Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 21

Villiam fA. Rmmef- Out Past iii SATURDAY, MAY 2, 1970 1 fEMORIES of yesteryears in old Dutch-11 town were brought back to mind recently as I looked out on the landscape below from my hospital bed in Allegheny General Hospital. Stretched before my eyes was a panorama of buildings, streets and scenes of my boyhood days in old tf Battles Loom Over Control' Of Ecology By HENRY W. PIERCE Post-Gazet1 Staff Writer ONE OF MA.V& oldest dreams, control over the weather, is possible now to a limited extent. In a 9.500 word report, assistant commerce secretary Myron Tribus has concluded Carnegie Library Expands Program fo Handicapped Talking Books' Open a New World Allegheny.

There was James Street with its many colored houses. And at the head of the street stands the little frame house where I spent my early boyhood. As I stared at the street I could see Patrolman Brown swinging his night stick and stroking his walrus-like mus that man can increase rainfall in some tropical -x CtJ Mr. Rimmcl I regions and can change snow-! fall patterns on mountains and near the Great Lakes without disastrous results ecoloeica v. uui ne empnasizeu mai proper controls must be used.

Pittsbureh has a definite aicmc in uuo. irie cue in a ovi Ut 1111CL IIIUUUICUU lgiuil ut- tween the Alleghenies and the Great Lakes. Experiments in i rji 4. t'Xx'K I Wf W( If; i N' VI 1 if i i If si fj i it Mioh i i -it hx- fi Ti By GEORGIANXE PETROSKY GLORIA HARRIS, a cerebral palsy victim, smiles when she speaks of her special "friends." "Friends" that are always at her disposal, ready to read to her at her convenience. "Friends" that never grow tired or hoarse or out of breath and rarely mispronounce a word or misread a sentence.

These "friends" have succeeded in opening up to shut-in Gloria new worlds of profit and pleasure which mean the difference between living and just existing. Gloria's friends are Talking Books, the marvelous program of recorded books made possible by Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped at 4724 Baum Oakland. Now the stroke patient, partially or completely paralyzed, the heart attack convalescent, the person who has had an accident and is in traction, the aged woman with cataracts all the blind and physically handicapped can read as widely as they wish in the arts, sciences and humanities-everything from bestsellers to tall tales. They can even keep abreast of world affairs through recordings of nationally-circulated news magazines. ACCORDING TO Mrs.

Frederick Harris of Braddock, Gloria's mother, this special library service has really bolstered her daughter's spirits. Gloria's eyes sparkle when she proudly says, "I can't walk or comb my hair, but I can listen to my Talking Books!" Mrs. Harris, who found out about Talking Books from Mrs. Dorothy Martin, home service representative of the United Cerebral Palsy Association, explained: "I was really thrilled when I discovered that the library not only supplies the Talking Books but also record players on which to play them at no charge!" Now every afternoon at the Harris household is "reading" time. Gloria, who suffers from asthma, has a keen mind and especially enjoys stories that challenge her imagination.

Since she doesn't have any friends to visit her, the records fill a real, void in her life. Like the "Little Lame Prince" on tures. "Talking Books have turned a life of despair into one of delight for Gloria," stated Mrs. Harris, whose patience and love contribute' greatly to Gloria's pleasant disposition. PRAISE FOR THESE records is endless.

Blind patrons call them "Voices in the Darkness." The staff at Cerebral Palsy headquarters, Downtown, stress that this library service is "one of the nicest things that's happened to us!" In addition to providing Talking Books and record players, the Library also sends Jean Brown, children's program assistant, to Cerebral Palsy Headquarters once a month to conduct story hours. There, Miss Brown weaves a spell of magic as some 15 children, ages five to eight, giggle, scream, jump in their chairs and applaud with delight at the antics of "The Three Billy Boats Gruff" and "The Old Woman And Her Pig." Sometimes the stories serve as therapy as well as entertainment. Take the case of "Lennie," a completely withdrawn seven year old, whose emotionless face and vacant eyes didn't seem to comprehend anything when he started daily classes. A few months ago, he quite reluctantly joined the other youngsters for story hour. Today he chuckles appreciatively, stamps his feet, and almost pulls the book out of Miss Brown's hands in order to get a closer look at his favorite storybook characters.

