Latrobe Bulletin from Latrobe, Pennsylvania • 4

PAGE 4 THE LATROBE BULLETIN WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18. 1987 Commentary 1 I 3 The writing of the written word they were words he himself wro you haw pxl handwTttag. 11 1 ofen. They were THE BALLSTO they were words he himself wrote ofen. They were THE BALLSTON -if- 3rf n.

Andy Rooney you're lucky and unusual. Mind is so bad that I'm all bet lost trying to write something down on paper without a typewriter. I come on notes I've written to myself with little ideas and frequently they are so illegible that I have to throw them away, underiphered. Miss Rose, who in my memory looks like Diane Sawyer, taught me to write in the third grade but I cant Mame my handwriting on her. I Name it on something called "The Palmer Method," a system used by many public schools when I was growing up.

I don't know anything about The Palmer even today I hate to write the name except it was a style totally unsuited to my character and ability. The rules and manner of writing were drummed into my head so often that I recall every detail of how it was supposed to be done. I'm not certain whether my failure was because of a physical inability or a temperamental unwillingness to conform to rules that seemed siHy to me. Miss Rose was quite clear how she wanted us to do it. We were to take the pencil and hold it between the thumb and index The New evidence challenges Dwyer Garbage collection Latrobe Borough looking into the possfbi lity of switching its garbage and trash collection to private haulers.

Council, at the behest of Ron Smith, First Ward councilman and chairman of the Street and Santftatlon Committee, authorised the solicitation of bids from private haulers at its last meeting. It isn't that Mr. Smith and his committee, or for that matter other members of council and the administration are dissatisfied with their own collection system, but they are fulfilling a pledge made last year to the public when council was putting together its five-year plan to wipe out a debt. During the cost-cutting reorganization of the borough's operations, which included the transfer of dispatching to 911, the reduction of the police force and street department personnel, it was suggested during public meetings that it was more economical to have garbage disposed through private carriers. Council could not at the time accept or reject the proposal because it did not nave data upon which to make a determination.

However, it promised to Investigate the matter. Council will be able to make an intelligent cost comparison of the borough vs. private garbage collection once it receives the bids. Then It can make a decision which is the only proper way to go. Neighboring communities have private haulers, and unquestionably council will Interview those officials to determine whether they are satisfied.

Making the switch would be a big decision and there are other considerations besides costs that must be weighed. And one of them is, as suggested by Councilman John Trout, the negotiation of a long-term contract, if the council decides to go private. Mr. Trout correctly points out that there must be assurance that any private hauler will not be a "hit-and-run" artist, so to speak. At any rate, council now is in the position to settle the question once and for ail whether it is more cost-efficient and practical to abandon Its system for a private hauler.

Focus for debafes The question whether the League of Women Voters or the Republican and Democratic parties will be the main sponsors of presidential campaign debafes in 1989 remains unsettled. Meanwhile, though, the League has stolen a march by announcing that it plans to stage four rounds of primary debates, hoping that this move will give if an edge as the favored post-convention sponsor. Word of the plans for debates among rivals for the maor party nominations is not entirely cause for joy. There are concerns about the format of such confrontations, and also about how well they can Illuminate significant Issues. The general-election campaign debates prompt simitar concerns, If to a lesser extent.

Experience suggests that In the primaries the Issues often tend to be obscured as a number of aspirants engage in what amounts to a popularity contest. That is especially true In early stages of the primary campaigns, which Is ust when the League expects to bring the whole field of candidates together for the first time In Man-ctiesfer just before New Hampshire's kickoff primary around fh middle of February, and in Nashville, fust before fht? March 8 "Super Tuesday" when perhaps 17 states will hat either caucuses or primary elections. There Is reason to worry some about trivialized exchanges basal more on personalities than on issues. This Is outweighed by theadvanfage of having the candidates before the public on an equal fooling not only early, as noted, but also In additional ttebates further along when the field will be narrowed. The overriding hope Is that this lime, In both the primary and gerwrnl election debates, the discussion can be more tightly focused on what matters.

