Fort Lauderdale News from Fort Lauderdale, Florida • Page 121

Fort Lauderdale Newt and Sun-Sentinel, Sunday, July 9, 1972 39 Reminiscences Rich In Nostalgia Lindy's Youth Huck Finn Tale Business In Doghouse To Many Americans i .1 1 1 I really acts to protect the consumer and they generally favor strict government controls if not government ownership as the only feasible means of saving the public from robbery. In May 1927, an unassuming young man named Charles A. Lindbergh from the American Midwest astonished the world and won its warm acclaim by becoming the first man to fly the Atlantic Ocean solo, piloting a small monoplane, "The Spirit Of St. Louis." Now, for the first time, he has written of those boyhood years in a nostalgic reminiscence that might almost have come ont of the stories of Mark Twain. The following excerpts are published by special arrangement with the Minnesota Historical Society.

UPI TtlwhotM LINDBERGH POSES WITH 'DINGO an undated photo of flier as boy LINDBERGH IN RESTORED HOME letters published as book By JENKIN LLOYD JONES pEWER AMERICANS are friendly to' American business. More and more think businessmen are callous to public welfare, dishonest and greedy. A rising percentage believes, industry could lower prices, pay i higher wages, contribute more taxes, in-' erease quality and still make plenty of money. r-nyi' The money matter is interesting. A cross lection of 4,059 consumers, interviewed by Opinion Research Corp.

of Princeton, N.J., guessed that the average manufacturer nets bout 28 cents on his tales dollar after taxes. The consensus was that 10 cents would be plenty. y' Last year the average industrial profit was 4.2 per cent on sales, down from S.6 per cent six years ago. The S00 largest corporations netted 4.S per cent 11 The same survey showed 81 per cent of those interviewed thought polluting plants should be closed, but only 22 per cent said they would be willing to pay higher prices for goods made in plants that installed expensive pollution controls. The rest either didn't know or felt that the difference should come out of profits.

Most alienated are the young, many of whom believe business is grubby and who yearn for a life of "public service," generally on some government payroll. Where a large part of the tax wherewithal comes to make that payroll hasn't seemed to occur to them. But "the young" Is an imprecise term. Those who only get as far as. high school seem as anxious as their fathers and grandfathers were to just get good Jobs, and Jobs in private business are fine.

j' There is little antibusiness feeling among business school graduates from the universities, possibly because they have bees exposed ia their classrooms to the genuine difficulties of making an honest profit Nor are graduate engineers, being pragmatio types, "turned off" by private enterprise. Most of the flak business receives comes' from liberal arts students via their professors. As one professor at the University of Iowa told me not long ago: "You have no conception of the economic illiteracy prevalent in our letters and science faculties." Such professors find the competitive sys-; tern abhorrent, as demonstrated by their i fondness for rigid tenure guarantees which I freeze them into lifetime teaching jobs. They also doubt if business competition It is not surprising that their students would reflect this, but it would be' a great 4 mistake if businessmen assumed these atti- I tudes would be a passing phase, like acne. Many of the young detractors of the Ameri- I can business system, whatever their mis- I conceptions, are natively articulate and evangelical Immense damage can be done to incen- 4 rive, research, profits, prices and foreign 1 trade if impractical or confiscatory theories 4 become law, and these disaffected young people will soon be making law.

(, So the time has come: 1 For business and industry to respond i positively' to legitimate consumer gripes, 4 particularly those involving false advertis- 1 tag, deceptive packaging, design deficien- cies and so on. I 2 To go over to the offensive where the rebuttal is solid. For example, many youths fl are convinced that automobile recalls are evidence of the worst engineering and work- manship ever. It should be pointed out that the bug-filled autos of a generation ago 4 were never recalled, nor does the carbuyer 4 In any Communist country have such pro- tecrlon today, 4 3-To throw out those public relations departments which imagine that their chief 4 function is to keep reporters away from i the boss. In these parlous times of slipping public confidence, the executive who refuses to answer questions of legitimate publio in- I terest Is not doing the job for his stockhold- I tn, 1 I 4-To use business' secret weapon the periodic, informative and factual ad do- 4 scribing Just how the company Is doing.

