The Times Herald from Port Huron, Michigan • Page 24

PORT HURON, MICH. 8B Where the wild goose flic Salute to the typewriter THE TIMES HERALD Sunday, April 8, 1 973 TheTimes Herald PORT HURON, MICHIGAN Sunday, "3 Editorial Viewpoint AMin the tvDewriter I Eot into I 1 By DOROTHY MITTS Local Historical Writer commercial shape is now known as the Remington." A specimen of writing done on that first successful typewriter is in an old Edison scrap-book of the early 1870s. That early wooden model, thanks to Edison, led the way to the new IBM "Correcting Selec-tric" now making its debut over 100 years later. Control must be County's commercial." But he worked on it until the machine gave practical results, and, to quote Edison Animal control means different things to different people. To many it means no controls.

Others look at the issue from humanitarian viewpoints. Still another segment sees the problem as impossible to solve without a form of pet euthanasia. Animal control is a costly, controversial issue in practically every hamlet, township, city or county. St. Clair County, or example, has three agencies concerned with the problem and its solution: County government which spends some $50,000 annually in animal control, the St.

Clair County Humane Society which has laudable goals to protect helpless animals, and the St. Clair County Anti-Cruelty League which also approaches the problem from a humanitarian point of view. The issue of animal control is particularly timely now for these three reasons: Warmer weather usually brings more complaints dealing with animals running loose; the county will again soon decide on tentative budgeting for animal control in the coming fiscal year; and an offer that has been made by the St. Clair County Humane Society to expand its program. The society proposes to build a new shelter which it would own and operate.

The shelter proposes financing through a fixed fee paid to the society on the basis of per capita population in the county, and by a daily fixed fee based on animals cared for at the shelter, plus any public donations. The society has made it clear that in no way is it proposing to operate the county dog pound on Griswold Road. The society's goals have much that is commendable in that man is responsible for the care of dumb animals that suffer from human brutality and indifference. But it is doubtful that the county can or should abandon its role to operate an animal control program. Because the county cannot afford duplication or a diluting of public tax funds, it is unlikely that the society will be able to depend on any extra large sums from regular public tax funds that are now used to operate the county program.

In short, it would seem that if the society is to realize its goal to independently build a shelter, it will have to hack it alone with whatever support it can gain from private or public donations. Without negating the humanitarian aspects of animal care, it is still a fact that the problem is one of CONTROL. Pet population explosions are just as much of an issue as talking about the human population explosion. The problem of animal control would not exist if more animal owners accepted the responsibility of caring and paying for animals they own. But there's no reason to assume that the irresponsible animal owner is suddenly going to assume the responsibility that is the key and core to the problem of animal control.

Meanwhile, private humanitarian agencies have their function. But so does county government, and it is a responsibility that can't be divested or abandoned to any private interest. 1973 by NEA 'Better decide which piece of meat you want. We're going to mark everything up again in about three minutes!" All in a day About the time the typewriter was celebrating its one-hundredth birthday in the United States, (1968) a reporter, reflecting on the emergence of the electric model, mentioned that it had come a long way "from the days of plodding clunkers that weighed tons to where about aU a secretary had to do is breathe on it and a letter is dashed off." Now comes the announcement in the press that the International Business Machines Corporation has introduced a new electric model, called the Corrective Selec-tric, a typewriter which will "erase mistakes on command." These announcements, of course, brought to mind that two pioneers associated with the St. Clair River area had much to do not only with the inception of the idea of a typewriter, but with the practical production of it as well-William Allen Burt and Thomas Alva Edison.

The former produced a device which was the germ, or the nucleus of the typewriter idea; the latter made the typewriter commercially possible. William Burt, inventor (solar compass, land surveyor, mill builder, legislator and promoter of the Sault Ste. Marie Canal, like so many of the earlier pioneers, worked as a millwright. In 1825 he came up from Detroit and built a saw mill for Robert Smart, a mill later to be known as the Wadhams Mill. It was a mill which was to mean much for the economy of the district.

