The Argus from Fremont, California • Page 25

Two yes votes needed 'Here comes a fortcard Newark Unified School District's bond issue package looks good and should be passed by voters at the polls next ruesday. Ballot measures will seek voter proval to: uls 5 5 ill 0n 2-- Approve a J3.5 million building bond issue. The two ballot questions are necessarily linked; a yes vote on either is not much good without a yes vote on both. The district will not be eligible to accept the $5.5 million in state funds unless the $3.5 million bond issue is first approved. This is one case where being impoverished and in debt up to your ears is an asset.

The district can now legally borrow, MI the basis of its assets, the additional J3.5 million bringing its debts up to 10 per cent of valuation. If it does this, through voter approval of the bond issue, it is technically in a poverty state, and can then receive the $5.5 million as a "loan." Such "loans," however, are in fact seldom repaid. After 30 years, in this a the' loan will be forgotten-- unless during that period the district unforaeeably becomes wealthy. Thus it is standard school district practice, backed up by years of suburban school poverty, to merely defer repayment of the loan year after year, making only token interest payments. The district is doing this now on a $13 million state debt.

Conceivably, voters could approve the bond issue and reject the gift of state funds, but this would be almost pointless. Having borrowed yourself into poverty, what 'advantages lie there should be exercised. Without the gift, the burden of building all schools would fall on the local taxpayer alone. Regardless of how one might feel about this philosophically, pride is not at issue here. Reality is.

None of the total of $9 million could be spent without existing need. No construction could be begun "on the come." Funds would be spent over the next four years to expand the under-conatruc- tion Memorial High School and M. -D. Silva Intermediate School, build a new elementary and new intermediate school, and expand the district's corporation yard facilities. The program appears prudent, has adequate safeguards built in to avoid unnecessary spending, and will allow for orderly growth in Newark.

It will cost if anything a fraction of a cent on the tax rate, a bargain to obtain $9 million. A two-thirds voter approval is necessary for general obligation bonds, which even in the total absence of organized opposition is difficult to obtain. In the interest of orderly growth and adequate education for our children, we urge a yes vote Tuesday in Newark. A LINN BBOWN, Editor Thursday, November 25, 1971 Page 25 Letters to the Why not freeze taxes? EDITOR: An.open tetter to the President: as lymeowners in Fremont, Coun- ty of Alameda, have what we feel is a pertinent is a difference in your position and ours, so.if this is put into tile it is only what the majority of middle class 'America has become accustomed to. In what was supposed to be an overall price and wage freeze was put into to be removed in November.

Now'we are told it will stay in effect until the various appointed boards have come up with their solutions. Why, oh why, does the freeze npt include the spending and collecting by the governments, city, county, state and federal? We in Fremont receive our property tax bills, first payment due Dec. 10. Without exception the "increase" was between $90 and $100. This naturally means our mortgage payments will be raised.

If there is to be a freeze on the people, the people are supposed to be the government, why then should we have to pay such a large in. crease. MRS. D. -W.

McGOWAN Fremont Philosophy of death EDITOR--I have before me two baby pictures: One is of an infant girl named Kelly Iforman, born last March 30 in Toledo, Ohio. In the photo she is 3 days old and alive today, born at 21 weeks. The other picture is one of a 21- week old infant aborted in California lying quite dead and soon to be a product of the hospital incinerator! I ask myself, can this really be possible in a country-founded on the right to life for every man, woman and child? Or is this just a living nightmare or on "underdone potato" as Scrooge so aptly put it? Have our people been so brainwashed by their unwarranted fear of overpopulation that they are willing to embrace a philosophy of death rather than life? MRS. MARIAN BANDUCC1 t'remont Harvey Bear market good news? A declining stock market is good news? This declining stock market is good news. On subject on which nobody is an expert 5s the stock market.

Want evidence? During September, 1968, the stock market posted an all-time high when most analysts had been forecasting a plunge. The Wall Street Journal published a front- page confession that the experts which it regularly quotes did not know what they were talking about. Want more evidence? If the experts were so expert would all those brokers have gone broke or run for cover these past three years? Including four big ones! The only stock market advice you ever got this column was this: If you haven't the for a roller-coaster ride, stay out of it. So if anybody tells you the downtrend is over or that the slide will slide further, tell him you remember 1968. And lots of other times when the highly touted economists had egg on their faces.

