Quad-City Times from Davenport, Iowa • 2

OUAMITY TIMES Thursday, Nov. 11, 1999 2A United Way sets record with '99 total and Family Counseling Service; Mer-; rill Lynch in Moline; Nichols Group Office; Oakwood Realty; Parr Instrument Pleasant Valley Schools Administration; Quad-City Conven-. tion Visitor Bureau; Quad-City Development Group; River Bend Library System; Robert W. Baird Continued from Page IA community," said Frank Clark, volunteer campaign chairman and plant manager of Ralston-Purina Co. "Tonight of all nights, as we wrap up our efforts in the last campaign of this century, our focus will be on thanking the countless groups that have made this year's campaign such a success." The dollars raised in the Quad-City area stay Jim Graham, vice president and general manager of KWQC-TV6, was introduced as the 2000 volunteer campaign chairman.

Twenty-six people who did a lot of work for the. campaign were the loaned executives. Tom Crowley, retired from Alcoa, ended his eighth year as a loaned executive. He and the others spent the past 11 weeks going from business to business, industry to industry, talking with employees about making their individual campaigns successful. Volunteers and organizations were honored at the thank-you event for their outstanding efforts.

Companies and organizations that achieved Gold level awards for employee campaigns also were recognized. That level of recognition is given when employees contribute $200 or more per person from a given workplace. This year's Gold level recipients are: American Red Cross, Quad-Cities Chapter; Bartlett Agency; Bi-State Regional Commission; Boy Scouts of America; Brackey Land Surveying Braren Mulder German Associates Commonwealth Edison IBEW Local 15; Deere Deloitte Touche; Enterprise Rent-A-Car; Friendly House; Taxtronics Hanson Watson Howe Advertising; HELP Legal Assistance; Isabel Bloom Studio; John Deere Construction Equipment John Deere Intercontinental Industrial Region Overseas; Larri-son Associates; Lee Enterprises LinguiSystems Marriage Ruhl Ruhl Insurance; Salomon -H Smith Barney; The Catholic Messen ger; The Herald Printing Co. GCIU" Local 98C; Trissel Graham Toole UAW Sub AG-IMP Office; UAW; ,1 ft-' Vll the Quad-Cities Area; and Wessel Pat- Bill Wundram tern Co. IAM Lodge PM 2825.

Q-C anchor returns to head up news operation for them. That's the traditional networks' Continued from Page IA In a prepared statement, Wilson, a former news director and anchor at WHBF-TV and a weekend anchor at KPLR-TV in St. Louis, said, "I'm looking forward to this great opportunity to once again serve the Quad-Cities in front of and behind the scenes." Word of a new player in the local news business came as no surprise to other Quad-City TV station managers. "We do news, we've been doing news, and covering local news is a very tough, challenging, 24-hour job and I wish anyone luck," said Marion Meginnis, the president and general manager of WQAD-TV in Moline. "But producing news is very expensive.

It's certainly very innovative what they're doing." Lyle said this will be the only market in which an independent company is producing the newscast for a Fox station. "Without a boilerplate, it's hard to know which way to step," he added. The effort will require his company to purchase about $300,000 in new equipment. "One of the most unique things is we'll be a totally tape-less, newsroom: The cameras will be digi-, tal, it will be digitally edited. It's nice not to be saddled with old Still, Porter expects that many of the viewers who will be attracted to a 9 p.m.

newscast are people not typically staying up until 10 p.m. "I think the majority will stay with the tradi-; tional 10 p.m. news, but the more news the better." strongest hour of programming." Under the partnership, KLJB will oversee the marketing and advertising-sales, while EBI will handle the day-to-day operation and production of the new program at its studio in a neighboring liuilding. The partnership includes a revenue-sharing situation, although DeBoeuf declined to offer details. The 13-member news staff, which will include an anchor, producer, news director, four photographers and three reporters, all will be employees of EBI.

