HSE 155, 8
PAGE FOUR
EDITORIAL
a tribute
With the death of Myra, the name of Risley is
no longer synonymous with that of the Dallas Post.
Myra carried on the management of the newspaper
until it changed hands in 1969, assuming a tre-
mendous burden, but shouldering it with the
determination which was her heritage from a
father who was superintendent of the Wilkes-Barre
Schools and a mother who was his mainstay
through difficult times.
Myra and Howard between them had built the
Dallas Post from a four page paper with patent
insides to a publication which bore on its masthead
“More than a newspaper, a community insti-
tution.” A newspaper which was recognized in
publication circles as something unique, a paper
which consistently won awards for excellence.
Without Myra’s steady support, Howard could not
have accomplished this.
It was Myra’s ideas which made of the building
a thing of beauty. She pored over garden
catalogues and ordered the rose bushes which line
the drive. She had a love of growing things and of
small animals. Her garden was a thing of beauty,
lusty vegetables ripening among the rows of
flowers. The orchard was carefully cherished, a
living picture in blossom time. There were always
kittens on the back porch, enjoyed until they were
old enough to give away, and always given with the
provision that they could be returned if necessary,
but that a good home was essential.
The annual Library Auction found a home in
the Risley Barn and on the Risley grounds. The
antiques department was her first love, but every
booth knew that Myra would contribute something
to it. Each year she parted with something which
she would have preferred to keep in her own
collection of glass, giving it whole-heartedly
because it was for support of the library which had
been one of Howard's cherished dreams.
Few people realized how very ill Myra had
been for months. Few people knew that she was
facing surgery. Myra was one of those intrepid
souls who carried her own burdens, plotted her own
course, and decided in her own mind what she was
going to do, true to what she herself called her
Pennsylvania Dutch inheritance.
Myra wore the valiant badge of courage to the
last, asking no quarter, meeting life on its own
terms.
we believe
When South Vietnamese and American troops
undertook their offensive into Laos we were told
that the objective of the drive was to cut off supply
lines on the Ho Chi Minh trail to insure the safety of
American troops while we withdrew from Indo-
china. Since that time the drive has bogged down,
16,000 additional South Vietnamese troops have
been sent to Laos, we have sustained heavy losses
to personnel and equipment, North Vietnamese
supply lines are still open, and the administration is
backpeddling as fast as it can.
It is too early to call the invasion of Laos a fail-
ure, if we believe it can ever be a success. The
Laotian drive is a step towards scaling down the
war, if we believe the enemy isn’t going to overrun
Laos like it has Cambodia. We can disengage our-
selves from Indochina if we believe the administra-
tion is willing to gamble that Cambodia and Laos
will not fall under Communist control.
It would also be helpful to believe that Mao Tse
Tung heeded Ron Zeigler’s words when the latter
stated that the invasion of Laos poses ‘‘absolutely
no threat to Communist China,” as if Soviet troops
in Cuba would be construed as absolutely no threat
to America.
Finally we should all believe that the lives of
Americans are more valuable than the lives of
Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, and that
somehow we are miraculously exempt from the
consequences of living by the sword.
Tie DALLASC0ST
An independent newspaper published every Thursday morning by the Greenstreet
News Co. 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 the Greenstreet News Co. are William Scranton 3rd, president and
managing editor; J.R. Freeman, vice president and general manager; Doris Mallin,
secretary-treasurer.
Editor emeritus: Mrs. T.M.B. Hicks
Editor: Doris R. Mallin
News editor: Shawn Murphy
Advertising: Carolyn Gass
THE DALLAS POST, MARCH 4, 1971
Hix by Mrs. T. M. B. Hix
There was a bray of sound from within
the house, one which seemed to rise and swell
and then subside again. This is normal for the
average television broadcast, but disturbing
when the house is locked and there is nobody
home.
So Mrs. Dress paused on the doorstep
before inserting her key in the lock. Could be,
she reflected, that she’d left the television
turned on instead of switching it off before she
left the office that morning. A burglar would
not announce his presence by turning
on the set, he’d go unostentatiously in and out
the back way. A burglar would catch up with
his favorite soap opera at home, doubtless on
a stolen TV; he wouldn't be likely to stop his
prowling to get a load of what kind of a dust-
up Aunt Mamie was having with the kids from
next door.