Wall Street is never having to say you're sor- But the traders are a breed apart. The news is good, they go to sleep: It's bad, they go to pieces. Have you ever heard Robert Orben's version of how the world will come to an end? What the last spoken words will be before the world comes to an end? Often says, "In tlie concrete bunker 800 feet under the White House sits a lone individual with a red telephone and a black button. "The phone rings, he picks it up. The President of the United States orders him to mash that button.

He says, 'Yes "Then he hangs up. "And with trembling hands reaches for the other telephone, dials a number. Then, his voice cracking with emotion, he says, 'Merrill Lynch? Sell!" AH of which is preparation for this observation. This recently sagging stock market is good news. It reflects the inflation fever subsiding.

Recent years investors have hedged in the market against the apparent inevitability that dollars would be worth less And speculators look advantage of that logical response. Now, if dollars are going to slop shrinking so fast and Treasury Secretary Connally expects the inflation rate to be cut in half this next year we can all invest with prudence instead of in panic. History says it's beller that an overheated stock market cools down than for our nation's irurrency to burn up. So, Merry Representatives in Sacramento AUte legislators whose constituencies include an or part of Southern Alameda County'are: SENATORS: MchtiM C. Pttrfe Democnt- tlth District' MM W.

llilmdtM, Democrat- tUi District, and Clwfc L. Republican -14th District: The and lift Districts are eotenntaUi and include all of Alameda County except the Livermcre-Amador Valley and Castro VtUqr. IfeM are in the Htt DMrict ASSEMBLYMEN: Carte BM, Demoerat- Mtti DJstrict (Hayward, Union CUy, Fremont, Newark and Uveimore-Amador Valley); W. Cmm, Democrat-Hfh District (San Lorenzo, San Leandro, Alameda, part of Oakland); March K. Democrat-lSth District (Castro Valley, Ashland, part of Oakland).

Letters to legislators may be addressed to' tern at (be State Capitol, Sacramento, KM. Holmes Alexander Candidates and crises WASHINGTON, D.C. Campaign biographies (well, anyhow, books by political writers about political candidates) are swarming ki upon us like locusts. President Nixon, of course, heads the list of those sitting in front of portraitists or caricaturists. As you might expect there are volumes (call them lottery tickets) on stake horses which conceivably might have the foot to win (Muskie and Jackson), on rank outsiders (Congressman and a prospective one.

which has belatedly been discussed with several publishers on Treasury Secretary John Connally. Agnew has been done, favorably and unfavorably. Poor Ted Kennedy is the subject of a baok-tength study which is sufficiently described by its title, "Teddy Bare." It's an open question of whether a footsore columnist-reporter ought to sit still long enough to read and review these or should leave them to the literary critics. But I've noticed that in this particular preelection season there is a common theme that very "definitely invites editorial comment. Jt is a theme a little apart from the personality profiles, and it pertains more to the auspices of current history than to the dim- pels and warts of the Presidential aspirants.

In truth, we have just as many crises as we have candidates'. If a panel of were to give a prize to the best of these books, I believe that the award should go to the author who fingers the most appalling calamity that has developed through these leaders, in the past sev- eral years. I propose to return to the subject in the months ahead, but for today it might be useful to make a round-up of the crises that face America and to chase (hem into a corral for a public viewing. 'Among the hideous catastrophes in such a stockade (not necessarily in order of ugliness) would be: Environmental Panic: Although the nerves of the timid and the terrified have somewhat been soothed by the massive legislation to purify air, water and edibles, the breath-holding suspense over the recent subterranean nuclear test in the Aleutian Islands gave this nightmare a new lease on life, or rather on the death-dread. Those who feared that a mushroom cloud, ac- Russell Kirk companied by earthquakes and tidal waves, would result from the test shot, are the same persons who are going to put on the same set of tantrums when we have another such test (as the President says we must have), and are also the same who will renew the cries of "havoc" when it's discovered that the myriad of ecology- saving laws and regulations are not going to reduce pollution as, for example, polio was reduced by the Salk vaccine.

