St. Joseph News-Press from St. Joseph, Missouri • 10

On the House. Timely Observations HfeT. JOSEPH NEWS-PRESS fourtM Moy 3, 1 179 Dond IrodWy and Publisher Mvniff Oitlcot9.k........B...............t..a.....MonoQiftQ EdltQf Main Offie. Wi and Eamond St. JeMph, Ma.

64502. 279-5671 sTfr i i "ni qui i Our Old Jail Is a Storehouse of Memories tridge didn't hit the would-b escaper, but it hit I steel door hard enough to make a big dent. The prisoner quickly surrendered. Some Jallen we-rent so lucky. Cam Htillx was brutally beaten when four men, two of them under We terms, escaped.

TT7 LAST WEEK'S ruling by. Thursday," July 6, 1972 4fc the United States Supreme Court voiding the death penal MEMBER OF THE ASSOCIATED PRtSS brings to mind the execu 'Associated Pnm it mtitbd xdusivty to lh um or ratfoduetim oi tJX IrwW mmm mint ttitt nawtivinaf wt pr AP mw dttpatcnci. SUBSCRIPTION RATES BY MAIL in Missouri, I' Kansas, Iowa, ond Nebraska Nt-rYss, Daly arid per yeai Dairy and Sunday GoieWe per year pointed by the National Academy of Sciences, made a study of the alleged sightings and found they could not be substantiated. -Complicating the situatiqn is the point that some of the sightings have been reported by Air Force personnel and others by veteran pilots of aircrafts. It is difficult to believe that all could have been mistaken in what they saw.

That perhaps is the reason why some 284 voluMee-4nvestigators in the United States still follow up on each report they receive of the unidentified flying objects. They believe perhaps the experts may be wrong and those objects are really coming from some other planet. Better Bail Plan A new state law which will permit circuit judges or magistrates to bypass professional bondsmen is a welcome step forward. Under the law, scheduled to go into effect Aug. 13, a judge or magistrate may set a bond, then release the defendant upon receipt of 10 per cent or less of that bond as a deposit.

Provisions for retease of the prisoner without any type of cash bond also are included. A professional bondsman is a parasite, feeding on the ills of those charged with a crime. And that bondsman must be paid. The 10- or 15 per cent fee which he charges is not refundable when the defendant appears in court. Bypassing the bondsman is a definite step forward.

(Other subscription rates avoilabie upon request) Other memories include the prisoner, who showed a newsman how he could unlock the heavy steel front door of the jail with a fork handle The fellow from Arkansas who liked the jail so well he wrote his Daddy down home and suggested be do something to get incarcerated here The time a Kansas City bootlegger, supposed to be serving a federal sentence htire, was killed In a car accident on his way to a football game at Columbia. There was a lot of explaining to do and it wasn't too satisfactory. li (rp' 2 jThou art worthy, 0 Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created aUV things, and for thy pleasure thev are and tion device in the Buchanan County Jail a trajrdoortor hangings that was never used. The trap Is on the walkway to the cell tiers on the second floor of the jail. Above it is the big steel eye from which the hangman's rope was to be attached.

Years ago the trap, which could be set off by a handle on the near-by iron railing above the well of the jail, was welded shut. Too many prisoners and some jailers had played practical jokes by having the steel trap doors clang open when someone was walking in that direction. They did that by attaching a rope to the release handle. It was a dangerous practice. Also there was the time three affluent illegal liquor dealers prevailed upon aides of Sheriff John Roach to let (hum havs fhn laroo roll thpv JJS Sei TV, had- built 64 years ago, legal exe the ceiling painted blue, the bars silver, and the floor a we)-e created.

Revelation 4:11. tit is oftenointed out that the general concept of God is too small. Is your idea of God bi(j enough? Airline Security Or Lack of It "A recent attempt to hijack a Pan-American airplane raises additional doubts about the air-Una security. In this particular effort, the would-be hijacker was killed as the plane was on a runway in Saigon. There was no harm to any of the passengers.

Put the incident raises some serious ques tion The hijacker Rimself was carrying a large-box, which he said contained a bomb, and a long knife. (f greater concern perhaps is the fact that onejof the passengers the one who eventually, killed the hijacker had an armed pistol with him. it this easy to get on an airplane with a long'k'nife and a loaded pistol? The passenger who killed the would-be hijacker was not an airlines security employe. He was a former American policeman, traveling to Vietnam to accept a job there. The hazard of potential hijacking is a sig No Scarcity Bob Considine's Column Forty University of Arizona engineering students have devised an inexpensive car bumper which they say will withstand collisions of five miles an hour.

