Page A4 EDITORIAL Hoagie Night Add ‘‘Hoagie Night’ and ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken Night’ to the long list of misunder- standings about what is going on at the State Correctional Institution at Dallas (SCID). Many people have the idea that SCID superin- tendent Leonard Mack is throwing parties, weekly, or perhaps even more frequently, at the institution, and they think that taxpayer dollars are being spent on hoagie and chicken orgies for ‘‘convicts’’. That idea is about as far from the truth as it can get. The Centurion chapter of the Jaycees of North- eastern Pennsylvania is run just like The Centurion chapter of the Jaycees of North- eastern Pennsylvania is run just like all the other chapters in this part of the state. It’s entire membership, however, is made up of residents of SCID. Their membership is large. They have received state and nationwide Jaycee awards for membership growth. Under their very active and interested president, Paul Yuknavich, a lifer who has been elected, mostly by non-residents, to the vice-presidency of the Northastern Pennsylvania Jaycee organ- ization, the Centurion Jaycees are a public service group. They raise money for worthy causes. They recently raised money for the Richard Norkunas Kidney Transplant Fund. They gave a total of $135 to help that Wyoming Valley resident their treasury. The other $110 was raised through the sale of Kentucky Fried Chicken dinners to residents, most of whom make only 75 cents to a dollar a day for their prison jobs (janitorial work, gardening, medical-clinic assistance, working in the mattress factory, which makes matresses for all the state’s institutions, ete. ). SCID residents paid $1.75 each for the benefit-dinner. When they hold a hoagie sale the Jaycees charge 80 cents. Residents report that the ‘‘sales’’ occur about once every two months. Another such ‘‘sale’” raised money for a guard at SCID who had to have a leg removed. ; Superintendent Mack is not holding weekl picnics. Every once a while, instead, SCID residents are spending one or two days of their earnings for a worthwhile cause. Graffiti Artists For some time now, New York City officials have been trying to find ways to combat. the growing. scribbles have become immortalized on the sides of report said that cleaning up the mess might cost as much as $24 million; officials also point out the futility of trying to catch the culprits red-handed, as it were, spray cans poised and ready in the station. But while the city fathers pine, the graffiti artists prosper. Recently a group of graffiti writers-- namely, ‘‘Co-co 144,” ‘“‘Snake 131,” “Bug 170” and other friends--retired from their thankless work and decided to join New York’s trendy art scene. Now, according to a Wall Street Journal report, they’ve organized into a group called United Graffiti Artists and have begun to put their work on Just recently the group staged a graffiti art exhibit at City University, made $600 for a per- formance on the stage of the Joffrey Ballet com- pany, sold some of their canvases for $100 apiece and appeared on six television shows. Mostly high school dropouts, the graffiti specialists are now back in school planning careers as graphic artists. “Success is important,”’ one of the artists allows. one way of looking at it. And at least that’s better than the way the artists used to spend their time--sitting in a subway station for two or three hours waiting for the car with their names on it to pass by. Sociologists and psychologists who've taken on the graffiti experts as their subjects argue that these products of New York’s slums are anonymous kids looking for fame and immortality in their work. Thus their signatures usually don’t involve obscenities or sayings; just their names followed by their street address. If all this seems a little worrisome--as it certainly does to the officials. charged with washing the colorful signatures off the subways--we don’t recommend losing any sleep over it. New York being what it is, these upstart artists will probably form a labor union with the rest of their anonymous brethren in hopes of improving their bargaining position. Then, as a test of the city’s mettle, they’ll proceed to go out on strike indefinitely. And, Mayor John Lindsay will be praised for something--as the genius who got the graffiti off the walls. : Ch ---Dottie Beckham Capitol Notes by William Ecenbarger “Drunken driving and other misconduct under the influence of alcohol must be rigidly policed by our law enforcement officials.”