In I stock companies it's all ii the annual re- port, "anyway or should be. Business 1 news is hot People read it But most insti- I tutional ads are slick, meatless and bland, An annual full page, heavy with text I written so the average man can understand it, and laced with photographs and charts would have high readership. It might go far to counter the wild swings of Ralph Nader and bum dope put out by some unions and the New Populists, American business has craved it can sell I By H. D. QUIGG UPI Senior Editor Charles A.

Lindbergh's mother liked to name things. He grew up among the white pine groves on the banks of the upper Missis-, sippi with a succession of farm dogs named Sweet Snider, Breeze, Shep, Tody, Spot, Hunter; Dingo, and Wahgoosh the last being what the Lindberghs were told was the Chippe- wa Indian word for fox. Interspersed in the canine parade were a tame chipmunk, shorttail, so called after an encounter with one of the dogs; a three-goose gaggle Hooligan, Fanny, and Matilda and a marvelous machine named Maria. "Maria impacted on our farm life in 1912," writes the man, now 70, who the world knows as an aviator, author, medical technologist, and conservationist. "Pronounced as is the farm rye, Maria was a Ford Model Tourabout with standard footpedal gearshift my father bought it partly for campaigning and partly for farm transportation." Charles A.

Lindbergh Sr. was an agrarian political reformer who was congressman from Minnesota from 1907 to 1917. He had a 118-acre farm on the Mississippi and a law- office in nearby Little Falls. "In 1912 learning to drive an automobile was a formidable and extraordinary experi- enee," the son says in a book of reminiscences, "more of a stunt than a necessity I learned to drive in 1913 at the age of 11. By 1914 1 was driving most of the time (but) when my father drove, I usually rode the running board "I could pick leaves off branches as we passed scoop up a stone from the road.

I liked the wind on my face and through my hair." The father taught the boy to love swimming naked in the river or in Pike Creek close by, at first carrying young Charley on his back by doing the breast stroke. The congressman would ride a bicycle from office to farm. "He would turn in on the Icehouse Road, dismount, and start whistling the call of the whipperwill. This was my signal to start running with my dog up the Icehouse Road to meet him. We would go for a swim, tramp over the farm "Sometimes we would go down to the river and walk out on log jams.

These were often quite big twice each summer the Bateaux and Wanigans came through to clear them. Then the 'River Pigs' would give exhibitions of logrolling and break up seemingly unbreakable jams." The Huck Finn boyhood by the river and young manhood of farm managing, animal handling, driving a three-wheel tractor, riding a motorcycle on his sales rounds as a milking-machine agent, and his final nostalgic arrival back at the farm as a barnstormer in his first airplane at the ripe age of 21 are detailed in "Boyhood On The Upper Mississippi." This book subtitled "A Reminescent Letter," publisned by the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, is indeed a letter from Lindbergh. It was sent to the society in five installments in 1969 and 1970, written in pencil and ink from such locales as the split-bamboo floor of a grass hut in Luzon, a plane nearing Hong Kong, and a New York office building into which he had been accidentally locked. Set down in snatched moments for the guidance of the society's staff in restoring the old Lindbergh farm house, with no original intention of publication, it is a remarkable recollection of farm life before and during World War I.

Lindbergh grew up with guns. His grandfa- ther gave him a 22-caliber rifle when he was 6, and his father gave him a repeating rifle the next summer. (He was 7 when he shot his first duck). Two years later he got a 12-gauge shotgun that was so heavy he had a hard time 'i holding it to his shoulder. He hunted a lot with his father, as the many pictures in the book attest.

