Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 1

Final Friday, February 4, 1977 4 Sections 15 130tk Ytv No. 177 CMcim Trlbun rxnnnn' I i I 1 I'll" I Hi i I II 1UVJ uu my nn ji pro) I II I A A' A 7 I 1 11 City, close suburb riders to pay more By DavicTYoung Transportation editor A FARE CUT was voted Thursday for most riders on the Chicago North Western Transportation Co. commuter system. But North Western riders from the city and its nearest suburbs' will have to pay higher fares The Regional Transportation Authority board unanimously approved a new fare nlnn tn hrino North Western fares" in line with those of other commuter railroads regulated by the RTA. For most riders, the new plan means decreased fares averaging an estimated 5 per cent.

The North Western carries about 50,000 riders a day to and from the West, Northwest, and North suburbs. THE NEW FARES were made possible by an agreement last month between the railroad and RTA that resulted in subsidies to the railroad of about $27 million for a four-year period. RTA officials have estimated the new plan will decrease fares on the North Western by $1.5 million a year, but will 'cost less than $500,000 for the remainder of the RTA's current fiscal year, which ends June Thn RTA board voted Thursday to amend its 1977 budget to shift $500,000 to the railroad to make the fare cuts possible. RTA officials said the new plan could go into effect March 1 at the earliest, but probably not before April 1. The exact amount of the compensation re; quired by the railroad to decrease its fares must still be negotiated, they Said.

An RTA official described the cuts as the first tangible benefit North Western riders have received from the agency. 'THIS GIVES US a chance to do something for thb commuter," said D. Daniel Baldino, RTA board member from Evanston and proponent of the North Western fare decrease. "This means the North Western's commuters Continued on page 14, coL 1 Column 1 Merchandise Mart is still city's giant A town of ZOfiOOand it's not yery crowded By Robert Unger ON A CLEAR day It looks like a gold-trimmed fortress sitting there on the river, its corner towers keeping watch in all directions. On a gray Chicago day its dark hulk can look almost menacing.

At Christmas, before the energy crisis, the colored lights and the "Peace on Earth" vsign on its facade made one of the mosi stunning views in the city. But most of us hardily look at it any more. The Merchandise Mart Is, after all, nothing new. It's been there a long time, long enough to become one of the city symbols. Long enough for.those thousands who walk-by every day and hardly glance in its direction.

Then, once in a while, perhaps when out-of-town friends come for the downtown tour, that thought again shoots through one's consciousness: "My God, the mart is big" NOW, WITH the recent opening of the adjacent $50-million Apparel Center, it is even bigger the dimensions and the dollars involved reinforcing mart officials' claims that it is the "world's latest wholesale buying center." For years they added "under one Now maybe they'll say "under two It doesn't matter- wouldn't change 4he size of that first big roof, the one that covers two city blocks, tops 25 stories of offices and showrooms, and has housed a major segment of America's wholesale, fodus-try for nearly half a century. To those who walk past it every day and scarcely notice it anymore, it has remained a mysterious sort of place, a place where you must be somebody spe- cial just to spend your money there. And that's exactly what it's supposed to be-exclusive in its clientele and deceptive in its design. "AT THAT time when the mart was-built you were trying to disguise the interior structural system so you weren't able to recognize the structure from the outside," remembered T. Clifford Noonan, a retired vice president of the firm that designed the mart.

"What peo I -v; trv t- yr.r. i lA 5 'f i 1 i -i i-'S V. 1 1st National aide Battery boost electrocutes Texas visitor A TEXAS MAN WAS electrocuted Thursday when he touched the door handle of his auto while his battery was being charged in a Near North Side service station. Jack Heflin, 29, of 'Edinburg, was dead on arrival in Hen-rotin Hospital. Police said he and his wife, who were vacationing in Chicago, had their car towed to the gas station at 520 N.

Wells St. where a mechanic, Greg Casselman, 30, connected a battery charger to the auto. Casselman told Heflin not to go near the car while the. battery charger was hooked up, police said. ANDREW ASS AGLIA.

manager of the station, told police he heard a yell and looked out to see Heflin's hand locked to the car door. He said he shut off the electricity in the station, but efforts to revive Heflin were unsuccessful. Police said they were -puzzled, how Heflin received a lethal shock from touching the car. banker edly, funneled $248,000 back to him. Submitting a false financial statement to American National Bank to renew a $37,500 unsecured loan.