SPA NATIONAL BANK. I greatly admired my grandfather but I was totally unable to duplicate his handwriting and it strikes me now that I must have been coming of age because I recall not being very worried about penmanship. I wished I could write as he wrote but I simply felt he could and I couldn't My grandfather, I noted later after I grew up, didn't do any better with his own son, William. My uncle became a very successful commercial, artist drawing charcoal sketches for VOGUE magazine. As an artist he must have had a great ability to control the direction of the movement of his pen on paper but his handwriting was as ahrd-to-read and childish-looking as mine.

It's a mystery to me why some people have good handwriting and why others have writing that's so hard to read. It's probably for the same reason that some people are six feet tall and others are not Maybe III ask Diane Sawyer to come over and hold my hand, ni see if she can teach me how to be six feet tall. government Daughenbaugh, for instance, continues to believe Dwyer was not guilty, but said he still can't figure out how John Torquato CTA's owner and admitted mastermind of the bribery scheme, got through the door to talk to the treasurer in 1984. The treasury official said Dwyer should have heard warning bells when he met Torquato, based on the legal troubles of his father, John Torquato Sr. The elder Torquato, head of the Department of Labor and Industry in the 1950s, was indicted and jailed in a highly publicized corruption case that curred in the 1970s when Dwyer was in the state Senate.

Torquato and Smith decided to approach Dwyer because the Thornburgh administration refused to deal with them. Thornburgh, who was a U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh before becoming governor, was instrumental in prosecuting Torquato Sr. If Dwyer had followed Thorn-burgh's lead and refused to deal with the younger Torquato, his aides say, the case never would have occurred. It wasn't the first time Thornburgh and Dwyer, both Republicans, failed to see eye-to-eye.

Dwyer said his troubles began in February 1984 when he refused to pay a $1,680 airfare voucher for Gin-ny Thornburgh to accompany her husband on a trade mission to Germany and England. Since then, he said at his news conference, the governor was out to get him. He called his version of the facts "The Thornburgh Conspiracy," and he said West, who was an assistant U.S. attorney under Thornburgh, was a co-conspirator. It is on this point, more than any other portion of Dwyer's final statement, that some supporters say he was wrong.

West and Thornburgh also debunked Dwyer's conspiracy talk. Horshock said the conspiracy theory upset him so much that he refused to help Dwyer set up his Jan. 22 news conference until the treasurer promised not to use the forum to discuss it. Dwyer broke the promise, and railed about Thornburgh, the "medieval" sentences imposed by Muir and the uneducated jury that convicted him. The next day, Dwyer was faced with giving up his office, along with his pension and other benefits.

The state pension board is expected to announce next week whether his family will get his retirement money. But one lawyer familiar with the law said it is clear to him that they will get the money because Dwyer was still treasurer when he died. Dwyer's pension would be based on his 22 years of state government service and his $38,000 salary as treasurer. A section of the state constitution bars elected officials from serving when they are convicted. The day before Dwyer took his life, state Attorney General LeRoy S.

Zimmerman said conviction would legally occur when Dwyer was sentenced. In a chillingly prescient remark, Zimmerman's spokesman said the constitution as it applied to Dwyer was "was self-executing." By thumb had to be completely extended, not bent at all. The pencil stuck almost straight up because it was held against the finger above the knuckle, not down in the crotch of the hand. The little finger was curled underneath and rode on the paper. Each day Miss Rose went up and down the aisles inspecting our hands as we did push-pulls and continuous circles between two lines on a pad of paper.

Even at that age I recall being impressed by Miss Rose's beauty and being excited when she bent over next to my small desk and gently took my hand in hers to reform it in the manner prescribed by Palmer. She would lean over to see if there was fight coming under my wrist, too. You were supposed to have fight coming under your wrist The wrist was not to touch the desk. The whole motion came family. Unresolved is what sentence Dwyer would have received.

After the suicide, fellow defendant Robert Asher, a former state Republican chairman, was sentenced to one year and one day hi jail. A lawyer friend told Dwyer to expect up to 20 years. Senior U.S. Middle District Judge Malcolm Muir has not said what Dwyer's sentence might have been. In an interview before the suicide, he said his general practice is to determine a sentence after a pre-sentencing conference with lawyers from both sides and probation officers.

