The La Crosse Tribune from La Crosse, Wisconsin • Page 5

La Crosse Tribune, Monday, February 9,1976 (Opinion KENNETH 0. BLANCHARD, Publisher SANDERS HOOK General Manager ROBERT S. GALLAGHER Editor SANFORD GOLTZ, Opinion Page Editor No followup "How much of a narrative are you going to stack up on a guy before it rings an alarm bell?" Rep. Virgil Roberts, D-Holmen. "If the probation officer didn't know he was dangerous, the really out of control." Rep.

Bernard Lewi son, R-Viroqua. AT LONG LAST, Wisconsin legislators may take a detailed look at the system of justice in this state which relies more and more on probation and parole, even with persons found guilty of violent crime. Rep Virgil Roberts say he would like to have the Legislative Council take a look at the appalling lack of communication between the various branches of the system as demonstrated in the Jerold Hammill story. Generally, Legislative Council study projects are aimed at learning whether corrective legislation is needed In this case, it might be more properly an oversight function, as Congress belatedly is getting into at the national level. That calls for seeing whether existing agencies are doing their job.

and within the framework of the law. PREDICTABLY, those involved in the probation-parole system tend to be defensive. They are in the Hammill case, as reported elsewhere in the Tribune today. hard to revoke probation, said a deputy secretary in the huge Department of Health and Social Services, which is responsible for the corrections system, including both incarceration and supervision of those on parole or probation. The rights must be protected, he noted, adding that the probationer must commit an overt before he can be sent to prison or reformatory.

Well, how about robberies and purse-snatchings? What about drug use? Or carrying a weapon? BUT probation officer get the full picture on his background or his psychological picture The private drug treatment center, where Hammill went after armed robbery and a stabbing on probation despite an eight-year sentence evidently feel obliged to keep the courts or the probation system informed on his progress or, when he escaped, on his whereabouts. This is a system that because of its size and complexity has become a nonsystem. The casual attitude toward the risks involved help, either. all very well to talk about protecting the rights. But what about ours? So now what? TWO RALLIES at the La Crosse Post Office Saturday afternoon, separated only by the width of Fourth Street, made their points.

The preservationists want to save a landmark building. The labor union members, chiefly from the building trades, want work to proceed on schedule on the new post office and federal building; they need the jobs. Neither side, as it turned out, showed any sweeping communitywide interest in its cause. There were an estimated 60 persons in each group, hardly an uprising. ON THAT KIND of showing, it likely that construction will be held up on the first portion of the new building, which is to go up while the present structure continues in use.

On the other hand, the old building is safe during that construction period, scheduled to run through much of 1977 Upon completion of the main building, the old post office is slated for demolition to make room for covered parking for postal vehicles. Downtown La Crosse will lose another piece of its past if the post office falls before the wreckers. Those trying to save it will have to generate wider support than they have so far if to succeed. We're still paving precious cropland From Tribune files TWENTY YEARS AGO 1956 Average pay in state industry increases to a new peak of $2 per aecourding to the State Industrial Commission. The Rt.

Rev Msgr Peter Pape, resident of Holy Cross Seminary, is honored guest on his 90th birthday at program in the parish Hall. Connie Mack. baseballs (Jrand Old Man, dies at age 93; hre raised baseball to a new dignity and became a symbol of the national pastime. THIRTY YEARS AGO 1946 I Orval Nelson is chairman of tjie annual semi-formal dance of United Commercial Travelers at By JOHN WYNGAARD MADISON Casually inserted in the annual review edition of thd statistical report on Wisconsin agriculture (published as a joint venture of the state and federal Departments of Agriculture) is another revelatory account of the continuing loss of huge acreages of fertile Wisonsin soil. That there are fewer farms in the state each year is generally understood, and visible to the naked eye.

It is the inevitable result of the mechanization of agriculture; today there are about 103,000. The decline recently has been less steep than during the 1960s, when about 3,000 independent farming operations disappeared yearly. Yet the total of farm units has been virtually halved in 40 years. It now stands at the level of the years immediately following the Civil War. The more serious issue with respect to farm land is the decline in the size of a basic re- source: the steady, heavy diversion of fertile acreage to nonagricultural uses in a fashion that in most instances is irrevocable.

