STRAPS i We’ll Remember We knew that George Thomas, chairman of the Dallas Borough Council, would be moving one day in the future. But we were caught by surprise, at this past Tuesday’s council meeting when George turned his gavel over to councilman Jerry Machell. The future had caught up with the present. George announced that he would soon be moving and resigned his post. We know he did so reluct- antly. We didn’t always agree with every stand George what he believed was best for the borough and its residents. We'll remember the way he kept borough meetings running smoothly. How he could put a quick stop to the redundancies that turn council meetings of some communities into circuses. We'll remember his concern that the youth of the borough have a place to play. And his recent hope that they will soon have a decent gathering spot for summer evenings. We'll remember this and much more, but most of Equal Rights Day Sunday was Equal Rights Day in the state and the nation. The day marked the 53rd anniversary of women’s suffrage, and the occasion was observed with nationwide demonstrations spearheaded by those threats to home and hearth, the ‘women’s “Women’s liberation’’ women, chained to their sinks and stoves with While we concede that the stereotype does exist, we maintain that for the so-called ‘average’ house- frau, life has never been easier. Today’s middle class homemaker has conveniences her mother never dreamed of. Dishwashers, garbage dispo- sals, automatic laundry equipment, electric brooms, electric knife sharpeners—not to mention the thousands of pre-prepared foods which make cooking dinner a simple trip from the freezer to the oven. These attempts to make Mrs. America’s life eas- ier have backfired, however. They have given the housewife more leisure time than ever before, time about personal dignity, staying home, and family significance and proportion of which few Ameri- cans are able to comprehend. It is complicated by the fact that more American women than ever be- fore have college and professional backgrounds. Are they to use their specialized skills, their intel- lectual ability, in the kitchen? If a woman opts for a career in business, should she not be treated as her male co-worker’s equal? And if she chooses the de- manding role of wife and mother, does she not de- serve the same respect and the same dignified treatment which her husband receives in the busi- ness world? The answers to these questions seem obvious, yet despite federal and state laws which make sex discrimination in the job market illegal, the discrimination exists and it is difficult to fight. the media to the point that the word ‘‘housewife’’ suggests a dimwitted if well-meaning soul who - The so-called ‘radicals’ of the ‘‘movement’’ may offend some, but they are important in the scheme of things. They are the lobbyists, the doers. They are the outward manifestations of the identity crisis; they are attempting to interpret it, to tell the American woman not only who she is, but also who she can be. The wrongs are many, and it has taken more than half a century to make the strides that have been made; but the notion of male suprem- acy, that a woman must stand in her husband’s shadow in order to achieve fulfillment, will even- Capitol Notes by William Ecenbarger This is the centennial year of the Pennsyl- vania Constitution, but there’s no cause for celebration. There just aren’t many nice things to say about it. The truthis that the Pennsylvania Consti- tution is everything that a constitution ought not to be—cluttered with obsolete ideas and contradictory statements, redundant, wordy, unduly restrictive, badly written and illogi- cally arranged. Some perspective can be gained by a quick comparison with the sturdy federal Constitution, which has 6700 words and has been amended only 26 times in 184 years. The Pennsylvania document runs nearly 20,000 words and has been amended 82'times since 1873—inclyding a wholesale revision of four articles by a convention five years ago. But for all this patchwork, the state Constitution remains a very leaky vessel. Take Article II, Section 13, which looks like a watereddown version of a well-meaning attempt to open the legislative process to pub- lic scrutiny: ‘‘The sessions of each House shall be open, unless when the business is such as ought to be kept secret.” Or consider the requirement that all bills be read at length for three days before being passed by the House and Senate. This is a practical impossibility, and thus it is simply ignored. Anyone who merely advocates gun con- trols automatically runs afoul of Article I, Section 21, which states without equivocation that ‘‘the right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves shall not be questioned.” In a more serious vein, the Constitution now bars a graduated income tax, the use of highway funds to finance mass transit projects and perhaps even a no-fault auto- mobile insurance program. One of the secrets of the Constitution’s longevity is that there are small groups of people happy with these restrictions—and collectively they are able to block any at- tempt at thorough constitutional reform. The most serious attempt at reform was the 1967-68 Constitutional Convention—and that was agreed to by