Redlands Daily Facts from Redlands, California • Page 16

With a Grain Of Salt Page 16, Thursday, May 28, Redlands, Calif. By Frank Olid MOOM Don't Need You!" Oregonians slap down 19-year old voting Oregon voters gave the young a slap in the face Tuesday. By a deluge of ballots they defeated a proposal to lower the voting age to 19. It doesn't require the service of Dr. Gallup to discover what was eating on the Oregonians.

Surely they were to unrest on the campuses. They weren't about to extend the franchise to those in whom they hold no. confidence at this time. Never mind the fact that the majority of students are earnest, stable, reliable citizens. The voters were in no mood to make careful discriminations.

It is probable that the trend will continue in most of the 10 other states that vote this year on lowering the voting age. 1 Prospects are also dimmed for the retention of the 18-year-old provision in the Voting Rights Act renewal bill. This passed the U.S. Senate in March but awaits action in the House. Many persons who are under 21 will take the Oregon defeat as not only an insult.

They will see in it further reason for their axiom: "Never trust anybody over 30." Again and again they have been told that they should woi'k through the system. They should not take issues' into the streets. Now they will say, with logic, that they are being shut out of the polling place that they aren't being permitted to work within the system. There is nothing in the Constitution, however, that says a citizen must cast a ballot according to anyone else's opinion but his own. He is not to be held accountable for the way he chooses to vote.

This means that reforms are stalled when the public mood is hostile to them, and they often advance rapidly when the time is ripe. For example, it was impossible to place a two-term limit on the Presidency during any of the four terms of Franklin Roosevelt. But during the period of disenchantment that followed, in Harry Truman's regime, the Constitution was amended. And so if the Oregon vote is truly a straw blowing in a national wind, lowering the age of full citizenship is doomed to general defeat in 1970. This reform will not sweep the nation until the young return to better grace with their elders, no matter whether that is fair or unfair, wrong or right.

Repression? Cries now arise that dissent in America is being repressed. Consider, then, the case of Daniel J. Schacht. On December 4, .1967, he acted in a 3-man skit several times as part of a 14- hour demonstration against the war in Vietnam. The protest was staged in front of the Armed Forces Induction Center in downtown Houston.

Schacht wore an Army blouse with a European shoulder patch. He also had a fur felt Army officer's cap, of World War II vintage, with an officer's insignia affixed upside down. Impersonating American soldiers pursuing a Viet Cong, one demonstrator would say, "Be an able American" and they would shoot the black-robed Viet Cong with red ink from a water pistol. He would fall to the pavement. Then they would kick the black-robe aside and say, "My God, this is a pregnant woman." Schacht was convicted in the lower courts under a dormant federal law which prohibits the unauthorized wearing of a distinctive part of an Army uniform unless the uniform is used by an actor in a theatrical or motion picture which does not discredit the armed forces.

Monday the Supreme Court struck down the law. Schacht goes free. He can return to an induction station where citizens become soldiers and imply that they will kill pregnant women. How's that again about At the dinner at the Country Club honoring the Armacosts we happened to be engaged in conversation with Dr. Mike Talbert, who was sitting directly across the table.

To his considerable surprise, an electronic voice began to page: "Dr. Talbert. The voice was not that of Ernie Larsen, who was presiding at the microphone. Nor was the voice being cut into the public address system in the dining room from a microphone in the office. Rather, the voice was coining right out of Mike's coat.

It was coming so loud and clear that everyone in the vicinity could hear it and looked toward him. At that point, Mike stood up and beat as hasty and graceful retreat as he could from the dining room. Tuesday we caught up with him at the Redlands water filter plant, where Kiwanis was having a look-see luncheon, and had a little chat. At his suggestion, we also talked with Mrs. Delia Choate at the Redlands Answering Service and Phy- sicians Exchange, 411 Cajon street.

It seems that about 15 doctors have banded together to establish and operate the radio paging service. The system is manufactured by the Motorola company and was set up here by a Motorola dealer. The antenna is located on Sunset drive. Mrs. Choate explained that a doctor telephones the answering service at.

any time he wishes to switch to the radio paging service. "We keep calling him until we hear from him by telephone," she said. "The radio is one-way. only; he can't answer us. If the matter is not too urgent we page him at intervals of about 10 minutes.

If it's urgent, we repeat about every five minutes." The receiver is a little larger than a king-sized package of cigarettes and clips to a belt, or inside a pocket. Like a transistor radio, it can be used with an ear plug. Also, it can be linked to an automobile antenna to increase the range of reception. Yes it also has a volume control. "I got my receiver just before I went to the Armacost dinner." Mike explained Tuesday.

