The Kokomo Tribune from Kokomo, Indiana • Page 19

18 Kokomo (Ind.) Tribune Saturday, Mar. 1, 1980 'Damn the State is bitter epitaph on grave space HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) The gravemarker is simple enough to look at. But the space it marks contains no grave, and the epitaph is bitter: "Jerry Bibb Balisok. Born Sept.

8, 1955. Murdered in Guyana Nov. 18, 1978. Buried in Oakland, May, 1979. Damn the State Dept." Balisok's body is not here.

Indeed, he may not even be dead. But his mother, Marjorle Balisok, is convinced her son, his wife and his step-child died in the horror of the Peoples Temple mass murder-suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, and she ordered the tombstone placed in the family plot. Mrs. Balisok, a widow and a retired hospital worker, is obsessed by a Life magazine photograph of some of the more than 900 bodies at Jonestown. She believes the photo, which appeared two months after the atrocity, shows her son's body lying next to that of his wife Debbie, and her 5-year-old son, James Kindred.

"I have tried in every way to have my son's body returned to me for burial," she said. "I have insurance policies of all kinds that I cannot cash in until I have a death certificate or a certificate of presumed death." FBI agent Dick Marx of Huntsville is searching for Balisok for other reasons. Balisok was indicted three years ago by a federal grand jury in Birmingham on a charge of writing bad checks. He never stood trial and left town two weeks before he was indicted. A federal warrant charges him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

"I'd like to catch this one," Marx said. Mrs. Balisok is well-known among officials connected to the State Department's Jonestown Task Force. Col. William Cowan, a military pathologist who examined the bodies, said none was "anywhere close" to being Balisok.

Cowan said that Mrs.Balisok apparently cannot be convinced of that. Another Task Force official, Reid Clark, said dental X-rays were taken of all of the bodies at Jonestown. He said he also had the Life photo enlarged 40 times. "I defy anyone to say that's him (Balisok)." Added Clark: "You'd think she'd be thanking us instead of damning us." Mrs. Balisok said she sent the Task Force an X-ray of her son's hip as well as his dental charts.

A steel pin had been placed in one hip to repair an injury from a motor- cyle accident, and Mrs. Balisok tried in vain to get officials to perform complete X-rays on the bodies. Clark said many of the bodies were too decomposed to permit such an extensive undertaking. Last spring, 248 unidentified bodies of cult members were buried in Evergreen Cemetery at Oakland, Calif. At least 20 were adults, and Mrs.

Balisok believes Jerry's and Debbie's were among them. Sen. Howell Heflin, wrote to Mrs. Bali)ok about her son's dis appearance: "Apparently, the State Department and the FBI have investigated your son's case and these agencies are thoroughly con- vinced that your son never left the United States," "That's all they know nothing," said Mrs. Balisok.

She said her son telephoned his lawyer from San Juan, Puerto Rico, a year before the Jonestown incident. She said she found out Jerry and his family had been in the Bahamas when she got an American Express bill for almost $10,000 worth of goods and services her son had charged on her card. "He was a rotten kid," said American Express Investigator J. Barron Daniel of Atlanta. Daniel said Balisok disappeared about September 1978, after making the charges in the Bahamas.

Before then, Daniel said, he made "a lot of charges at motels and hotels in Miami." Balisok's attorney, Charles King of Huntsville, said, "For me not to hear from him in any way for this length of time is unusual. He may be in prison in a foreign country, Something has happened to him." Mrs. Balisok, who also has one older son, said she last saw Jerry in late 1977, She said his troubles stemmed from a time of illness in 1975, when he was severely sunburned during a motorcycle race in Tennessee. He suffered high fevers for weeks after the race and was eventually hospitalized, she said. He never returned to freshman classes at Alabama University.

She said she believes he went to Guyana because "there weren't only cultists there, but fugitives, too." Then, shaking her head over Jerry, she added, "he wasn't much of a person, but he was my son." Marjorie Balisok places flowers on tombstone for her son (AP photo) Sperm bank renews questions about genetic engineering LOS ANGELES (AP) Disclosure of an exclusive sperm bank that offers the sperm of Nobel Prize winners to carefully selected women has rekindled the scientific and moral controversy sparked by genetic engineering movements before World War II. Robert K. Graham, a 74-year-old retired Escondido businessman, said he set up the sperm bank probably the world's most exclusive to produce exceptionally bright children. But some scientists questioned Friday were skeptical of Graham's methods. "I think there are such serious problems in this kind of social manipulation that (there are) serious dangers involved," said Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, genetics professor at Stanford University.