Dwyer's conference was scheduled to take place five hours after he died. Dwyer set the stage for the debate about the justice system at his Jan. 22 news conference, which ended when he stuck the barrel of a Magnum handgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Before that tragic moment, he read excerpts from a statement that criticized West, Thornburgh, Muir, the media, the jury specifically and the American justice system generally. The U.S.

Justice Department announced Friday that it had started a preliminary investigation of the government's handling of the Dwyer case. Before he died, Dwyer took one more step that may someday provide proof for some of his claims. He mailed a 40-page typed document to Roger Richards, an Erie attorney and family friend. Richards said the document from Dwyer contains names, dates and places and is now in a safe deposit box. Richards did not return reporters' telephone calls.

In interviews after returning verdicts against Dwyer and Asher, some of the jurors said they believed Smith's testimony that he offered a bribe and Dwyer accepted. Evidence that was not available to the jury, but which supports Smith's testimony, is contained in a statement Smith gave to the Philadelphia Daily News five days after he was indicted in October 1984. The information, which the newspaper never published because Smith decided to keep his comments off the record, contains his confession that he offered Dwyer $300,000 in return for the contract. Smith, in a brief interview, confirmed that he gave the material to the newspaper and that the details were similar to his testimony against Dwyer. Dairy News City Editor Mike Freeman agreed the information was similar to Smith's testimony.

Freeman said the paper would have liked to run the story but, "We just couldn't do it without breaking the agreement with Smith. Off the record is off the record, as far as I'm concerned." The newspaper resisted attempts by West to subpoena reporter Bob Grotevant to testify about the information, Freeman said. A government source, who asked not to be identified, said West dropped the issue because, "We didni need a confrontation over the First Amendment in this case." Although the information wasn't from the shoulder and your arm was an arch between your hand and the under part of the muscle of your forearm. The fingers of the hand were not supposed to move by themselves. It was very unnatural.

I could no more do what Miss Rose and Palmer were asking me to do in those penmanship classes than I could eat an ice cream cone slowly. It was not my nature. At home my grandfather, John Reynolds, worked with me. He had learned to write in a little school in Redruth, Cornwall, England, and he had a fine, firm, legible hand. When he put a word on paper, it.

looked as perfect as the model alphabet written over the blackboard in Miss Rose's homeroom. I remember the sample words my grandfather had me write. He thought they displayed the grace of the written word and presented to the jury, it was one factor in the government's decision to allow Smith to testify against Dwyer through a controversial plea-bargain agreement Smith testified at his own trial that he didn't offer bribes to Dwyer or anyone else. To testify against Dwyer, he had to change his story and admit he lied under oath previously. West acknowledged it is not customary to strike deals with admitted perjurers.

Before he was indicted, Smith gave his two lawyers statements that alleged Dwyer had accepted a bribe offer from CTA. He was trying to get immunity from prosecution, a bid West said he rejected because Smith's role as Dauphin County Republican chairman made him a quasi-public official. West said he used those statements and results of polygraph exams to determine Smith was telling the truth this time. Government records show Smith refused a polygraph test in August 1984, after he told FBI agents he did not make or promise contributions "to any campaign, any Republican or Democratic committee, any state official or state employee." Dwyer, who presented no defense at his trial, said before he died that he offered to take a polygraph exam on the condition he not be indicted if he passed. He said the government rejected the offer.

In return for Smith's testimony, the government pledged not to indict Smith's wife, who had been identified in court records as a target of the investigation. West said he went along because Mrs. Smith was a minor player in the scandal. West also agreed to support Smith's bid to reduce his sentence from 12 years to 22 months. Smith is scheduled to report to prison next month.

A motion seeking the reduction is expected to be filed any day. The deal is angrily denounced by Dwyer's supporters. Robert Daughenbaugh, the Treasury's director of public assistance disbursements, said he thinks West held Judy Smith hostage to get William Smith to testify. Dwyer, at his final news conference, complained, "That wasn't even a plea bargain. It was just an outrageous deal that is legal under our current justice system.