Internal Insecurity: We now have so many Mack and Red, young and criminal insurrectionists, that tile danger of anarchy is no longer' debatable: 1 Tough as the Nixon administrators talked, permissiveness is still else does the White House promote a'medical life of ease, instead of punishment, for armed services drug addicts? Why hasn't the President (or any opposition candidate) pointed out that It's time overdue to nominate a hanging judge for the Supreme Court? Military Peril: The crisis here is in apathy No matter how often the proof is offered that we are sinking from nuclear parity, to nuclear inferiority, to nuclear impotency, there is less public concern than over botulism and Attica. Inflation: Did President Kennedy's bawling out of Roger Biough and U.S. Steel do any good? Did President Johnson's guidelines Is President Nixon's New the cure? The answers hang high, but the ordinary citizen (our modern "Autocrat of the Breakfast will swallow almost anything except humbug. He knows that this age of draft defiance and generalized social slackness is not an era where "voluntaryism" is going to be enough, nor one in which either the OIO-AFL or the Congress is going to vote for self-sacrifice. Finally, dictatorship: It is no longer a word to play lockjaw with.

The non-sensalionalist Wall Street Journal has editorially noted that when we lose our economic freedoms, we are risking loss of other freedoms: economics and politics are conceptually and pragmatically entwined." The campaign biographies of 1971-72 ought to be rated, not on the portrayal of character, but on the identification of crises. Empty dream of idleness As one who likes work--whether intellectual or physical I find it difficult enter into the mentality of folk who think that perfect idleness would be a return to the Garden of Eden. Yet the delusion is'Widespread that it must be great fun to do next to nothing. This notion afflicts people of widely varied social backgrounds and political convictions. A grandson of Karl Marx wrote a book called "The Right to be Idle." He was true to his famous grandfather's principles; for Marx declares in "Capital," that when a Communist society comes fo pass, all men will "hunt in the morning, fish in the ailernoon, make love in the evening, and criticize at dinner just as they (The phrase "make love in the evening" sometimes is translated "breed What a boring prospect! But many people whom the name of Man is anathema nevertheless share Marx' desire for idleness.

George Orwell (a very different sort of socialist from Marx) points out in his essay on Charles Dickens thai a yearning to be idle prevailed among middle-class English folk in the 19fh century. One may add that many Americans nowadays work hard enough most of their lives, will) the object of being idle when they "retire." And how disappointed most of them are, I suspect, when they at last achieve the purposelessness of total retirement! As a novelist, Charles Dickens labored most diligently and even enthusiastically. Yet, as Orwell points out, Dickens' characters are rewarded, at the end -fo the baok, by wealth or at leaiv a competence that enables them to be perfectly idle. In Orwell's words, "The feeling, This is what I came into the world to do. Ev- erylhing else is uninteresting.

I will do this even if it means which iurns men of: dif- wring fenr.p^ramenls into scientists, inventors, arlisU, priests, explorers, and revolutionaries th'5 molif is almost entirely absent from Dickens' books." This a middle-class, and sometimes a working-class, aspiration, Ihis- "strange, empty dream of complete idleness." People born into circumstances that would enable them to be idle are of another mind, usually. The landed aristocrat or the son of a millionaire does not sit about doing nothing: he may turn to extravagantly dissolute ways (and nothing is more arduous than the unremitting pursuit of pleasure), or he may-take up a career without thought of the money in it. He may become a soldier, a politician, a virtuoso of the arts but from idleness he endeavors to escape. The end or aim of man, says Aristotle, is an action; and the highest form of action is intellectual. The genuine scholar is anything but idle; may work himself into a premature death, among folios.

If a person refrains from attion, he is not fully Human. Some forms of work, of course, are monotonous eiMugh. Yet I have known many assembly line hands who took advantage of shortened hours and increased wages cither to moonlight on a second (and perhaps more lively) job, or else to labor hard at cultivating a garden or improving a house. They vftre not wrong to do so. Leisure, I add, is not the same thing as idleness.

True leisure opportunity do something tise than to earn one's bread in the sweat o'i brew; it is a ciiance for fuller development and renewal. Unless some talented people have leisura, time to think and to act with imag- insiion, all society must suffer terribly. Those who use their leisure well are greater benefactors of humanity than people who do nothing but plod through a routine of remunerative work. journal Value of Indian art growing By NEIL MORGAN Copfty Mtws FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. When the night bell rings at Don Hoel's Cabins in Oak Creek Canyon south of here, Hoel gets out of bed even his NO VACANCY sign is lighted.

He may have an Indian caller. "Sometimes they come in here at 2 and 3 in the morning with forbidden goods like fetish bowls," Hoel said. "They need the money and I need the merchandise. I've got collectors aH over the Southwest waiting for fetish bowk." On one of many crowded shelves in Hoel's inner rooms, behind steel vault doors, I recently saw two fetish bowls crude clay pots designed as resting places for the small carved animals in which Zunis believe supernatural spirits dwell. When I went back the next day, Hoel was selling them for $1,100 to a Tucson physician and his wife, who 'collect Indian artifacts.

