Indiana Gazette from Indiana, Pennsylvania • 6

VIEWPOINT A-6 Sunday, September 9, 2001 The Indiana Gazette Judge battles alcoholism By J.R. LABBE Fort Worth Star-Telegram Wallace Bowman kept telling himself he couldn't possibly be an alcoholic. As a judge who has sat across the bench from thousands of people whose substance abuse problems led to legal problems, Bowman couldn't see himself in the tattered bodies and tortured lives that passed through his courtroom. "The second-hardest thing I've ever done is coming to grips with being an alcoholic," said Bowman, tall and lean in a well-cut navy suit, his full head of salt-and-pepper hair neatly trimmed. "The first was admitting to my wife what happened that night." "That night" Aug.

20, 1999 has been well-documented by the local media. The Colleyville Republican was arrested on a misdemeanor public intoxication charge in the early hours after police found him drinking beer with a woman who was not Mrs. Bowman in a car parked in an isolated Fort Worth field. Bowman wasn't lying to the arresting officers when he said he didn't have a drinking problem. At that time, he didn't realize he did, he said.

He never drank during the day only in the evenings and was always at work early. Courthouse observers said his demeanor on the bench was one: of compassion, professionalism and efficiency, handling more misdemeanor jury trials than any other criminal court judge in Tarrant County. He wasn't your stereotypical drunk. No slurred speech, missed work. No sloppy appearance.

But his denial was stereotypical of people who struggle with alcoholism. Bowman has found that out during his treatment in a 12- step program. "The program has helped me come to grips with reality," Bowman said. "I realize I might not get re-elected, but I have to try. I was a good judge before; I'm a better judge now because of the changes I've made." Bowman is hoping that county voters will look at the way he's run his courtroom for 11 years and not at the way he ran his personal life one summer night when they are deciding whether to return him to the bench.

He's up for re-election next year for Tarrant County Criminal Court No. 4. He knows full well that running will reopen the books on the worst chapter of his life. Bowman's wife of 11 years said she's prepared for whatever comes. "I'm ready for what anybody has to say." Rhonda Bowman said in a telephone interview.

"For him to not run because of what happened would be a total waste. It would be a big letdown for the people if he didn't get re-elected. He's a deeply caring, serious judge who's there for the lawyers before his court and the clients they serve." This from the woman who at one point wasn't sure her marriage would survive. "My first reaction was, 'I'm out of here," Rhonda admitted. "It was a hard, painful time.

But we talked and talked. He walked around here like a dead man, he was so distraught. He was a broken man. He would cry and say, 'I ruined our "But it was a blessing in disguise. Alcoholics don't know they have a problem until something like this happens." Six of talking and six more months of working with a counselor salvaged their relationship, Wallace Bowman said.

Now he's ready to see 1 whether the voters will forgive him. Tom Wilder, who has his own reelection race for Tarrant County district clerk to worry about in the spring, has not wavered in standing by his longtime friend. "It is not fair to compare Wally's mistake to those who have engaged in repeated misbehavior," said Wilder. "It was an isolated incident. The way he runs his court is uniformly respected.

He has kept his nose to the grindstone, even with all the distractions of the past. I see no diminution in the office." Of course, the people of Tarrant County will be the ultimate arbiters. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, voters expect the men and women they elect to public office to be above the temptations and foibles that mark human life. Bowman's political future may be out of his control, but his personal life is on the right track. He hasn't had a drink since "that night," and he continues to faithfully attend his 12-step program.