Smith's sobbing statement on the witness stand 'I'd do anything to protect my wife' and his near-fatal heart attack and emergency surgery a few hours after he testified dramatize the weight of his guilty conscience better than anything you've seen on stage, in the movies or in a TV soap opera." Mrs. Dwyer said a number of changes her husband recommended for the justice system will be pursued by the Dwyer Justice Foundation, which is being set up with money given to the family since the treasurer's death. She said she will focus on the inequities of plea bargaining, especially the government's use of convicted felons to testify against others. But not aD the questions and criticisms that remain since Dwyer's death are directed at the Editor's Note R. Budd Dwyer claimed he was a victim, unfairly persecuted by federal prosecutors and turned on by a fellow Republican in the executive mansion.

Facing a potentially long prison sentence for a bribery-conspiracy conviction, he called news reporters together, aired his complaints, and then shot himself to death. In this story, The AP examines some of those claims and finds evidence that supports the prosecutors.) By DAVID MORRIS Associated Press Writer HARRISBURG (AP) The coroner's report says he died of a self-inflicted bullet through the head, but friends say the system killed Robert Budd Dwyer. The 47-year-old state treasurer took his own life shortly before 11 a.m. Jan. 22, with more than two dozen horrified journalists at a news conference as witnesses.

The suicide came one day before he was to be sentenced for his role in the Computer Technology Associates bribery-conspiracy scheme. Since the shot referred to by one lawyer as "the million-dollar bullet" because it may have preserved Dwyer's government pension for his family the debate has focused on one large, troubling question: Was Dwyer, as he maintained until the end, innocent? More than 2,000 people who have written to Joanne Dwyer since her" husband's death say yes, although even the strongest supporters say they have no solid proof. But evidence never made public in the CTA case appears to support a federal jury's finding that Dwyer conspired to accept bribes in return for awarding a lucrative contract to the California-based company. A review by The Associated Press, conducted in the weeks since Dwyer killed himself, found that: The government's key witness, William T. Smith, implicated the treasurer in a never-published 1984 interview with a Philadelphia newspaper before he denied at his own trial offering Dwyer any bribes.

Acting U.S. Attorney James West almost decided not to use Smith as a government witness against Dwyer because, according to West, Smith committed perjury at his own trial by denying he offered the bribe. Some of Dwyer's closest aides rejected his view that former Gov. Dick Thornburgh was part of a conspiracy to persecute him because the treasurer blew the whistle on two matters involving Thomburgh's Cije latrobe bulletin Thomoi M. Whitemon, President; Corl A.

DePosqua, Gen. William J. Costanxo. Editor; Vincent J. Quotrini, Editorial Writer; George A.

Covlggio, Adv. Dir. Published Daily, except Sunday ond Holidays. Entered at Second Class Mail at Post Office, latrobe. Pa.

UU Telephone: 537-3351. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: Sing Copy. 25': Week Home Delivery: $1.50. MAIt SUBSCRIPTIONS: Westmorelond County: Bloirsvllle: R.F.O.i end Servicemen: One-Month, $5.75: One Year. 161.00: Ouf-Of -County Retee: One Man.

h. So 00: One Year. $70.00. Letter to the editor still control its own destinv. To The Editor: In reference to editorial on Wed.

Feb. 11, 1987, Solici tor McDonald pointed out that under R-l private use of new parking area would not be permissible. My opinion differs from the borough solicitor's. The solicitor could have advised that (tie zoning ordinance could have been amended to permit a special permitted use in an R-l of a private lot. It's something that I brought up several times.

This would have served three proposes. The hospital would have their Immediate needs taken of, eased the fears of the residents of the North Side, and council cauld MO, MR.PRe51DENT- YUM Present R-6 tone without expansion already contains a very generous area for hospital use. By expanding the R-6 zone we nave lost control of what hospital can do with the expanded area in the future since the present R-6 zoning standard gives the right to erect any building, garage, or facility as long as they declare it to be for the hospital use. We as elected officials have the right to amend or change ordinances as long as we are not in violation with state Constitution and laws. Ronald J.

Smith First Ward Councilman YOU HWETO STAY.