Abilene Reporter-News from Abilene, Texas • Page 49

Ibtltne Reporter 'Without or with offense to friends or foes we sketch your world exactly as it 22 PAGES IN 2 SECTIONS ABILENE, TEXAS, MONDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 17, 1977 20 CENTS, On stage Kiva, top, opens their award-winning rendition of Sunday at McMurry's annual sing song: Kiva won the award for the best music while the women of Pi Delta Phi, above, did not fare as well as their performance of My Fair Lady failed to pick up any awards. (Staff Photos by Mark Allred) McM Clubs Hit the Stage With Parodies It was 'lights, camera, action'' time at McMurry College's Radford Auditorium Sunday afternoon as'the college's social clubs parodied past great flicks of the silver screen. Theta Chi Lambda's rendition Mary Popping won the overall award at the 20th -annual T.I.?; 'Sing Song. The judges named Theta Chi Lambda's performance the best of the 10 skits, each of which was a musical parody of an Oscar-winning motion picture. The theme of 'the show was T.LP.'s.

salute the 50th Academy Awards. Besides Theta Chi Lambda, other clubs to win plaques-were in the men's Omicron for its rendition of Bonnie and Clyde; -best costuming, Gamma Sigma, Winnie the Pooh; music," Kiva, M'A'S'H; choreography, Eta Epsilon Iota, Yaa- kee Doodle Dandy, and women's, Delta Beta Epsilon, Fiddler on the Boot. The six winning clubs were presented a plaque which they will keep until next year's competition. Other clubs participating in the sing song were Pi Delta Phi, Ko Sari, I.H.R. and the independents.

This year's performances were dedicated to Bob Gillette, director of McMurry student activities. Vicki. Yoder and D'Lyn. Davison were, mistresses of ceremonies for the Sing Song. West Germany Refuses Demands of Hijackers ADEN, South Yemen (AP) A hijacked West German jet with four terrorists and 87 hostages aboard made a 10-hour refuelling stop at Aden airport tnd returned to the air early Monday, the Kuwait airport control tower reported.

Boeing 737 flew in a northeasterly direction and may have been headed toward. Kuwait, control tower officials said. Heavy security measures were immediately imposed at the'Kuwait airport: Several high-ranking Kuwaiti government officials, as well as ambulances and fire engines, rushed to the airport. But it was not known whether the Kuwaiti government would allow the plane to land. The hijacked jet arrived at Aden airport after a deadline for death passed with the West German government refusing to meet the demands of the terrorists who had threatened to blow up the plane.

There was no word on the fate of West German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, whose kidnapers had threatened to kill him unless the Bonn government met the hijackers' demands by the deadline. South Yemen's civil aviation agency said authorities unsuccessfully tried to prevent the Lufthansa Boeing 737 from landing in the capital of Aden after it was turned away by the Sultanate of Oman. "But despite our disapproval the plane force-landed on a dusty strip," a South Yemeni spokesman said. The government agreed to refuel the craft only if the hijackers left "as soon as possible." The 82 passengers, including an American woman with a heart condition and her 5-year-old son, and five weary crewmen were reported safe following the shaky landing on the unpaved dirt strip. The jet, dark except for a faint illumination in the cockpit area where the hijackers are said to be, parked about two miles from the main terminal.

The Aden airport was closed until further notice. In recent years, this Marxist country at the tip of the Arabian peninsula has granted refuge to hijackers and other terrorists. But officials here insist the Lufthansa jet will not be allowed to stay. The Lufthuit had left Dubai airport in the United Arab Emirates 40 minutes before the 7 a.m. CDT deadline set by the four hijackers for release of 11 anarchists imprisoned in West German jails and two Palestinians imprisoned in Turkey as well as J15 million ransom.

