The Times Herald from Port Huron, Michigan • Page 8

PORT HURON TIMES HERALD, Sunday, April 3,1964 PAtoE 8, FIRST SECTION ALL IN A DAY TIMES HERALD Which State Hos Deem (Who?) Fop Secretary By LOUIS J. DUNN (Timei Herald Executive Newt Editor) The nation has so many pressing problems in these trying times, it's almost downright unfair for us Michiganians to argue among ourselves about whether 18-year-olds should be allowed to vote. Just think of the many other issues to which we, the people, could devote our argumentative talents how better to keep old bushy beard Castro from getting lard, how to per At Wrong Target A distinct flavor of sour grapes pervades the complaint of Representative E. G. Burkhalter (D-Calif.) about the old men in Congress.

He says that nobody will listen to what he has to say. He plans to toss in the sponge and go home at the end of his term. Maybe the reason nobody listens to him is that he doesn't have much to say. If his "old age" complaint is typical, it's no wodner he can't hold an audience. Mr.

Burkhalter says he never realized before how a few old hands have preempted the helm in Congress. "A lot of these old men are in their dotage. They far reaching than any of us imagine. Not only can the anti-18s use it as fresh ammunition in their campaign to preserve the vote for the "more intelligent" citizens, but backers of Mr. Rusk might well argue that any diplomat who is so well known by Highland Park students might be destined for higher things.

And alas, what are the politicians going to say about James M. Hare, the Michigan secretary of state of long service and many votes, whose name the students did not know? Will he run for reelection, and if so, will he carry Highland Park? This is the kind of stuff which the political' columnists love to nibble on when Progress Dooms Chesapeake Ferries when a group of Highland Park students, supposedly versed in government, went to Lansing to plug for the vote and flunked a civics question posed by their State Representative. He asked the 40 students to name the Michigan Secretary of State. There was awkward silence before one of them answered: "Dean Rusk?" THE CONSEQUENCES of this boo-boo may be more rtHE 1fES Dorothy Mitts, millwright invented a are living in the last century." He says that before he retires he will introduce a bill to lengthen the term of representatives to four years instead of the present two, limit to four the number of terms a congressman may serve, and bar congressmen from seeking election after reaching age 70. Mr.

Burkhalter came to Congress for the first time in 1962. He is 67 years old and served 20 years in the Los Angeles City Council and in the California State Assembly. If he didn't learn in that time how the Nation's business is run, his retirement is overdue. In the first place, his barbs are misdirected. They should have been aimed at the seniority system by which congressmen advance up the power ladder.

The system makes years of service the key to the inner sanctum. It makes terms in office take precedence over skill and wisdom in filling the top positions in the land. In the Senate, for example, 74 of the 100 members have less than 14 years of service in the upper chamber. Almost one-fourth of them have served less than four 8 a w' i. JT: 'SSI imW4 By BERNARD P.

LYONS (Timea Herald Managing Editor) Another thing, we don't understand about the communist struggle: How does Khrushchev get away with calling THIS coexistence "peaceful?" It's really not so remarkable that a Latin American revolution can come off so smoothly. With all their experience, it's about time. Michigan's Democratic Congressmen descend on Lansing to put in their plug for redistricting just as long as it's other people's districts. Washington says a shortage of coins will reach the crisis stage in three years. Americans feel they can face it, though.

More pressing is how to get through the shortage of dollars until next payday. The world is slowing down, the Bureau of Standards reports, as it sets the Nation's official clock back one-tenth of a second. So that's what's taking spring so long to arrive! were, in fact, standing on a mountain of iron, as history was to record, and where the famous Jackson mine was later to be located. William Burt had other inventions to his credit, including his equatorial sextant, an instrument he invented "to be as useful on shipboard," he said, "as the solar compass was on the land," but it was his solar compass which brought him fame. As a member of the Legislature Burt was credited with securing the necessary legislation for building the Sault Sainte Marie Canal, an accomplishment which was also made possible by the valuable services rendered by another noted pioneer, Eber Brock Ward, a one-time resident of Marine City.