"That message was the first one I had ever received. I was wearing the darn thing on my belt under my coat and I couldn't turn the sound, down Quick enough. I was sort of embarrassed." When the Kiwanis visit was planned, a warm spring day was anticipated with box lunches-being served outdoors. The weather, as things turned out, was cold and tables were set up in the lobby. That is an appropriate place for a luncheon.

A large flow chart on the wall has illuminated arrows on blue, green and brown lines, indicating which direction the water is going in what lines. Moreover, one interior wall has a large, double-pane window in it. A sheet of clear water the end product falls in the space between the sheets of glass and is brightly illuminated. The plant is highly automated with the result that from the basement come- rather surprising sounds of booming valves and whirring motors. The raw water comes from Mill Creek canyon by way of the flumes and penstocks of the Edison power houses.

The filter plant takes out the sediment and the algae and kills the If you taste chlorine in your water, don't blame the filter plant, says Emmett Lowry, head of the water department. In certin pipelines that come to dead ends, chlorine does accumulate and so far there is no remedy. If you have sand in your lines, don't blame the filter The grains come from' wells and the well water does not go through the filtering system. Message is lost in all the shouting By BRUCE BIOSSAT Redlands Yesterdays FIVE YEARS AGO Temperatures Highest 96, lowest 50. i The controversial Oak Glen Youth Conservation Camp will become a Job Corps facility under the federal anti-poverty program, it was announced by Gov.

Edmund G. Brown. Clock Auditorium's interior lighting and electrical wiring will be remodeled this summer. Ted Runner, University of Redlands track and field coach and athletic director, named National Association of Intercollegiate Athletic District III track coach of the year. TEN YEARS AGO Temperatures Highest 93, lowest Barton road from west city limits of Redlands to Waterman avenue west of Lbma Linda to.

be rebuilt to four-lane capacity, Supervisor S. Wesley Break reveals. Rev. Oscar W. Sedam, retiring executive secretary of Redlands and San Bernardino Councils of Churches, to be honored at recognition dinner June 7.

NAIA district championships in track and field to be held at the University of Redlands tonight. FIFTEEN YEARS AGO Temperatures Highest 96, lowest 53. Roger Chaney, sophomore Terrier first baseman, elected to all-CBL almost unanimously. Mrs. Lewis Geib, only recently elected Redlands Breakfast club president, now elected president of the San Bernardino area Panhellenie.

Memorial Day to be general holiday in Redlands' with veterans organizations honoring the war dead in ceremonies at Hillside cemetery. One-Minute Pulpit In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refused to be comforted. Psalms. 77:2. There is no history but that of the soul, no peace but that of the soul.

Dag Hammarsk- joid, former U.N. secretary gen-, eral of the United Nations. World Newspapering was more suitable By NORTON MOCKRIDGB I was privileged last week to be the speaker at a dinner given by the Ocean City (N.J.) Chamber of Commerce in honor of the author and ex-newspaperman, Gay Talese, who was born in Ocean City. And I learned that he nearly became a tailor instead of a distinguished best-seller author. Gay's big book, "The Kingdom and the Power," the story of The New York Times, was on the best-seller list for 26 weeks, which probably netted him more than a tailor makes in five years.

Anyway, the story as I got it from Gay's buddy, Dick Kabat, is that when Gay was 14 he got a job as a sports reporter for the Ocean City weekly. The Sentinel-Ledger. (Gay says he was paid 10 cents per column inch which caused him to "write elaborately and at His first assignment was to cover a football game in Hammonton, N.J., but when be went to get on the bus that was taking the Ocean City team, the coach turned him down. "Sorry, my boy," he said, "but there's no room." Desperately afraid he was going to miss his big chance, Gay went to his father and begged him to drive him to Hammonton. Mr.

Talese, a tailor, was reluctant to close his shop and he thought it was nutty, anyway, to go to a football game on a freezing November day. However, he gave in and he bundled his wife, his daughter and Gay into the car and drove to Hammonton. Then, of course, he had to pay for everybody to get into the game, and he paid for. hot dogs and things during the game, and then after the game he paid for everybody's dinner. And, to make matters just a bit worse, when they got home, Gay sat up typing his story until 3 a.m., keeping everybody awake.

A week or so later Gay got a letter from the Sentinel-Ledger. It contained a. check for his story. The check was for Mr. Talese.looked at the check and said to Gay: lose an afternoon at the shop, I drive to Hammonton and back, it costs me $15 for The Newsreel The superannuated friend says he would consider one of those retirement villages if it weren't for the threat of organized recreation.

In the current economic situation, people would be angry about inflation's effect on their money, if they had any money. The fellow who has a "humble opinion" js always pretty proud of it. Culinary Maxim: Most great sandwiches and all great casseroles were discovered by mistake. The little boy down the block says that when his-mother, calls him by his full name he knows she is about to overreact Tax figures show that while smoking has been declining, drinking is on the rise. If the minor vices don't get you, the major ones wilL Timely Quotes Here these guys were griping every five minutes about wanting to get out of Vietnam.