Burt surveyed for the U.S. 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 Northern Railroad promoters. This was the railroad which was subsequently graded as far as Lapeer, and which, eventually, after the railroad scheme failed, became the corduroy road that was the origin of our Lapeer Avenue of today. In the meantime Burt had invented, and had received a patent (1829) for the first writing machine in America, which he called the "Typographer" the prototype of the modern typewriter, and which was probably of the "plodding clunker" type that "weighed tons." Unfortunately, Burt's original machine model was destroyed by a fire at the Washington Patent Office in 1836, but a replica of the machine was exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

It was about the time that Edison was working on automatic telegraphy in his Newark shop on an automatic which would print messages in bold Roman letters that D. N. Craig, one of the organizers of The Associated Press, brought to Edison from Milwaukee a Mr. Sholes who had a wooden model of a machine to which he had given the unfamiliar name of "typewriter." Craig was interested with Sholes in the machine and wanted Edison to perfect it and make it commercially possible. crude wooden typewriter, as Edison is quoted as saying, "proved a difficult thing to make 4-on-the-floor (plus one) It says here Gutsie's gang knew the rules FLOYD A.

BERNARD Editorial Page Editor But the little ones, with their four-speed manual shifts "on the are something else. You ride along almost flat on your back, just like a bathtub on. wheels. The low center of gravity gives the car a stability surprising for its size and weight. Whatever blubber the driver carries along with him adds to that stability, and brings the gravity center down even lower.

It's definitely not the type of car to take grandma for a ride in not that she wouldn't enjoy it. But arthritis and other afflictions being what they are, there is just no way to get her tucked inside. My experimental ride ended after a few blocks of four-shifting around town, bouncing rather unceremoniously on the behind a few times and keeping a wary eye on the instrument panel (it looked like the inside of a small airplane). I "debathtubbed" by wiggling out from under the steering wheel with both hands in full pushup position until the last things to leave the size 12 gunboats finally crashed to the ground. The trip was over, no joints were dislocated and there were no charley-horses.

I can only say this. Such cars are great, but chiefly for the young in fact as well as in spirit. For me, let there by running boards, side curtains and seats that fit (and sit) like chairs. Then we all can push the starter and go zarooom in comfort. Lots of people read Ann Landers.

And lots no doubt read her tribute to Gustie Lederer, 81-year-old Detroiter who died recently. Gustie was Ann's mother-in-law. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that many of those readers were the ones Ann was really trying to reach. That may be a presumption, judging whom she was writing to, since much of her writing is evidently aimed at her historical and philosophical contemporaries. Yet her comments about Gustie were unlike what much of the younger generation is hearing these days.

was different, for example, than the message State Representative Perry Bullard was trying to get across by joining in that mass pot-smoking rally a few days ago in Ann Arbor. He evidently believes that whatever people are doing is all right because everybody is doing it, or words to that effect. Ann's thought was different, too, from what the New York Times news service found about the modern-day concept of fidelity. That would seem to boil down to an immoral possessiveness. "What they are trying to say," one psychiatrist interviewed remarked, "is that people are free spirits and shouldn't be pinned down." It's By LOUIS J.

DUNN Times Herald News Editor Back in the days of running boards, rumble seats and side curtains, cars also had wide doors and upright seats. You opened the door, stepped in and sat down. And by I mean SAT. There have been many changes since those times. If you really want to find out how many, try climbing into one of the little sports specialty cars that are on the market today.

I had the chance to drive one the other day. All I can say is that getting in and out of one of them on a daily basis could do more for TIMELY QUOTES As long as there is a demand for drugs, all the law enforcement efforts and all the money spent will be to no avail. Raymond P. of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse. The need (for equipment to rebuild city transportation systems) is greater than the entire industry could fill if it were to drop everything else tomorrow.

Aerospace Industry spokesman. We must have room for our prayers to go through to the east. Move those cameras away. Keep the line clear for our prayers to our Indian gods. Crow Dog, medicine man at Wounded Knee, to a TV crew.

I just want to be a high-class bum for a while. CapL Burton W. Campbell, returning POW. I know everyone calls me happy-go-lucky and things like that, but I'm a nervous player. I think I'm as nervous as anyone on the tour.

Golf pro Lee Trevino. a bulging waistline than even learning how to dance. In the first place the car looks small enough to be picked up. Only it isn't. Try it and you could get a hernia.

You might even get one just trying to get into the thing, unless caution is observed. To enter you really don't have to lie on the ground and roll in. But that would help. It is only necessary that you half lie down, which means that you have to tip yourself into a 45-degree straining to remain on your feet while dropping backward far enough to be almost off them. Somehow, in this contorted position, you must get one foot, and then the other, through the front door and then get both of them up under the hood area so that the rest of you can ease into position in the bucket-type seats.