The first staff member hired is Greg Wilson, a Quad-City TV news veteran who will be the news director as well as the main anchor. folks are looking for something a little different in their newscast. We're going to cover the news that's important." Fox has been encouraging its affiliates to get into the local news business for the past couple of years, she said, adding, "We're not doing it because Fox requires it, it's something we want to do." But management at other Quad-City television stations said local news has become a recent strategy for Fox. "Left to do it on their own, I don't think they would have done it," said Marshall Porter, the general manager for WHBF-TV in Rock Island. "I don't think it will impact us at 9 p.m.," he added.

"It's a very difficult hour Banking industry tries to calm customer fears done before New Year's Eve, "We've turned the clock forward" and made sure all the systems were, working correctly," said Tom Robin-', son, president and chief executive officer of Southeast National Moline. But around Dec. 31, the bank will check its ATMs regularly. "We've' told our people that we have a full roll' of tape for receipts in the ATMs. If we run out of paper, what will people think? The public perception is it's a-Y2K issue when it's not." In addition, the banks' employees will work past regular hours Dec.

31 to run paper records of all their accounts as a back-up process. Like many of his competitors, Robinson said bank officials will return Jan. i-to see whether Y2K created any "We've had to consider the outside organizations that touch us from the telephone to electricity all the vendors that provide anything that has to do with our everyday banking operations," he said. While much of the planning is regulatory, it also provides a contingency plan that can be used in any unforeseen situation, said Kathleen Snider, the manager of Norwest's downtown Davenport office. "We've tested the plan and what we would do, say, if we couldn't operate at another location.

If we had to move here from our Cumberland branch office, who would move and how would we do it?" Final preparations Not all of the preparations will be saved financial records in anticipation of Y2K problems. Banks take lead "One good thing for banks is we've been real leaders in the whole Y2K process," said Gayla Starcher, assistant vice president of Liberty Trust Savings Bank in Durant, Iowa. Iowa became one of the first states in the nation to have 100 percent of its banks and thrifts Y2K-compliant, Hildebrandt said, adding that the designation was achieved in late August. Disaster plans Planning for Y2K began four years ago for Firstar long before it announced plans to merge with Mercantile Bancorporation, both of which have several locations around the Quad-Cities. "We have extensively researched and worked on any aspects of Y2K to our satisfaction where we feel we are ready," said Steve Dale, a spokesman for Milwaukee-based Firstar." Arabian nights and a desert adventure CAIRO.

Egypt Finally. I see the true desert. It is the symbol of this Arabian Nights journey. The sand, it is so soft beneath our feet as we stroll aimlessly in this mystic land of the pharaohs. The desert: It seems 'to be a final wasting of the land, and it may be reasoned that at one stage 3)f our grain-of-sand lives that this was a vast bottom of the sea.

The starkness here, far outside Cairo, hits me with clarity. Even the sky is the color of the sand on this day. Here and there a tree struggles, it is covered with the fine film of the sand. I wonder about what is happening back home. Here, all I see is sand.

At night there is no sky like the desert's. It is bleak, dark and perhaps it helps me understand the draw of this place. It is difficult to forget Cairo, its 36 million people and its stark contrasts of wealth and beauty and shady palm-treed boulevards and stifling poverty: the goats that wander the streets like homeless dogs, the strife with Israel and the unforgiving, worst city in the world for beep-beep-crash-bang traffic. A fender-bender is to be accepted with a wave and drive away. Like bumper cars at the carnival.

Lyle Rutter of Moline exclaims with a gulp, "Look. Migosh, our bus driver just passed another bus driver and there was not space for a horsefly in between." We drive into the city, passing a hovel here, one cluster of villages after another there. There are little more than mud huts, and one man may harbor four wives and a dozen children inside. We cruise near to them, everyone comes out to wave. It is much the same on the Suez Canal, extraordinary, between mountains that look like craters of the moon and waving people in huts along its banks.

Our guide shrugs: "These people in villages are never sad, always happy Villagers like this know no other life. There are no drugs, no crime. They worry about nothing. Some villages do not even have a name. They are.