The loss has been at the rate of 100,000 acres a year lately. That is a lesser rate than in some earlier years, but it is nevertheless frightening to economists and others with a reflective turn of mind. THE EROSION through diversion to a hundred other uses has continued relentessly for more than three decades. In 1942 there was a record total of almost 24 million acres; today there are only 19.4 million, according to the latest census. Although the loss recently has slowed, it continues at a breathtaking pace.

The diversion tends to be in the areas of highest soil quality, moreover, in southern and eastern Wisconsin where the competition for land use public works construction, urban sprawl, industrial expansion, recreational development Why, that's how your grandmother looked the Lineup trouble in both camps i the Hotel Stoddard, others on the committed George Jansky and Ove Guberud. Aldermen propose to temporarily fill with asphalt the grooves left by streetcar tracks. Property owners who fail to shovel snow from sidewalks will be charged three cents a lineal foot, instead of one cent as previously, Board of Public Works announces. FORTY YEARS AGO 1936 A winter storm termed one of the worst blizzards in paralyzes the La Crosse area. A lone bandit robs three La Crosse filling stations and escaped with more than $100.

As part of Boy Scout Week, local Scouts assist in putting out an edition of the Tribune. FIFTY YEARS AGO 1926 Eight local soft drink parlors are ordered closed by the U.S. Justice Department after an investigation by its agents. Mr and Mrs. Lyle Tabbert and their 2-year-old son, Jack, escape death by leaping from the second story of their burning apartment building.

A.W Ollie" Streicher. owner of Streicher Drug Store here, sells his business to Ward Gilbert of Melrose By ARTHUR SRB Associated Press writer MADISON, Wis. If it's any consolation, Ronald Reagan supporters should know that the other side makes mistakes, too. Joni Jackson, secretary of Reagan's Wisconsin campaign committee, was embarrassed recently when the national Reagan committee sent a campaign letter addressed to Gov. Warren P.

Knowles in the statehouse. Mrs. Jackson fired off a letter advising national headquarters that not only is Knowles no longer governor, he is heading President Ford's Wisconsin campaign committee. A short time later, Mrs. Jackson received a letter from the Ford committee asking that she join the President's campaign.

DEMOCRATIC Senate Majority Leader Wayne Whittow is expected to resign from the legislature soon to become Milwaukee city treasurer, a job for which he is unopposed in the April 6 election. Some believe Whittow, 43, hopes to follow the footsteps of another ex-state senator, Henry Maier, who is mayor of Milwaukee. Whittow smiles at such talk, obviously flattered at the suggestion SEN. ERNEST KEPPLER, R-Sheboygan, giving up when it comes to seeing that females get equal recognition. In 1969 Keppler, then GOP senate majority leader, directed that the sergeant at arms staff integrate the previously all-male staff and hire women.

Last week, the Senate adopted sponsored resolution praising the Random Lake High School girls' volleyball team, 1975 public high school Class state champions. LIKE MANY OTHER private citizens, attorney J. Curtis McKay of Cedarborg thinks wrong for Wisconsin legislators to be drawing salaries of $15,681 a year. That salary should either be twice as high or half as said Why? Because it is attracting persons get close to the level of the Peter said McKay, a former GOP state representative. The Peter principle holds thal many people are advanced through the ranks until they reach the level at which they are no longer competent.

McKay quit the legislature after the 1969 session to devote full time to his law practice and to help get four kids through Supersonic Concorde: a wonderful folly An editorial in the London, England, Times THERE IS NO DOUBT that Concorde is the most advanced passenger aircraft ever produced. It is the fastest it depends on complex technology, and its design standards appear to be higher than those of the very similar Russian aircraft. People will always look back at the society which was able to produce Concorde and reflect that whatever its other faults, this was a society of remarkable inventive power able to bring together in one project many extremely highly developed skills. Yet they will also remember the Concorde as an incredibly wasteful use of resources; as a wasteful use of manpower, of money and above all. of irreplaceable forms of energy.

Concorde will be a symbol equally of the intelligence and of the folly of twentieth-century man It will also seem to our grandchildren to be a conspicuous if small part of our general crime against mankind of having wasted a billion years' supply of oil in one generation. THE LAW OF diminishing returns applies to technology as to any other investment of effort. Between the first passenger aircraft and the jumbo jets there was a consistent and steady gain in the real return from the investment of energy and capital that was made. More people could be carried farther and faster at less cost per mile With the jumbo jets as with the passenger car in the 1930s, the limits of practical advantage were virtually reached. The additional costs of going supersonic were, and are, disproportionate to the gain.