The indictment charges Heymann supervised the Hardwicke loan account and recommended approval of a $30 million loan for development of the safari theme park, Great Adventures, in Ocean County, J. It says he concealed that he was getting consultant fees of $1,000 to $2,000 a month from Hardwicke, totaling $50,000 between February, 1972, and September, 1974, when he quit his bank post. The indictment says he also hid his directorship of Wild Animal Kingdom, a Hardwicke subsidiary. CHICAGO BUSINESS leader A.N. Pritzker confirmed Thursday his family owns one-half interest in New Adventures, which owns and operates the Great Adventures Safari Theme amusement park.

His family also owns a small interest in Hardwicke, which in turn owns per cent of New Adventures, Pritzker said. Pritzker said his family became Involved in the Great Adventures park at the request of the First National Bank. "The bank felt that with us in there, Continued on page 14, coL 5 fraud Indict ex Saved from 150-foot plunge in $250,000 'Held by safety lines. Indianapolis firemen Donald Gras- Abbott, custodian a. i Ummm 4m a (IaIIimsv turns irm mnra than at the memorial, had threatened to an hm ir t-iafnra tha irfiinon uora fihlo Clarence Abbott, 32, who tried to leap 150 feet from the to grab him.

He top of the Indiana World War Memorial Wednesday, tinder arrest for was taken to an Indianapolis hospital disorderly conduct. offer to protect seals ple don't realize is mat tne man originally was a great big warehouse." When Noonan's firm, Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White, took on the ect in the 1920s, one of their primary considerations was the maze of railroad tracks that run under the mart. Supports had to stand between the tracks, and nothing was allowed to interfere with the trains. "The perimeter space was set aside offices and administrative areas," Noonan remembered. "The rest was to provide warehousing and exhibition space for Marshall Field and its customers." THAT WAS still the concept of Mar- shall Field Company when it opened the building in 1930, but things changed in a few years.

With central air-conditioning and flourescent lighting, the vast interior area could meet a new use. A widened approach developed that has led to special floors for everything from floor coverings to giftwares, each floor populated by businessmen representing thousands of lines of wholesale items. From the beginning the mart was meant to be "associated with the great trade fairs." Today it stages its own "fairs," but they're called "markets" for all segments of the wholesale Indus-, try. And as with any elaborate fair, the. process is expensive.

Exhibitors rip and tear the old and prepare for new sea-, sons at a clip that produces a constantly changing face for the mart and 3,718,000 pounds of garbage a year. But there's a lot of work to be done. Those showrooms, after all, cover a large part of the mart's acreage and acreage is the right word, for its floor would equal a 97-acre field. BUT IT ISNT hard to find your way around provided your legs are The mart has 7.5 miles of corridor lead- Continued on page 4, col. 1 Weather By Lee Strobel A FORMER senior vice president of the First National Bank.

of Chicago has been charged in a 15-count federal indictment with defrauding the bank of nearly $250,000. Robert L. Heymann, 56, of 2248 Linden Highland Park, faces up to' five years in prison and fines of $5,000 on each charge. The grand Jury indictment, disclosed Thursday by U. S.

Atty. Samuel Skinner, charges Heymann with mail fraud, bank fraud, and making false bank entries. Heymann, an employe of the bank since 1943, was made senior vice president in 1972 and resigned in 1974. He headed the loan division which handled department stores, mail order houses, specialty stores, and the clothing, textile, sporting goods, millinery, fur, and jewelry industries. The frauds alleged in the Indictment Involve three transactions: Recommending that First National loan $30 million to Great Adventures Safari Theme amusement park while concealing that he was receiving consultant fees from Hardwick'e, developer of the park.

Loaning more than $300,000 to Kenosha Full Fashioned Mills, which alleg cause of Rita," she said. "A deaf baby coos and gurgles just like a-normal' baby at first, but then they. begin to' make this horrible sound, a gutteral, animal sound that goes right through you. i 1 "It's really hard, because you don't want to believe it. You tell yourself the baby is okay, because he turns when the door opens and you think he heard the door.

But what he did was see the shad-' ow of the door move. "The first thing you have to do is accept it, as hard as it is. And then they accept it." THE FITZPATRICKS put their chil-dren into St. John's School in Milwaukee when each was 3 years old. "I remember that Dad and I cried all the way home," Mrs.

Fitzpatrlck said. "We cried so hard we couldn't see the toad. We felt like the kids had been abandoned. $400,000 NEW YORK Reuters A Swiss conservationist, opening a campaign against the killing of more than 170,000 baby harp seals off Canada's Atlantic Coast, said Thursday he will offer the Canadian government $400,000 to retrain seal hunters for other occupations. Speaking to reporters In the Central Park Zoo's cafeteria overlooking the seal rond, Franz Weber, 45, a former Journalist, called for support of his "Save Our Seals" campaign to pur-suade, the Canadian and Norwegian governments to ban the bunting, which begins next month with, the ieals migration, "The yearly slaughter is supposedly regulated by government quotas.

