The Salina Journal from Salina, Kansas • Page 30

30 Sunday, December 31,1989 TheSalina Journal 1989: a year in review 1989 meant change; much of it was for the better By MITCHELL LANDSBERG Associated Press Writer The wind blew and the earth shook. And the wall came down. There it is: 1989 in review. A year of disasters that rivaled Old Testament plagues, of triumphs that challenged credulity a year that led people, again and again, to the same words: "I never thought I'd see the day." For a while, it seemed that this would be the Year of the Oil Spill. Then the Year of the Hurricane.

Then the Year of the Earthquake. But the last turbulent year of the decade will be remembered, finally, as the year the Iron Curtain lifted. Twenty-six years earlier, John F. Kennedy had stood before the Berlin Wall and said of free citizens everywhere: "Let them come to Berlin." In 1989, they came and from the least imaginable direction. They came from the East.

'What joy!" a West Berliner exclaimed; and people from East and West Berlin danced and laughed and hugged atop a wall that no longer divided them. "We live in exciting times," President Bush observed. "The rapidity of change is mind-boggling." Indeed it was. Communism on the ropes In Poland, th6 Solidarity trade union was illegal at the beginning of the year; it had ousted the Communist government by the end. Then came Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia: One by one, Eastern Europe's ruling Communist parties followed Poland's lead and agreed to step aside and allow democratic, multi-party elections.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had loosed the shackles that once bound Eastern Europe. And after a seasick summit with Bush in the tempestuous Mediterranean, he declared that the Cold War was over. Even Romania, among the most stalwart of the old-line Communist states, was overwhelmed by democratic fervor that drove President Nicolae Ceausescu from his palace and ultimately to his death before a firing squad. Images of Eastern Europe's peaceful revolution will stick in the memory for a long time, but so will a sadder picture: a lone man standing before a phalanx of tanks near Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

It had been a hopeful spring in the square, where tens of thousands of students demonstrated daily to demand democratic change. Military officers at first balked at suppressing the officers signed a statement saying the army "will never shoot the people. "But, on June 3, the army began shooting the people. The death toll may never be known. Estimates ranged from 300 to 3,000.

Brute force blocked democracy in China, but U.S. troops forcefully imposed it in Panama, where an invasion just before Christmas ousted the dictatorship of Gen. Manuel Noriega and installed an elected president. On a smaller scale, too, it was a year of tumultuous transition. Celebrities go to jail The TV lights went out for televangelist Jim Bakker, who got a 45-year prison term for conspiracy and fraud.

Zsa Zsa Gabor finally starred in a film that everyone trial on cop- slapping charges. She played Beverly Hills' official court jester and was rewarded with a conviction and jail term. Leona Helmsley was the queen of a hotel empire, but she was mocked and reviled outside her kingdom and was sentenced to In China, a couple cringes in fear as a tank passes above during a student uprising. A Virgin Islands resident guards his hotel after Hurricane Hugo hit the Caribbean. The yacht was dumped against the trees by the high winds.

Pholot by AP A West Berlin boy peeks beyond the opened Berlin Wall at a border guard. Californians view a crumbled expressway after an earthquake jarred Oakland. four years in prison for tax evasion. Pete Rose became as closely linked with betting as batting, and agreed to a lifetime suspension from the game to which he'd devoted his life. The year's obituaries noted the passing of both famous and infamous: Irving Berlin and Bette Davis, Lucille Ball, Robert Penn Warren, Salvador Dali, Vladimir Horowitz, Herbert von Karajan, Laurence Olivier, Mel Blanc.

Ferdinand Marcos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Emperor Hirohito. Abbie Hoffman. Rep. Claude Pepper. Sugar Ray Robinson, A.

Bartlett Giamatti. Secretariat. Mass murderer Ted Bundy was put to death; other killers died at their own hands. They included Patrick Purdy, who killed five schoolchildren in Stockton, Joseph Wesbecker, who killed eight people in a printing plant in Louisville, and Marc Lepine, who systematically gunned down 14 female engineering students in Montreal. More than 20,000 Americans died of AIDS.

