Banner Graphic, Volume 9, Number 274, Greencastle, Putnam County, 26 July 1979 — Page 2
The Putnam County Banner Graphic, July 26,1979
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Harrisburg deals with new hazard HARRISBURG. Pa. (AP) - After surviving a nuclear accident and enduring recurring floods. Pennsylvania’s capital city must now deal with a new hazard hand grenades. the fourth grenade found in the last two months turned up this week at the city’s steam generating facility. "It's developing into some sort of syndrome," said Richard Vajda, captain of city police detectives. Officials at the 56th Ordnance Detachment at nearby Fort Indiantown Gap determined Wednesday that the latest grenade was not live. But two of the four found so far were. One exploded May 25. killing Terrence Adams, 4, and seriously injuring his 15-year-old brother Bernard. Authorities said the boys apparently found the M-67 high explosive fragmentation grenade while they were playing. It went off while they were handling it in front of their house. Other grenades have been found in a cemetery and near a school. The grenade found Monday arid the one near the school were missing their top portions, including the fusing devices, police said. Though the grenade at the school had no fuse, it did have a charge and was detonated by explosive experts at Indiantown Gap. Police and military authorities still have no idea where the weapons some of Korean War vihtage are coming from. “ThereTl3een.no headway,” Vajda said of his investigation. Two of the grenades, known a£ MK-ll’s, haven’t been used byf the Army for at least 15 ydars, said Staff Sgt. Patrick Ccaig of the Ordnance Detachment. The grenade that turned up in the cemetery was identified as a training dud, produced since 1973.
Banner-Graphic "It Waves For All” (USPS 142-020) Consolidation ot The Dally Banner Established 1850 The Herald The Daily Graphic Established 1883 Telephone 653-5151 Published twice each day except Sundays and Holidays by luMar Newspapers, Inc. at 100 North Jackson SI. Greencastle, Indiana, 46135. Entered in the Post OHice at Greencastle. Indiana, as 2nd class mail matter under Act ot March 7,1878. Subscription Rates Pet Week, by carrier 5.85 Par Month, by motor route .83.70 Mail Subscription Rates R.R.in Rest ot Restot ’. Putnam Co. Indiana U.S.A. 3 Months *8.75 9.50 *11.45 6 Months *17.50 *19.00 *22.90 1 Year *34.00 *37.00 *45.75 fMail subscriptions payable in advance . . . net accepted in towns and where motor route service is available. Member ot the Associated Press The Associated Press is entitled exclusively to the use tor republication of all the local news printed in this newspaper. ,
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Energy, food costs to blame
Consumer prices pushed up one percent in June
WASHINGTON CAP) - Another big spurt in the cost of energy and housing pushed consumer prices up 1 percent in June as inflation continued to rage above a 13 percent annual rate, the government reported today. Soaring price increases for gasoline and heating fuel and a slight rise in food prices kept the Labor Department’s monthly inflation measure at 1 percent or higher for the fifth consecutive month. Through the first half of the year, inflation has been running at a 13.2 percent annual rate. If it continues at that pace for the full year, 1979 will register the highest inflation since immediately after World War 11. The inflation rate continued to take its toll on a typical worker’s real spendable earnings, after deducting taxes and taking inflation into account, the Labor Department said. Spendable earnings of a married worker with three dependents declined 0.8 percent in June, meaning that wages could not quite keep up with the rise in consumer prices during the month. For the 12 months ended in June, a worker’s real spendable earnings declined 3.5 percent. The Labor Department said gasoline prices continued to soar in June, jumping 5.6 per-
Rationing plan suffers setback
WASHINGTON (AP) - After an unexpected setback, House leaders are planning another vote next week to give the president standby authority to ration gasoline. * Debate on the legislation was abruptly halted Wednesday after the House approved, 232 to 187, a Republican-sponsored amendment sharply limiting the president’s flexibility to impose rationing. It was the second blow the House has dealt President Carter’s request for standby rationing authority this year. In May, the House turned down a similar rationing plan entirely. The proposal before the House would allow either the
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cent after a 5 percent rise in May. Those prices have advance at a 60.8 percent annual rate so far this year. Similarly, fuel oil prices leaped 8.6 percent in June following a 5.3 percent rise in May. Through the first half of the year, fuel oil prices have been climbing at 70.6 percent annual rate. The government’s index of housing continued to rise steeply for a fifth straight month. Housing prices increased 1.5 percent during the month, home financing costs jumped 2.1 percent and maintenance and repairs rose 0.9 percent. The good news for consumers was that food prices rose by a modest 0.2 percent during June, the smallest advance in 11 months. Clothing prices declined 0.1 percent and entertainment costs rose by just 0.1 percent, the smallest rise this year. The overall 1 percent rise in consumer prices last month is down slightly from a 1.1 percent rise during each of the two preceeding months. The Consumer Price Index stood in June at 216.6, meaning that a marketbasket of goods and services that cost SIOO in the base year of 1967 cost $216.60 last month. The government said prices of grocery store foods declined 0.1 percent in June, primarily
House or the Senate to block rationing any time the presi-. dent tried to impose it a safeguard Carter says he can live with. But the amendment adopted Wednesday would also give Congress "one-house veto” power to reject details of the plan in advance. The amendment was by Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman, R-N.Y. Supporting the proposal were 79 Democrats and 153 Republicans. Claiming this provision would make it extremely difficult for the president to ever order rationing, the bill’s sponsors had it removed from the House floor while they tried to figure out
because of a 1.8 percent decline in the cost of meats, poultry, fish and eggs Beef prices, which had shown sharp increases during the preceding eight months, fell 1.3 percent in June, as had been expected. All of the price increases are adjusted to reflect seasonal variations in price patterns. The June consumer price report is the first since the administration rasied its inflation forecast for 1979 into the doubledigit range, ah apparent admission that the fight against inflation would produce no major victories this year. In a new economic forecast issued July 12, the administration said inflation would be 10.6 percent this year, up from a previous forecast of 7.4 percent. Since the end of World War 11, inflation has topped 10 percent only twice in 1946, when the removal of price controls sent prices jumping 18.2 percent, and in 1974, when a quadrupling of imported oil prices contributed to a 12.2 percent rate. Meanwhile, President Carter’s appointment Wednesday of Paul A. Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board was hailed by the nation’s financial community and in Washington as a welcome development in the fight against inflation.