"I'm not perfect," he said, "but I'm a better person than I was." Gill Labbe is a Star- Telegram senior editorial writer. Visit the StarTelegram's online services on the World Wide Web: www.startelegram.com) Bethlehem victim of Mid-East strife BY CHARLEY REESE King Features Syndicate The assassination of a high-ranking Palestinian official followed by the invasion of Beit Jala a Christian suburb of Bethlehem by Israeli tanks has probably fired a fatal bullet into the peace process. Even our timid State Department has condemned the assassination and entry into Beit Jala, which the Oslo peace process placed under Palestinian control. And well the State Department should, because the British Broadcasting Corporation reported that nearly all of the Arab newspapers are condemning President Bush. They consider that his recent remarks putting the onus entirely on Yasser Arafat amounted to giving a green light to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"Jala" means field of grass, and Beit Jala and Beit Sahour are suburbs of Bethlehem. This largely Christian area has suffered greatly during the intifada. When the area was placed under Palestinian Authority control in 1995, hopes ran extremely high. It was the first time in literally generations that the people were free from an occupying power. So hopeful were the people that last year before Sharon's arrogant visit to Islam's third-holiest site in Jerusalem sparked the intifada Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, wrote these words in a introduction to a new book about Bethlehem: "Yet the second millennium of the birth of the messenger of peace and love, Jesus Christ, is not only a significant religious occasion.

It is also a historical occasion of special significance in religious, historical and cultural terms for the peoples of the Middle East and for the rest of the world. We have dedicated our wholehearted efforts to achieving the peace we so ardently desire in our country and in the region as a whole. May the celebrations on this important religious and historical occasion provide a unique opportunity to make progress on the road towards reconciliation, coexistence and tolerance between the peoples of the region on the basis "The Gazette wants to welcome guest in the and to assist every worthy or politics. Our cause will THE MARK OF DUBYA RIGHT GUARD! OK. SO FAR YA GOT ME.

ON THE PATIENTS' RIGHTS BILL, THE TAX CUT, THE MISSILE ENERGY DEFENSE SYSTEM FUT and IM YOUR 'EN GARVE NOT DONE FOR YET! A ME OK. ON YOU THAT GOT ONE be the friend of every man, the home. We want to build up, not tear person in the community without be the broadening and bettering 66 Quotable was nothing but a big wall of fire. There was nothing that I owned that didn't have flames on it." Kenneth Renfrow, whose home and car were consumed by a ragirig wildfire in Northern California. By The Associated Press James: Sport replacing religion By GEORGE F.

WILL Washington Post Writers Group LONDON Baroness James of Holland Park is the somewhat forbidding title of the energetic 81- year-old grandmother known to millions of readers worldwide as P.D. James, author of elegantly crafted and morally complex detective novels, the latest being "Death in Holy Orders." However, Holland Park is just a nice swath of urban green space across a busy street from her modest home here, and she functions as a baroness only when in the House of Lords as that 700-year-old body does what it can to cause whatever government controls the House of Commons to have second, or perhaps first, thoughts about what it cannot really be stopped from doing. It is instructive to solicit the judgment of the elderly about contemporary conditions, because, as James has written, episodes long past "catch on the threads of memory as burrs stick to a coat," and provide benchmarks for marking progress, or what passes for it. Her formative years were dominated by reverberations of the catastrophe of 1914-18 which cast "a shadow of uncomprehended vicarious sadness." Her generation "was born under a pall of inarticulate grieving." Measured against that benchrnark, contemporary Britain is blessed. Yet the "devolution" of power from Westminster to Welsh and Scottish assemblies is but one, and not the most profound, sign of a country less unified than it once was by certain common beliefs.

Those, she says, centered on the empire, the monarchy and the Church of England and its liturgy. The attenuation to put it mildly of those beliefs, and the replacement of religion by sport, particularly tribal loyalties to soccer teams, has resulted, James says with mingled regret and complacency, in a "less moral country, but a more equal and fair one." Time was, "ordinary people certainly were more honest--but, then, many lived under the fear of hell and the law." Progress. Perhaps. She is mildly disdainful of what she calls "the climate of compensation," which Americans call the entitlement mentality of a therapeutic culture. "People," she says bemusedly, "expect to be counseled if they suffer trauma." Recalling the soldiers returning from two wars, she says tartly, "I don't remember them all comhome expecting to be counseled about what they went through." Remembering what fell upon London six decades ago, she dryly wonders, "Would there be enough counselors to go around after a bad bombing?" Her judgments have the edge of a survivor from a sterner age.