I think, living in a happy netherland. It has been their only existence for thousands of years." Tanks are aligned in the distance in stick-straight rows and always we are reminded of security. Buses travel in caravans for safety; there is an armed guard on each bus with an AK-47. Every few miles we halt at a checkpoint, where more mustachioed soldiers with weapons scan the highway from towers. We're reminded with a little shudder (quite a little shudder) of how a bus of 23 tourists from Switzerland was once halted by terrorists on this highway and all were slain.

I feel secure, perhaps blindly secure. We shrug. Whatever will be, will be. There appears no wracking of nerves for our 30 Quad-City tourists. This is what may be expected of an adventure.

Besides, "I'm With Bill" journeys have always been to extraordinary places where adventure is "This city has really fixed itself up since the last time I saw it five years ago," says Bonnie Butterworth of Moline, the tour mistress who is keeping us from drifting astray Lovely, yes, in many places, but rooftops still are used as a handy place to dump the garbage. Minarets and skyscrapers and we watch life in the City of the Dead. At least 50.000 people, dogs, donkeys and sheep cluster in boxes and hovels in a cemetery where the Turks buried their dead 1,500 years ago. There are burials there yet today, but no one objects to the squatters. Strange, too.

is the thousand-acre city dump where 7 million reside in shanties and eat throw-aways for existence and scavenge for salvage of measly value. Yet, I convince myself, this is a fascinating actually lovely city in so many ways. It is an exciting place and perhaps I could live here, but my wife says, "NO, NO, NO." Public buses are a maze of crowded heads, and beggars in Bedouin caps seem incongruous on sidewalks in front of the sleek TWA Building. Hundreds wait their turn in the street outside the city's only free hospital. Some anticipate a long wait.

They are roasting sweet potatoes over a small fire of sticks in a tiny stove. The Cairo Museum is a maelstrom, but we manage to snake our way through, catching most of the words of Hana. our tour guide who is an expert on King Tut and all his trappings. We can almost touch these eerie, golden wonders. It is a drab display compared with when King Tut and his sarcophagus and all his needs for the promised land were displayed in such splendor a few years ago in Chicago.

"Funny but it reminds me of a big mausoleum," Phil Baker of Bet-tendorf says to his wife Rose Marie. We pause beside a small stream within the city. One man is washing his face, then his feet in the water. A few feet away, a woman is washing clothes. We turn at this point into a flashy hotel where the dining room is vaulted with a cornucopia ceiling.

It all reminds me of the Casbah, and I expect Humphrey Bogart to muse, "Play it again, Sam." We dine upon endless dishes, mostly chicken and fish and, surprise, old-fashioned pineapple upside-down cake in the shape of a doughnut. That dessert is interesting, but not nearly as fascinating as the belly dancers that boggle our eyes for a half-hour. Continued from Page 1 A 2000, approaches. "If someone wants to take money out to feel comfortable and have an extra $150 to $200, we say fine," said Ben Hildebrandt, the vice president of marketing and public affairs for the Iowa Bankers Association. "Our concern is people don't do illogical things like taking out $10,000 or their life savings for the weekend.

We believe that's very dangerous." Yet the banking industry knows there are customers who fear a widespread computer crash which could be caused when the date turns over from 1999 and computers recognize 2000 as 1900 will erase their accounts or make other mistakes with their money. "It's the big 'what if question," said Laura Ernzen, the marketing assistant for Quad-City Bank Trust, which has its headquarters in Betten-dorf. "We've held conferences for our customers to really basically get in and show what the concern is all about because knowledge, in essence, really take the fear away." A Quad-City Times survey of 387 people conducted by Personal Marketing Research Inc. indicated that only 19 percent of the respondents were concerned about Y2K issues in general. Of that group, 68 percent had some level of concern about Y2K as it relates to financial institutions or transactions.

But when asked what preparations they had made for Y2K, only 1 percent said they have taken money out and only 2 percent have nique yellow white gold jewelry that marks a historical occasion with lasting beauty. Come pick your design before the moment is gone. CORflECTrOIMS An article published in Wednesday editions incor- rectly listed the time of Veterans Day ceremonies today at the National Cemetery on Arsenal Island. The public ceremony will begin at 1 p.m. jsjKm THE MILLENNIUM COLLECTION now at J.S.

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