TRB
from Washington
The other day on a New Jersey highway
two women stopped their car at a red light
and the car behind crashed into them with
terrific force. The first car caught on fire and
the doors were bent and wouldn’t open so the
girls were dragged out through the windows.
One of them was not severly burned but the
other, the wife of a third year medical stu-
dent, is still in the hospital. The cost of hospi-
tal care, room and board, now averages $70 a
day for the nation as a whole, but in big cities
like New York it is $100. One hundred dollars
a day; think it over. Yes, there’s some insux'-
ance; yes, they may collect damages from
the yahoo who fell asleep but, even so, there is
need at the hospital in this case for intensive
care, medicine, skin grafts; the young
husband of the girl will be lucky if he starts
his medical practice with no greater burden
of debt than $50,000.
The problem is far greater than acci-
dents, or catastrophic illness; it is national
health in all aspects. The US is the only indus-
trial country on earth that doesn’t have some
kind of national health insurance. Otto von
Bismarck introduced health insurance in 1882
oa
But on the other hand. . . She turned the
key and opened the door, armed with right-
eousness and about to speak firmly to the
burglar.
The racket was coming from the bedroom
where she had recently installed a new tele-
vision set with all the fixings, and all in living
color.
There on the bed, stretched full length
and waving his tail in time with the music, lay
Gus, one grey velvet paw on the remote
control, eyes slitted rapturously, rousing
momentarily and rumbling deep in his chest
as a commercial interrupted the flow of
music from the magic sound box, relaxing
again as the drum beats came back on the air,
and turning the volume just a mite higher.
Fat cat, that’s Gus.
paws for station identification
Fat and spoiled, enjoying a nightly brush-
ing to discourage knots in his long grey fur,
demanding and getting the best in cat food
and tender loving care.
But nobody would have suspected that he
needed a colored television set to keep him
happy, one he could turn on at will by remote
control.
He used to live on Pioneer Avenue, but that
thoroughfare is now far too dangerous for
household pets, especially late at night when
a cat does his best prowling and catting. Cars
shoot by at 70 m.p.h., along about midnight.
You have to understand cats to like them.
Most people prefer the blind adoration of a
puppy. A cat is a supercilious creature, turn-
ing his back and switching his tail in distain if
his environment is not to his liking. He makes
no compromises, takes no back-chat from the
people he owns, demands his rights in no un-
certain terms, turns his aristocratic nose at
the horse-feathers ordinarily provided for fe-
lines, chasing meadow mice at his pleasure,
and occupying the softest cushion in the house
when he has completed his day’s rounds of the
territory to see what’s cooking.
Gus is a changed character since leaving
Dallas, where he rated the minimum of atten-
tion. He is expanding mightily in all direc-.
tions, both emotionally and physically, ac-
cepting tender loving care as his due, and
weighing close to 17 pounds. :
He likes it out in Beaumont.
He never had it so good.
And that colored television is really the
cats. -
here we come, Otto,90 years late
in Germany, almost 90 years ago, and the US
doesn’t have it yet.
The most powerful drive for national health
insurance is the history of the country gets
under way here this week in the Senate health
subcommittee under Edward Kennedy. Pre-
sumably it will start with Administration tes-
timony on the new Nixon program. Mr. Nixon
has come a long way on the issue and many of
his proposals are to be commended, but the
difference between them and the comprehen-
sive health insuraance program backed by
Kennedy and 22 other co-sponsors is the dif-
ference between a handful of aspirins and
open heart surgery.
In the Senate Kennedy backs the
program; in the House, the formidable Rep.
Marth W. Griffiths of Michigan. Mrs. Grif-
fiths’ admirable sentiments are reenforced in
moments of stress by a voice like a chain saw
hitting a pine knot. She is a powerful sponsor.
As for Ted Kennedy, he has a special role. We
have watched him wonderingly. When he
enters to take his place at a hearing every-
body stops talking. There is a little pause.
People crane. So that’s Teddy! They think
about different things. Chappaquiddick. Jack
Kennedy and Camelot. Bobby Kennedy and
the murder in the hotel kitchen. And now this
Kennedy, the last (It’s digression, but some-
how or other we have always felt that he did
not really seek the presidency; that the role
was beingg forced upon him by a kind of
morbid national speculation. He could not
reject it because, if he turned his back, he
would feel he was somehow a traitor to his
family like one of he royal pretenders in
Europe. Now he’s out of the race, at least for
1972, we think; his mortifying defeat for
Senate whip by reactionary Robert Byrd,
West Virginia, removes him for a time at
least and he can get on with serious matters
like health insurance. It may have been the
best thing that ever happened to him. End di-
gression.)