Instead of more peoplet being carried faster at less cost, Concorde carries fewer people faster at more cost. In Concorde only one factor of the equation is right. HAVING REACHED this stage, it is right that this brilliant but inherently uneconomic aircraft should be given the opportunity to fulfill its necessarily limited purpose. There is never going to be a major diversion of air traffic from the subsonic to the supersonic unless a wholly new technology is discovered, and that at present seems most unlikely. Concorde flies beyond the law of diminishing ft turns and can therefore be nothing more than a splendid spectacle and a dreadful warning.

continues relentlessly. Actual farm numbers have declined also, but that is not especially relevant to the conservation issue. Farm units are larger, out of the demand for efficiency. Indeed, the Wisconsin proprietors of slightly more than 100,000 farms are producing more food and fiber than their fathers on 200,000 would have dreamed possible. Yet the issue of irrevocable loss of fertile acreage is not yet fully understood.

The problem of public awareness may be as difficult as the challenge of resolving the dilemma. Four years ago, Gov. Patrick Lucey invited former Gov. Warren Knowles to head a prestigious task force to consider the issue, It labored mightily, but the dimensions of the question are as formidable as they are numerous. STRICTER ZONING is obviously one approach.

Another is a preferential system of tax fication for agricultural lands to slow down, if not altogether prohibit, the diversion of quality acreage to non-agricultural use. But that issue is stalled in the legislature, despite recent adoption of a constitutional amendment to aid the effort. The method proposed is preferential taxation for farm land while it is used for agricultural production with a provision for recapture of tax liability if its use ultimately changes. But the measure remains in committee. Speaker Norman Anderson, principal sponsor, fears he does not have sufficient votes to pass the legislation.

One reason is that some farm.spokesmen are lukewarm, apparently because they feel that the tax-recapture concept was not understood when the constitutional revision was approved last spring. Other legislators have noted that the popular vote of endorsement was narrow, and therefore not altogether convincing. Kissinger's trust is misplaced By JOHN P. ROCHE NO SANE AMERICAN can oppose efforts to achieve symmetrical strategic arms limitation with the Soviet Union (SALT), but where some of us differ strongly with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is over his confusion of hard- boiled negotiations to avert nuclear war, and detente. We are convinced, for example, that in the past Kissinger has made concessions on SALT in the full expectation that the Soviets would behave, or get their clients to behave, in Indochina, the Middle East and now Angola.

Indeed, if you go back and look at the original SALT negotiations and then at the hit-and-run session at Vladivostok, you discover an interesting pattern. When we have signed or initialed the agreements, we have issued unilateral statements underscoring our expectations about Soviet behavior. The Soviets have not publicly commented on their view of our expectations (though Brezhnev has probably regaled the Politburo with his reaction to this quaint American custom). They have simply made it clear they accept Kissinger's freedom of speech. THUS AROSE the great dispute over Moscow's on SALT.

There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that Moscow has been moving heaven and earth to attain nuclear superiority, but when you get out the original SALT documents you find contrived ambiguities. Then you realize that they have been in terms of unilateral explanation of what these ambiguities really meant. Since Brezhnev did not repudiate these footnotes at the time, the presumption was made by Kissinger that silence indicated consent. This novel diplomatic notion would have been treated with scorn by Professor Kissinger in a Harvard seminar, but only a few small- minded nay-sayers like "Scoop" Jackson, James Schlesinger and Paul Nitze have objected when the chairman has peddled this absurdity around Washington. Curiously, Kissinger allowed the Palestinian Liberation Orgnization to be bootlegged into the United Nations Security Council on precisely this gambit.

Ambassador Pat Moynihan was instructed to treat the presence at the Middle East session as "procedural" (not subject to veto), on the grounds that the Security Council can invite anybody in to make a speech. This is gopd law, but then Soviet spokesman Jacob Malik announced that, in the view bf the and others, the PLO was going to participate in the Security Council discussion. In other words, the treated the PLO role as and got away with it. Our silence did constitute consent. BUT BREZHNEV simply plays by different and we have nobody to blame but ourselves for our problems.