Five years ago, heeding Samuel Johnson's dictum that "At 77 it is time to be in earnest," she published "a fragment of autobiography" titled "Time to Be in Earnest." In it she approvingly recalled a similar astringency in a letter Jane Austen wrote when she learned that a neighbor had given birth to her 18th child: "I would recommend to her and Mr. Dee the simple regimen of separate rooms." James believes that her vocation, writing novels, has a mildly moral as well as entertaining purpose. She recalls that Victorian novelists rather defensively claimed a moral mission because then there "hung about novel-reading the sulphurous whiff of indolent and almost decadent self-indulgence." She knows that novels are unlikely instruments for the reform of institutions or individuals, but she thinks most novelists have an "urge to nudge society's inclinations in a direction more agreeable to our own beliefs and prejudices." Women, she says, have an eye for details and hence for clues, are more interested in motive than violence, and are gifted with psychological subtlety and the exploration of moral choice. Besides, "bringing order out of disorder is a female function." This thought has two virtues: in addition to scandalizing a certain stripe of feminist, it is explanatory. It explains why women (Dorothy Sayers, Josephine.

Tey, Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George, James herself, among others) are such masters of the detective genre: They have a natural aptitude for it. Especially for detection about murder, because death underscores "the fragility of life." Hence, again, the female functionwomen as agents of order. Furthermore, as a Christian, James believes detective fiction "provides for the reader the comforting reassurance that, despite our apparent powerlessness, we yet inhabit an intelligible Although she is fond of Henry James' statement that "We trust to novels to maintain us in the practice of great indignations and great generosities," she doubts that it is still accurate. Less demanding entertainmentstelevision, principally -have largely displaced novels. But not entirely.

Today's readers, too, have their lames. What about Almonte's education? The most distressing aspect of the Danny Almonte controversy has been something of a footnote to the dispute over whether the poised Dominican from the Bronx was a 12- year-old Little League pitching phenom or a talented 14-year-old playing below his proper age group. Last week, the Dominican Republic and Little League officials declared that Felipe Almonte, Danny's father, lied about his son's age. That conclusion made the boy ineligible for the recently completed World Series, erased his pitching feats from the record books and wiped out his team's third-place finish. But whether Almonte defrauded other youngsters of a fair-andsquare tournament, it had seemed to me that he committed an even worse transgression by not bothering to put his son in school for 18 months.

As the maelstrom swirled about Danny's age last week, the New York Daily News reported that Almonte apparently had falsely claimed his son was attending a Bronx public school. Then the father supposedly admitted the boy never had been enrolled. "He did not study this past year be- Rising lends hand again By LINDA CAMPBELL Fort Worth Star-Telegram I wanted to write a letter about someone who, over the years has helped others with music in times of need and loss from heart-transplant patients to families who have lost loved ones in farming accidents and auto accidents and to people suffering with cancer. He couldn't answer every call, but he has always tried to help as many as he could. Thursday night, at the Indiana County Fair, he answered the call again, and he helped raise cause he was having trouble speaking English," Almonte was quoted as saying in the Daily News.

So what had he been doing since moving to the United States from the Dominican Republic in June 2000? "He has been eating and he has been playing ball." Turns out that may not have been true, either. Both the Daily News and The New York Times reported this week that school records in Moca, Danny's hometown, show he attended seventh grade there this year, finishing in June, Little League rules require a player to take part in a minimum number of regular season games to be eligible for tournament play. So, if Danny was living in New York, not attending school in the spring, his father was willing to sacrifice his education to get him into the requisite regular season games. But, if Danny actually was attending school in Moca, his father was willing to sacrifice the truth, fairness and playing by the rules and we aren't even to the age thing yet -to get his son World Series exposure. In my mind, neither of these sacrifices could be in Danny's best interest, no matter what the financial promises of his big- league dreams.

