Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 25

Inside Deaths B4 lottery B8 Newsmakers B8 Best Bets B8 Weather B8 Kurosawa dies Akira Kurosawa, director of such classic films as The Seven Samurai' and died as his home in Tokyo. He was 88. B4 Today is your day to water if your address ends in either uwu Monday, September 7, 1998 or tri Gramm detail plan to fix Social Austin in '76 not exactly a cuisine capital Gan you imagine an Aus-' tin in which half the restaurants recommended in a travel book are cafeterias? No, this is not some kind of -weird "Twilight Zone" episode I'm talking about. The other day I came across a 1976 American Automobile Association Texas TourBook and looked up Texas Republican Sen. Phil Gramm speaks Sunday about Social Security reform at UT-Austin'sLBJ School of Pubr lie Affairs.

Gramm says not reforming Social Security will pit our children against our parents' over whether to raise payroll taxes or cut benefits to keep the system going. Rebecca McEnteeAA-S not changed. Leaving Social Security the way it is, he said, "will pit our children against our parents" over the question of whether to raise payroll taxes or cut benefits to keep the system operating. Gramm spoke at the Lyndon' Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs on the University of Texas campus. Essentially, Gramm's reform plan, which he has been urging for months, would take nearly one-fourth of the 12.4 percent of wages that U.S.

workers now have deducted from their paychecks and place it in private investments V1 lv In UT speech, GOP senator pushes for private investment of payroll deductions By Mike KeuY American-Statesman Staff U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas brought his Social Security-preform message to Austin on Sunday, warning that the country is "on the verge of an intergener-ational war" if the system of supplemental retirement income is i I 3 Vj-- managed by government-regulated companies. As the system matured over the next several decades, the payroll tax would be phased down to 10 percent Whether to opt into the new system would be voluntary for workers up to the beginning of 2000. Those entering the work force after that would be required to invest 3 percent of their payroll deductions in stocks and bonds.

Forcing a change in the present system, Gramm said, is a declining birthrate coupled with See Gramm, B7 4 relaxing parking enforcement to help neighborhood streets. A vehicle at Bowie High School parking. Many students turn to "It should be noted that many of the reported exceptions may be the result of inadequate resources," wrote Venita Fuller, chief assistant county auditor for Travis County Auditor Susan Spataro. DeBeauvoir faults Spataro's office for focusing on "very minor points" and stresses that the audit which took 13 months to complete, makes no allegations stronger than record-keeping flaws. DeBeauvoir's audit has become a central campaign issue in Republican Bud Schauerte's effort to oust the 12-year incumbent The audit was released with no fanfare or attention in late June, but Schauerte kicked off his campaign last week by highlighting its n.i off Andy Padgett patrols the Bowie High School parking lot on his bicycle in search of parking violations.

Some Central Texas schools are Austin. It the same book I brought withmein myoldVW when I moved here 22 years job. Joint Kelso I had forgotten I still had this book hanging around the house. But thumbing through it was like digging up a time capsule. You can get an idea how much this town has changed by looking under the restaurant and hotel The book mentions just six of Austin's restaurants from those days.

And three of them wereLuby's. The other eating spots that made it into the book were The Barn steaks, served in dining rooms decorated as a barn or now Harold's Clothing Outlet Barn at 8611 MoPac The Feed Lot, on 2222; and the Magic Time Machine, on East Riverside Drive. Probably the fanciest of these places was The Barn. For starters, the Barn served its customers a block of cheese about the size of your head. Thenrafter they loaded you -down with cheese and bread, they brought you the third basic food group meat.

"Rv the time vmir stealr ent there, you had food running out of your nose," recalled Eddie Wilson, owner of Thread- Lamar Boulevard that was a closed beer joint in 1976. At the Magic Time Machine, the rooms and wait people were cornily decorated to represent various eras of history, such as ancient Rome. "The food was awful," said June Conway, a friend of mine who attended a birthday party there. "I think we were sitting in some kind of a jungle hut" You could not accuse 1976 Austin of being overly sophis-, ticated. There was no Louie's 106, no Mars Restaurant Bar, and no Zoot American Bistro Wine Bar, three of the 20 restaurants listed under Austin in the current AAA Texas Tour-Book.

Nine more are listed under "Greater Austin." There is no "Greater Austin" listing in the '76 book, because there was no "Greater Austin." The '76 TourBook says the pop- ulation was 251,808, as opposed to 465,600 listed in the new one. The 1976 book mentions Barton Springs Pool, but not by name. This was back before the invention of the Ozone Action Day, so people spoke much less effusively about nat- ural wonders. The book says, simply, that Zilker Park "has a swhnming pool. There is no mention of sparkling waters or sala- 1 manders.