-- Gov. Milton J. Shapp, testifying before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, April 24, 1973. The sentiments are fine, but the facts are that under the first two years of the Shapp administration drunken driving arrests by State Police actually have declined. Last year State Police made only 2391 drunken driving arrests--a decrease of nearly 200 from the year before. More importantly. drunken driving arrests represented less than 1 percent of all traffic arrests by the troopers. And in nearly half of the cases. the tipsy driver was apprehended after an accident. These figures do not bespeak of an ‘all-out war on the drunken driver.” which is what state officials promised the public in 1968 when the so-called ‘‘implied consent’ law went into effect. Under the law. all drivers, by signing their operator’s license, agree lo take a chemical test for intoxication if asked to do so by polite. Refusal to submit to the test gives the state the right to suspend the license for six months. 3 State Police had had the testing equipment since 1961. but before the implied consent law suspected drunks could simply refuse lo take the test without penalty. The threat of the drunken driver to the gen- eral public has been documented to the point of redundancy. Study: after study has shown that at least half of all traffic deaths involve lipsy motorists. Nationwide that means 30.000 dead Americans a year and countless others maimed and crippled for life. When politicians talk about ‘‘safe streets.” they usually allude to nighttime in the city. Yel a drunken driver—anywhere, anylime—is, statistically, a more dangerous criminal that a mugger, a burglar or a rapist. TRB from Washington The hearing starts at 10. I dash out waving for a taxi, and in no time at all am buzzing up Pennsylvania Avenue (o the Watergate show. A bright day in early sum- mer. Everything safe, orderly and secure— lively traffic, fine government buildings, flags snapping, a sense of strength and power. But at 9th Street I give a little shiver. We are passing the almost finished FBI building. President Nixon in his May 22 statement tells how he proposed a new super-secret police force in June, 1970. It was never imple- mented because of ‘the opposition of Director (J. Edgar) Hoover.” The agencies ‘‘were no- tified five days later,” he says, that the plan. was off. The FBI chief vetoed the President. What Mr. Nixon wanted to restore with the help of the FBI, in his words, were certain “options” that had been dropped in 1966, op- tions that “‘included authorization for surrep- titious entry—breaking and entering, in ef- fect...’ Mr. Nixon continues matter-of-factly that “in July 1970, having earlier discontinued the FBI's liaison with the CIA, Director Hoover ended the FBI's normal liaison with all other agencies except the White House.” Why Mr. Hoover didn’t want to burglarize is unclear; he had done it plenty in the past but dropped it on orders of attorneys general Kalzenbach and Ramsey Clark. One report says that J. Edgar wouldn't break the law without written authorization from Mr. Nixon and that the palace guard feared this might be used for blackmail. Correct or not, Mr. Nixon's impersonal statement reveals an extraordinary condition of disorganization behind the scenes. What he seems to be | Rustlings by Russ Williams As I type this I can see little red scratches dotting my hands. I have recently acquired a roommate. A kitten. The kitten’s name is Cliff. Its godmother told me that it’s a boy and I've taken her word for it. He's a furry paradox. He looks like a little hunk of fluff, but he’s tough as nails. He's continually frightening me by falling from 10 and 20 times his height. He just shakes his head. as if some minor irritation. perhaps a tickle in his ear. had bothered him ; them climbs to twice the height and falls again. He’s always standing right behind you when you least expect it, so thal when you turn around your first step sends him rolling across the floor. I think my record is 8 feel 6 inches. Bul he just stands up, shakes himself so hard he falls down again, and then forgets anything happened. You almost can’t hurt him. I think he’s so tough because he is the only survivor of three premature kittens. He had to compete with two others for milk from a mother whose body wasn’t ready for kittens. For the first few weeks he was the ugliest thing I've ever seen. Now I think he’s one of the cutest. The little hippy already has prelty long hair. I found out how long the other day when he fell into a full bath tub of water. When I take my bath he comes into the bathroom. climbs onto the baseboard radiation cover and then pulls himself onto the top edge of the tub. Recently he decided to come in with me. I never realized how skinny he was. The fur had me fooled. I was now even more amazed at his ruggedness; I also began feed- ing him more frequently. With his hair wetted down close to his skin he looked like somebody else’s something-or- ) State