But it was as a millwright and a surveyor that William Austin Burt's name is indelibly inscribed in this district, just one more of the famous names in Michigan associated with St. Clair County. the pickings for topics get lean. We're no political columnists, but that doesn't mean the pickings don't get just as lean! ANYWAY, we think the arguments in favor out-weigh the arguments against, and that 18-year-olds should be allowed to vote. The record doesn't seem to indicate that folks 21-and-over have done such an all-Ameri-can job of voting that they should make the privilege that exclusive.

Some people argue that the 18-year-olds aren't sufficiently informed about government and politics to know how to vote intelligently. Yet who can say folks 21 and over are any better informed and perform their obligation at the polls any more intelligently? We josh at the Highland Park youngsters who ed Rusk for Jim Hare, but how many adults out of any 40 picked from anywhere in the state might name Jim Hare for Rusk if the question were reversed? Or not name anyone? Honestly speaking, we can't believe things would get much worse if the voting age were lowered to 18. And it is just possible they might get a lot better! Wisconsin boundry line. It was due to his solar compass on that survey trip In 1844 that iron was discovered in Michigan. While running a line in the hills below Lake Superior, on land that is now the town of Negaunee, Surveyor Burt saw the needle on his compass begin to flutter and then whirl crazily around in the box.

It could mean only one thing, and Burt immediately told his men to look for iron. They cleared away the leaves and other accumulations, picked about with axes and shovels, and found chunks of almost pure iron ore which had surfaced where the earth had eroded. They BERRY'S WORLD "7 ttn WHERE THE WILD GOOSE FLIES Typewriter Inventor Pioneered (Here if CHESAPEAKE BAY FERRIES will soon be no more, with the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Here the Little Creek ferry Princess Anne is seen from the ferry Northampton. But of the 26 who have been in the Senate since before 1950, 12 head committees.

There are 16 regular committees in the Senate, but the 12 senior chairmen hold down every important job. Applying an age yardstick to these figures shows that most Senators are under 65, but most committees are led by men over 65. The old guard, understandably enough, wants to reserve power and prestige to itself. But the oldest man on the job is not necessarily the best man to boss it. This seems so obvious as to be above argument.

By the same token, age is not necessarily another name for senility. A wealth of years of itself is not valid reason for turnine a congressman out to pasture. suade Cambodians to take the millions in foreign aid they don't want but we insist they take anyway, and how to boost tax revenue while enjoying more money by paying less. There are things to be said in favor of the vote for 18 year olds, and, there are things to be said against it. That seems to cover all possibilities.

The pro-18 adherents suffered a setback last week ed an Indian potentate named Kiptopeke and his boss, the Chief of Accomac. "The King," wrote Captain Smith, "was the comliest, most proper civil savage we incount-ered. His country is a pleasant fertile clay soyle, some small creeks, good harbours for small This endorsement caused several colonists to move across to the eastern shore in 1614. The shoremen were so far removed from the seat of government at Jamestown that English sovereigns of the 17th Century referred to their New World possessions as "Ye Colony of Virginia and Ye Kingdome of Accawmacke." In the next 200 years the trip remained unpredictable, hazardous and uncomfortable. It was not until 1817 that a regular line of steam packets began a run between Norfolk, Old Point Comfort and Baltimore.

Sometimes these Baltimore boats would obligingly swing over to the eastern shore to land or pick up passengers. In June 1830 the first weekly run to the shore from Norfolk began, and, prophetically, it was the "new and elegant" 428-ton Pocahontas. The venerable and no longer so elegant Pocahontas makes the final run in April. The little wooden-hulled side-wheel steamers of the first half of the 19th Century provided more than just transportation They were more like floating carnivals and advertised themselves as pleasure boats. Daily steamship service to the shore had to wait another half century.

In 1884 the Pennsylvania Railroad extended a line down to Cape Charles on the shore and sailings were timed to the arrivals and departures of the trains. i In the first quarter of this century a few automobiles turned up to be ferried across. The contraptions were allowed aboard only if the owner agreed to drain his gas 'tank. The automobiles increased so that by 1929 the existing ferries could not handle them. The first ferry built expressly for automobiles was the 250-foot Del-Mar-Va, which made her maiden voyage April 1, 1933.