When it comes to health insurance, Presi-
dent Nixon is the prisoner of family tradition,
too. Last week an acquaintance of ours, a
well-known English newsman with the mem-
orable name of Peregrine Worsthorne left the
White House after interviewing the president
for two hours. Among many questions, he
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Part two
by J. R. Freeman
The scramble to plan, design, and con-
struct nuclear ‘power plants as fast as
possible, though most will be only demonstra-
tion facilities through the rest of this century,
is dictated by an incredible maze of economic
uncertainties.
With anything but an adequate supply of
raw materials for nuclear power plants
located, a sleepy Congress maintains its post-
‘World War II position that nuclear power
must be sold to the consumer. Economics dic-
tate that rather than construct these plants
wherever they are most needed, only large,
centralized complexes can be considered.
This creates both a non-competitive aspect
for choice sites, and a less safe situation
should an accident occur that would release
radiation into the atmosphere.
The cost of such facilities is prohibitive
over the long run if considered by the side of
alternative methods of generating power. But
because of the sale thrust of the Atomic
Energy Commission, and the will of Congress
to sell nuclear power at all cost, no alterna-
tives are currently considered. The sale
thrust is made possible because of huge subsi-
dies to private power generated by a process
which has neither been proved safe, nor
workable, as well as one that will deplete its
raw materials in this country in less than a
hundred years.
More importantly, Congress has placed
little or no concern to alternatives of filling
this power gap. At least three possibilities
exist to at least supplement consumer
demands of the future, one of which could
prove to be so long-lived as to provide all the
power requirements of the entire nation for
the next thousand years.
In the Green River Formation of Color-
ado, Utah, and Wyoming, lies such a huge
abundance of oil shale, a known fossil fuel, so
asked Mr. Nixon if he might not have been a
New Dealer himself, if he had come into poli-
tics in he 1930’s during the Depression? No,
said the president meditatively. And then
next morning to his amazement Worst®orne
got a postscript from Mr. Nixon by special
messenger amplifying his comment and
telling of a formative incident in his youth.
His older brother, Harold, was dying of tuber-
culosis. The Nixon family was not affluent.
The doctor urged the parents to send Harold
to the county TB hospital to relieve the finan-
cial burden. Mr. Noxon wrote, “They adam-
antly refused to do so and borrowed money to
keep him in a private sanitarium during the
most critical last days of his illness.” He
added, ‘Both my mother and father were
almost fierce in their adherence to what is
now deprecatingly referred to as Puritan
ethics...” They felt it would be ‘‘mwially
wrong,” he said, to accept aid from the gover-
nment under the circumstances. ;
Revealing, indeed. Mr. Nixon evidently
pondered his reply to that particular tion
that night, rather than to any of the others on
war and peace, and got up next morning to
amplify it: “I developed in these formative
years a strong commitment toward indivi-
dual responsibility and individual dignity.”
It is poignant, and comes straight from
the heart, making Mr. Nixon seem more of a
human being than he sometimes appears. But
what a strange interpretation of ‘New
Dealer.”
The very point about national insurance
is that it comes to a citizen as a matter of
right, not as charity. As Kennedy says,
‘every individual residing in the United
States will be eligible to receive benefits.” It
(ds so. abroad. There will be no means ti t any-
more than there is for social securi § The :
Nixon parents could accept it without sifame.
Except for welfare itself, no condition in
American is a more shameful mess thig the
$70 billion a year health industry. Cost are
rising 15 percent a year. We need 50,000 more
doctors. Private health insurance is as much
loophole as protection; it normally pays about
a third of the bill. Amidst an explosion of
scientific knowledge, slum children never see
a dentist and rarely a doctor; private enter-
prise produces Nobel prizes for medicine, and
a horse-and-buggy system of health delivery
with no family doctor insude. Infant mortality
is disgraceful : we trail behind 12 other coun-
tries—the rate for nonwhites is twice that of
whites and in some ghettos it is worse than the
plague of ancient Egypt, one death in 10. The
time for change really can’t be far off! Here
we come, Otto, 90 years late.
no nuclear alternatives planned,
rich as to stagger man’s imagination. In the
heart of the formation the shale rock is often
2,000 feet thick. This rock, when heated, gives
off a substance known as kerogen, a material
similar to crude petroleum. In this one body
of ore there is estimated to be 2.6 trillion bar-
rels of shale oil, or more than 70 times the
known crude reserves of the United States,
Alaska included, and more than eight times
the known world crude oil reserves.