Now we're back in Cambodia and they're griping every five minutes about wanting to get back to Vietnam. I.C. LM Broomt, soldier involved in the Cambodia' operation. The hurling of either rocks or epithets is scarely an alternative, to the rational thinking process. The country is actually in danger of embroilment and perhaps even breakup unless calmness and reason can be made to prevail among old and young.

Norman- Vincent Peale, president, of the Reformed Church in America. I believe this administration finds itself today embracing a. philosophy which appears, to lack appropriate concern for the attitude of a great mass of Americans our young people. -Waller J. Hlckel, Secretary of the Interior.

"When dees HeyerJahl get off having the TIME to ems Atlmtk like the game and the dinner and you make a dollar ninety-five. I tell you. Gay better you should be a tailor!" All of us are going to miss Merriman Smith, the UPI White House correspondent, because Smitty was one of the most humorous speakers I've ever heard. But Louis Cassels, a senior editor of UPI, looks as though he might succeed Smitty in the laugh department. Speaking to editors and publishers in New York recently, Cassels referred to Lyndon Johnson's TV interview shows as "Me the People." And, talking about the, Vice-President, be said: "We all like Spiro Agnew.

We just don't want to play golf with him." (And not tennis, either.) George Segal, now filming "Where's Poppa?" in Brooklyn, tells me that they had much trouble finding a beat-up battle jacket for a scene in the film in which a young hippie is a war protester. The prop and costume man went through more than 30 thrift shops and second hand stores and couldn't find exactly what they wanted. Then one day they saw the very thing but it was being worn by a was slouching along the street. They approached the young fellow and offered him $20 for the jacket. "Nah," he said.

"I don't want to sell it." Then, curious, he asked: "What do you want it for?" They told him it was to be worn by a war protester in the picture. "Here," said the young man, whipping off the jacket. "Take it for nothing." King Levinsky, the old-time fighter, now works as a tie salesman in Miami. The other day he was in the Pagoda Restaurant, Miami Beach, with Jackie Gleason when an elderly man who had seen.him fight asked King if he'd ever fought Joe Louis. "Yes." said King.

"For two minutes! He's the man who put me in the tie business." Many authors believe that you really can't' write authentically about things unless you've had some experience with them yourself. If, for instance, you're going to write a war novel, they say, you surely must have had some 'military' service. And so Well, in that line, I want to nominate an. author who, it seems to me, is equipped to write about practically everything. He's Don author of "The Last Boat Out of Cincinnati," published today, who has been a newspaper reporter, radio newscaster, armored car guard, tap dancer, mattress farmhand, clothing photographer -model and "on a modest scale" a bootlegger.

"The Boat-Out of Cincinnati," however, is about a boy who is sent to purchase a string of horses the only thing Don has never. done! (Copyright, 19T0, by United Feature Syndicate; Inc.) Quick Quiz What is the meaning of the name Timothy? A It is of Greek origin and means "God-fearing:" What two basic requirements must player meet to be nominated to the National Baseball Hall of Fame? A Candidates must- be retired and have played 10 years in the major leagues. There is probably more talk and less understanding in this country today than at any time in its history. Information is exploding all over the place, but the fallout does not automatically spell "Knowledge" and does not inevitably make for "better- educated" people, young or otherwise. Despite the excitable talk about "repression," there has never been more argument, discussion, dissent, fundamental questioning hot just about the immediate issues of the day but about the nation's values, its political process, all the guidelines under which we live.

But none of the warring groups in this society, and we really are warring at home today, are getting through to each other. And it is not just because so much of the argument is conducted at the shouting level, though that is symptoma- tic of what ails us. The crushing fact in all this turmoil is that nobody is convincing his "opposite number" because most of us are talking in code, language really meant just for those who are already with us. By sheer volume of noise and numbers, the contesting parties can and do surely "affect" each other, as President Nixon clearly has been given pause by the reaction to his Cambodian venture, as New York City's hard- hat construction workers have been aroused by shouting students, etc. But there is hardly any real persuasion in any of this.

We are not, in any truly hopeful sense, "communicating" across the wide gulfs filled with this echoing noise. Each warring group hears the sound, but does not really listen. Along comes author Peter Drucker, a consistently thoughtful man, to help suggest why. He says flatly that we really do not know very much about communicating, for all our filling of the air with "facts" and our supposed mastery of modern techniques of persuasion. He goes to the heart of it in an essay on "Information, Communications and Understanding." embodied in a newly published collection of his writings.

