The Morning News from Wilmington, Delaware • Page 14

A14 Wilmington, Del. Wednesday, July 10, 1985 The News-Journal papers Gannett newspapers Brian Donnelly, President and Publisher John H. Taylor Editorial Page Editor John R. Jurden, Editorial Cartoonist Susanna P. Cortv and Joseph J.

Hanson, Editorial Writers Mary M. Baker, Editorial Assistant Superfund may do a lot, but keep its limits in mind TYBOUTS Corner does say it all The nation forgot a fact the military knows full well: Fatigue goes on forever. If someone eats, someone must wash dishes. If an area is used, someone must police it. The nation has thousands of areas which were used but never policed.

Tybouts Corner is one sort. We know they should be policed but can't agree on how to pay for it. Tybouts Corner was used for a perceived necessary purpose. New Castle County operated a landfill there. Landfills, or alternatives, are needed if people including those around Tybouts Corner are to enjoy life in an industrial society, with the waste generation it entails.

But, after substances collected at such a site imperil people, particularly water supply, you must do the fatigue. The federal Environmental Protection Agency, having rated the site as one of the country's most hazardous, is suing the county and pursuing methods to do the job. As reporter Nancy Kesler describes options consultants presented to the EPA, the cost of this one cleanup could be from about $21 million to contain the pollutants to about $370 million to incinerate them. The EPA has listed 20,000 suspected hazardous waste sites in the nation. To clean them up, Superfund was granted $1.6 billion.

It must be renewed before October. Each of two bills in the House to reauthorize Superfund would boost it to $10.1 billion. (A Senate version would provide only $7.5 billion. The Reagan administration has proposed only $5.3 billion). There is no idea that 20,000 sites will be cured at once.

The stronger House bill, sponsored by Rep. James Florio, and backed by most environmental organizations, calls for EPA to begin 600 cleanups in five years. If the Superfund has $10.1 billion, it can spend $33 million on each of 600 sites. (That's using a theoretical unattain-( able 50-50 matching basis; at Tybouts Corner, the state must pay only 10 percent.) That means, by Tybouts Corner standards, 1.5 of the minimum; less than 10 percent of the possible maximum. Obviously the National Audubon Society, as point man for environmental groups which call the rival House bill "Super-stall," is correct in saying the fund must be used "wisely and expeditiously." As obviously, the Superfund can never be all things to all sites.

The Florio bill would set standards for the EPA to follow rigorously. The rival bill, whose chief sponsor is Rep. Dennis Eckart, D-Ohio, would allow it considerable discretion. Considering costs, a combination of the two approaches apparently is the only workable program. Stick shifts, real clocks, enforced ignorance Does that make me an old fogey? No sir-ree.

An old fogey would make the girls in home-ec class learn how to bake a cake in wood stove, not one of those new-fangled things where you just punch in 325. An old fogey, bless his heart, would not let you put of grammar school unless you could tell time on a sun dial with Roman numerals. As it is, a kid can graduate from college without knowing IX from VIII. Hell's bells, most of 'em can't operate with just plain ordinary figures. And, mark my word, it's going to get worse.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has issued a policy paper calling on the schools to give calculators to students, starting in kiddie-garden, in "all activities associated with mathematics learning, including testing." It's nothing but enforced ignorance, is what it is, and people just sit back saying "Ain't progress wonderful?" Well, I'm not against progress. I just happen to think it's not much progress when a kid can't tell you how much 9 times 8 is, even if his calculator is on the fritz. A properly brought-up youngster ought to be able to use a dishrag, turn an ice-cream freezer and tie his shoes without that Velcro nonsense. And if you think that makes me an old fogey, well XXIII skiddoo to you. I KNOW what you're thinking, and you're wrong.

I am not an old fogey. You don't have to be an old fogey to recognize that the world started on the road to tarnation when they started handing out driver's licenses to people who do not know the first thing about shifting gears. No, I am not philosophically opposed to automatic transmissions any more than to Polaroid cameras. But one who cannot operate a stick shift car should not be certified officially as a driver. Would you call some whippersnapper who takes pretty good pictures with a Polaroid a photographer? Automatic transmissions were invented for the convenience of And just to show that I'm no mean-minded old I'd be willing to grant operators of these clutchless wonders a license-of-convenience that would allow them to go to the market, church or some such.