The current edition gives Barton Springs more importance by describing it as "a spring-fed swimming pool with a constant temperature of 68 There was no Whole Foods Market in Austin in 1976. If you had asked your grocery clerk back then where they kept the tofu, he might have asked, "Toe who?" Christie's; on the south shore of Town Lake and one of the main seafood places in town, served fried fish with a quarter head of lettuce covered with about a quart of Thousand Island dressing. Many of those tall buildings downtown weren't there. And there was no Starbucks. You couldn't have found a mocha latte on Congress in 1976 with a search warrant Not that there's anything wrong with that John Kelso writes a humor column on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

He can be reached at 445-3606 or at jkelsostatesman.com. A parking pileup at high As shortage worsens, students' vehicles flood off-campus streets aft hoi By Diana Dworin American-Statesman Staff A 10-year-old Killeen boy was hospitalized over the weekend after a bullet fired from outside his home blasted through the entry-way and struck him in the chest while he was playing in his bedroom, police said Sunday. The gunfire, reported about 10 p.m. Saturday, occurred within moments of another shooting only a few blocks away jn the Willow Springs neighborhood in Southwest Killeen. In that incident, a bullet fired into another home narrowly missed a father and his two children as they watched television.

No suspects were in custody in either shooting, police said in a statement. "The preliminary investigation indicates that these two shootings may be random," police said. "The Killeen Police Department believes that the two shootings are related incidents." The 10-year-old boy, whose name was not released, was treated overnight and discharged Sunday from Scott White Hospital in Temple. He was expected to make a full recovery, police said. In the second incident, the two children were in the living room with their father when the bullets were fired, their mother said Sunday.

The woman, who declined to give her name, was in the kitchen and her mother was in a bedroom ironing clothes when they heard the loud pop. "I thought something fell," she said. Shortly after, the woman discovered a large crack in the family's back-door window and a hole in an expensive porcelain vase. The family later foimd a bullet fragment near the vase. The mother said she spent the rest of the night comforting her 7-year-old daughter, who felt shards of glass pass across her face when the shooting occurred.

It was unclear whether the shooters were driving or walking in the neighborhood, police said, or how close they were to either house when they opened fire. office that had not reconciled an account for that period of time." DeBeauvoir blames the unbalanced account on a failed automation system that was partially installed in the clerk's office before its money ran out leaving the office with a half-manual, half-computerized network. The account has been reconciled since the auditors questioned it DeBeauvoir wrote in a response to the report The county clerk complained that the auditor's office has targeted her. But Fuller said the audit is the second in four years for DeBeauvoir's office. She said the See Audit, B7 Taylor JphnsonAA-S photos ease the vehicle overflow onto schools gets a warning sticker for illegal limits spaces to find spots.

criticisms. "We wish we were perfect and that the bank never made a mistake and we never made a mistake, but we don't live in paradise," DeBeauvoir said Friday. "There's never been a question of any money missing from the county clerk's office. We've accounted for every penny." But the audit found that a probate court account has been balanced in four years and that the auditors and clerk's office cannot determine exactly how much money is in it "Any time you don't reconcile an account that's a serious finding in an audit" Fuller said. "I can't think of another (county) By Sharon Jayson American-Statesman Staff Student parking at Bowie High School, the Austin district's largest high school, is so tight that even the enforcers have relaxed the rules.

Hundreds of cars and trucks squeeze into parking spaces and stack up along any available curb, making the student parking lot at Bowie look like a jigsaw puzzle gone awry. With 3,100 students and 490 parking spaces for them, Bowie students are parking anywhere a vehicle can fit including zones that were once off-limits. "There are certainly restricted zones, but it's pretty much park wherever you can get one. It is drastically overcrowded," said Andy Padgett, who has spent the past three years as a parking lot attendant roaming the sea of cars via bicycle. Bowie senior Ben Parker, 18, agrees.

"I don't waste my time looking for a spot because I probably can't find one," said Parker, who pulled his '97 Nissan truck along a curve painted yellow in the Bowie student lot. Much the same scene replays at campuses across Central Texas where a population boom spurred See High school, B6 Dana DeBeauvoir: Travis County clerk says no money is missing. keep records by generally accepted accounting procedures, frequently errs on fund balance statements, hasn't balanced one particular account since 1994 and has reported incorrect interest earnings to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS could fine the county for the mistake. Audit firalts Travis clerk's accounting Report detailing money-tracking problems focuses on minor flaws, county clerk says By Kelly Daniel American-Statesman Staff TheTravisCountyClerk'soffice still has problems keeping track of all its money properly, despite making some improvements since a 1995 review, an internal audit concludes.

The audit says County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir's office doesn't.