Scientists continued searching for a vaccine and a cure, and the government tried to find new ways to make experimental drugs available more quickly. People worried about homelessness and hunger, abortion and child care, flag-burning and the "greenhouse effect." The most-honored movie of the "Rain that the "Me Decade" ethic might be softening. It was the story of a fast-talking wheeler-dealer from Southern California who found some measure of humanity in caring for his autistic brother. Bush offers openness Historically speaking, the year began on a chilly, cloudy day in January when George Bush took the oath of office as the 41st president of the United States. If presidencies are defined by symbols and styles, Bush set out to cast his as open, informal, of an aerobic Teddy Roosevelt.

But critics said later in 1989 that Bush was dragging his feet when it came to governing. By year's end, he still hadn't filled some important jobs in his administration. Bush declared war on drugs, and Colombian drug barons declared war on their own government. "Narco-terrorists," they were called. By year's end, both wars were stalemates, at best.

Drugs also figured in the Panamanian invasion, which was partly aimed at capturing Noriega, a former CIA informant who had been indicted in this country for drug trafficking. But the wily general, who had become a thorn in the side of two U.S. administrations, slipped into the night and subsequently took refuge in the Vatican Embassy. In Virginia, the old capital of the confederacy, L. Douglas Wilder became the first black person to be elected governor of a U.S.

state. New York City, Seattle and New Haven, elected their first black mayors. "We passed another milestone on free- dom's road," Mayor-elect David Dinkins of New York said in his victory speech. But the road contained familiar detours and roadblocks. Racial violence, too Racial violence raged for three days in Miami's black Overtown neighborhood after a black motorcyclist was shot to death by a Colombian-born police officer.

In New York, a black youth went into a white neighborhood to buy a car; he was surrounded by a white gang and shot to death. When blacks marched through the neighborhood to protest the killing, they were jeered. "My son will never turn this corner again, and it's only because of pigment of his skin," said Moses Stewart, father of the slain youth. "This is what America has to we no longer are going to take this." America learned something else in lesson about the price of progress. At 12:28 a.m.

on March 24, Capt. Joseph Hazelwood picked up the microphone on the radio of his ship, the Exxon Valdez, and called the Coast Guard in the harbor town of Valdez, Alaska. "We've fetched hard Hazelwood said. "We're leaking oil." The light of dawn showed that the worst oil spill in U.S. history, almost 11 million gallons of thick crude oil, had begun tarring the pristine shoreline of Prince William Sound.

Hurricane Hugo's fuel was wind and water. The vicious storm rampaged through the Caribbean, leaving more than 30 people dead, and reached the U.S.. mainland Sept. 21 at Charleston, S.C., where it flattened historic buildings with 135 mph winds and spun on devastatingly through the Carolinas and Virginia. In all, 29 people died on the mainland.

"We're going to be a long time digging out of this and rebuilding," South Carolina Gov. Carroll Campbell said. Quake rocks California The same could be said of the San Francisco Bay area, where the biggest earthquake since 1906 killed 67 people and rang up $7 billion in damage. The quake was tragic, but it also brought forth the resiliency and compassion of ordinary people. Just moments after the Nimitz Freeway collapsed in a poor section of Oakland, residents clambered into the wreckage to search for survivors.

Similar tales of heroism were written throughout the quake- damaged region. The Sunday after the quake, the Rev. Joseph M. Powers of Oakland's St. Francis de Sales Cathedral held services in a Baptist cathedral was too badly damaged to be used.

Powers' message could stand as a sort of epitaph for the quake, and maybe for the year. "Sometimes in life," he said, "God shakes us and says, 'Pay There is something more important than the ordinary thingsin our lives." THE SALINA JOURNAL 823-6363 Toll Free 1-800-827-6363 Classified Advertising HOURS: Monday thru Friday 7:30 pm, Saturday 8 am-Noon, DEADLINES: For Ad Placement, Cancellations or Corrections 1:00 p.m. AAon. thru Thurs. for next day's publication 10:00 a.m.

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