This may seem tough going for any but the young and it is but the rewards, once you are inside the car, seated and in driving position, are worth it. How can anything so difficult to get into be so comfortable once the seating has been achieved? The answer is one of those modern automotive design miracles. The car is built right around the operator. The only trouble is it won't bend and straighten up to let the poor fellow in and out. Even though the little sports type autos are extreme in these features, just about all the cars have them in some degree today.

Meat, phone, etc. Boycotting tests principles different, too, from the comments made here a couple of weeks ago by Dr. Cyril M. Worby, MSU psychiatrist with the MSU Medical College. He indicated that the great lack within the homes of today is communication.

The young are afraid to speak out and the parents refuse to recognize what their children are trying tp tell them. The fact that the younger generation does not accept the same standards as the those of their elders ust be recognized, he said. Ann's words seem pertinent at, this point: Left with seven young children when her husband was killed in an automobile accident, "Gustie was no chicken-soup mama. She was loving and gentle, but she was also determined that her children be self-reliant and independent. There was neither the time nor money for pampering and multiple choices that so many children today find.

Everyone did his share. Gustie once told me that she never set up any house rules and she had very few disciplinary problems. Her children knew what was of them and they did it. "Not one of the seven went wrong, although had they done so, the psychiatrists could have come up with many plausible The situation was classic teen-agers without a father, severe economic hardship, etc. 'We were what you might call Jules (Ann's husband) once told me.but we weren't actually poor.

We just didn't have any Now there's a radical thought. They were almost always broke, but they were not poor. They were 'disadvantaged, but they came out proud and self-reliant. They followed rules without having rules spelled out for them along with exceptions and exemptions. What Gustie Lederer did, and her children in their turn, was follow a set of rules that is older than time and deeper than the softest couch psychiatry offers.

Changing times make surface changes In attitudes and behavior response. They bring forth a rush of educated nonsense about what is right and wrong. But the rules, observed or not, are still there deep within each person's being. And they are unchanged. Without them, neither us tie's privileged family, nor the specially privileged American society could together.

By ART BUCHWALD Lit MmI V. fill 1 man It was the fifth day of our meat boycott, and the family was sitting around the dining room table wiping up the gravy from the cheese and turnip casserole that my wife had prepared for us. You could see the pride in the children's faces. They had survived almost a week without meat and they knew they had struck a great blow for lower food prices. "I don't even miss meat," my daughter Jennifer said.

"I don't even miss chicken," my daughter Connie agreed. My son Joel said, "The voice of the consumer has been heard in the land." "Then you all agree," I said, boycotts are the best way of showing our discontent over high prices." Everyone agreed. "The reason I raise the question," I said, "is that the telephone company is thinking of doubling the price of a call from 10 to 20 cents. This would be an Increase of .100 per cent, and I think If they do it we should boycott the telephone system." The family looked at me if I had gone mad. "Boycott the telephone company?" Jennifer said.

"But how could I talk to my friends?" "You could write them letters," I suggested. "No one writes anyone letters anymore," Connie said. "Raise the price of gas?" Joel said. "What am I going to do with my car?" "Keep it in the garage until the gasoline companies see the error of their ways." "How do I get to school?" Connie said. "Take the bus." "What's a bus?" Connie demanded.

"Don't be smart," I said. "If we're going to give up meat because they raised theprices on us, we're going to give up the telephone and gasoline, and if they raise electricity we'll give up air conditioning." "But we have to have air conditioning," Jennifer said. "Look, prices are going up on everything. Why should we just sock It to the farmer? If we really want -our voices heard, we've got to sock the phone company, the gasoline companies, the power companies, and anyone else who thinks they can horse around with our household budget. I say we're either in the boycott business for real or we get out of it altogether.

Now what do you say?" My wife order a pork roast from the butcher tomorrow morning." 1 3 A 3 A "Even if they did," Joel said, "They'd never be delivered." My wife, who never knows when I'm kidding, asked, "Are you serious about boycotting the phone company? "Dead serious," I said, "We've got to bring them to their knees. We've got to bring the cost of a telephone call down, down." "I won't do it," Jennifer shouted. "I won't give up the telephone." "You gave up meat," I said. "Meat is just food," she shouted, "The telephone is my life." Connie yelled, "We'd die without the telephone." Joel agreed. "Man 'has to communicate by phone or his ear will wither away." My wife said, "I'll give up one or the other but I won't give up both meat and the telephone." "Nevertheless, "I said, "if we're going to stick by our principles we will have to boycott the telephone company, just as we will have to boycott the gasoline stations when they raise the price of gas." 'Take my word for he's clean as a hound's tooth I'.