West Germany took no action to meet the demands as the deadline passed. The Bonn government continued round-the- clock crisis sessions into the night to decide what their next step would be. South Yemen was the fifth stop for the hijacked plane which was ordered to Rome, Nicosia, Bahrain and Dubai after the hijackers commandeered the Majorca-to-Frankfurt flight over France on Thursday. A crowd of 300 waited behind a steel fence outside the German Chancellery in Bonn while Chancellor Helmut Schmidt held marathon talks with his special team of crisis advisers. By mid-afternoon, government spokesman Klaus Boelling emerged from the chancellory on the banks of the Rhine River and addressed the tense crowd while troops with submachine guns stood by.

"The federal government has been striving ceaselessly today for the lives of the women, men and children and crew in the Lufthansa plane," he said. The government made no move to comply with the hijackers' demands but Boelling said it was pursuing "all.realis- tic possibilities" to free the hostages. He said Schmidt had sought and received support for his position from British and French leaders. Mourners Attend Mass for Bing Crosby in the aisles of London's Westminster Cathedral for a mass said in memory of the late (Jing Crosby, "a gentle soul who gave such pleasure with unaffected modestly to so many." Pg. 6A.

Executives Say Economy Needs Certainty Top businessmen say the best thing President Carter could do for the economy is spell out a consistent economic program, even if it is anti-business. Pg. 2A. Soviet Makes Flight to Freedom After 36 years of Soviet citizenship, Valery jumps ship in Houston and makes his way to what he hopes will be a new life in a free country. Pg.

8A. Cowboys Blitz Redskins 34-16 a a bl i Washington Redskins 34-16 behind Roger Staubacii's two touchdown passes and a relentless pass rush that yielded eight quarterback sacks. Pp. Ann Astro-graph 10A Bridge 10A Classified 6-106 Comics 4t Dr. lamb IDA Editorials 4A Harris Sports Today in TV Log TV SA 10A IDA IDA 10A Complete Weather Pg.

2A Brownwood Water Canal 'Engineering Marvel' Page One by Kathar'yn Duff What Sort of Winter Will We Have? We have come through a dry September, have had less than a quarter-inch so far this October and the latest 30-day forecast'says little "rain is expected from now until mid-November. The current weather is fine for cotton and grain farmers, whose harvest season is at hand, but ranchers are running short on water for livestock. Where are those soaking rains which would revive pasture grass and prepare the soil for wheat planting? Without them, cattlemen are faced with buying feed for their herds this winter. And what sort of a winter will we have? James Estes, editor of The Electric Times, house-organ for West Texas Utilities can give you some answers. He found them for a piece in his paper.

He located these omens for cold weather: Long hair on a dog's back. Worm holes in the leaves of Japanese elm trees. Bumper crops of June bugs or candle- Hies. "For every fog in summer, that many snows in winter." And we've had three foggy days in the Set SEE Back pige thil lection By STEVE McGONIGLE SUflWriter Brownwood's water supply "problems are nothing new to.Herman Bettis. He and members of his wife's family have been damming up Brown County's watery woes since before there was a water canal to wash Lake Brownwood, today's sole water source for 30,000 Brown County residents, was just a dream until Bettis' father-in-law, W.A.

Bell, and other prominent Brownwood businessmen persuaded the state legislature to create Texas' first water district in their home county. First tax assessor-collector of the first water district in Texas Brown County Water Improvement District No. 1 -was Herman Bettis, then a recent graduate of Howard Payne University with a degree in mathematics. After the dam forming Lake Brownwood was completed, Bettis became the district's first manager. Constructing the 70-foot-high earthen dam across Pecan Bayou took a year to complete, and unlike most other Texas dams was done without aid from the U.S.

Army Corps of Engineers, the 74- year-old Brown County native says proudly. However, Bettis, who calls 1518 Woodridge in Abilene home now, concedes it -did require a $600,000 grant from the federal Public Works Administration to sell off $2.5 million in water district. bonds which financed construction of the dam, a 14-mile water canal and a filtration plant. The project's cut-rate price tag was due in part to an engineering firm's decision to build an open, concrete-lined supply canal rather than an enclosed pipeline, Bettis explains. A pipeline would have provided a more direct route from the dam to the filtration plant, he says, but it would have required expensive pumps to force water through the pipe.