As the old saying goes, The first time you get taken for a ride, blame the other guy the second time, kick yourself Since day, the Communists have rejected Kissinger's beloved concept of and there is no reason to believe that his persuasive charm is going to alter the character of the Politburo, particularly when those veteran ideological gangsters think they have a winner. I would love to see the KGB's "psychiatric profile" of Chairman Kissinger, a character who, no matter how many times you kick him. comes back for more. (When Kissinger announced in Moscow that Angola was on the detente agenda, Brezhnev quipped that the secretary was free to discuss the question with his State Department aide, Helmuet Sonnenfeld!) "Linkage" just on, and never has been. Bolshevik theory makes a sharp distinction between formal state relations and subversive activities.

I think it was the early Soviet Foreign Commissar Chicherin who observed wryly that one of a Bolshevik ambassador's tasks was to measure bourgeois leaders for Communist nooses. THUS, IT WAS predictable that Brezhnev flatly refused to discuss Angola with Kissinger Why should he? as Moscow calls detente, always had a provision excluding of liberation" from the sunshine of mutual cooperation! 'They are simply barred from the detente agenda. In short, by unilaterally ending the Cold War we have set ourselves up for some nasty shocks: the fall of Indochina, the Yom Kippur War. and the ongoing of Angola by those Communist Gurkhas, the Cubans Isn't it time the spell was broken and we came out of our trance? Art Buchwald For the top job, it helps if your a senator WASHINGTON Although Marion Javits has resigned from her job as public relations consultant for Iran Airlines, the question of whether or not a wife should be allowed to work at a job that may conflict with her husband's has not been resolved. It has become a Women's Lib issue, and some of my best friends who are Women's Libbers maintain if Jack Javits really cared about his wife he should have resigned from the Senate instead.

This is not the easiest case to strike a blow for Women's Lib. The big question is not whether Mrs. Javits should have quit because her husband was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but whether she was hired by Ruder Finn at $67,500 a year for her talent, or for her connection with her husband The problem arises every day in the PR business, which is one of the oldest professions in the world. For example, the other day a lady applied for a job with Softsoap Armtwister, one of the leading public relations firms in Washington. Among Softsoap Armtwister's accounts is the country of Bogeyland, a friendly dictatorship whose main income comes from exporting rings which are used in TV for around the collar" commercials.

"I would like a job," the lady said to the personnel manager. "Can you type and take shorthand?" the personnel man asked. "Yes, I can." is your name?" "Sheila McGillicuddy." THE MANAGER wrote it down. rela- ton to Sen. Hedrick McGillicuddy of the Senate Armed Services Committee?" "He's my husband." The manager was flabbergasted.

a minute. Don't go away." He returned in 15 minutes. "Mr. Softsoap and Mr. Armtwister want to see you in their office." Mrs.

McGillicuddy was escorted into a plush office. "Please be seated," Softsoap Said. my chair," said Armtwister. understand you want to work for us?" "Yes, but not very experienced. The children have grown up, and I thought I should do something.

I was hoping you might need a receptionist." "A receptionist?" Softsoap chuckled. "We think of making someone with your talent a receptionist." "How would you like to be the chief executive in charge of the Bogeyland account?" don't know anything about Bogeyland. "THAT'S WHY we want you in charge of the account," Armtwister said. could bring a fresh mind to it. wouldn't be prejudiced because a dictatorship with a corrupt government and a president who throws everyone in jail that doesn't agree with him." "The job pays $75,000 plus a lavish expense account, and a free pass on Bogeyland Airlines, "said Armtwister.

"Well. I gess better than being a typist." "Sheila," said Softsoap. hope you don't mind us calling you Sheila, this has been our lucky day. been looking for someone for months to head up the account, and you seem to have all the qualifications." all right," said Mrs. McGillicuddy.

you think I can do it." "There a doubt in our minds," Mid Armtwister. the way, before you take the job. we think you should talk it over with your husband." "Oh, 1 do that." not?" re getting a divorce going to marry some young chippy in his office." Softsoap got his composure back first. know, on second thought we do need a receptionist more than we do an account executive. Would $200 a week be all right, to start?".