How well have the quotas worked?" Weber asked. "In 1900, there were 10 million 'harp seals. In 1975, there -were qne DAN FITZPATRICK Is a champion, an all-star football player, and a record-setting track and field star an Olympian, in But when Dan Fitzpatrlck Makes a ferocious tackle or puts the shot or throws the discus, he does not hear the thousands cheer. Because for Dan Fitzpatrlck, every spring has been a silent spring. He was born deaf 21 years ago.

And since then he has spent his life Not onlyMs he a champion athlete, but he also is a dean's list student at Gal-laudet College in Washington, D.C., the only liberal arts college for the deaf in the world. A history major, he wants to get his master's degree and teach the v. BUT BEFORE THAT he wants to do something else. He wants to participate in the Deaf Olympics that will be held later shed for a gray covering. The white fur is water-absorbent, preventing the animals from escaping, since they can't 'leave the ice masses at that stage of life.

The white fur is used to make coats and as trimming with other expensive- furs. Importing of the white seal skins into the U.S. is prohibited except as a finished product, Weber's wife, Judith, showing reporters a coat she designed from a synthetic material resembling seal fur, said their goal is to persuade the Canadian government to use the mon- ey to set up an industry that would manufacture the synthetic coats, which she said would cost about $601 Mrs. Weber also designed a toy baby harp seal, which is under production in South Korea. Sale of the $20 toy seals will help raise money for the Weber Foundation campaign.

With- rSfexl Dorothy Collin born without hearing. She raised them and three other children, two of whom have impared hearing. And she has done it for the last 10 years without her husband, who died of Hodgkins disease. iSince his death, she and a son have run the family farm near Custer Park. It was right after 'the Fitzpatricks moved to the farm that Dan was born.

Mrs. Fitzpatrlck knew from the beginning he was deaf. -r "i guess I knew what to look for be- million. Now, there are less than a million." HE SAID the Weber Foundation, of which he is president, has offered Canada $400,000 to train the 150 Newfoundland harp seal hunters in other occupations. The hunters, Weber said, are rily unemployed except for the two- to three-week season when they hunt the baby harp seals, whose male parents have stripes on their body resembling harps.

The Newfoundland hunters and a Norwegian fleet stalk the seals as they ride ice masses south through the Strait of Belle Isle separating mainland Labrador from Newfoundland. The animals often are clubbed to death, Weber said. THE BABY SEALS are sought for their valuable white fur, which they this summer In Romania. To hpln Dan pet there he needs $2,500 the people from his hometown of Custer Park and from other nearby towns in southeastern Will County started a fund-raising drive, complete with pancake breakfasts, door-to-door solicitation, and local newspaper stories. But so far they have only raised about To help things along, the chairman of the drive wrote to The Tribune, and I went down to Custer Park to find out about Dan Fitzpatrlck.

What I found out Is that he has a heck of a mother. Mrs. Frances Fitzpatrlck is a gritty, good-humored woman who in a way symbolizes all such mothers who learn to cope with what life has dealt them'. DAN IS NOT Mrs. Fitipatrlck's only deaf child.

Her daughter, Rita, also was f'Danny really gave us a hard time. He didn't want to go. He tried to grab the steering wheel to turn it to go home." But the children stayed. And they learned. And they came home every two weeks "because we wanted to keep them close to the family." After her Husband died, Mrs: Fitzpatrlck felt she could no longer afford St.

John's, and the children transferred to the Illinois School for the Deaf in Jacksonville. ON HIS WAY to Jacksonville, Dan hi in the washroom at a roadside stop and wouldn't come out because he was afraid the other kids would beat him up. But he prospered at Jacksonville. "He got right into sports and it did him good," Mrs. Fitzpatrick said.

"He had', problems after, his father died and he -Continued on page 14, coL 4 1 CHICAGO AND VICINITY: Friday mostly cloudy, chance of snow, high around 34 1 before turning colder in the afternoon; winds becoming north- west to north 12 to 22 miles 19 to 35 kilometers! an hour. Friday night partly cloudy, chance of show, low 10 to 15 -12 to -9 CI. Saturday partly sunny, high I 21 to 25 4 to -4 CI. Map and other reports are on page 6, Sec. 3.

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