and local police complain, that they are reluctant to make drunken driving ar- rests because judges are too lenient with the offenders. Judges complain that police come to drunken driving trials ill-prepared, forcing dismissals. Everyone, it seems, has an ex- cuse. Legislation is before the state Senate that 3 ing roadside intoxication tests to determine if suspected drunks should be taken in for a more sophisticated examination. But slate traffic safety officials were less than enthus- iastic last month at a public hearing on the bill. What is lacking here is a resolve on the part of public officials. Police, prosecutors. judges and bureaucrats must begin behaving as though a drunken driver is a potential mur- derer—and one of the worst kind. at that, be- cause he is indiscriminate about his victims. The impetus for change must come from Harrisburg. There are a lot of thigss state governmenl can do to improve lifc¥n Penn- sylvania. Being soft on drunken drivers isn't °% — — en Sas PERSONALLY! saying is that the FBI had become a sover- eignity, one that outwaited attorneys general and vetoed Presidents. The huge new FBI building is built like a fortress and fills a block. It is planted right there on the Avenue. Lalest cost estimates are over $100 million. Its 11 stories towers above the parent Justice Department’s seven, Its excavations are three stories deep. There are miles of corridors for citizens’ dossiers. Only the Pentagon and Rayburn building ex- ceed its space; it is the most expensive build- ing ever erected in Washington, I give a little shiver; I can’t help it. Mr: Nixon wasn’t happy with the CIA and the FBI. What he wanted was something small and cozy, so he says, he created the “Special Investigations Unit within the White House—which later came to be known as the ‘the plumbers.” It appears to have been a bunch of Private Eyes doing bugging and bur- Under Hoover's temporary successor, Patrick Gray, Mr. Nixon ordered the FBI to investigale Walergalte and then told his palace guard to restrain the investigation so as not to expose the plumbers, and not to ex- pose a supposed (and non-existent) role which the CIA played in laundering (hiding the iden- tity) of campaign funds from Mexico. It’s all pretty complicated and maybe you under- stand it better than I do. Certainly Patrick Gray didn’t understand it, or Vernon Walters, deputy director of the CIA. They warned the President that somebody in the White House was betraying him. ‘I should have given more heed to the warning signals,” says Mr. Nixon in retrospect. New York Times correspondent Seymour Hersh quotes a former high-ranking FBI offi- cial as saying, ‘‘We’d been doing burglaries for years. We did them regularly-as a matter of policy.” Ramsey Clark put a stop to it in 1966 and J. Edgar Hoover later called Clark a “jellyfish,” a *‘softie,”’. The former attorney general mildly replied, ‘‘He’s entitled to his opinion; he never said it while I was there.” There will always be national security threats and one wonders what the future rela- tions of the White House and this huge new FBI building will be. The FBI passed along confidential information on anti-war, and other, groups to the Committee to Re-elect the : President. Confidential FBI files on its Watergate inquiry went to the White House aides. In the Berrigan case the FBI let a paid stool pigeon out of jail day by day to help build a case against seven defendants and en- courage them in a fantasy to bomb heating tunnels in Washington and kidnap Henry ‘Kissinger. In the Camden case the FBI used an agent provacaleur, not to prevent a raid on adraft board but to make sure that it was car- ried out. He provided tools and skill without which the amateurs couldn’t have performed. They committed a crime, all right, but the judge told the jury that if they found the government’s own actions were ‘‘offensive to the basic standards of decency and shocking to the universal sense of justice’ they could let the defendants go. The jury let them go. The government, not the anti-war protestors, was on (rial. The government's lawless ac- tivities in the Ellsberg case brought an ac- quittal in California, 100. It would be too simple to make this just an attack on the FBI. After all, it is a highly {rained, elite group. with a tradition and fine morale (if Mr. Nixon hasn't ruined it) and to do. But the FBI is an arm of the White House. Its present annual budget is a third of a billion. How will it be used in the future, not just tomorrow bul 50 or 100 years hence? Future clashes in diverse America are certain, belween rival groups, between rich and poor, between majorities and minorities. between those who. order wars and the young imen‘who must fight the wars; between people and