1 In winter the temperature would drop to 30 below, and once hit 40. "Then (walking to school in snow too deep for bicycling) frost would form on the front of my cap on nos- tril hairs." Once he got caught at night in a blizzard and lost Prince, a pony, as a result of fatigue the animal suffered on the trip, even though the boy walked much of the way leading his mount. "Storms of one kind or another punctuate my memory of the farm and areas around it: the blizzards swirling snow against my face; the -violent thunderstorms of summer with their lightning flashes and ear-splitting cracks and the sheet lightning making luminous demon forms of clouds." And hail, once, the size of hen eggs. Walking to the barn in early winter morn- ing, "I could tell the approximate temperature by the bite of the air in my nose and the way the snow crunched underfoot; the next sign of cold would be the thickness of ice in the barn water trough." There was a garden, and Charles liked best the sweet corn that his mother cooked. "She cooked on a wood stove, a Majestic.

We used wood sticks and slabs from the sawmill in Little Falls because they were easy to get and cheap. "My mother's dishes were simple and wonderfully good. She fried, boiled, baked and roasted. We usually had meat three times a day, along with vegetables, salads, and fruits. For dessert we had pies (apple, peach, berry, pumpkin, gooseberry), pudding (bread, tapioca, plum), cakes (angel, chocolate) and cookies of various types "We made ice cream on occasion in a churn, packed with cracked ice and salt.

My mother usually baked our bread herself white, rye, white salt-rising, and potato bread. For breakfast she would bake biscuits. It was seldom that we were without homemade jam and cottage cheese." From age 11, Charles drove his father on election campaigns, often getting stuck on the unpaved muddy roads. "One rainy evening in the country, he, two other men, and I got on a road that was so bad, and we got stuck so often, that we gave up trying to reach the town for which we were headed and spent the night on the parlor floor of a roadside farmhouse. The farmer could give us only two blankets, but we kept the stove burning enough to stay warm in spite of half-soaked clothes." The Lindbergh farm had no electricity nor telephone.

Kerosene lamps lit the house, kero-. sene lanterns the barn: "Both gave a soft and lovely light plenty of light to read by, to milk by, to feed by if you kept the chimneys clean. Of course it is not a convenient, but personally I prefer kerosene light to electric." In the fall of 1920, he rode off on his Excelsior motorcycle to enter the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In the spring of 1923, he bought his "Jenny" airplane in Georgia, barnstormed to Texas, and then north to Little. Falls and landed on the West 40 of the farm.

"I felt nostalgia then if I ever felt it in my life, for I knew the farming days I loved so much were over. I had made my choice. I love still more to fly." its products marvelously, but if it wants to stay out of the straitjacket it had better start selling itself. Art Buchwald Demo Convention Scenario JjJVERYONE HAS HIS own scenario for this week's Democratic National Convention. The way things have been going with the party, one scenario has as much validity as the next.

This is the one that I have written and if It comes true, remember, you read it here. It is the fourth day of the convention and the Democrats have been un Jack Armstrong Peri's Worth 30 Years' Wait able to decide on a presidential candidate. The fight to seat delegations has taken up three days and those people who were ruled ineligible have refused to give up their seats to those who were officially designated as delegates to the convention. Almost every state delegation has two people sitting in every chair. No one dares McGovern, Humphrey, Wallace, Chisholm, Jackson and Muskie.

There have been no demonstrations for the candidates in the hall because everyone is afraid if he gets up and marches they won't let him back in his section again. On the first ballot McGovern picked up 1,234 votes, well shy of the 1,509 he needed. The rest were split between the other candidates with the uncommitted refusing to vote for anyone. The second and third ballot found no one budging. By the tenth ballot of Wednesday's all-night session, the convention was hopelessly deadlocked.

