The State from Columbia, South Carolina • 21

The State Living. Columbia, South Carolina Thursday, May 26, 1988 Bill McDonald State Columnist The courage to say: Tam an alcoholic' A friend of mine, a former beauty queen, was sipping a soft drink at the Marriott Hotel bar last week. I said, "Can't I get you a mixed drink?" She laughed. "Do that," she said, "and I'll show you how I can swing on a chandelier." I forgot. She's an alcoholic.

As: member of Alcoholics Anonymous, she's often rousted from bed before dawn to help other alcoholics battling an overpowering urge to drink. My friend once drank a fifth a day but hasn't had a drink in 10 years now. Recently, she received "a 10-year pin" for her sobriety, and the speaker at the awards ceremony was her father. My dad joined Alcoholics Anonymous after I did," she said. "He saw the good it was doing for me." The chronic drinker Being drunk for "about 15 years" taught my friend a thing or two about drinking.

The chronic alcoholic is not weakwilled, she said, "he's sick." And the tragic aspect of the disease is that the alcoholic invariably hurts those folks he loves best: his family. She told me she needed four drinks every morning to emerge from the dark cellar of her thoughts to the ground floor where humans live. If four made her feel normal, she was sure eight would make her feel superhuman. They didn't, although she kept trying. "I got locked up in jail three times for drunk and disorderly conduct," she recalled.

"My parents, took custody of my children once and had me committed to the State Hospital. "They even had a restraining order to keep me from visiting their home." Pete Strom, the late chief of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, helped her clear her police record after she'd been sober for five years. Newspaper saloon Heavy drinking, if not alcoholism, quite often is portrayed in books and movies as the curse of the newspaper profession. After struggling over stories all day long, we reporters like to convene at the neighborhood newspaper saloon. We're tense from the day's news.

We're impelled to wet our feathers. At one out-of-state newspaper where I once worked, for instance, we sports reporters customarily "took our supper" on Fridays at a little bar near the newspaper. The copy boy routinely fetched us from the bar as soon as the telephones started to ring high school coaches calling in the scores of their football games. We'd write our sports stories in race-horse fashion, then resume our drinking. We were filled to overflowing with machismo.

AA meetings A lot of the alcoholics I know don't like to discuss their drinking. "Oh," they say, "I'll admit I get plastered now and then. But so does everybody else. If it ever became a problem, I'd stop." Those who want to live, however, swallow their pride, as my friend did, and say, "I am an alcoholic." An alcoholic might be in terrible shape, she said, but help is no farther away than the telephone. (In Columbia, anyone needing information can call 254-5301.) Included in the 12 steps of AA is to be willing even eager to get out of bed and run to the rescue of those who require help at once.

To save himself, the alcoholic must save others. My friend makes speeches all year long, for instance, and has even had an article published in Grapevine, the international monthly journal for AA. There are 10,000 members of AA in Columbia, she said, and meetings are being held all the time. "We don't just talk about drinking," she said. "We talk a lot about coping with stress.

Right now, for instance, I need to go to a meeting badly. I'm mad as hell at my son for leaving the freezer door open and spoiling 20 pounds of meat!" THE RATINGS GAME Joe The State WIS-TV news team Joe Pinner, right, crumples his script following the newscast with Joe Daggett, left, Ed Carter and Susan Aude Fisher. WIS-TV's success is news By DOUG NYE Television Editor 11 o'clock each weeknight, televiA sion tune in viewers to local across newscasts South to Carolina catch up on the day's happenings. In Charleston, viewers have three stations to choose from. In Greenville, and in South Carolina towns near Charlotte and Augusta, it's the same story.

But if you live near Columbia, there's only one place you can turn NBC affiliate WIS-TV, channel 10. Columbia's other two network affiliates CBS station WLTX, channel 19, and ABC station WOLO, channel 25 have long since thrown in the towel at 11 o'clock. The late-night news is just one illustration of how WIS dominates the Midlands television market. WLTX and WOLO don't compete with WIS during the early-evening news, either. Both are content with airing their local newscasts at 6 o'clock, making it easy for WIS to build a big audience during its "7 O'Clock That's odd in itself, since most stations in the United States set aside either 6 p.m.

or 6:30 p.m. for local newscasts. But such is the power of WIS: It can schedule its newscast at any hour and still expect a big audience. So completely does WIS saturate the Midlands, in fact, that it was recently named the top-rated television station in the entire country. Translated, that means WIS reaches a higher percentage of potential viewers than any other station in America.

0 For decades, most Americans cities have had just one or two newspapers, usually owned by the same company. Television news, however, has remained very competitive, and most big cities have at least two TV stations, usually more. In that respect, Columbia's situation is very unusual because of the WIS stranglehold on the market. Local broadcast journalists, including those at WIS, aren't particularly happy about that, but it isn't likely to change. Both WLTX and WOLO cite economics and a 35- year-old ruling by the Federal Communications Commission as the reasons for the imbalance.

"We used to have a newscast at 11 o'clock," says Gene Upright, program director at WLTX. "It was taken off before I got here. It was basically an economic move. We didn't have enough reporters to do a first-rate job at 11, so we decided to concentrate our resources on a 6 o'clock newscast. So we put on Andy Griffith.

"Philosophically, we'd like to do a newscast at 11. But you might say that now we're a victim of our own success with the Griffith show. It does very well in that time spot for us." Nielsen ratings show that Andy Griffith reruns come in a strong second to the WIS See News, 4-B NIELSEN RATINGS FOR COLUMBIA Rating Share WIS Wheel of Fortune WLTX News 19 WOLO Newscene 25 WRLK -Lehrer Richard Roberts 7 o'clock Report WIS WLTX The Jeffersons WOLO The Newlywed Game WRLK Business Report WCCT Jimmy Swaggart WIS 11 o'clock Report WLTX Griffith WOLO Cheers WRLK McNeil Lehrer WCCT PTL Club Source: Nielsen Station Index for February 1988. Ratings points represent the percentage of households in the market. A share represents the percentage of television sets use at a given time.

Brad Blackstone. The Stale Graphus Dad's best advice What's the best advice your dad ever gave you? We'd like you to tell us about it, and welluse the best responses in a special feature were planning for Father's Day. Write as little as a paragraph or as much as a page or two. Send your responses to Dad's Advice, Fran Zupan, Features Department, The State, P.O. Box 1333, Columbia, S.C.

29202. Be sure and include your name, address, daytime telephone number and your father's name. We'd like to hear from you by June 2. Tim Goheen State Graphics So you got caught speeding? Lawyer advises clients to challenge their tickets in court By ROSALIND Knight-Ridder Newspapers ROSALIND RESNICK Newspapers ou're cruising down the highway with the and your mind millions of miles away. until you're jolted to reality by the blare police siren and the glare of the squad car's flashing blue lights.

You pull over and start assembling your excuses. Before you can blurt them out, the officer has handed you a ticket. The charge: speeding. Driving home at a sheepish 54 miles an hour, you realize you were doing at least 70. You start to worry about your car insurance you can barely afford it now.

Should you try to fight the ticket even if you know you broke the law? Yes, says Mark Gold, a Miami lawyer who owns The Ticket Clinic, a -volume legal practice that specializes in helping drivers get off the hook. "I recommend everybody to challenge it," Gold said, "especially if they have a bad record." Depending on your state's laws, a guilty plea may put points on your record and threaten your license. A conviction could hike your insurance rates or get your policy canceled. "There are no guarantees," Gold said, "but we've been relatively successful. Out of 45 speeding tickets we defended last month, only one person was found guilty and four people had adjudication withheld.

The rest were dismissed." Gold, who drives a red radio on al tickets of his own, doesn't have That is, does have is a battery of of the down the government's case. Ferrari and has beaten severa magic wand. What he defenses aimed at breaking Gold is a master of traffic technicalities. To defend a routine speeding case, Gold typically charges $200. A typical fine in a speeding case is $70 plus $39 for court costs, he said.

"If you know the rules, you can usually find some error in the way the citation was issued or the machine was calibrated," he said. The radar machines police use must be tested for accuracy every six months by a federally licensed technician. Gold often tries to prove the machine hasn't been tested recently, or questions the qualifications of the technician. He also relies on standard courtroom rules of evidence, such as requiring the officer testifying to produce original documents, not photocopies. Despite Gold's impressive track record, drivers who are caught speeding shouldn't get too confident.

The best thing for drivers to do when they're pulled over is to act courteously, Gold said. "My advice is to just be quiet and polite," he said. "Don't say anything: Just 'yes, 'no, 'thank you, sir." In cases involving an expired license tag, a driver can sometimes lighten his penalty by bringing a valid registration to the hearing..