His listlessness has been transformed into enthusiasm; he's the life of the class now! MISS BROWN'S skillful storytelling enkindles in these children a passion for reading. And they, like Gloria, soon become users of Talking Books in their homes or at Cerebral Palsy headquarters. The loud giggles and grins that result during each listening session seem to prove beyond all doubt that "Heading Reduces Handicaps." The Library needs volunteers with clear, pleasant reading voices to tape material for their young and old patrons. Interested persons are asked to call 687-2440. Your voice could bring hope to the physically handicapped and conquer darkness for the blind.

tache between nodding a greeting to the housewives scrubbing their front steps. And once again I heard Mr. Foley calling "Coal Coal," as he rode by on his battered Gazing at Fountain Street above my thoughts drifted back to those Saturday nights when Mrs. Rafferty, a tall thin woman, visited Rafferty's Row, a long rambling row of tene-ments to collect her weekly The cry "Mrs. Rafferty's coming." that echoed up and down the street, always signaled the arrival of the landlady.

Mrs. Rafferty listen to excuses. The tenants paid their rent or the constable who accompanied her would set the tenant's household goods out on the street. Looking out on another part of this breathtaking view of old Allegheny I saw St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, where hundreds of boys and girls were taught religion as well as German and English and the Three R's.

And just beyond was the top of Faul-haber's store at East and North Avenues, where they made and sold penny bricks of ice cream. On the week before Christmas Mr. Fatilhaber handed out fancy gift boxes containing "cigar lighters" and "coat hangers" to a few select customers. The lighter box contained a match and the coat hanger box a nail. in the distance I saw old Weiterhausen Church that faces demolition to make way for the proposed highway through the East Street Valley.

Down the street stands Wagner's Cigar Factory where thousands of those famous Pittsburgh stogies were made in years gone by. And just beyond is Gerst Way where I was born. Looking towards the Allegheny River I saw St. John's German Evangelical Lutheran Church that will soon fall to the wrecker's ball. Here, too, the services were held in German and children of the congregation attended school in a building in the rear of the church.

Watching the white-plumed smoke rise from the H. J. Heinz plant my thoughts drifted back to the days when Henry Heinz, the founder, rode around the district in a carriage. When he wasn't driving one of his black horses you'd find him visiting Dutchtown's housewives and sampling the food they were preparing for their brood. Looking eastward I saw two other familiar landmarks.

One is the Sarah Heinz House, where thousands of boys and girls founa wholesome recreation for over 50 years. In the background stands Bohemian Hill, Troy Hill and Spring Hill with their many houses looking down on the valley below. And on and on the picture changes with each turn of the head. Jean Brown, children's program assistant at Carnegie Library, weaves a spell of magic for children at Cerebral Palsy Assn. Mr.

Pierce modifying rainfall patterns over the Alleghenies have baen carried on successfully at Pennsylvania State University. Experiments modifying Great Lakes snowfall patterns have been carried out successfully near Buffalo. No one knows exactly how Pittsburgh would be effected if either or both of these projects were implemented on a large scale. Other cities will face similar problems. The effects of weather modification may even be felt internationally, Tribus noted.

Special interest groups will clash. Somebody is going to have to decide whether to satisfy the demands of farmers or picnickers, thirsty cities or summer resorts, cities with snow removal problems or ski resorts, people who like white Christmases or people who don't, growers of crops that demand large amounts of rain or growers of crops that need relatively dry weather and much sunshine. One-sixth of the water that falls on eastern United States from June to October comes from hurricanes, Tribus said. To what extent, then, should hurricanes be suppressed? Not a great deal is known about how weather modification in one area will affect weather in other regions-even fairly distant ones. Not much is known, either, about how weather changes might affect local ecology, forcing migration of native species which keep local pests in check or have other indirect economic importance.

Among the things we do know: as clouds go over mountains, they undergo changes which make it possible for cloud-seeders to increase or decrease snowfall; using much the same principle, snowfall can be increased or reduced near the Great Lakes; seeding clouds in a warm climate can increase rainfall; seeding clouds whose tops are too cold will reduce rain. These achievements are technological window dressing at best, and "instrumentation for havoc" at worst, Tribus said, without "the conscious realization of the possible consequence and without a conscious moral commitments to make the environment more livable than before we started." "We bave reached the point," he declared, "where the scientific fraternity and the public in particular those portions of the public most affected must talk together and decide what to do with this new ability we have created. Meteorology is too important to be left to the meteorologist." The same thing can bt: said for a host of other scientific fields. In biology, for example, we are approaching the day when man may be able to extend his life span appreciably. Dr.

