nd St. Ah! The box office was open and yes,
the cashier was nodding, the tickets were still
br
cr
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Vaal
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to dam up and sail boats in. Well, we've got op
another figure coming! au
Let that “treated sewage’ saturate the . ar
soil to the point where it makes drain field | TE
swampy and watch, smell, step in or hear So
action. [her CO
In early spring when the frost first goes bi
out of the ground, the first evidence is an odd la
smell, not really unpleasant, rather Zike a ; th
combination of baby powder and d®fnfec- Wi
tants. Then the sun shines longer, the grass
and weeds grow greener and more lush over
the saturated drain field than on the sur- ) [
rounding area, and the odor permeating the
air gets stronger, more sour, drowning out the I
natural, earthy, spring time smells. The
insect activity over the saturated area be- in
comes a frenzy. Holding your breath and J
parting the lush, weedy growth to get a close- 10
up view, what you see makes you sick—at
stomach and at heart! St
Grayish water surrounds a dump and is ~
pooled in natural depressions with no place to | Ww
drain. The surface undulates rhythmically, 50
bobbing tin cans and bottles, you wonder why. =
Then you see ivory-colored larvae, maggotts, b
thousands of them, wriggling through the | Si
awful-colored ooze and muck and you know
why. The stench is overwhelming. M
What to do! What to do! Well, first thing a
right off—as soon as we're done regurgitat- h
ing, we read ‘He Brought a Stream Bggk To ih
Life” in July issue of Reader’s Digest" So we t
realize something can be done. We postpone D
purchase of the color television and cancel N
plans for the vacation to “get away from it
all.” And we begin fighting for our lives. ¥
Maybe, after a few years of denying our- d
selves the instant entertainment of g#hdern r
technology and progress (?), we won’t fave to u
get away from it all. But we are going to have 9]
to start using artificial respiration on that
part of our environment already drowning in =
our own filth—NOW!
d
available. Just step into that other line,
please.
- Panting from our eight block trek, I fell
into line behind an elderly man who ¥ also
purchasing tickets for the show. t an
elderly gent, hair dyed brown but graying in
places where the dye had worn off. Brownish
suit jacket with a few specks of dandruff on
the shoulders. Trousers a bit mussed. Shorter
than I. Ho hum.
And as I stood behind him, trying {ggicatch
my breath, I thought it was just amazirig how |
much this guy sounded like Jack Benny. But
what was Jack Benny’s voice doing coming
out of this man. Unless . . . unless . . . JACK
BENNY!! ; 3
“Jack Benny ? MR. BENNY? !” [
practically shouted into his face as he turned
to leave the box office window. I couldn’t be-
lieve it . . . right before my very eyes—JACK :
BENNY! :
And in that oh-so-familiar Jack Benny i
voice of his he said “yes,” nodded ever so !
slightly, gazed coolly into my eyes for a split
second, and continued on his way.
JACK BENNY! I was shaking. JACK
BENNY! Imagine! Right here in perg@in!
As I said before, I've always prided my-
self on the way I greet celebrities. That is, ah,
1 ah, well. . .Well at least I didn’t ask him for
his autograph!
Tie DALLASCPosT
. 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 675-5211 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 emeritus, Mrs. T. M. B. Hicks; managing editor, Doris R. Mallin; editor of
the editorial page, Shawn Murphy; advertising manager, Annabell Selingo.
| guest editorial:
(The
The theory is that summertime is an ex-
cellent time for fatties to lose weight. These
are called the salad days of the year. Heavy
foods are for wintertime, as everyone knows.
Why is it that it just doesn’t work out that
way for this fatty? Why do friends and rela-
tions band together and plot the downfall of an
erstwhile skinny Ginny?
What perverse reasoning causes them to
throw huge cookouts, complete with home-
made potato salad, luscious baked beans,
everyone loves a fat lady
Suffolk County News, Sayville, New York)
dripping fried chicken with French fries on
the side?
What drives them to arrive at our house
unannounced, six packs of beer under their
arms, and bags of pretzels on hand for nibbl-
ing while the poker game progresses?
What ever happened to iced tea? Why do
those people insist on inviting us over for ice
cold martinis?
What is the point of us prominently dis-
playing the weight watchers’ diet guide on the
‘walls of the dining room, only to have teen-
agers descend upon us and demand pizza pie?
You might say, if you have a mean
streak, that this is no fault to be laid at the
doorstep of well-meaning friends and rela-
tives. You might say that we must develop
will power if we are ever to stop waddling
down the street and intend to slither instead.
You might say that, but we say it is all a
diabolical plot, because everyone loves a fat
woman!
So how come Twiggy is so rich?
ithe right to write
To THE POST:
Because of my interest in the success of
the Back Mountain Library and the Library
Auction, I wish to join the Ham ‘n Yegg Club.
Best wishes for a most successful Aue-
tion! i
SISTER MIRIAM TERESA, R.S.M. |
President {
College Misericordia |
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