As an Indian trader, Hoel rides the crest of a nationwide vogue in Indian arts and crafts. The new wave of awareness of the American Indian has made Indian weaving and jewelry popular with the young. Prosperity and inflation have ted their elders to seek Indian art of museum quality as an investment. Hoel caters to both urges. He is making more than he ever made before.

Bui at the same time, Indian arts and crafts are growing scarcer. Talents passed down by generations are disappearing. Navajo weavers are thinning out. Western Apaches, famed for the fineness of their pitch- covered bowl baskets and water battles, now produce little. The Papagos of southern Arizona make more baskets than any olher U.S.

tribe; in many tribes the art of basketry has disappeared. Turquoise has been found in Southwest Indian craft since 500 A.D., although none of the turquoise mines of the Southwest are owned by Indians. It remains a staple of jewelry made by the Navajo, Zuni and 'Ifopi. Silver was first introduced in Indian, jewelry late in the -1850s, when the -Navajos learned silversmithing from Mexicans eager to swap trinkets for horses. But only a handful of Indian craftsmen are making a living today from any of these trades.

Hoel befieves that unless the Indian trader and collector encourage gifted Indian artists, their work will disappear entirely. Hoel maintains close contact with serious Indian artisans and offers them a steady market and guarantees. Among them are Bonnie Quam, a 45-year-oM Zuni whose turquoise jewelry is so fine it resembles needlepoint; Mary and Rudi T. Sikewa, Zunis who specialize in fetish necklaces; Blue Cora, a San lldefonso (N.M.) Pueblo potter whom he regards as second only to Santa Fe's Maria Martinez, and Grace Ta Foya, a Santa Clara (N.M.) Pueblo potter who signs her work Medicine Flower. Hoel keeps drawers crammed With jewelry by full-lime -Indian artisans whose names are respected and whose work commands high prices.

1 watched him sell a gold and turquoise squash- blossom necklace to -a San Francisco woman for "Prices have gone up so high it scares you," ha said. "I used to tend cattle with my father up on the Colorado Plateau just above here. Indians helped us. That's when I got interested in work. Thirty years ago these Santa Clara puebio pits sold for $10.

Last week I bought one for $425 and sold it the next day to a museum $550." He brought out a 9-by-12-inch woven wool tapestry by Daisy Togelchee, 76, of Toadlena, N.M., a Navajo known for the fineness of her weaving. The price tag was $900. "She does HO -weft to the inch instead of 30 weft," Hoel said, "and she gets the price. A Navajo double saddle blanket now brings up to $5,000. I've got more than 100 black pots by Maria Martinez, the famous Maria the Potter of Sanla Fe.

Her third son just died last month and she's in a nursing home and there won't likely be any more of her work. These pots bring up to $2,000 each." Hoel's inner shelves hold an impressive library of research on American Indian crafts, including Bureau of Ethnology volumes from the iDth Century. He will quickly flip through such a volume to convince a customer of the authenticity of an old Apache his, or water bottle, or a turquoise-studded silver tobacco flask designed after the U.S. Cavalry water canteens. Heel and his wife Nita settled within the cozy red sandstone ck'ffs of Oak Creek Canyon 28 years ago, buying creekside acreage from a landholder who had bought from the original homesteader.

Today the unsuspecting tourist may buy a six-pack of beer or a tank of gas from Hoel or spend a night in one of his 24 cabins without any hint that he ranks among the three or four leading dealers in American Indian arts and cralls. Other well-known centers for Indian arts and crafts include the Tuba City, trading post and Window Rock Arts Grails Guild, both on the Navajo reservation. Hubbell's trading post at Ganado in Navajo country is now a national historical site. Tobe Turpin's post at Gallup, -and Tom Bahti's shop in Tucson are also respected by seasoned collectors, who are usually reluctant to do business with tourist-type vendors. Tilts day in history In 1783 more than 6,000 British troops evacuated New York City after the peace treaty ending Hie Revolutionary War.

Pope John XXIII was born Nov. 25, 1881. In 1920 station WTAW in College Station, broadcast the lirst play-by-play description of a foo.ball game. It was between Texas and Texas A Situ. In 1944 the American War Refugee Board charged Germany with mass murder during Word Warn.

In 1963 President John Kennedy buried in Arlington National Cemetery..