"Naive enthusiasm (in this area) has very often in the past caused some major tragedies." He said even the best of humans carry some bad genes and legal problems are possible if an offspring of the program "turns out to be mentally deficient, which is entirely possible." Graham said at least five Nobel laureates donated sperm to be used to artificially inseminate women, preferably those with infertile husbands. don't want a whole flock of ordinary women," Graham said. Graham said there is no payment for donors nor charge tO'recipients. He said about two dozen women have contacted his Repository for Germinal Choice. Three, all on the East Coast, have become pregnant, he said.

"The principles of this may not be popular," Graham said Thursday, "but they are sound. We're trying to take advantage of the possibilities of genetics." "So far, we have refused to apply to humans what we already know and apply to animals and plants," he said. "It's crazy. I just don't know what to say about it," said Princeton University psychologist Leo J. Kamin, author of "The Science and Politics of IQ." Some scientists, and others, question whether selective breeding will guarantee smarter or better humans.

One acknowledged donor to Graham's program is Stanford University's William B. Schockley, 70, winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics. Shockley has long held that intelligence is based on genes and that some races are gentically inferior to others. "I welcome this opportunity to be identified with this important cause," Shockley said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. "I am endorsing Graham's concept of increasing the people at the top of the population." Cavalli-Sforza said, "It's just' another episode in the eugenics movement." The movement, proposed late in the 19th century and embraced by many scientists and government officials, was designed improve humanity, or individual races, by encouraging procreation by those deemed most desirable and discouraging those judged deficient from having children.

Recent revelations that Virginia state hospitals had sterilized thousands of "misfits" the retarded, petty thieves and prostitutes grew out of laws passed in many states during the 1920s, when eugenics was popular. The Virginia law, still on the books, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The movement fell into disfavor when Adolf Hitler used it to justify the Holocaust which exterminated millions of Jews, gypsies, mentally retarded citizens and others. "People backed off when they saw what happened in Nazi Germany," said Princeton's Kamin.

"I think it's coming back now." Kamin also said, "The evidence is extremely weak at best" that genes are the only or primary determinant of intelligence, a question that's still being hotly debated in scientific circles. Kamin contends environment and other factors have a major role. Cavalli-Sforza said, "Even if it's scientifically valid, in the past (similar projects) inevitably have failed." He also contends the average offspring of Graham's program is likely to be only slightly brighter than the average American "The increase is going to be minimal. Any good environmental program (to enhance home life and education) is going to be more effective." Snuff may be answer for cigarette addicts Seeking Howdy Doody earmuffs? Just ask Jim Tice, professional finder WICHITA, Kan. (AP) Where can you find a pair of Howdy Doody earmuffs? A recording of hump- back whales at play? A hundred thousand ladybugs? Ask Jim Tice, professional finder.

Jim Tice takes close look at latest find He's found those items and 1,000 other elusive treasures in nine years of hunting. Ten to 20 letters arrive at Tice's office each week from as far away as Hong Kong, Ireland and Australia. They seek Tice's help in finding everything from fat fadies to scarce construction materials. Tice, 43, who works full-time as a communications consultant, takes on only five new searches a week. The more intriguing the challenge, the more likely Tice will accept it.

He began by finding hard-to-locate items for friends. The avocation grew into a part-time business he calls Finders Keepers Worldwide Search Service. Tice declined to reveal his total income from his search service, but he said it 'accounts for about half of his total income. "There's a knack for taking the most narrow path to the item you're looking for," Tice says. "You can tread water a long time and waste a lot of money if you don't know how to approach the search." He attributes his success to a network of contacts and his persistence.

"Sometimes I'll write 20 letters in search of an item," he says. "Out of that I might get one good lead. The secret is to keep plugging away." He found the Howdy Doody earmuffs at a traveling antique show. Sounds of cavorting whales he tracked down through a whale preservation society and contacts in the recording industry. For the ladybugs, which a firm' needed for a large landscaping project, he located a ladybug brecd- ing farm.

These days Tice is on the track of three antique Tiffany postal scales. The man who wants them already has six of the nine in existence. Tice also is looking for a gas-fired store model coffee roaster, antique ice-fishing decoys, words and music to "Methodist Pie, Sugar in the Gourd," and a pre-1890 wooden water tower. A film studio once asked him to find a fat lady willing to do a nude dance on a trampoline for a film on the study of motion. Tice contacted (AP photo) acquaintances in the entertainment field and rounded up three women willing to do the part.

Tice first realized he could turn his knack into a business nine years ago while Jiving in Oklahoma. An Oklahoma City oil executive who had heard of Tice's ability asked him to find a particular clock that gave the hour in cities around the world. The executive had promised the clock as a Christmas gift, and he contacted Tice on Christmas Eve. Tice tracked down a distributor in Tulsa who had one of the clocks in an attic storeroom, and Tice arranged for a courier. The next day Tice told his wife: "There's got to be a place in the business world for a guy who does this." Finders Keepers was born.

Tice does most of his work out of his home. His wife, Lynda, and their three teen-age children help. He keeps track of ongoing searches in three books. One includes requests for information on such things as the origin of an item. He charges $15 for that.