Pumps aren't needed for the open air canal, Bettis says, because the water is pulled by gravity along its route to the filtration plant. "An open air canal will carry more water at less cost than any other type of water transportation," he says. Exactly how water in Brown County's concrete canal the first of its kind -travels 14 miles to its destination, is "an engineering marvel," according to Bettis. Unlike the underground pipeline, the canal "curves around all over the country," as Joe Paul, the water district's current manager said in a recent interview. The reason for the canal's zig-zag path, Bettis explains, is that it must follow the land's contour to use the 50-foot elevation drop from the dam to the filtration plant.

The canal's election drops a foot every mile, allowing wa.er to flow fast enough to provide 45 million gallons a day for the district's customers, he says. During hit tenure as water district manager, Bettis says customers never lacked water because the flow in the canal was too slow. Even with the Big Country's sometime frigid winter the canal never freezes over, he Bettis recalls that the canal's flow was interrupted during his term as manager only because of problems associated with normal maintenance. "That canal is like a house, as it gets older it has to be maintained. If it's not maintained, it'll break every week," he says.

Bettis says in the 1940s the canal experienced a kind of "wash out" similar to an incident which reduced Brown County's water supply to a trickle a month ago. A heavy rainM eroded the soil behind two concrete sections of the canal, causing the slabs to collapse into the canal, Beltis says. Water supplies to Brownwood were cut off 24 hours before new slabs could be poured, he says. As with the latest wash out, the porous shale soil beneath the canal moved several feet because of its susceptibility to landslides, Bettis says. "Shale swells when it gets wet," Bettis explains.

"When it gets wet enough, shale will slide like its on soap." Several sections of the canal are built in shale and Bettis says those are the parts he had to watch the most as manager. One of the men watching those shale portions now is Bettis' nephew, Bill Bell, a director of the Brown County water district. Now it's Bell, a Brownwood attorney, whose chewing his fingernails over the water canal his uncle supervised. Bettis can a i with his nephew's water problems. After all, he was once there himself.

Cambridge City Asks: Where is Ann? CAMBRIDGE CITY, Ind. (AP) Ann Louise Harmeier, 20, could be considered nothing more than a statistic one of thousands of persons reported missing each year, in time destined to be erased from police computers and human memories. But Miss Harmeier, a lifelong resident of Cambridge City, is a symbol of the ability of the 4,000 people who live in this small eastern Indiana community and adjacent towns to counter frustration and despair with optimism and determination. The people arc searching for Miss Harmeier. And they won't give up until Town Unites in Search for Coed they find her.

On the morning of Sept. 12, the Indiana University "junior loaded her clothes and books into a car and headed for the campus in Bloomington, about 105 miles away. She stopped at service stations several times en route because she was having car trouble. She was last spotted standing outside her disabled car along Indiana 37, two miles north of Martinsvillc, less than 20 miles from campus. The Rev.

Rose Taul of Cambridge City Presbyterian Church, a family friend, became alarmed when Harmeier failed to telephone her that night as 'aimed. The next day, she and Miss armeier's mother, Marjorie, retraced the route Miss Harmeier had taken. They found the loaded car, emergency lights flashing, abandoned by the Where is Ann? That question, in bold, black type, is spread throughout the nation on bumper stickers, posters and billboards, all part of a massive campaign that began the weekend after Miss Harmeier vanished. "Two dtyi after Ann was reported missing, I called Mrs. Harmeier and asked if there was anything I could do," said David Wcston, Dublin Elementary School principal.

"That's when Ernie Alder a retired slate police sergeant and another neighbor ot the Harmeiers and I decided to put out the posters." Thousands of posters bearing a picture and description of the blue-eyed, blonde Miss Harmeier have been distributed, he said. Weston, Alder and the Rev. Miss Taul set up the Ann Harmeier Search and Reward Committee, which has collected more than $10,000 in pledges and $5,000 in cash thus far. Small search parties of area residents and Bloomington citizens arc helping police scour parts ot the Morgan-Monroe Set FOUL Back pige this sectloo.