The tragedy is that Danny's educa- Letters Letters money for the Travis family during its loss in a tragic auto accident. He played music for a dance at the Swine Barn that evening, where not more than 10 feet away hundreds of pigs were squealing with their tails twitching to the beat of the music. You would have to have seen it to believe it. This person is the disc jockey and my husband, John Rising, and I am very, very proud of him. With the help of Roger Dinger and SO many others, nearly $200 was raised that evening.

Thanks, again, to the fair and to everyone who works so hard to make the dances happen every year. Linda Rising Indiana RemiNiSCe WITH THOSE OLD PHOTOS, SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS promulgator of all that's right, a down; to help, not to hinder; reference to race, religion of the county's interests." Indiana Gazette, 1890 of equality and mutual respect of rights." If those words sound out of character for a man, a Muslim, so consistently branded a terrorist by the Israeli propaganda machine, then perhaps you should know that Arafat began in the 1980s trying to find some way to start a peace dialogue with the Israelis. The Israelis, however, refused to talk and had persuaded the United States to refuse to talk to the Palestine Liberation Organization. It's heartbreaking to realize how very much the people in Bethlehem, Beit Jela and Beit Sahour had been looking forward to the Christmas celebrations eight months ago. They had worked very hard to prepare their area to receive tourists from all over the world.

Because of the Israeli-instigated violence, it was a bust. They, by the way, have three Christmas celebrations. Dec. 25 is observed by Protestants and Catholics; Jan. 6 by the Eastern Orthodox; and Jan.

18 by the Armenian Church. The different dates are the results of different calendars. All Christians know of course, that the exact date of the birth of Jesus remains unknown, but that doesn't really matter. What is celebrated is the birth, not the date. I had an opportunity recently to spend an evening with a group of Bethlehem expatriates.

They have an organization, the Bethlehem Association, and every now and then hold a convention. Palestinians born in that area or whose parents were born there gather from all over North and South America. It is mainly a social and charitable organization. They were delightful people, and no matter how long they've been away or where they now live, they harbor fine memories of the little Palestinian city that, in the words of Arafat, "was blessed and chosen by God to be the birthplace of the messenger of peace and love." Hopefully, one day the Israelis will get the message that the days when you could kill your way to a conquest of territory are over. (Charley Reese can be contacted at tion probably matters little to the scouts who'll be keeping tabs on him, waiting to offer him a Major League Baseball contract and signing bonus in two years or four, just in case he really turns out to be 12.

They'll be focused on whether he's endangering his arm by throwing curveballs too soon, not whether he's mastering algebra a and reading "The Grapes of Wrath." Why should they care about him off the field? Because this boy is not an arm in a uniform or a money machine but a youngster who should be enjoying his youth and who might just need to know how to make his way in the world without baseball. It's a wonder that no one noticed the discrepancies about Danny's age or his schooling before he became a great story and skeptics started investigating whether a player so unhittable and unflappable could really be 12. As a veteran sports mom, I know it's easy to get swept up in the excitement of a successful team. But you try to teach your children that it's not all about wins and losses. You want your children to excel, but also to have fun; to develop self-confidence and discipline, but also to enjoy goofing around with friends.

It was a revelation this summer when my Little Leaguer son hit a GRAFFITI A on shot nearly over the fence and said, with the innocent wonder of self-discovery, "I never knew I could hit the ball that far." But even more touching was what happened to a teammate, who came to the team with little self-confidence but slowly developed his skills during the season. In a pivotal game, he stroked a zinger up the middle to spark a rally, thrilling both himself and his teammates. We lost the game in a heart-breaking finish, but that couldn't diminish the joy of one child's shining moment. A parent can't be faulted for thinking of a child's future or of aiming for the big time. But is it right to lie and cheat and gamble with his youth i in the process? the Indiana (Gazette (USPS 262-040) Published by THE INDIANA PRINTING PUBLISHING COMPANY 899 Water Street Indiana, PA.

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