The second book is for one-of-a- kind items that "I'm constantly on the lookout for." For a $35 retainer fee, Tice keeps the item listed in his book for a year. If he finds it, he collects an additional fee of 10 percent of the item's value. Tice's most important book includes items he has agreed to find quickly. Such a search runs $85, plus the 10 percent finders fee when the item is located. The demand for finders services has increased dramatically in the past year, Tice says.

"Human beings have always accumulated things," Tice says. "The reward used to be the accomplishment of collecting now there's monetary value in collectibles." But some misunderstand Tice's service. One woman asked him to find a purse she lost in Cincinnati. Others have asked him to find missing persons. Tice was intrigued, but said no to a man looking for the family fortune he said his mother had buried on the 40-acre family farm.

"That man needed a treasure hunter," Tice says, "not a finder." LONDON (AP) medical research reported here Friday shows that snuff the rage among 18th century gentlemen of fashion is a "satisfying and less harmful" substitute for cigarettes. What makes the scented tobacco powder even more attractive is that smokers can switch to snuff "relatively easily" since it provides cigarette addicts with the same surge of nicotine to the blood. "Switching from cigarettes to snuff could have enormous health benefits," said a trio of addiction and poison specialists from the London Institute of Psychiatry and New Cross Hospital here. "Snuff could save more lives and avoid more ill-health than any other preventive measure likely to be available to developed nations well into the 21st century," they concluded. The study of nicotine absorption among cigarette, cigar and snuff users appeared in The Lancet, Britain's noted medical journal.

The Times of London the newspaper most read by the upper crust of British society which used to take wrote that the doctors' recommendation was "not to be sneezed at." The taking of snuff was considered an elegant custom among members of the upper class starting in the 15th century, when it was introduced to European explorers by American Indians. In the 18th century, the English almost completely abandoned the smoking habit in favor of the more trendy snuff. Today, the snuff industry is thoroughly British, with a dozen small firms supplying most of the world's sniffers. When the first health warnings appeared more than a dozen years ago, the snuff- men expected a rush on their nose- tickling blends. It was not to be.

The demand for snuff has stayed rather small, and British snuff production has not expanded beyond its 165 tons a year. In America, the taking of stuff is virtually a dead art form, with most tobacco lovers preferring to smoke or chew it. British government health authorities have not given snuff their seal of approval. But after the Lancet article, a Health Department spokesman said his agency may "re-evaluate" its positive side. The London researchers found that snuff is even better than cigars for smokers who want to give up the cigarette habit.

Smoking a cigar without inhaling injects nicotine into the blood stream at only a slow pace, they found, while "by contrast, the absorption from a single pinch of snuff was extremely rapid." Because the nicotine is absorbed too slowly, many cigar and pipe puffers inhale to speed it up, which defeats any health advantage from the cigarette substitutes, the doctors found. It is nicotine that is behind an addict's craving absorbed through the lungs in cigarette smoking, through the buccal mucosa in tobacco chewing and through the nasal mucosa in snuffing. Snuff has several advantages over cigarettes, the researchers said: it inserts no harmful by-product into the user's body like tar, carbon monoxide or oxides of nitrogen, and it cannot be inhaled into the lungs, eliminating the risk of smoking-related cancer, bronchitis and possibly heart disease. "In addition to its capacity to deliver nicotine, snuff could provide many 1 other components of the smoking habit, such as a variety of aromas, attractive packaging and intricate sensorimotor rituals which add to the pleasure and social aspects of the habit," the doctors added. Nor does snuff contaminate the atmosphere for non-users.

But snuff is not without some side-effects, and researchers admitted "some problems could arise from continued absorption of nicotine and local nasal irritation in heavy users." 2 injured in fire at Logan Airport BOSTON (AP) Fire broke out in a storage room at the Eastern Airlines terminal on Friday, filling the terminal with smoke, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of travelers, and injuring two people. The midmorning fire was brought under control quickly, but one section of the terminal was closed to passengers for several hours, forcing some flight delays. Firefighter Cornelius M. Keane, 33, of Boston, was listed in stable condition at Boston City Hospital, suffering from smoke inhalation and back injuries. An Eastern employee was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation and cuts, according to Massport spokeswoman Jo Ryan.

The employee, identified by the hospital as Francis Nigro of Revere, was released after treatment. "Everyone filed out orderly, just like we asked them to," said State Trooper Ronald Comeaux of the evacuation of a section of the Eastern terminal. Comeaux estimated 300 to 350 persons were evacuated from one part of the terminal. Airline officials said the fire started inside a room under the reservations area. Damage was confined to the room, which is used to store empty cartons.

Spokesmen for the Massachusetts Port Authority, which operates the airport, said they had no estimate of damage. The cause of the fire was under investigation..