But you wouldn't want them on the Interstate, would you? That would be as outlandish as allowing a child to think he can tell time because he can read off numbers on a digital watch. Oh, yes, plenty such children are around. Give 'em a proper clock and they'd be hard pressed to tell you whether it's morning or evening. They sit there pushing buttons on the dadburned digitals and imagine they are telling At least some of them are still able to pick William Raspberry up a phone and call Time of Day service if their watch battery is dead. But don't count on their being able to much longer.

This feller writing in the New York Times the other day knows what I'm talking about. A friend of his wanted to call him from his hospital bed, but never got the call made. Know why? "He had become accustomed to using an autodialer with the numbers he called most commonly programmed into it. He had made calls with a touch of a button for so long he had forgotten all the numbers." Probably he would have written that Times feller a letter, but I'd bet a Confederate he couldn't write a note to the milkman without his dadburned word processor. That's what the world has come to.

The more conveniences they come up with, the. less anybody knows how to do. If I had my way, nobody would be allowed to graduate from high school until he learned how to use a fountain pen and tell time on a good old two-handed clock, not a red-dialed contrivance that just sits there blinking 12:00 like a dumb ox if the electricity happens to go off. Signal to guzzle gas Is the president really a paper tiger? ft is possible to agree in theory with the Reagan adminis a president's trump card. "The problem is that, despite the tough talk, Reagan actually has been very timid in playing this trump thus far This apparent aversion to vetoing may seriously impair Reagan's ability to prod Congress to act responsibly, particularly in slashing federal spending where few major victories have been won since 1981." Reagan has not shunned the veto.

This year, he vetoed an emergency farm-credit measure. His support was so evident that House Democratic leadership didn't even try to override. But in his first term, Reagan used the veto only 39 times barely half the average of all 20th Century presidents, even more below the average for presidents who faced a Congress partly or entirely controlled by the opposition. White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan has argued that "there has been nothing mammoth to veto." But that is hard to reconcile Itration about what should determine standards for auto fuel economy and still disagree with its reported decision to lower those standards.

Reports from Washington hint that the Department of Transportation, through its National Highway Traffic Safety Administration which is assigned to enforce the standards, might lower the average mileage required of automakers from 27.5 to 26 miles per gallon. Apparently the NHTSA may announce the move this week. Ford and General Motors have plugged for such a change, which would be the first such lowering since the fuel standards were enacted into law in 1975 for energy conservation. The administration position is that the economy, not government, should determine such standards. But government, by lowering the "fleet average" will send the wrong signal to the economy: full speed ahead on energy guzzling.

No time is the right time for that. Government in this wise will signal that it is fine to consume more and more of cheaper and cheaper gasoline. The combination is doubly damaging. If the administration would promote a levy, perhaps to rehabilitate highways and promote mass transit, that would make U.S. gasoline prices more realistic, it might be excusable to let a few more gas guzzlers out on the roads.

As it is, the public, aware of the pathetic but temporary failure of suppliers like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to prop up oil prices, could be vulnerable to suggestions that the oil glut is permanent. As analyst Daniel Yergin wrote this week, that surplus is real but measured one way or another, it is a short term one. THE TEFLON still is in place, judging from the polls, but there are increasing doubts among his supporters that President Reagan has the toughness they supposed or that effective leadership requires in these times. As the latest terrorism slips into history, conservatives are asking what happened to Reagan's 1981 promise of "swift and effective retribution" for attacks on Americans. The sad truth is that hundreds of American lives have been taken by terrorists since 1981 and no one has been punished.

After picking up a cheap win on Grenada in 1983 and lobbing a few naval shells into Lebanon in 1984 to cover withdrawal of the Marines from that misguided deployment, Reagan apparently has forsaken the threat of force in international relations Now the conservative Heritage Foundation, a source of people and ideas for the Reagan administration, has raised the embarrassing question of Reagan's unilateral disarmament in domestic politics. It asks how deficits have reached record levels under Reagan without his systematic use of one of the great constitutional powers any president enjoys: the veto. It's a pertinent question as Congress returns and Reagan begins to involve himself again in the unsettled issue of the fiscal 1986 budget. In a policy paper last week, James Gattuso and Stephen Moore of the Heritage staff put it: "Seldom has a president adopted a tougher stance with a Congress than has Ronald Reagan in the first months of his second term. He has vowed to veto congressional efforts to raise taxes or pass budget-busting spending bills.