the Legislature only after severe restrictions were placed on the delegates. The main no-no’s were the sections | TRB from Washington My grandfather is the last one to the right on the top row, looking benevolent in full beard.He was president of the Newmarket (NH) bank, 1900-1907, where photographs of past presidents ares displayed. They look respectable enough though thie display faintly resembled a’ police line-up. # %# wf % He used to drive over to Portsmouth with dressed chickens ‘at Thanksgiving (a half day’s journey); and some nights he would sign the bank’s $5 bills, which required the president’s signature, on the red gingham cloth of the kitchen table while Grammie pumped water, and did dishes and threw out scraps to chickens. They lived in the story- and-ahalf, green-and-white, picturebook farm house which is first on the left after the South Lee depot. Susie was the second of eight children and told me about it. Bank presi- dents, she said, were different in those days. I have been on a sentimental journey. It began badly. I spent vacation toting a heavy radio from living room to front porch listen- ing in shock to Haldeman and Ehrlichman when I ought to have been swimming. Why does a Washington reporter take a vacation, anyway? But I got back finally from New York state (John DeBiase, managing editor of the lively Oneonta Star, told me the heavily Republican farmer reader asks wonderingly why the President doesn’t release the tapes, while the college people are 100 percent op- posed) back to South Lee, N.H., where the Langs lived. There is a family graveyard over in one corner of the old Lang farm and the Langs are Rustlings by Russ Williams Every once in a while it hits me. How big the universe is. How small I am in compari- THING we live in is bigger than can be imagined by this mere mortal. I looked up all the meaninglessly huge figures. First I tried to imagine how many of me it would take, laid end to end, to go around the 24,894 mile circumference of the Earth at the equator. That made me feel humble enough, but I was just getting warmed up. After that I went straight to looking up light years. That's what they measure the stuff that’s farther away than Williamsport, Denver or the Sun (a mere 93 million miles away). love to think about light years when I think I need a little humbling. A light year is the measure of how far light, under ideal conditions (in a vacuum), will travel in one year. Well, consider that you should start with the fact that light has been clocked at 186,281 miles per second. In one second it could almost make eight laps around the circumference of the Earth at the equator. Now to get to a light year I have to imagine that great distance (Imagine how many of me, laid end to end it would take to go around the Earth eight times! ), and multiply it, first, by 60. for the number of seconds in a minute. Now I have to try to picture this huge distance and then imagine adding 59 more of the same size to it, end to end. That’s for 60 there, father and son, back to the lichened stone with the DAR Revolutionary War flag. You can trace out who married whom, and wonder about them. Susie told me a lot about them. George and she are buried there and after: 98 years, she is looking out across the pasture to the house where she was born, Coming back to South Lee, my car purred casually up the breath-taking Mohawk Trail, but one time I traveled the route the other way in a Model T. Susie and George and my brother were along, and I pretended I knew what I was doing, but all the time wondering if the oil would reach the vulnerable No. 1 pearing in front which missed lubrication on hills under what was cosily described as the “splash system.” 1 got to thinking about it oddly enough, as I stopped at the final Howard Johnson rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike, (‘‘Food, Gas, Service’) after buzzing along at 70 on the eight-lane, divided highway (‘‘Mimimum speed: 40 miles”). I ate my hot dog on a mound above where the interstate highway trucks park. If they pass you on the road the shuddering suction shakes you. You imagine drivers are eight feet tall, with permanent snarls. But here in jeans they look quite human. A monster trailer-truck inches in below me, but the alignment doesn’t suit the driver, a perfectionist, who backs the huge trailer into the precise geometric angle and comes for- ward again as gracefully as a canoe. He gets out and kicks all 14 tires. The sign says “Broadway Poultry Farm - Concord, N.H.” forbidding the graduated income tax and use of highway trust funds for anything but high- ways. : Some convention delegates toyed with the idea of ignoring the restrictions and declaring themselves a constituent body of the people, free to act as it wished—a tactic that touched off a revolution in France two centuries ago. Unfortunately, cooler heads prevailed. And thus Pennsylvania is about to em- and he is piled mountain high with empty chicken crates. I calculate 463 crates, and he says proudly there were 5600 chickens; Grandpa Lang going to Portsmouth behind Old Zeno wouldn’t have believed it. The Model T, I guess, was half way in between the two worlds. It all came back as I sat there, listening to the roar of the turnpike traffic that I