Te Page Help the Library Like manna from heaven, the first checks from the federal revenue sharing program have arrived in our Back Mountain municipalities. And as with any windfall, the question of how best to spend the “found”’ money is being debated by our local government officials. | Each township and borough in the circulation area of the Back Mountain Memorial Library has received a letter from the library’s president, Homer Moyer, asking that a portion of the funds be donated to the library. We lend our unconditional support to Mr. Moyer’s request. { For as many years as there has been a Back | Mountain Memorial Library, the principal support for the institution has come from the annual library auction. Municipal support has been minimal, and when taxpayers were asked to tax themselves in a recent election to ensure the library’s continued existence, the referendum question was resoun- iP dingly voted down. Because the library has not been able to drum up enough grass roots support, there has been no State Aid to ease the library’s financial burden in recent years. In effect, the State is saying: “If Back Mountain residents don’t care about their library, the State won’t support it for them.” i We think this situation reflects neither the true attitude of Back Mountain residents toward their library nor the true worth of the library to our community. Records indicate that library cir- culation in all Back Mountain municipalities has increased dramatically over the past several years —-and with every library in Wilkes-Barre sustaining substantial damage to their facilities, the Back Mountain Memorial Library has assumed an even more significant role in the education of our school | children. Ed Mr. Moyer explains that if each community donates 10 percent of its revenue sharing sum to the | library, the library will then qualify for financial assistance from the State. Because library assistance is one of the uses for revenue sharing funds which has been advocated vigorously by federal guidelines, we urge each municipality to | review these guidelines and apportion its revenue | sharing check accordingly. i y | Mail Delivery It was not long ago, you will recall, that the U.S. Post Office was converted from a government department to a public corporation. There were cries about the need to get politics out of mail delivery and generous predictions of the improved | service that would follow. Well, now some of the boys in Washington are singing a different tune. The postal service is log-jammed long after the Christmas rush. An irate senator has called for hearings and a representative has introduced a bill to reestablish the old post office department. But if these worthies are to take us back to better days why should they be so timid? Clearly, there is a need for bold action. We suggest the Congress of | the United States re-establish the Pony Express. Think of the lift to our citizens’ spirits when they | saw a daring rider spurring his steed toward the ~ horizon, the wide brim of his felt hat blown back by the wind. What opportunities there would be for youngsters from blighted areas, both urban and rural, for, employment. What an outlet for their pent-up energies. They could establish new equestrian speed records from sea to sea; learn the ¢ intricacies of caring for saddle and harness: work - at relief stations in remote areas and find out whether they could endure a Dakota winter or find ~ solace under a starry Kansas sky. There are great opportunities here. We hope our legislators are primed for the moment. Who ‘knows? It might even mean better mail delivery. Thissa 'n Thatta by H. H. Null, III Although tempted, I have so far avoided the use of a number of cliches, which the erudite columnists pull out of their bag of tricks every few months. Today's pearls of wisdom, however, will be interlarded with a couple of them; my reason being to empha- size that I am getting a little tired of hearing them, after 50 years or more of use and reuse. If the pundits to whom I refer want to take this as a hint that it is time they think up some newer and more sparkling metaphors of their own, itwill be O.K. with this * ‘1mble seeker of wisdom. What has been dogging p = is the one about ‘‘not being able to see the tor ‘st for the trees” and the one about ‘‘throwing out the baby with the bath water”. I remember coming across these two back around the days when I was trying unsuccessfully to get a college education and sow a few wild oats at the same time. That was quite a while ago. There is also the one about the ‘‘tip of the iceberg’, which the political spellbinders have adopted, plus the toastmasters’ pid chestnut about ‘without further ado’’; but to do them justice, I doubt if the word-wizards use that one, even when toastmastering. If my memory serves, the “trees” allusion was taken from an article by Wood- row Wilson. The ‘‘baby’’ one came from the pen of Methusaleh. Sidney J. Methusaleh I think it was. : Be that as it may, I can use them both today in pointing out to those who have not missed one of my columns in the last fen years that I have been screaming off and on that all of this jazz about ecology and pollu- tion and consumerism and environment was going too far and that the end result was going to be that we Americans were going to run out of our adequate supplies of power, light, heat and a lot of other comforts if we didn’t pipe down and allow the profit motive to course with fewer remarks from the grandstand. I know full well that those who insist on saying ‘‘I told you so” are pretty sure to be unloved by their fellow men and women and since I want to be loved and respected, it might be smarter to remain mum on the sub- ject. In choosing to proceed, anyhow, I am driven by plain ordinary anger. I well remember life in the days when few had telephones, even fewer had their homes wired for electricity, your heat came from a coal fire that needed constant care and if you | TRB from Washington The question is now, Can he govern? Mr. Nixon stands at his peak; an unprecedented election landslide, a Gallup