Alex Comfort, director of the University of London's medical research council group on the biology of aging, has predicted we will be able to slow down the aging process and stretch the average life span by 10 to 20 per cent. He sees it as virtually certain that experiments with groups of at least 500 subjects will be underway at several institutions within five years. If any of several present hypotheses prove correct, Dr. Comfort states, an agent that will reduce the rate of aging in man can be expected in the next 15 years. And at a time when we are in the grip of the worst population explosion the world has ever seen! Has anyone considered how the world's economy will be affected by extending the lives of those who are already pressing heavily on its limited natural resources? What about the impact of extending the productive life of a nation's citizens? What happens when you increase the ratio of old to young? Also in the cards is sex determination.

Before too long, prospective parents will probably be able to decide whether they'll have a boy or girl. Suppose girls become fashionable? Or boys? And when the succeeding generation grows up, suppose one sex outnumbers the other by maybe ten to one? And how about continuing to save the lives of babies with genetic abnormalities? Or will this be remedied by biological research? Of such stuff will our future politicians deal. his magic carpet, Gloria, confined to a wheelchair, travels via records to the four corners of the world and experiences many exciting adven i Yirs'mia Poette. Comments ss: ses ass ass sst smtsu x. si Sras I-S aw liat tt its x.

I 1 a Kim ia. -w va- 8J WfJS as ass rix SS as fit ses: 1 8 stKvt mm Mt rrrs: ke esss Hxs 3 zzs zss ras SKS S3 f-M gg REMEMBER THE BIG SPLASH President Nixon made introducing his Cabinet members to the voters? It's a good thing we met them then, because with a few explosive exceptionsthat's almost the last anybody's 7 'sVHn 'r-f-'u. i xx- xx4 1 1 Hit 1 xA heard from them. Nowadays, at least one Cab- I II uJ V'vsT 1 1 I if than the 12 men who sit around that oval table. You couldn't call it a "cardboard Cabinet," exactly, because they are all hard-working officials who surface from time to time with ideas.

Trouble is that Mr. Nixon jj XX iinmiiiiiii il'iii 'i ji.ii Tiil'lilTiilijiHli Mrs. Margaret McHugh records a book so that blind and Gloria Harris, a cerebral palsy victim, listens intently to physically handicapped can "read" favorite selections at home, the "Talking Book" made available through Carnegie Library. 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 iimiimimimiiiiiiiimimmiimiimmiiiiiii mum mm i iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimimimimiiiiiimiimiiiii huh D. H.

Myers Well Aims Hh Needle Chuckles on Contemporary Art and Artists' RT, THE artists, and the liimillll lliilillimnillimihlillliii able to carry on. He acquired world surrounding them THE THURSDAY EVENING tne attltude of Beckett, he Words Wisdom By WILLIAM and MARY MORRIS ART WORLD doesn't pay a heck of a lot of Miss Payette attention to them. He spends more time with his Presidential assistants, who are closer to him ideologically and geographically than most of his Cabinet. Tet yourself. Do names like DaniM Mov-nihan, Arthur Burns or Henry Kissinger ring a bell? Now, how about Clifford Hardin George Schultz or Maurice Stans? Attorney General John Mitchell is the man Mr.

Nixon listens to most often, although Cabinet members (and maybe even Mr. Nixon himself) wish he'd listened to somebody else on a couple of things lately. Probably the unhappiest member is the President's old buddy, Robert Finch, who's having rough going with the mammoth Health, Education and Welfare spot. Commerce Secretary Stans started out gung-ho to get all economic development 'in the country under his control. The White House said nothing doing.

1 Labor Secretary Schultz has his work cut out for him this year but you won't hear too much about it. His boss believes in letting unions stage their own cat fights. Another unhappy man is George Romney in Housing and Urban Development. He drew the thankless job of saving the "inner cities." And there they are, as unregenerate as ever. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird pores over his Vietnam charts every day and Secretary of State William Rogers gets away now and then on a crash course in foreign affairs.