What he says in its bare essence may strike some as too commonplace to be instructive, but it is nevertheless absolutely basic to our difficulties in communicating. His word is that we can bo touched, verbally or otherwise, only by what we are capable of accepting which means what we can and will perceive. We all know man has physical limitations which affect his perceptions and his whole behavior, but in Drucker's view "the most important limitations on perception are usually cultural and emotional rather than physical." In other words, when.emotions run strong, when differing "life styles" or value systems get into the picture, there are massive barriers standing in the way of our perceptions and hence in our ability to communicate with each other. Says Drucker: "That fanatics are not being convinced by rational argument we have known for thousands of years. Now we are beginning to understand that it is not 'argument'-that is lacking.

"Fanatics do not have the ability to perceive a communication which goes beyond their range of emotions. Before this is possible, their emotions would have to be altered." If this notion be accepted, then the causes of our present divisiveness become clearer. This country is in a highly agitated emotional state. Moreover, though the young through the ages have always questioned the "value systems" of their elders, they never before have had such strength of numbers and thus such powerful ways of reinforcing their convictions of their own "rightness." Not only are we as people in an unequaled emotional frenzy, but we make an immense fuss about that fact. No day passes without stress on somebody's "anger," whether it be that of students, of irritated workers, of Vice President Agnew assailing others, even President Nixon lashing at senators or at "bums" on the campus.

Many Americans celebrate these angers as the hot proofs of our deep need for' changes across the board. Who can question that need? What we can question is whether there will be any real listening or persuading so long as we shout at each other across a boiling gulf of emotion. Agnew for comic relief By FRANK MANKIEWICZ ami TOM BRADEN If it weren't for Spiro Agnew, the malaise which has overtaken the nation in the wake of Cambodia would be all-pervasive. But Agnew has reminded us once again that there are still a few things to laugh about. It was Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom in the.

musical comedy "Of Thee I Sing" who wired his opponent: "Congratulations on you sweeping victory and charge fraud in. six states." And Agnew's speech of last Friday, while not as succinct, was almost equally funny. There was first the intimation that the press was responsible for the Administration's terrible domestic defeat in Cambodia. (It will be a military victory because the Pentagon will say so.) As though any President could go barging into an invasion of another country without causing some concern among his countrymen. As colleges close, the stock market plummets, our casualties in Vietnam and Cambodia increase and serious students of government wonder whether ours will work any more, only a man who knows the value of a good laugh during a time of national tension could think of blaming it on the press.

By this stroke alone, Agnew has made of himself a kind of uptight, suburban Will Rogers. Only a man with the talent of a good standUp comedian could have carried out Agnew's second great boffo. He referred to his critics with the following words: "Fulminating," "hysterical" (twice), "master of sick invective," "irresponsible," "apoplectic," "strident," "unbridled invective," "frenzied," "excitable," "vicious," "irrational" and "raving." Then, with timing any vaude- villean would envy, be delivered the punch line: "Ladies and Gentlemen, you have heard a lot of wild, hot rhetoric tonight, (pause) None of it mine." The' Agnew performance is vaudevillean in another sense. As with any good comedian, his agents do hot book him into cold towns. Even the New Yorker magazine was not for ''the old lady from Dubuque." Agnew crosses and recrosses this great land of ours, from Birmingham to Montgomery, from Jackson to Hattiesburg, from Dallas to Houston, sneaking out fearlessly wherever, an.

audience of rich white Southern Republicans with $500 and a tuxedo can be found. He may never make the big apple and play the Palace, but as long as the Washington Post and the New York Times print bis speeches in full, connoisseurs of humor in the big cities will come to know his work. Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby never played the big towns, but their works may be found in any standard anthology of humor. It is no accident that some of Agnew's speech-writers come from "Laugh-In," and they have given him not only wisecracks but humorous themes to develop: His "schtick" is the use of the funny $10-word.

In the last two weeks he has given us "struth- ious" and "tomentose," which are real words, and "disincentive" and "permissivist," which are not. And the humorous theme probably the creation of Pat Buchanan or Clark Moilenhoff, who has turned lately to fiction is the idea that only elected officials can criticize other elec-" ted officials. This concept has its roots in the divine rights of kings and finds an echo in the Magna Charta, which prescribed that barons could be tried only by other barons but it is marvelously funny just the same. As life became gloomy, wrathful even despairing in the days prior to Worid War II, there were great men who gave us respite with laughter. Charles Chaplin in "The Great Dictator" even made us laugh at Adolf Hitler, and there were Bud Abbott and Lou Costello with one- liners about the war.

But the old comedians telegraphed their punches; they told us they were going to make us laugh. Today, the medium is the message; and Agnew's seemingly unconscious humor marks him as not just another jokester, but contemporary and relevant in the great tradition of American wit (Copyright 1970, Los Angeles Times) Now You Know By United Press International The first labor strike in the United States was called by Philadelphia printers in 1786, a year before the U.S. Constitution.was draftedin that city. The printers won a $6-a- week pay increase..