He even has taunted Congress to 'make my day' by passing a tax increase. The message is clear and welcome: Ronald Reagan would appear to relish vetoing the actions of an irresponsible Congress. He seems to recognize that the veto is with repeated administration assertions that Congress is to blame for the massive deficits facing the country. The Heritage study asserts that "Congress has presented Reagan plenty of bills of dubious merit which he chose to sign rather than veto." The examples it cites range from farm subsidies to education and grant-in-aid programs. Cumulatively, they explain part of the climb in federal spending above the levels Reagan had requested.

But the Heritage authors do not acknowledge that much of the deficit they deplore stems directly from the tax reductions Reagan pushed through Congress at his presidency's outset. Nor do they examine a point made by congressional Democrats: Congress has rearranged spending priorities but not increased overall appropriations beyond budgeted levels. Still, the thrust of their criticism is valid. In domestic as much as in foreign affairs, Reagan has tended to huff and puff but rarely to blow the house down. He is observing the limits of arms-control treaties he once denounced and moving toward a summit conference with the Soviet Union's leader, a symbol that detente is back in fashion.

He would rather threaten retaliation against terrorists than take concrete actions to punish those who kill Americans. And he would rather complain that Congress won't give him new item-veto power than use his existing veto power as predecessors from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gerald R. Ford did.

So far, Reagan's rhetoric has convinced people that he is a man with the strength of his own convictions. But as time goes on, more than the conservative ideologues will begin to suggest that this man is something of a paper tiger. Washington Post Writers Group What successes can Ferris School celebrate at its centennial? Bill Frank HOW DOES a state institution such as Ferris School commemorate a 100th anniversary at a time when it is in a mess? From all accounts, Ferris officials cannot boast about accomplishments in rehabilitation and reformation of youngsters. Oddly, Ferris is about to be just what John Ferris of Wilmington, whose money started the school in 1885, had in mind: "A place for wayward juveniles." I For 100 years Ferris was only for boys, but this year wayward female juveniles will be admitted after Woods Haven-Kruse School for delinquent girls near Claymont is closed. Again the question puzzles me: How does such an institution observe a centennial? Does it sing the to make a study and issue a report on Ferris' faults and of course good points, if any.

There was a time when many citizens could tell you what was going on in Ferris. But now the interested public is shut out by bureaucratic law and the reformatory is operated by a superintendent who is responsible to a director of the Division of Rehabilitation for Youth. That person in turn is responsible to the secretary of the Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, who in turn is responsible to a governor with hundreds of other concerns. As for the press, we have many hurdles to clear before we can find out what is going on in Ferris and how true are the rumors that are slipped to us, particularly when employees are warned not to talk. There was a time when Ferris had trustees who met regularly.

The superintendent reported to them what was going on and the press attended such meetings. Then came the so-called cabinet form of state government. The governor appointed a secretary who reported to him but a citizens advisory council also met regularly with the superintendent. Now? The public is barred and there's no evidence that Gov. Castle gives a hoot or damn.

If Russell W. Peterson were still governor or if William Quillen had been elected governor (men with a constructive sense of history), the 100th anniversary would have prompted a statewide concentration on problems of troubled youth and whether the state is really meeting needs of wayward juveniles. While the school is named after John Ferris, a Quaker cabinetmaker who died in 1882, its founder was really his cousin and executor of his $250,000 estate, Dr. Caleb Harlan. Harlan was to liquidate the real property Ferris had, pay debts and devote the rest to a worthy project.

Ferris was not specific but did state in his will: "I might suggest that the application of said residue to aid in the establishment of what is known as a House of Refuge or place for tering wayward juveniles would have my approval." In 1884, Harlan was ready to begin the project and had $70,000 left from the Ferris estate. It was decided to buy a farm house not far from Wilmington, to be the cornerstone of the proposed house of refuge for youth boys, of course, because fewer girls were adjudged wayward then. The 197-acre Woodside farm on Faulkland Road was picked. The house is still used for offices. The legislature chartered Ferris School for Boys in 1885.

Four years later, the name was changed to Ferris Industrial School. As years passed, New Castle County began to contribute funds to the school. In 1918, Ferris became a state institution. The school today is vastly different in appearance and program from what Dr. Harlan had in mind.

Anyway, the centennial question is: What goes in Ferris now? blues? Can it boast of accomplishments? Does it have records of what happens to graduates? How many go to the big prisons? How many are truly reformed? In early days when Col. A.E. Tanner was superintendent, or when Bernard Nobis and later Warren Gehrt were superintendents, Ferris could have staged glowing centennial ceremonies and boasted about accomplishments. But now? With all the reports of shortcomings at Ferris, perhaps it would be best to ignore its centennial. Or maybe the governor could apppoint a blue ribbon committee ,1.