The location of these rich oil shale
deposits have long been known, with 80
percent of the resource publicly owned, in
that it belongs to every American citizen in
the most legal and moral sense. Its value has
. been placed at more than $6 trillion. Had it not
been for a massive effort by big oil in the last
30 or 40 years, almost 100 percent of the oil
shale in this one geologic formation would
remain publicly-owned.
Thus far Congress has viewed oil shale only
as a possible source of petroleum and pet-
roleum by-products, keeping its eyes closed to
the possibility of converting this huge treasu-
re trove into electricity. If this could be done
in an economic competitive fashion, enough
raw materials are already located to meet the
entire electric energy requirements of the na-
tion for hundreds of years, no matter what the
population might demand.
And with a plan already progressing to
link the nation with a grid pattern whereby
the whole country would be internally wired,
the centralized location of the rich Ricky
Mountain public domain oil shale deposits
appears geographically suited.
Congress, with taxpayers’ money, has
spent billions of dollars harnessing the atom
for peaceful purposes. Subsidies totaling bil-
lions more are going to be given the private
power companies in their quest to construct
at least 100 or more nuclear power facilities
before the turn of the century. But there
doesn’t appear to be any move to spend even a
token amount on research and development
of oil shale towards a source of electricity, by
either government or the private sector. It
appears to already be a forgone conclusion
that oil shale, in time, will be relinquished to
big oil for its sphere of huge economic gain,
perhaps in a similar way a second alternative
to nuclear power is being divested from the
public domain now.
Tourists who stand in awe and watch Old
Faithful geyser spew its hourly gusts of steam
and water into the air of Yellowstone National
Park, seldom realize the electric power po-
tential they are witnessing.
More than 300,000 acres of ‘‘hot places’
remain on the earth’s crust, mostly on public
lands in the West, to the extent that holes can
be drilled into these volcanic remains. When
water is piped in, steam is created, thus
giving a future power company perhaps
hundreds of years of almost free steam,
which, as we all know, can turn generating
turbines.
This public resource, however, is about to
be given away by the government. These ‘hot
rocks’ are generally known about by the oil
industry because of its drilling and explora-
tion activities. And big oil is now focusing its
attention to the geothermal steam aspect in
its quest to control the nation’s energy
sources, no matter which kind of energy is
involved.
U.S. Geological Survey estimates indi-
cate that about 30,000 megawatts of electrici-
ty could be generated daily from geothermal
steam facilities on public lands. This is
enough electricity for about 20 million inhabi-
tants. Big oil, however, remains in control of
Congress and the U.S. Interior Department to
the extent that it is about to be successful in
obtaining control of this power source.
It is common knowledge that the nation’s
coal reserves are huge. And big oil hasn’t
overlooked that aspect, either. In the last few
years it has bought up virtually all the large
coal companies, now owning at least 21
percent of domestic coal production. At the
same time the Office of Coal Research, an
arm of Interior, has made major break-
throughs in an effort to use this fossil fuel to
generate electricity without polluting the en-
vironment. One new process is known as
magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). )
Under the MHD process, all three hs of
power generation is combined into one. The
hot combustion products of coal and air are
made to conduct electricity by the addition of
small amounts of a salt. These combustion
gases become the ‘‘armature’” of the MHD
generator and move at very high velocity
through the magnetic field where electric
power is generated directly, providing less
need for heat to be absorbed and providing ef-
ficiencies of nearly 60 percent. The conven-
tional coal fired facility not only pollutes, but
operates at only 40 percent efficency, and
nuclear units at only 33 percent.
Congress, meanwhile, under pressure
from big oil, whittled the suggested $2 million
budget for MHD research to a measly
$400,000, while allotting billions to the AEC.
$50 million, if needed, would seem a paltry
amount for such needed research. Under the
new MHD process, the pollution problem
diminishes, and more power becomes avail-
able at a cheaper price. But a docile Congress
holds little prospects for protecting the public
interest.
Big oil is out.to capture the energy
markets of the world, while making sure that
a robber-baron philosophy is maintained. And
with such a deep entrenchment into
government, there is little hope that their
advances will be halted.
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