The state delegations caucused right on the floor, trying to get people to change their minds. But it was impossible. On NBC, John Chancellor and David Brink-ley became short-tempered and refused to talk to each often Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner onABC were also not speaking to each other, and on CBS, Walter Cronkite wasn't talking to himself. It was obvious to everyone in and out of the convention hall that a compromise candidate had to be found one who bad not already been nominated.

But who? The Democratic Party leaders call a recess behind the podium. They argue and thrash it out for several hours. The only man whose name is proposed as the compromise candidate is a very famous, but controversial' figure on the American scene. He has announced many times that he is not a candidate for the Presidency or the Vice Presidency, and has said under no conditions would he accept a draft. Yet, the leaders argue he is the one person who can save the party.

This young man, whose name had been associated with a very embarrassing incident, is a household word now. Because of the deadlock at the convention, he is the only one who can possibly beat Nixon in November. The compromise candidate is not at the convention. He has purposely stayed away so people would believe he was not interested in the nomination. O'Brien puts in a call to Everyone, in turn, gets on the phone and tells him he has to be the candidate.

The compromise candidate speaks to George McGovern, Humphrey, Muskie and Wallace. They urge him to run, The candidate finally agrees to a draft and says he will take the next plane to Miami. And that's how Bobby Fischer, the U.S. chess champion, became the Democratic presidential nominee for 1972. VALLIE 4 NELSEN'S yj LITTLE -1 WORLD Who hath a book Has friends at hand.

And gold and gear At his command: And rich estates, If he but look, Are held by him Who hath a book. W. D. Nesbit leave the floor for fear that someone will grab his seat When someone tries to speak he is- hooted down by the opposition faction. Larry O'Brien, the chairman of the party, has the podium ringed with the National Guard so no one can grab the microphone.

The nomination speeches have not been heard, but the candidates have been nominated Gee, but I'd give the world To see that old gang of mine. I can't forget that old quartet That sang Sweet Adeline. Goodbye forever, old fellows and gals, Goodbye forever, old sweethearts and pals, God bless them. Gee, but I'd give the world To see that old gang of mine. Max Rafferty Total Insanity Terrifies Totally PEOPLE TODAY HAVE the wind up.

We Americans worried during the '30s about the Depression. We were saddened a little later by the casualty lists of World War II. Still later, we recognized somberly the deadly peril implicit in the A-bomb. But none of these things frightened us silly at the time. Today we're scared.

It's not wars or the econ Billy Rose, Mort Dixon and Ray Henderson had a hand in that one. Came out in 1923, and we mink the whole world sang it Radio was too young to help it along but it didn't need any help. A lot of us get a little misty eyed when we hear it now with the old arrangement. It's on that tape that Ev Biddle made for us, and we play all those songs as we sit here and type. We told you that Dick Chapman was nice enough to loan us a tape recorder.

Dear Mr. Nelsen: When I was a boy, I listened faithfully to Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy daily. I'd moan, groan, stamp my little feet on the floor until my mother would rush out and buy a couple of boxes of you know what breakfast food. Eventually we had to move into a 14-room house in order to store the stuff. One day they interrupted the show to offer an amazing fountain pen.

It was disguised to resemble a cheap, leaky pen, but in reality this i was a most ingenious instrument. About four ink drops down from the point was a secret button which made the pen split in half. Inside was a picture of my beloved Jack climbing the Statue of Liberty and waving an American flag. If you shook the pen, Jack would wave the flag. It also claimed that the pen wrote in 48 different colors one for each state.

(Only 48 states, then.) I grabbed 25 cents from my mother's purse and took it with 974 box tops to the post office for mailing. I then hurried home to watch for the mailman. I still haven't left the house for fear of not being there when the pen arrives. Now here is my problem Mr. Nelsen.