The; bumper is fashioned from 20 beer cans, placed on end between two pieces of 2 by 4 lumber. The ability of the beer can to withstand force to collapse comparatively slowly is the key to the shock-absorbing power of the new bumper. The invention undoubtedly will draw a number of persons for one job connected with the new bumpers that of emptying the cans to be used in making the bumpers. cutions were conducted in the jail yard on a wooden scaffold that was dismantled after each execution and then reassembled when needed. The last hanging on that scaffold was in 1904, but parts of the gallows were still stored in the courthouse basement 25 years ago and still may be there.

Writing of the jail's gallows brings back many memories of the county jail to anyone who has ever covered it as a newsman. There was the time a condemned slayer brazened" his way out of his cell with what appeared to be a small automatic pistol. He was demanding the two steel doors between him and freedom be unlocked by threatening to kill jailers. Louis Silverman, then constable, and Lowell Nash, then a deputy sheriff, views with regard to his performance are the same that I reflected rather generously in my interview with Mr. (Dan) Rather (CBS) in January." Later, this question from the floor: "I gained the impression that he may be a one-term Vice President.

Am I correct in this?" "Certainly not," the President replied. "No I said to him (Dan Rather) Mr. Agnew had conducted himself, I thought, with great dignity, with great courage, some controversy which is inevitable when you have courage and that under these circum rich red. They also were allowed to have a refrigerator in their cell The time when one fellow serving a' sentence got out of jail so often for purported church attendance and dentist visits that he completed his 90 days with a very fine tan. Also there was the time when one jail prisoner'with fiery red hair (Is there any other kind of red hair?) dyed his locks with black shoe and walked out undetected with a group of visiting high school students.

He was away three days before the law caught up with him Then, too, there was the first ftllow ever to escape from the Buchanan County jail. That was nearly 45 years ago. A single bar was cut out of a tier. He soaped his body to get through that small opening. Fellow prisoners pushed him through and then tossed his clothes out to him.

Such memories could go on and on, but, as you can see, space is running short. Way of Knowing Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are. NEW YORK Vice president Spiro Agnew, job is to attend to the grubbier chores of the Administration, was nobly doing his thing the other night on Long Island at the same time President Nixon was hedging about whether he'd have a job after the GOP convention next month. Mr. Agnew was raising money on Long Island at a.

$125 plat du jour, thus swelling his party's campaign coffers to what must be an all-time surplus. The Vice President has been, by far, the party's most effective individual money-raiser since he and Mr. Nixon squeaked into office in November of 1968. People flock to his dinners in droves and can hardly eat the plastic chicken and BB-shot peas in anticipation of hearing him take off against the bankrupt opposition (the Dems are $9 million in the red) and those pusillanimous pundits of the press. He gives them a jolly good show, and their applause overwhelms the thin-cries of protest from the knot of jaundiced juvenile jackasses picketing the premises.

Mr. Agnew, like every Vice persuaded nimto surrender. ic under the collar as he hears his leader praise him with faint damns. During the President's summit trip to Moscow I asked one of Mr. Nixon's ghostwriters why the President had never come out flatly and said, "Spiro's my man, come Hell or high water." The spook had a reasonable-sounding answer: "We've got four days and nights of television time to kill during our Convention.

How can. we sustain any interest, generate any suspense, unless we make the Vice Presidency an issue? The Democrats will put on a very colorful show at their convention, what with all those candidates, and poor George Wallace, and delegate fights and those Hollywood and Broadway types. We've got to do something to make the people realize that we're still alive, too. So that's why we've got to make like Spiro's in trouble." If the President was stringing along with this kind of charade about Mr. Agnew, he was a darned good actor at his first general press conference in more than a year.

He said, "I will announce a decision on that (the Vice Presidency) well before the convention so that the delegates will know my views My nificant one today for airlines. But armed passengers whose judgment may be open to question perhaps pose an even greater danger. An on-board shoot-out could lead to all types of casualties. Reaching the Goal Approval by the city council of a contract -lor construction of the Roy's Branch section of the city's riverfront interceptor sewer marks the approaching end of a long effort to free the Missouri River in this area of untreated waste. -The project began more than a decade ago when the federal government decreed that all waste from the city had to be treated before the effluent could enter the river.

stances, I did not believe turned out his "pistol" had breaking up a winning team been carved our of a large po- was a gcod idea. Confusing, Isn't It? It's truly a mixed up world. The Secret Service has found it necessary to check thoroughly into the background of every newsman given press credentials to the Democratic National Convention. It even must have his social security number. Chess champion Bobby Fischer never travels without bodyguards.

And the Supreme Court has knocked out the death penalty for even the most heinous crimes. Confused? Death Forecasts We're not against statisticians of the forecasting variety. We just wish that sometime they don't come so close to their predictions of how many will be killed on a given holiday week end. The death forecasters scored again over the Fourth of July holiday. They wouldn't have though if drivers had been just a little extra cautious.

tato and given a metallic appearance by being painted with iodine. Another daytime jail break attempt there was thwarted when Lloyd Cole, alone in the jail office, fired a heavy tear gas cartridge at a prisoner armed to break out. The car- "However, the final deck sion will be deferred until before the Republican convention. Meanwhile, back on Long Island, Agnew got a big hand by saying that the assembled Republicans could do something about the political "bias" expressed in their newspapers and on the air. The thing to do was to let those scoundrels hear from "the market place," and that would surely bring them to heel.

There is, of course, no bias in "the market place." Poor guy. By ART BUCHWALD Auld Lang Syne at Miami Reviving an Old Red-Baiter told them? We told them instead of demonstrating in the streets and closing down the schools that they should work within the system." "That's right," Big Al said. "I remember myself saying this country was so designed that you could get anything you wanted by working within the today, minions oi aouars later, mucn ot that waste is being treated and practically all will be processed when the Blacksnake Sewer is cut into the interceptor line. Then only the Rdy's Branch section, contributing only a small amount of sewage, will continue to pour waste into the river. When the Roy's Branch line is completed, possibly in a year or so, then no sewage from St.

Joseph will be entering the Missouri River without treatment. It' has been a long road and one that at titties has been irksome to residents but it has achieved an important goal. Fireworks Sales Sometimes things are difficult to figure. 'National safety authorities stress the ger of fireworks. rVet a number of organizations, including service clubs and even Boy Scout troops, sell fireworks each Fourth of July.

Jheir excuse is that they are raising money for; a good cause. Tfiose UFO Sightings "it all started 25years ago the spotting of flying saucers or7 more technically, unidentified flying objects. that quarter of a century, the government has maintained that none of the sightings-could be substantiated. The U. S.

Air FeCce, during a 22 year period in which it chletked on more than 12,000 of the reports, dejjided there was no justification for checking oil the reports. Similarly, a special panel of scientists, ap The weather was so cool here the first part of July you could almost imagine folks going to Colorado to warm up. Up to noon today we had met only 11 people who had ways for spending any and all new taxes levied by any division of government. One fellow here says he was raised in a real conservative and quiet town. For example ringing a bicycle bell there after 8:15 p.m.

was a felony. For a status symbol it is hard to beat the announcement: "I can't be with you tomorrow afternoon as I have to watch that chess championship game on TV." It's difficult to realize what has become of our sense of values on reading that a letter written by Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of President Kennedy, sold for $1,250. We've never been able to understand why they have to have No Smoking signs on fireworks stands, but know there would be the devil to pay if they didn't. President before him, is going through the tortures of being essentially powerless in his own right. He is completely under the control of his superior, the only superior he has in all the land.

Mr. Nixon knows what that's like. President General Eisenhower treated V. P. Nixon like a second lieutenant and absent-mindedly deprived him of the Presidency in 1960 by telling a White House press conference that he needed a week to recall any instance in which Mr.

Nixon had helped shape Administration policy. John F. Kennedy, at times, seemed to have V. P. Lyndon Johnson on the payroll just for laughs.

He dispatched Johnson on some of the more dismal journeys which afflict modern-day Veeps ar.d apparently made little effort to squelch his family's dim view of the "style" of the big Texan. President Johnson, in turn, seemed to take it out on V. P. lie knocked candidate Humphrey down whenever he tried to promise that, if elected, he'd change things in Vietnam. Humphrey seethed with indignation, but.

never rebelled against the man who was more albatross than lame duck. For all we know, Mr. Agnew may be secretly sulphur- MR. TWEEDY Old red-baiters never die, nor even fade away. Artificial respiration, lovingly administered by congressmen who lust after the paranoia vote, keeps them wheezing.

And now the House of Representatives has decided that the comatose Subversive Activl-tiies Control Board should be pumped up again. The House majority recently staved off an attack of common sense which threatened to put the board to sleep permanently. A smart aleck from North Carolina, Democratic Representative Richardson Preyer, had proposed the euthanasia, on the grounds that the board's five members arc being paid $36,000 a year for doing nothing. Since the Supreme Court stripped the board of its old job hunting, registering and publicizing Commies and since another federal court frowned on President Nixon's vague and overboard attempt to give it the power to add civil disobedience groups to the attorney general's list of subversive organizations, why not (Mr. Preyer reasoned) dispense with it entirely? Why not replace it with a federal employe security and appeals commission equipped with a simple, unopprcssive method of screening federal job applicants on loyalty and security grounds? "Nothln' doin'," replied the House.

"The House Internal Security Committee (nee House Un-American Activities Committee), which has lots of experience fightin' creepin' subversion, says the government can't be protected without our Subversive Activities Control Board. Besides, the President likes it. Just blow a little congressional air Into it and paint a new name on Us door and it'll be as good as new." So, if the Senate concurs, the Federal Internal Security Board (nee Subversive Activities Control Board) will be out spotting subversives and protecting the government from them. Who's a subversive? The board will decide, just as it did during its heyday a generation ago. And when it finds some, maybe It'll put them on TV, scare the daylights out of some voters and re elect some congressmen.