As the years passed more ferries were added and some of the antiquated boats were retired. Soon they too will be gone, but any person who liked to take a leisurely trip on the poor man's ocean liner will miss them. '7 v- HERAtD below, tells how a local "writing machine." the railroad scheme failed, became the corduroy road that was the origin of our Lapeer Avenue of today. In the meantime, however, Burt had invented and had received a patent for a writing machine his "Typographer" the prototype of the modern typewriter, and which was no doubt of the "plodding clunker type that weighed tons," as a staff writer for a Detroit newspaper called the first machines in the display when he compared them to a 1964 model "where all a secretary had to do is breathe on it and a letter is dashed off." But William Burt is probably better known as the inventor of his Solar Compass, which he used when surveying the Michigan- iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin The so-called Black Country is an industrial area around Birmingham in the British Midlands. The name is derived from the muck reduced by the collieries, last furnaces and foundries' set op there because of the nearness of coal and iron mines.

Mining has almost ceased in the area, and old quarries have been laid out as public parks. Urycleateiio BritaMMea By ALEXANDER C. BROWN (Newport Newe Dally Prei Writer) KIPTOPEKE. Va. (AP) -When the first automobiles start rolling across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel soon an era of water transportation dating back to Virginia's colonial days will come to an end.

Many will regret its passing, for the ferry ride across the lower bay provided an unexpectedly pleasant diversion. But it would take an exceptional ship lover to enjoy watching a jam-packed 120-car ferry sail away leaving him of the dock to wait an hour or so for the next boat since he has been 121st in line. The first European visitor to the eastern shore apparently was Capt. John Smith, who, with a small band of explorers from Jamestown, crossed from Cape Henry. There Smith encounter- History is full of men whose wisdom and skill matched their abundance of years.

Mr. Burkhalter's proposed bill is foredoomed. Age holds the reins in both Houses and is not likely to be shouted down by any disgruntled freshman. Besides, it would take a Constitutional Amendment to do what Mr. Burkhalter has in mind.

As the books stand now, each state has the right to set its own standards in such matters. If the voters want to name an octogenarian to represent them in Congress, that's their privilege. By DOROTHY MITTS (Local Historical Writer) The display of the evolution of the typewriter which proved so popular with the public attending the 1964 Business Show at Cobo Hall in Detroit last week should have been of special interest to area residents since the man who invented the typewriter was once associated with early St. Clair County. The man was William Austin Burt, inventor, and surveyor, mill builder, legislator, and promoter of the Sault Sainte Marie Canal.

Burt, like so many of the earlier pioneers, busied himself as a millwright and as a surveyor. Moving to Detroit from Massachusetts in 1824, Burt came up the river the following year to what is now Port Huron, and built a saw mill on Black River for Robert Smart, the mill which was later to be known as Wadhams Mill. This was when Smart, together with Ralph Wadhams (w worked for him in Detroit) and John Biddle, also of Detroit, became interested in the pine lands of St. Clair County. It was a mill which was to mean much to the early economy of the district.

Burt surveyed for the United States Government much of the land in the northern part of St. Clair County, and he also surveyed the railroad line from Port Huron to Saginaw for the Utopian scheme of the Northern Railroad promoters. This was the railroad which was subsequently graded as far as Lapeer, and which eventually, after Faster, Faster! 1 nil titit iittjtijtiif iriiiit rtiiiiriiiit iiiiiiiit riti ifiit Miiiiniiiiiiitiiiiiintiitiiiiiiiif liiiTfiiiiiiitiiiiiiiif tititiMfiiiiiiiiii I THIS SPACE IS YOURS The Times Herald welcomes letters to the Voice of the i People column on topics of general interest. The Voice of the People column will appear on this page i as often as appropriate letters are available for publication. Letters should be addressed to "Voice of the People," Times Herald, and must be signed by the writer and in- elude his street address.

Unsigned letters will not be con- sidered for publication. All letters printed will identify the writer by his name and the community in which he lives. iiiiif iiitf fiitiiiiiiiiifif iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittiiiiiitttitiif iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiMiiiitiiiiiiiaiiiiittiittiiiiiini "Now that you've given up smoking, when are you going to kick the bubble gum habit?".