Poll rating of 68 percent. He is stern, taut, confident; eager to show who's boss. He looks expectantly at Con- gress, waiting for something to be outraged about. New Presidents in the past have been cooed; they have been conciliatory—the few months following the Inaugural, it is thought, are critical, the most plastic in four years. It is vital to get off to a running start. Not Mr. Nixon; he has contempt for an in- effectual Congress; he emerges from solitude with a veto in either hand. He has shucked off earlier dalliance with welfare liberalism; a year ago he called property taxes ‘‘a national disgrace’ but there is nothing about abolish- ing them in the new budget; he formerly advocated the Family Assistance Program but there is nothing about guaranteed in- comes in the budget now. He wants elderly beneficiaries of Medicare to pull in their belts and shoulder an extra billion dollars. They should practice self-reliance. Do they think their problems can be solved ‘by throwing money at them’? Do they think they are Grumman Aircraft, or Penn-Central, or Lockheed? He wants to be fair to the poor, but not just yet. The war on poverty is over; the poor lost. 3 It is called a ‘‘Coolidge budget’; Coolidge preached self-reliance, local solutions, de- centralization. Yes, but 50 years ago Coolidge was accessible; there was collectivized government; he did not go into solitude and invade Cambodia, or bomb Hanoi. Think of Coolidge’s cabinet! He may have been a light- weight but his Secretary of State was Charles | Footnotes by J. R. Freeman PG&W has done it again. If has broken another promise. Five or six years ago when homeowners were looking around to determine which kind of heating systems were the most economical, many were sold on the idea that it’s not only “fun living in gas country,” but according to gas company figures, it was also much cheap- er. Many of those who took advantage, of gas heat then have lived to regret the day they ever considered the barrage of ‘‘gas country” propaganda which then saturated the region. " Many of those ‘‘gas country’ consumers who believed the company line, installed new gas furnaces and appliances with the ‘“‘under- standing’’ from Pennsylvania Gas & Water Co. officials that within ‘‘a year or so’ gas mains would be extended into their areas. Meanwhile the gas utility said that it would furnish them with bottle gas (propane) at natural gas prices. Big deal. This has been going on for years, with PG&W never missing a chance to grab a new customer. - Then finally last month, it happened. The same company, which in 1969 saw 50 TERR &¥ wanted to go anywhere, your choice was be- tween a railroad train, a street car or a horse- powered vehicle. 1 did not even mention drinking water and sanitation, but improvements in all of these phases of American living came about, not through any assistance from Ralph Nader, Jack Anderson, Joe Stalin or any other enemy of American corporations. They came from American inventiveness and American labor, from the American system of liberty, and from making available to every citizen, the opportunity for him to make money if he had the brains and energy to do so. This system has brought about the estab- lishment of giant corporations, staffed by the best brains in the country and I am also con- vinced, by truly patriotic men who are con- cerned not only with the success of their own company, but with the success of the United States of America. : These corporation heads foresaw the shortages in power and heat and took steps to avert them. Since the base of it all is petro- leum, they kept on searching for it on the land and under the seas. They found it, too. On the North Slope of Alaska, there is oil and natural gas, which, if it were now available, would avert the cold houses and electrical brown- outs which threaten us today. There is also plenty of coal for the present that could be mined to produce power in sufficient quan- tity, if the environment fanatics had not pres- sured the law-givers to stop and hobble strip- mining. Furthermore, the big corporations have developed power plants which produce elec- tricity without the need for too much coal or oil. But every time plans are made to install such a plant, a group of zealots have raised their voices and screamed until the politi- cians, who understood little about the pro- blem and cared less, heeded the screams and the companies decided to try somewhere else. Meanwhile something much more signifi- cant than environment was lost forever— Time. The fanatics warned about real or imaginary dangers. The clear eyed ones warned about the loss of Time. It is now being proven that the ones who were concerned about time were right and the company haters, whatever their motives, were ywrong. I question their motives because te goer to coincide with those of internationar com- alists are conscious communists or even socialists. I mean that both classes are bent on destroying the American corporations by whatever means. The difference is that, if achieved, the Reds will be happy and the en- vironmentalists will be sorry. ‘They cannot see the forest for the trees. They will throw the baby out with the bath water. They have just seen the tip of the iceberg. CATHOLIC OR PROTESTANT! a A ay Evans Hughes; Treasury, Andrew Mellon; Attorney General, Harlan F. Stone (later a great Chief Justice, like Hughes); Com- merce, Herbert Hoover. These were national figures; compare their names with Ehrlich- man and Haldeman, with Butz and Lynn. To be sure, we make an exception of Henry Kiss- inger, the one man with a face in the White House crowd; the man who came out in his famous two hour Vietnam press conference and quietly acknowledged that it was a “‘civil war.” (The two words destroyed 12 years of lies.) Maybe Mr. Nixon is right; maybe he has the constitutional authority to ‘‘impound’’, i.e., assert an item veto over appropriations (wise or silly) voted by Congress. But if he is right (and he told his press conference it is “absolutely clear’’) then I have been living under a different form of government from what I