between people who love th&7: eounlry and want to keep it the way it is. There has always been (wifi ence in America though each generation™ihinks its own kind unique: draft riots in the Civil War, Molly Maguires, the anarchists, the steel mutlineers against the 12-hour day, the racial violence that burns just underground now. The majority of people generally oppose dis- senlers; all men want liberty but most will trade off a good chunk of it for order. Where will the FBI be? Will this elite police that Mr. Nixon tried.to warp, remain neutral? The taxi moves ahead with the traffic light. For the first time a kind of downtown civilian Pentegon is planted on the Capital's broadest avenue, where parades pass and In- augurals roll. He dominated it for 40 years. It ig here a long time. Te other. I was sure the experience would mean I would be taking baths alone from then on. He’s fallen in one more time since then. This time he shook himself off and climbed right back up. It’s not that he likes water, but 1 think he’s afraid I'll get lonely. And whoever pul his tail on, placed it about a half an inch right of center looking from the rear. When I got him, I promised myself that I would be a perfect cat-parent. I would let him do anything. 1 would never hit him. I didn’t wan! to stand in the way of his naturally free and wild nature. I was being idealistic. I find myself “standing in the way” of thal nature a lot. When he began trying to claw a little scratch-path up my new suede arm chair, for instance, I stood in the way. I even hit. Nothing works. He doesn’t get the message. \ This little ball of fur will run at the chair, jump about halfway up to the seat and dig in with four razor sharp claws. He then scrat- ches his way up to the seat. (I'm up by now.) As 1 come toward him, he scurries across the seal toward the back. By the time I've gotten hold of the devil, he's already made his way to the top of the chair, after having inflicted the same kind of torture to its back that he had doled out on his way lo the seal. I pick him up, look him right in the eye, and tell him what I think of the whole pro- cedure. If it’s the third or fourth time he’s done it, I'll also give him a couple of discom- forting taps to the nose. then let him down. Before he’s even reached the floor his tiny legs are pumping furiously. He’s gelling ready as soon as he touches the ground, to re- peat the whole thing. When he’s in thal mood all you can do is try to distract him, or shut him in a room where he can do less harm. When he starts fighting with my philoder:- nd dron. which I'm rather fond of too, I have to put aside those idealistic, perfect-parent thoughts again. I can’t help myself. I know the plant is a good deal bigger than Cliff, but it still doesn’t seem like a fair fight to me. A Tol of people, dog-lovers especially. like to compare cats to dogs. “You can’t gel the love and devotion from a cat that you can from a dog.” they argue. Cats and dogs should not be compared. A cal is a cal, and a dog is a dog. (You're a gen- ius, Russ.) What I mean is if you aren't ready to accep! cats and their ‘ways’, don’t get one. Cats do love. They show it when they are kittens by biting and scratching the heck out of you. When they’re older they show it by leaving you alone. 4 Dogs are great. Bul if you're looking for someone you can just, sort of co-exist with. if you're not really ready for an all-out. all-con- suming. canine relationship, and all the heartaches and jealousies that can come with that kind of involvement, gel a cat. The first night I had Cliff he was only a month old and had been separated for the first time from his mother. I knew I had to show him a lot of love to get him through this poten- tially traumatic experience. I did it by sleep- ing (really mostly just lying there with the lights out) with my hand hanging over the side of the bed. with my forefinger pointed straight down. Cliff returned the gesture by positioning himself on his back, so that he could scratch the finger with all four paws full of needle-like claws, while biting it with a mouth full of needle-like teeth. He expressed his love in this way for a long lime, until the effort finally made him sleepy. When he gets bigger I'll miss his crazy antics, but I'm looking forward to ‘‘co-exist- ing’’ with him. His teeth and claws will be- come duller, and he won’t always.be attack- ing everything that moves, ail almost always a part of me. ni I'm looking forward to the day when I can sit and appreciate the graceful way he walks. To the day when he'll be able to get onto that suede chair by making a fluid. non-damaging. easy-going leap. 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 frome
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers