Evening Herald from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania • Page 6

Si Good Old Days 1 jimua 1 OF SHENANDOAH, MAHANOY CITY AND ASHLAND Ashland Tel 875-1184 Mahanoy City Tel. 773-101 1 Shenandoah Tel. 462-2777 Published everv evening except Sunday at Ringtown Boulevard. Shenandoah, 17976 SHENANDOAH VALLEY PUBLISHING Joseph E. Dalton, Publisher Member, American Newspaper Publishers, Pa.

Newspaper Publishers' Assn. Audit Bureau of Circulation National Adv. Mathews, Shannon Cullen, 38 Newbury Boston, Mass. The Evening Herald is delivered in Shenandoah and the neighboring towns by carrier for 75 cents a week. By mail $38.00 per annum paid in advance.

Advertisements charged according to space. The publisher reserves the right to change the position of advertisements whenever the publication of news demands it. The right is reserved to reject any advert isement whether paid for or not, that the publisher may deem improper. Entered as second-class matter Dec. 18, 1895, at the post office at Shenandoah, under the act of Congress.

March 3, 1879. 30 Years Ago 1941 Danny Sullivan has resigned as basketball coach at Shenandoah Catholic High to accept a government job at Middletown. Father James Murphy, director of athletics, said the coaching duties will be filled temporarily by Joe Dalton, former Catholic High cage star, who manages the Lyric Theatre. I I TUESDAY, DECEMBER28, 1971 Absenteeism Al Matuza of Shenandoah alternated at center with Bulldog Turner as the world champion Chicago Bears defeated the National Football League All-Stars 35-24. It was the last game the Bears will play as a unit as at least eight of the squad will be leaving for military service.

50 Years Ago 1921 Tommy Geary of Philadelphia and Harry Kid Brown of Shenandoah were put out of the Ring in the 8th round at Maher's Hall by Refree Tony Dean for stalling. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine), concerned about absenteeism in the Senate, has asked the right question but come up with the wrong answer. What she wants to know is how her fellow senators can be required to appear for more roll call votes instead of gallivanting about the country so much. She proposes a constitutional amendment as the remedy.

The problem of Senate absenteeism is a serious one which has a crippling effect on legislative business. Senator Smith takes a justifiably harsh view of this from her vantage point of exceptional attention to duty. Her indictment includes the roundhouse charge that the Senate has become a "springboard to those who would use it even abuse it for their selfish interests, whether such interests be commercializing their position and title with the acquisition of high-price lecture fees or running for president." That last point may lay the irate senator from Maine open to suggestions of partisanship. Still, there is evident truth in her assertion that some senators spend a lot of time "piling up annual lecture incomes," and that some appear "bent on squeezing out every bit of Senate-paid world travel and entertainment they can." This brings us to her proposed constitutional amendment. It would provide for the expulsion of any member of either the House or Senate who during any year misses more than 40 per cent of the roll call votes.

This stricture would not be tempered: not even grave illness would be accepted as an excuse. We question the wisdom of such an amendment, immuring a rigid attendance formula in the Constitution. Despite Senator Smith's misgivings about the ability of Congress to discipline itself, this is the proper approach. Some reasonable stricture on absenteeism should be written into the rules of both House and Senate, and then firmly enforced. KINO FEATURES SYNDICATE Walter Woomer, 32, of Lost Creek No.

2, a carpenter at Packer 4 Colliery, was planing a board at the shop when he went to brush chips away and his glove became caught in the machinery. His hand and arm were drawn in and cut off between the wrist and elbow. His life was saved by the outside first aid corps, who rushed to the scene and applied a tourniquet to stop the copious flow of blood. Members of the team were John Dudish, John Johnson, George Gibson, Ray Ulshafer and Francis Mclntyre. 75 Years Ago 1896 Mrs.

William Walton of St. Nicholas, who was accidentally shot by her daughter Bertha, 10, several days ago, will in all probability recover. The child was told to move the revolver of her father, a colliery watchman, from a table to a drawer and in so doing the bullet discharged. Dr. Klock of Mahanoy City, Drs.

Hamilton and Kistlerof Shenandoah made two unsuccessful attempts to remove the bul let and are now of the opinion that it did not enter the abdominal cavity but lodged in the fleshy part of the thigh. They deem it safer to allow the bullet to remain there than to do any more probing. Mr. Walton is suffering from a severe sprain of the back sustained while trying to lift his wife after she fell. He is a small man and his wife weighs 230 pounds.

A N' ALONG By JACK ROLAND Oath important The favorite flint lock rifle of Benjamin Laub, the Blue Mountain hermit, brought only five cents at a sale in Rohersburg. cultural enterprise whose effects are beginning to be felt throughout the country. The National Endowment for the Humanities, like its sister agency the Endowment for the Arts, is a means of channeling public revenue into undertakings that enhance the richness and diversity of American life. Dr. Berman's credentials are impressive.

His special field of interest is Shakespeare, but he has written widely on literary subjects ranging in time from the Renaissance to contemporary America. Most recently he shed light on the past decade with his book, "America in the Sixties: An Intellectual History." We wish him well as director of this federal agency whose function is to help stimulate and encourage work in the humanities. Neither President Nixon nor Vice President Agnew found time, so far as we can determine, to be present when Dr. Ronald S. Berman was sworn in as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The oath was administered by John Ratchford of the White House staff, and little note was taken on the occasion in the nation's press. Doubtless this rather low-key treatment of the affair was not intended to gowngrade either Dr. Berman or the office he is to fill. Our hunch is that it simply did not occur to people at the nerve center of momentous national and world affairs to attach great importance to this event. The ceremony was important, though, if one sees it as focusing attention on a great SHORT AND SNAPPY 1 By TOM BARRETT News stories that went right through 1971 and will go right through 1972 deal with fire, garbage and sewage.

the average meal at the Transportation Department is at the Treasury Department, $14.31 and at the Justice, $7.10. Keeping this in mind let's meander over to the Interstate Commerce Commission where executives can buy meals for an average of $3.53. Now you don't have to be a math major to see that the arithmetic is lousy between what the boys at the Commerce Commission can buy their food for and what the prices are at the other three departments. What is called for by the writer is a little intragovernmental coordination. In justice to the taxpayer and to provide modest help to the Treasury, the writer suggests that the Transportation Department provide a few cars to shuttle the high cost executives to the lost cost lunchroom at the ICC.

WE RECENTLY TALKED with one of the applicants who missed out on a police position in Mahanoy City. The Applicant's name is Joe Moyle and from the brief conversation we had with him he let it be known that he did not like the manner in which borough council appointed two new policemen under a federal grant. Even though he applied early enough Moyle felt he would not get the job. He has his reasons for believing this, but they are a miss tree to me. ONE MORE WEEKEND of indulgence like the last and the grim reaper will offer me my choice of three ways to leave this life: 1.

Obesity 2. Drowning from having absorbed too much beer 3. Murdered by an irate wife who wired the TV set to a 20,000,000 volt line hoping that I would turn on another football game. However, there is still a chance for me to be saved. The new year is just a few days away and with a little will power I will make some firm resolutions.

Let it not be said that I did not try to conquer these evil habits which have attacked my character. Therefore, I firmly resolve: 1. To give up water skiiing 2. To stop eating cherries from Antwerp 3. To give up mountain climbing.

I'M IN FULL AGREEMENT with an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal who took issue with the Federal government for another one of its injustices to the taxpayer. The writer criticizes the enormous differences in the costs of serving noon-day repasts to executives at various government agencies. He cited the costs of lunches at the Transportation Department, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department. According to the General Accounting Office, Imagine the costof waste. The mine fire cost runs close to ten million dollars.

That's enough money to build a community of 500 homes at $20,000 each. Resume briefings Sewage as required by law will cost each family in the entire area over $100 a year. With 30,000 customers anticipated the costisthreemillion bucksa year. Landfills, if we don't run out of them, may soon cost at least a buck a customer. With an estimated 33,000 customers this would cost $33,000 to get rid of what's of no use to us.

briefings must be halted, lest other government statisticians also present a picture different from that put forward by the administration. This administration is by no means the first to attempt such management of the news; similar actions have been seen in Washington. As in past instances, however, it is the public that suffers when important information is curtailed or distorted. The monthly unemployment and cost-of-living press briefings had been going since 1953 when they were halted. They should be resumed.

There was no sound justification for Labor Secretary James D. Hodgson's move last March to discontinue the monthly press briefings on unemployment and cost-of-living statistics. There is no sound reason for not resuming this useful practice at once, as the House subcommittee on government information recommends. Hodgson's action nine months ago was clearly motivated by partisan considerations. A Labor Department statistical analyst interpreted unemployment statistics in a less favorable way than the secretary: ergo, the Black Lung applications went through the year and in Pennsylvania alone the number seeking breathtaking aid is over 100,000.

1. 1 Job of schools 'i. hmmmmmsmmmsm By JOHN CHAMBERLAIN vwwmmmmmmm Other news in the area that Our Blonde feels carried widespread interest included the North Schuylkill School District squabble over taxes and a new school. Goden days By PHYLLIS BATTELLE Ecumenical services conducted in January throughout the area touched the hearts of many a soul Girard Estate, raising the rent, caused some unusual excitement in February. Our Blonde thinks the day in April when Democrats demonstrated against their leader, Gov.

Milton Shapp, outside the Fountain Springs Country Club, deserves special mention. The Primary Election of May 18 opened a new door in politics as Rebels, Progressives, and other Independents got nominated. of itself that it signed a contract in Gary, to take over the Banneker Elementary School in an all-black neighborhood with a guarantee to give the money back for any student who failed to reach national norms over a two-or three-year period. The Gary experiment has had frontpage recognition in big metropolitan dailies, for some 73 per cent of the Banneker pupils either reached or exceeded norms during the first BRL year. The system has had another run in Philadelphia, where 9,914 students in Philadelphia District Four schools have been eligible for the money-back guarantee.

BRL has made a profit on the Philadelphia deal $40 a student. The system is now spreading to Montreal, to Rochester, N.Y., to Detroit and elsewhere. The Bronx in New York is too poor to be on a full BRL money-back basis. With limited funds, Public School 20 had to contract at a $20-per-student rate, with no money back for failures. And BRL did not put in its own instructors.

It simply trained the local teachers and paraprofessional volunteers from among the parents. Eut a BRL man, Elmer Gant, a black who had risen to vice principal's post in Kansas City, shuttles in and out beteeen Montreal, The big political blunder of the year was the GOP rally at Lakewood on Sept. 18 when the main speaker called for a cleaning out of dictatorial one-party rule. New York City's Public School 20 in the Brcnx, an ancient building, was once slated for closing. The city had opened the new Charles James Fox School just across the way on Fox Street at 167th Street, an elegant piece of architecture in a generally dilapidated area.

But the Puerto Ricans kept coming, bringing in huge families, and Public School 20 had to be reopened to take care of an overflow of a thousand neighborhood children. The school wasn't doing a good job with reading. It was the old slum area story too many pupils, teachers who couldn't give personalized attention to the stragglers who needed continuous phonic drill ji addition to the more fashionable -word-recognition type of instruction. With nothing to lose, the school, along with others in its district, turned to the system evolved by a private educational service company, the Behavioral Research Laboratories of Palo Alto, Calif. The "BRL system" relies heavily on sound repetition the student must say uh, umbrella, zuh, xylophone, ih, Indian, zuh, zebra" and it demonstrably works.

It also uses "paraprofessionals" housewives trained from scratch to help teachers in overcrowded classrooms, thus giving every kid his individualized bit of attention. The letter and word books used in the system enable the student to correct his own mistakes by removing a "slider" card from a column giving the right answers. And the system lets each student go at his own pace, in a puzzle-solving atmosphere that offers a good deal of fun. The BRL company is so sure Rochester, and the Bronx to keep an eye on things. Bea Rubin, the motherly principal, has lost all her original skepticism about the system; she likes it because it "gets the teacher off the student's back," it has its own "built-in success factor," and it has, over a four-year period, turned out readers who are above the norms.

I watched Miss Nancy Judge teach her first-grade class and John Verrilli with his fourth grade, and it was obvious that they had a method that permits the accurate measurement of advancing skills. This is the point that Miss Judge and Mr. Verrilli wanted to make. The point I want to stress is that Public School 20 is 81 per cent Puerto Rican and 19 per cent black. Many of the Puerto Rican kids enter kindergarten speaking nothing but Spanish.

If there were busing to and from the neighborhood, white kids coming in from Westchester would not be getting an inferior education at Public School 20. But the Puerto Rican and black children who would be carted outside the area to predominantly "white" schools would not be doing as well as they are now doing. It comes back to quality education. This is the cure for the so-called ghetto schools. I watched little Danny Galindez in the first grade at Public School 20 fill in the columns of his work book and then remove the "slider" from the correct answer column to check on himself.

Danny Galindez will never have cause for sorrow that they didn't bus him out to White Plains. What America needs is not busing it needs good schools and sound methods of teaching where poor people live. The big scandal came to light on Oct. 1 when four were arrested for stealing meat and other food at Rest Haven. cent approving in '69, and 63 per cent in '71.

Breaking the statistics down by race, blacks are far less content, as might be expected, than whites. As opposed to whites, the black population is considerably more satisfied now than they have been in past years but they are still far behind white men in their contentment quotient. E.G., 83 per cent of whites are satisfied in their jobs, compared with 63 per cent of blacks. In terms of income, the contrast is 65 per cent for whites, 41 per cent for blacks. Widest gap of all remains in housing, with 77 per cent of whites currently giving the okay to their human condition, but only 51 per cent of blacks able to express satisfaction in the places where they live.

With the appreciable level of dissatisfaction among Negroes weighting the national average down severly, it would appear that the white U.S. citizen is quite pleased, indeed, with the status of his personal world. In fact, Gallup discloses, eight out of ten of them are satisfied with the negatively touted "quality of life" about them. That's wonderful. So why aren't more people smiling? "Well, it's New York, you know, that keeps you from smiling," said Angela Lansbury, who stopped by the office recently en route to her home in Cork, Ireland, for the holidays.

"It's a bit depressing at the moment, I think, a bit sad. And that's awful, because I adore New York City. As a kid, I was transported just walking the streets. Now I feel nothing-except this lingering sadness that what was once here is here no longer." Angela's name is up in two-foot-high lights on the marquee of Radio City Music Hall, where her latest success, Disney's "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" is playing. In it, she plays a marvelously funny amateur witch taking a correspondence course in "spells." But it does nothing much for her morale to see those lights, or even to be stopped on the street for her autograph, as she constantly is "People no longer smile when they ask for an autograph.

It's as if they didn't really want to meet you. It's as if they have to. You are playing your role, and they have to play their role. They sort of hang it on you for being a so-called celebrity, and a so-called success." She sighed. "New York was a golden place in the '40s and '50s, but the problems of the world now are troublesome and New Yorkers take the problems of the world on their shoulders.

That's very generous, but it doesn't leave a very happy city." Suddenly her exquisitely mobile face brightened, as she looked out on the city's skyline: "But we're coming into a whole new era, and I can't wait for it to come, and you know who'll be the first to know it to feel it? The people of New York. NEW YORK (KFS)-People who live in New York City, where a smile among strangers is as rare as a smokeless sunset, sometimes have the impression that most people are basically unhappy with their lives. It came as a mild surprise to us, then, to learn that the latest Gallup poll indicates the majority of Americans are satisfied with the way they live. Not ecstatic, of course. Not even as contented as they were two years ago.

But, in general, satisfied. One in eight Americans, the survey showed, would emigrate to another country if he had the opportunity. (These would-be evacuees represent, it seems, New Yorkers and other urban dwellers, and members of the uptight, held-down minorities.) But the nation as a whole still thinks that the U.S. is treating them reasonably well in jobs, income, housing and even the quality of education for their children. Satisfaction with jobs, income and housing has fallen somewhat since the last poll taken in 1969, however.

In the 1969 survey, for example, 87 per cent were content in their job situations. Only 81 per cent are satisfied now. Still, that represents a large majority. In the case of personal income, the decline has been from 65 per cent satisfaction two years ago, to 62 per cent today. Satisfaction with housing is down from 78 to 74 per cent.

And there's no significant change in attitudes toward education, with 64 per Our Blonde thinks the General Election of Nov. 2 made history because five Democrats were elected countywide. Little things that help: Sandy Beach got $20,000 from the government in matching funds. Little things that hurt: In spite of the widespread support and desire for a borough manager in Shenandoah the community went through 1971 without one. The heart rending fire at the Shenandoah Heights Fire House was softened by the William Penn firemen offering their banquet hall for the Heights New Year's Eve party.

Big credit to the area-The Coal Crackers football team. The big dilemma of 1971: Job patronage. The optimistic outlook for 1972: Reduced councils. Todoy in History Tuesday, Dec. 28, 1971 Jesus replied, "Because I will only reveal Myself to those who love Me and obey me.

The Father will love them too, and We will come to them and live with them." (John 14.23, LNT).