would shortly rejoin. You learned to drive a Model T mostly by yourself, though the dealer kindly drove you home the first time. There it was in the yard, seven feet tall with the top up, black and spanking new, and costing $350, and as in- nocent of equipment as a newborn baby. It had no temperature gauge, no oil gauge, no fuel gauge, no speedometer, no shock absorber, no rearview mirror, no heater, no wheel rims, no windshield wiper. Did I say self-starter? It had none. In short, folks, it was a beauty. There were millions on the road, and each one had a private personality. Ours we called “Southard” after an amiable family connection. It got a fresh coat of black enamel every spring and the engine block was removed to scrape out the carbon. Every owner knew how to do that. As to what really made it run nobody, I think, ever figured it out. There was a thing called a coil box under the dash which you could take out and shake, if the timing was wrong; or you could drop a camphor ball into the gasoline tank. Some people thought that was a good idea. It was from forward into reverse with no apparent mechanical hardship. bark on a second century under the Constitu- tion of 1873. There is not even talk thes dg¥s of wholesale revision, but the usual ple(®®:a of individual amendments has been dropped in the legislative hopper. Far from improving the situation, most of these proposals would merely make the Constitution more prolific, more redundant, more inconsistent and more disorganized. There we were, starting across New England in that never-never land of long ago, the four of us perched high, with top down, the extensible rack on the left running board holding baggage planned for months; We flew "blind, with no road maps, no rout ®iumbers (save occasional lettered blazes on telephone poles) and no fuel estimate saye dumb reckoning. 7 Yes, I remember; we drove up to the filling station where the owner sold three or four competitive brands and advertised “Free Air”’. We lifted the front seat and unscrewed the cap, of the tank, and inserted the wooden dip stick that looked like a yard ruler. (Stores gave them away free.) The wetness told you the fuel supply. My family watched admiringly as I casually gave the crank a couple of half turns, pulling out the looped end of the choke wire to prime it. Then I went back to the dash to switch on the ignition. Back again in front, this time giving the crank a real whirl; the engine exploded and the car pulsated at the thought of the waiting road. Watch out for street-car tracks that trap the 30X3 1» tires! Watch out for ss that requires the tire patching kit! Watts out for night signs to Albany where you must race the engine for light to read them. Dear me, I must have dropped off! The big chicken truck from Concord is moving out. He is waving. Off again into the zooming traffic. Off again to Washington, to San Clemente, to Watergate. that I’m having a little trouble coping with. Especially because I'm already trying to imagine 23 more of the same size laid end to end after it. Right, I've got to multiply times 24 hours in the day. The problem is that I've got a distance so huge by now that its beyond my thinking. I've spent all of my life on that little atom called Earth...how can I think about such big things? / But that big thing has to be multiplied by 365...364 more of the same size have to be laid end to end after the first thing that is so big I can’t imagine how big...before I have a light year. : i The nearest star to our own star ‘the Sun’ is four and one half of those ‘light years” away. The radius of the observable universe has been estimated to be 10 billion light years away. Remember that they said radius, the distance from here to any observable ‘‘edge”’ The diameter is twice that distance; the three-dimensional space within that radius all around, above, and below us would make quite a measurement. And remember also that that’s the observable distance. Who knows what else is out there. Where it ends. If it ends. Ten billion light years away. I'd have quite a time trying to picture that. I'd have to take a distance I can’t imagine (how far light can travel in a year) times a number I can’t JHE BR SR Another way to think about it is to think of third-rate star, the Sun, and to consider that the nearest star of the Sun is four and one half light vears awav. I can make myself feel much smaller than the almost non-existent that that consideration leaves me, by admitt- ing that the scientists know what they are talking about when they estimate that the average gallaxy contains a thousand billion stars each. (How many ity-bity planets, I wonder?) That nearby-neighbor star four and one half light years away) is the closest of about a thousand billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And the scientists. tell us that our beloved Milky Way is just one galaxy like an There. Now that I've gone about it two I therefore am smaller than Wrong. The figures sonce dh the 5 un- Which leaves me somewhere in the middle This is what I do everytime I think about it. Until the next time. 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 1 x # EA | ee mmm an at ps1 at paca] PERN aa ASS SN EN gs
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers