The Tampa Tribune from Tampa, Florida • 25

Levy Marion Citrus Sumter Serving Florida's Crossroads Sunday, April 5, 1987 A SECTION of THE TAMPA TRIBUNE Group proposes student-nin station at CFGC A group of South Florida women is vying for a television station at CFCC to be run by the students. By LARRY SCHUSTER Tribune Staff Writer OCALA A group of South Florida women has proposed an educational television station at Central Florida Community College that students could run. The college's new president is interested in the project. aware of the project so recently that the college's board of trustees have not yet officially taken up the matter. Mixson said she did not know whether the proposal will be discussed during Wednesday's trustees meeting.

Even with full backing from the trustees, community groups and funding sources, the idea is far from certain. Two other applicants have applied for the same permit, and it could be one to two years until a permit is granted and any challenges to the permit exhausted. No date for an FCC hearing or initial decision on the application has been set. College President Dr. William F.

Campion has told officials to "go ahead and get involved," in the project, said Sharon Mixson, media coordinator for the college. With Campion's backing, Mixson and Dean of Instructional Services Robert F. Ritterhoff, have joined the board of directors of the South Florida group, Mixson said. The original members are all women from Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, Mixson said. The two school officials learned of the group and the proposal after Cameron contacted them and met them two weeks ago.

School officials have become The group, called the Cultural Arts Television Association, was formed specifically for the purpose of establishing an educational station in Ocala, said Cara Cameron, a spokewoman for the group. It is one of three applicants vying for a federal permit to operate Channel 29, which the Federal Communications Commission has allocated to Ocala as a non-profit, educational television station. The group's proposal, if fully carried out, would lead to a TV broadcast training program, Public Broadcasting Service programming and the first courses ever broadcast from the school, Cameron said. The female predominance of the group which is now six women and one man, Ritterhoff is one factor that may sway the decision, Cameron said. "A slight, but very slight preference is given to minorities and women" in the permitting process, according to FCC policy, said Cameron, a communications attorney with 20 years in television and radio management.

"I felt we would have a better chance," as a women's group. While men may Join the group on the board of directors, Cameron said a strong female presence will be maintained. A separate issue that may also figure in the establishment of the station is approval of a tower site. A company that has proposed to build the tower for the broadcasting group has submitted plans for a tower just east of Lebanon Station in Levy County. The unusually great height will draw close scrutiny from aviation officials.

It would be the tallest tower north of Tampa on the state's west coast, and one of the tallest in the state, said Al "A.J." Roberts, aviation specialist with the bureau of aviation in the Florida Department of Transportation. Applications such See STATION, Page 2 f1 riv- Mvt Tin i 4 i "sir. i i i Rains give forest fire protection By PAUL HANSON Tribune Staff Writer OCALA Steady rain over the past month has the Ocala National Forest in good condition to withstand the coming busy season, or at least to withstand the possibility of fire. Visitors will find ponds brimming and little chance of fires such as those that charred several thousand acres of forest in three days of May 1985. Most of the fires in the forest are caused by lightning, said forester Harold Rivers of the U.S.

Forest Service. "Lightning seems to strike around the ponds," Rivers said. "When you've had a good wet spring like we've had the probability of a lightning strike causing a fire is greatly reduced." While the ample rains have reduced the chance of a natural fire this year, Rivers said the chance of man-made fires always remains good. "A wet spring doesn't reduce man-made fires," Rivers said. "In my opinion, we could still have them." But the the forest's swamps are well-wetted and Rivers said it's unlikely though possible that conditions will change enough in the next month to bring about real fire danger.

"You'd need heavy winds, low humidity and a prolonged dry spell," Rivers said. "To get those conditions all at one time could be dangerous. But you virtually don't have that happen but about once every eight years." As spring and summer move into the area, and a lot more people begin to use the park, visitors will find park officials have been preparing for them. The most noticeable improvements have been made around the popular Mill Dam recreation area, Rivers said. A new picnic pavilion and paved parking lot will greet visitors to Mill Dam.

"We've upgraded the whole Mill Dam area," Rivers said. "We've improved the boat ramp and spruced up the whole area." Minnows, men await mosquitos By GEORGE WILKENS Tribune Staff Writer Although recent heavy rains may create mosquito breeding grounds, flood conditions may also provide minnows with access to small pools where they can dine on the pesky insects, officials say. Like many residents, Citrus County Mosquito Control Director Harry Maynard has been waiting for things to dry out. But for Maynard, the departure of almost-daily rains will allow his crews to launch their seasonal effort to control the mosquito population. "In some cases it will hurt us," Maynard said of the heavy rains.

"But along the Withlacoo-chee River it's going to help." Although the rains provide standing water in which mosquitos can breed, the rain-swollen river will provide a bonus. "It lets the minnows get up In there and spread out. That helps us a Manatee exits prior to show By GEOFFREY MOHAN Tribune Staff Writer WEEKI WACHEE It may have been a bid for stardom, but a manatee who wandered into the main spring of the Week! Wachee attraction Saturday apparently gave in to stage fright moments before mermaids were to perform. "It was a marvel," said Sue Vance, general manager of the attraction. "We never, to our knowledge, had a manatee in our spring before." Mermaids coming in for the Saturday morning show were cleaning windows in the theater where visitors watch the show when they spotted the full-grown mammal at about 9:15 a.m., Vance said.

"It seemed to be sleeping," she said. "Once every six or seven minutes it would surface." Mermaids were at first afraid the animal was ill, but Vance said she contacted manatee experts at Homosassa Springs Nature World, who reassured her that the animal's behavior appeared normal. Then, as the 11 a.m. showtime approached, tension mounted. t'We were afraid, not that it would be a danger (to mermaids), but how much if we started our show it would disturb it," Vance said.

The mermaids would have been delighted to share the spotlight with the manatee, Vance said. "Legend has it they were the original mermaids," she said. But the sight of people filing into the fishbowl-like auditorium apparently was too much for the errant mermaid-to-be. At 10:55 a.m., Vance said, "It just gently turned around and went out. We tracked it down as far as our boat dock." Criminal record may be evidence By DAVID M.

POOLE Tribune Staff Writer BROOKSVILLE From the jury box, Martin Locke gazed across the courtroom at silver-haired Joe Harper and decided this guy couldn't be a schoolteacher turned child molester. "There's no way I wanted to find him guilty," Locke recalled, two months after Harper's trial. But Locke said he began to i change his mind as five girls, ages 10 and 11, testified that Harper had fondled them during class at East-side Elementary School. What clinched the case for Locke was testimony by three teenagers from Covington, who told how they had been molested by Harper several years before he moved to Hernando County. "The fact that (Harper) had molested girls prior to the five girls here" was crucial to Locke's decision to join other jurors in a unanimous guilty verdict, Locke says.

Though Harper had never been charged with molesting the Covington teen-agers, Circuit Judge L.R. Huffstetler Jr. allowed their testimony under a controversial evidence rule that local prosecutors have relied upon with greater frequency. The so-called Williams Rule was used last week to send a molesting stepfather to prison for life and is expected to be evoked again in the upcoming sexual-battery trial of Brooksville masseur Roy Hilligenn. The Williams Rule is controver sial, legal experts say, because it opens the door to evidence about a defendant's criminal record or See Page 2 Jim Twitty Dispelling babyhood mysteries It's been 20 years since I've had a one-on-one relationship with a baby.

Until my grandson recently tried to eat a grasshopper, I'd almost forgotten how a baby will put anything in its mouth much of it pretty gross, like mushy cigar butts and insects. But, what's amazing to me is that, with the exception of an occasional hard chunk of something too large to be swallowed, rarely is any harm done. That's because in the first year or so of a baby's life, nothing stays down long enough to cause trouble. Fortunately, a baby doesn't get its nutrition like other human beings. It absorbs it through its skin and hair follicles.

A baby knows that and instinctively smears food all over its body. The food that actually reaches a baby's stomach stays there just long enough to sour before it comes back up under enough pressure to shoot it half way across the room. A baby always has a puzzled look on Its face when that happens. (As a baby gets older and obtains a degree of manual dexterity, it sometimes will try to force food into its digestive tract through openings in its nose and ears. But that's another column.) Anyway, back to what we started out talking about at the beginning of this column: the repulsive things a baby will put in its mouth that even a starving dog won't touch, and how the baby's parents are to blame.

For the first few weeks of its life, a baby lives on liquid, either from a bottle, or if it's lucky, from more exotic packaging. Then when it finally does get its first taste of something solid, it's apt to come out of a small jar and have a name like strained stewed prunes with rutabagas, or assorted pureed meats with fennel and tapioca. A month or so of that kind of stuff and a baby's little system longs for something crunchy, even if it just crawled out from under a rock. (I've got this great idea for making high-protein snacks in bug shapes that parents can take from the freezer and hide around the house and yard for their baby to find. I'm looking for investors.) Actually, a baby can eat and drink anything an adult can pizza, beer.

The only reason a baby gets baby food instead of more substantial fare is to keep it from growing too fast and weighing 100 pounds by the time it's a year old. Can you imagine what it would be like to have a 100-pound baby running around with no control over its bowels? Can you imagine having to change its diapers? A baby is by nature noisy. When it gets real quiet and appears to be in deep thought, you know it's doing one of two things: it's either messing its diaper or eating something nasty. To tell which, you simply have to look at its face. If the baby's eyes are crossed and its face is all scrunched up and red, it's the former.

But, if the baby is wearing a sheepish grin, look for something wiggling in the corner of its mouth. You can make book that it's not the baby's tongue. Tribune photograph by KYLE DANACEAU Art Courtright, a U.S. Forestry Service worker, rakes at the Mill Dam Friday. Flooding forecasts revised 1 rvi But the weather has also kept spraying crews off the trail of the pesky mosquito, See MOSQUITO, Page 2 INVERNESS Water management officials revised forecasts for flooding along the Withlacoochee River Saturday, predicting the most severe peak at the Pasco-Hernando County line near Lacoochee, and pushing the flood date later elsewhere.

Water levels under the U.S. 301 bridge near Lacoochee were 15 feet Saturday, three feet above flood stage and a half-foot shy of its expected peak today, according to James Brooks, office manager at the Inverness field office of the Southwest Florida Water Management District. An estimate 35 homes could be evacuated if necessary, Brooks said. Officials in Pasco County, however, said no homes had been evacuated as of Saturday afternoon. Flooding along other waterways appeared to abate, Brooks added.

"It looks like most everything is going down, except the Withlacoochee," Brooks said. Further north in Citrus County, the river posted only a mild rise of .05 feet at Holder, Brooks said. The See FLOOD, Page 2 i Citrus County prepares for an unwelcomed guest. lot," said Maynard. "If the river had stayed down and we got this rain, we'd have had potholes in there.".