thought. Here is what Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist, now Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote in 1969: “With re- spect to the suggestion that the President has a constitutional power to decline to spend appropriated funds, we must conclude that the existance of such a broad power is sup- ported by neither reason nor precedent.” It is true, the President has limited right by custom to impound under certain circum- stances, but not the sweeping right that the belligerent Mr. Nixon is categorically assert- ing. That edges toward one-man rule. Mr. Nixon emerged from his election triumph with a chip on his shoulder. It is interesting to study recent utterances. “You’d think I'd be elated,’’ he told Saul Pett of the AP in a moment of self-analysis. ““...But there is this letdown.” Always he must com- bat the letdown; always face new challenge. are his adversary. They. appear again and again. He told the Washington Star News, November 9, that morals have declined; “We saw a breakdown in what I would call the leadership class in this country.” They ap- peared in his Inaugural; figuratively looking back over his shoulders at critics he said, “In recent years, that (American) faith has been challenged. Our children have been taught to be ashamed of their country, ashamed of their parents, ashamed of America’s record at home, and of its role in the world.” ment of the cease-fire, January 23. “Now that we have achieved an honorable agreement,’ he said, ‘‘let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have betrayed our allies, that would have abandoned our pri- soners of war...” It seemed a little unfair to imply that critics of the war wanted to “abandon’’ POW’s, but so what; this is no new thing though the adversary has changed, he has been disparaging the motives or patrio- tism of somebody almost since we can rem- ember, Jerry Voorhis, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Truman, Adlai Stevenson—now critics of his “peace with honor”. The “so-called better people’ appeared in Mr. Nixon’s press conference, too, on Jan- uary 31. This time they were in ‘‘the media and intellectual circles.” He said proudly that, in contrast to them, the majority of Americans supported him, ‘‘despite the fact that they were hammered night after night, day after day, with the fact that this was an it immoral war, that Americans should not be there, that they should not serve their country, that morally what they should do Said Time magazine: “It was a strange Nixonian equation—suggesting @at to criticize the war was practically tike same thing as preaching desertion.” But never mind, never relax, never forget the W chal- lenge. ce He was asked innocently at the press con- ference, if he had something in mind ‘‘to help heal the wounds in this country...in terms of amnesty’’. Amnesty set him off; he gave a tough response. They ‘‘must pay their price, and the price is not a junket in the Peace Corps.” A lot of people will agree, of course. We shan’t argue the point, but certainly it is not the line Lincoln took after the Civil War, nor is it particularly conciliatory at the start of a new term. Vincent Persichetti’s ‘A Lincoln Address’ (the Second Inaugural, declaimed against a symphony orchestra) was sched- uled as a feature of the Nixon Inaugural, January 19, but it was unexpectedly cancelled and given its premiere later, in Newz York. Presumably Mr. Nixon’s protect ll staff thought Lincoln’s compassionate words would embarrass the President, for the cease- fire had not yet been announced—*‘Fondly do we hope...that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” You can’t be too careful. But there itis: Mr. Nixon is engaged in an aggressive battle with Congress three months after election while feeling persecuted by “the better people.” He has an immense majority; can he govern? percent of all gas explosions in the state with- in its territory; the same company which was indicted by a Luzerne County grand jury a year later for negligent manslaughter; the same company which upped its rates a year or so ago retroactive by almost a year; and the same company which has been giving consumers less than desired service in both gas and water services, while controlling the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission as if they were one and the same, has done it again. Last month it notified hundreds of con- sumers throughout the region that the com- pany could no longer furnish these five or six- year customers a supply of propane or bottle gas at natural gas rates. Rather, a form leter said, the consumer would have to pay perhaps twice the price, or seek some other form of energy. Flooded by protests, the PUC has de- cided that it has no jurisdiction in the matter. The PUC doesn’t regulate propane. With this in mind, PG&W continues to play down the number of customers, mostly in outlying areas, even though the company paid a kickback te the appliance dealers who sold the natural gas appliances in the first place. And of course the gas company decided to notify consumers in the middle of the winter. No one outside PG&W seems to know just how many consumers fit this category. Figures have ranged all the way from a com- pany official’s statement in Lackawanna County that only eight customers were af- fected, to perhaps a thousand or more throughout the region. The point is that PG&W, after decades of “seat-of-the-pants’’ management and general disrespect for consumers under the reign of Rulison Evans, has not shown much improve- ment under its new leader, David Hansen, who recently became president of the com- pany, the largest corporation headqudgiered in Northeastern Pennsylvania. i Meanwhile, we can only hopelessly sit and watch as other gas company promises blow up. per year. Call 675-5211 for subscriptions. ~ president; and Doris Mallin, secretary-treasurer. Mrs. T. M. B. Hicks, editor Emeritus J. R. Freeman, managing editor Doris R. Mallin, editor Dan Koze, advertising manager Sylvia Cutler, advertising sales
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