Just like the good old days, before the Warren Court got uppity. Nader's Probe of Congress "Well, that's what the little stinkers did. They decided to work within the system. "But we didn't really mean for them to work within the system," the bald man said. "That was just a figure of speech like 'Have a nice day' or 'Give my best to your "Of course we didn't mean it," someone else said.

"We meant they should work within the system, but do It by working for us." "Gentlemen," Charley said. "Our biggest mistake was not that wc told them to work within the system, but that we never knew what the system was all about. Not one man In this room ever dreamed someone else could use the system as we did to control the party." "Well." said one pol, "I think it's a pretty lousy system if anyone can take It over just because he has more votes." "The thing to do now," WASHINGTON The Old Democratic Pros were sitting in a smoke-filled room. No one was smiling "Is anyone here going to Miami?" There was silence. "I ran for delegate," one pol said, "but I was beaten by a kid who plays drums with a rock group called the 'Meat Grinders' "Huh, I ran for delegate and was beaten by a 19-year-old girl who turned out to be a guy, after the votes were counted." "I've been going to Democratic conventions for 30 years, 20 of them as chairman of my delegation," a white-haired pro said.

"I've given my all to the party. There isn't a judge in my state who doesn't owe his job to me. There isn't a federal marshal or a postmaster who can't say Big Al wasn't the greatest friend he ever had. When the people wanted 'roads, they came to me; when they wanted housing, Big Al was there; when they wanted a little something to tide them over, they knew my door was never closed. This time, when it came to choosing a delegate to the convention, what did they do? They elected a black woman Jockey," "Jeez, Al! It's not going to be the same Democratic convention without us." "What hapH'ned to all of us?" a bald, florid man asked.

"What happened?" "I'll tell you what happened!" a man with a diamond stickpin In his tie shouted. "We did It to ourselves!" "How's that, Charley?" someone asked. "Remember when the kids were acting up and raising hell around the country?" "Who doesn't?" "Remember what we By RALPH de TOLEDANO iForeive me if I've kept it a secret, but By Ned Riddle the other information which Nader is spending $150,000 of somebody's money to compile in what promises to be a study of congressional activities, mores, and finances. Since Nader wants the study on the stands before the November election, it, will predictably include lots of Drew-Pearson-type nuggets about senators and congressmen who have not kept the faith by subscribing to his self-description of sainthood. Nader is going for broke in this "investigation" of the national legislature.

All other projects have been set aside for It Nader's reasoning probably being that even though the country will be raped, ravaged, and driven to madness without him to keep a finger in the dyke, he must give up his relentless pursuit of his pantheon of devils in order to set the Congress right. The results will speak for themselves. If Nader's "investigators" come up with a finding that there are 102 members of the Senate, no one will be very surprised. That about comes up to his usual accuracy quotient. But if he should tell us not only that Senator once had dinner with the president of General Motors but that Senator received $150,000 from the AFL-CIO as a campaign contribution, then Nader will indeed make news.

But I'm not holding my breath. Are you! one pol said, "Is to change the system so it can't hap some time ago I got a letter from Ralph Nader asking for my help. To be quite accurate, the letter wasn't from Nader himself but from on)5 othis quiz kids. And since I consider Na-. dey and his many organizations not much' werse than a bad case of poison ivy, I tossed it Into the waste basket.

I had no desire to tell N4der's investigators all about my relations with the Congress or with individual congress-men! and senators mostly because there is really not very much to tell. most newspapermen in thus city of sorrows, I approach legislators when I want some Information, and most of them are very co-operative. From time to time, one of them has a story 1o tell which he thinks is and if I agree, I Avritc it. I respect the confidences of my sources and, when I happen to be in a legislative office, I do hot try to go through the mail or ransack the filing cabi-ircts-a practice that has become almost epidemic in recent months. If Nader or one of his quiz kids should ask me, which I much doubt, not tell him which 'of my sources on Capitol Hill sometimes takes one too many or likes the girls perhaps more than is proper.

That Information would be known to Ralph rjader If he didn't keep himself in the kind of seclusion which makes a Trappist monk seem gregarious by comparison. So would most of pen again." "It's too late," said Charley, "they have con trol of the party, the con ventlon and the system." "Well." said Big Al, "we can't sit around here blow Ing cigar smoke at each Punctuality The most indispensable qualification a cook Is punctuality. The same must be said of quests. In Your Hands When you invite a man to dinner, never forget ihut duf-Ing the short time he Is under your roof his happiness is In your hands. other.

What do we do?" "This Is what we Charley said. "We go down to Miami next week and demonstrate." "We can't go in, but this Is the office of our president who decides about raises, promotions, etc.".