But President Nixon prefers to run the war and do his diplomatic dealing himself. This doesn't leave them much to do. John Volpe, Secretary of Transportation, lost his big fight to get Federal funds for the mass-transit mess. Agriculture chief Hardin spends his time quietly fighting off folks who want to slash farm programs. And, if you listen to capitol scuttlebutt, Postmaster General Wi'nton Blount, who hoped to eliminate his job by turning the Post Office into a public corporation (he's struck out, so far), 7 would now like to eliminate himself from the job.

are thoroughly explored, tossed into the air, steam-rollered, revived, speared, teased, and almost destroyed by this purported "Alfred Weary Lectures." They are not quite complete, as D. H. Myers explains in his introduction, because Alfred Weary (at least he thinks his name is Alfred Weary) became so engrossed in his own art writing and giving this series of lectures that part is missing. "When Weary left town, he By D. H.

Myers McCall $5 illlllillllMlimillllliilllllllll Ilium GATHER ROUND this passage: "As you can see from the crutches, I didn't watch my step The damage was done on a glass box in the corner of the living room of a collector I simply didn't see it. "I'm sure I would have seen it if Larry, Bell had just put something inside besides a says, who tells us that his work consists of: "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express." THE AUTHOR admits he is a bit late. He refers to the 1967 Manhattan Sculpture Festival when Claes Oldenburg hired two professional grave-diggers to shovel out a coffin-sized hole in Central Park and then fill it up again, whereupon Oldenburg proclaimed the result a buried invisible sculpture. Myers mentions "1200 pounds of dirt and peat moss and jellied industrial grease shoveled onto a gallery floor, a photograph of holes, a photograph of a field sprinkled with aluminum chips." His own efforts to create celsior. I apologized profusely and began to pile the excelsior up again on the floor in the corner.

"But the host explained patiently that it wasn't as easy as all that. Saret, he said, feels that only certain piles activate the mass and make sense, but most don't. No medium, he said, is more delicate and trickier than excelsior." MYERS DOESN'T call for "delight in such things as the odor of turpentine, the play of pig bristles against a cotton duck," but he makes great sport of the contemporary scene and those who play in it. "One must be careful of jests, especially when they are serious," he writes. Myers is especially careful and docs a wonderful job.

Perhaps his book of lectures itself is a bit of today's art. It has a somewhat frame, many tangential streaks, and a blank chapter. And the creator is chuckling at anyone who takes It seriously. faint opalescence which only left his manuscript with me DEAR WILLIAM AND MARY: How did Philadelphia come to be called the "city of brotherly Marcia Merkle, Hacken-sack, N. J.

A. There have been times and right now might be one of them, judging by reports of political unrest in that city when the "brotherly love" label seemed more ironic than accurate. However, it has always been precisely appropriate from the linguistic standpoint, since the word is made up of two Greek elements "philos" (love) and "adelphos" (brother). The city has always had a reputation for tranquillity bordering on sleepiness. Indeed it has long been a favorite target for jokesters "First prize: a week in Philadelphia; second prize two weeks in Philadelphia," and the reported inscription on the tombstone of W.

C. Fields, a native of the city: "On the whole I'd rather be in Philadelphia." HAVE FUN WITH WORDS! Send for "Top Ten Word Games" with titles such as "How English Is Your English," "Send a Wire," "Word Scrambles" and others just as intriguing. For your copy send 10 cents and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to WORDS, WIT AND WISDOM, "Top Ten Word Games," Post-Gazette, P. O. Box 1111, Los Angeles, Calif.

20053. The author-lecturer visited many artists in their workplaces, although often he found it difficult to tell the unmade pads from the finished art. He described one embarrassing visit: "In the corner of his living room was a pile of excelsior which I assumed to have come from a packing case. While my host was in the kitchen getting out the ice, I thought it might be a nice friendly gesture to put the excelsior in a wastebasket. "Well, when he returned and saw the stuff all scrunched up inside what turned out not to be a wastebasket but a sculpture of a wastebasket by Peter Agostini, he said 'Oh my God, the all except Chapter 1.

It was his served, you see, to make the conviction that this first chap- glass box rather less than more visible. ter contained the very best writing in the entire manuscript and so he wished to take it with him. 'An he said to me, 'ought to be entitled to keep a bit of his work for It is pleasing that he allowed the public to have access to the rest, because it puts just about the daintiest but "But until I broke my toe and found my theme, I was considering canceling this talk, for art and the art world, as it must seem to us all sometimes, had suddenly begun to seem how shall I put it? of less moment, of less interest to me." Since his friend Bell ex were aborted, because he was in a hotel room and figured sharpest needle to the Art plained his art as the "idea of "Much to my shame I was balloon of anything Jhat has making something devoi of the maid would "sweep it all' Informed that Saret is a young come to pass. any context" the author was up." artist currently working in ex.