Do you think that 30 years is too long to wait for the Jack Armstrong pen? (My mother, bless her soul, ate nothing but stale cereal and passed away from malnutrition 23 years ago.) She lacked parental understanding and kept insisting that I had been swindled. However, I like to think that they were so swamped with orders that like the butcher who backed into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work Sincerely yours, Ed Ihlefeldt. No, Ed, I do not think 30 years is too long to wait for such a magnificent prize. We sent for the same pen back in 1938 and feel certain that any firm that associated with Jack Armstrong surely will fulfill its obligations. Keep a stout heart and don't leave the house.

It may arrive any day and ours, too. omy or technological breakthroughs which keep gnawing at us now. We're not actually afraid of pollution or urban sprawl or activism. What we're really afraid of is each other. Example 1: Candidates for publio office are being implored by their opponents and their supporters alike to stay out of crowds.

We're ment of the asset which had made it dominant in the first place. The dinosaur relied upon size to dominate the Mesozoic world. It got bigger and bigger until at last it could no longer respond rapidly to sudden environmental changes. When the climate cooled and the food supply moved away, the dinosaurs died off. Except, of course, for the little mobile dinosaurs which today we call crocodiles and alligators.

The saber-toothed tiger terrorized the other creatures of his far-off time, largely by means of those formidable tusks which gave him his name. Eventually the sabers grew to such an outrageous size that he couldn't haul them around, at least not well enough to run down a square meal. His one conspicuous asset did him in at last Maybe the wheel of time has come around full circle once again, and this time it's man's turn to be dished by his own dominance. Actually, we're a sorry species, physically. Bad teeth.

No claws to speak of. Slow movers even at top speed. It was that marvelous brain that gave us a whole planet that intricate, subtle, ingenious intellect of ours. But now the mind that won the world is breaking down. The suicide rate is rising astronomically.

So are the insanity figures. People with empty faces and blank eyes stalk increasingly among us, killing and maiming senselessly, gigglingly. There are a few more of them each day, it seems. The shots are getting more frequent and more random. The giggling is getting louder.

numbers will be out of the phone book. And it's not just snobbery or status-seeking. People especially women are Increasingly afraid to answer the phone. Oh, we've always been pretty lethal to each other down the years: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, lynch mobs, vigilantes, John Dillinger. But the 70s are weaving a fabric of fear which is different from anything we've ever known.

You see, today we're confronted by violence which is completely irrational. And total in-' sanity terrifies totally. 1 Consider: Criminals like Al Capone were pretty scary, but at least they had reasons for the crimes they committed. When Al ordered the St Valentine's Day massacre, he was trying to protect his assets by liquidating his competitors, and this is logical once the monstrous initial premise Is accepted. But what's logical about walking Into an of- fice building with a sawed-off shotgun and blasting the first six individuals you see? Creeping into a nurses' dormitory and cutting eight defenseless throats? Climbing onto a clock tower and picking off casual passers-by with a high-powered rifle? Burning down a priceless library at a private college because someone disapproves of the national policy in Southeast Asia? Smashing the Pieta with a sledgehammer? Actions like these are completely mad.

How to explain what's happening to us? I have a theory: Every dominant species on this planet has eventually become extinct ud in each case Its demise was brought about by the overdevelop- I cannot sing the old songs, Though well I know the tune. Familiar as a cradle song With sleep compelling croon. Yet though I'm filled with music, As choirs of summer birds, I cannot sing the old songs, I do not know the words. Burdette. TODAY'S MEDITATION Fools rush in where angels fear to tread An oldie.

Alexander Pope said it. He died in 1744, so you see it is really old, and we think Shakespeare said it before that, like about 1680. afraid for them; they've just got to be scared stiff for themselves. And this is something brand new in this country. Example 2: The biggest boom market In the current economy is in manufacture and sale of anubreak-in devices for private homes.

In any city of considerable size today, you open your front door at night in answer to a knock at your own peril. Our grandparents could never have begun to comprehend such a state of affairs. Example 3: Telephone companies are frantically trying to meet the mushrooming demand for unlisted numbers. We're rapidly approaching a time when half of all telephone HAVE A HAPPY DAY I'm scare!.