what to do next. And Carter, responding to the latest development,' criticized Congress during his broadcast news conference Wednesday night for putting new “restraints” in the way of a standby rationing plan. He renewed his appeal that Congress give him rationing authority before leaving town for its month-long August recess. House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill tentatively scheduled debate to resume on the bill next Tuesday. Wednesday’s amendment vote clearly caught Democratic leaders by surprise.
Carter makes plea for support of windfall tax
WASHINGTON (AP) President Carter is telling the American people “your voice must be heard” if the Senate is to pass his windfall oil profits tax. Without it, he says, “we cannot reach our energy goals.” At a nationally broadcast prime-time news conference Wednesday night, Carter predicted “a massive struggle to gut the windfall profits tax bill” in the Senate. It already has passed the House. It was Carter’s first news conference in Washington since May 29 and he appeared forceful throughout. His upper lip twitched briefly, however, when he was asked if he had thought about taking himself out of the 1980 presidential race. “I have considered all the options,” he reported, “and my decision will be announced later on this year.” Carter had a snappier comeback when a reporter asked about a prediction by Sen. Henry M. Jackson, D-Wash., that the president’s problems will force Carter out of the race and hand the Democratic nomination to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. “Three or four years ago I was running for president against Sen. Jackson,” Carter recalled. “At that time he predicted he would be the next president, starting in 1977. His judgment was not very good then. And now I am ready for the next question. ” During the half-hour session in the White House East Room, Carter defended last week’s Cabinet shake-up, declaring, “I have no apology to make for it.” Saying that some have thought he acted too rapidly, he said he felt a need to “create a new team to work with me” and “I had the choice of dragging it out or getting it over, in effect, in 48 hours.” As for criticism of his decision to name longtime political aide Hamilton Jordan to be White House chief of staff, Carter said Jordan will do a “superb job”in an assignment he indicated will have strict limits.
Monster vs. farmer Controversey rages over best use of coal-rich land
ONEIDA, 111. (AP) The monster is outside, moving against the sky. “You can see it from here,” said Keith King, swinging open the screen door. “It’s destroying the best land in the world. This is top corn country and it’ll never be the same again.” On the horizon, in the distance, rising up off a neighbor’s stripmined farm is the silhouette of an alien machine in search of coal. And it is digging some of the richest agricultural ground anywhere to get it. The shovel outside King’s window is 150 feet high and covers half a city block. It is a machine so mammoth it can scoop up a school bus in a stroke, a machine the Midland Coal Co. knows only by a number but which the farmers of Knox County call by name “The Monster.” “It used to be far away,” King said. “But the light shines through the windows at night now and it makes shadows on the walls when I climb the stairs.” No longer is Midland mining marginal land 20. miles away. The company has moved onto prime farmground, moving its lumbering shovel onto new sections in recent months, and King knows there is little he can do about it. Coal companies have been strip mining in central Illinois since the 19305, but only recently has Midland moved onto the flat black loam “amid the prairie winds of Knox County, Illinois, and the corn crops” as poet Carl Sandburg, a native, described the place. Midland says it can restore the land, but the farmers don’t believe it. Once the delicate soil of Knox County is disturbed, they claim, it will never again be as productive. “They’re ruining the wealth of this county, which is agriculture, for a one-time harvest,” King said glumly. It is a classic conflict: Food or energy, black land or black gold? Earlier, there would have been no question which was more important, but these are energy-hungry times and the priorities have changed. “That farmer that’s ripping you because you’re tearing up the land, he’s going to be awful upset when he can’t get natural gas or when they turn off the electric power because somebody can’t mine coal or uranium,” Jack Devere is saying in his office 35 miles away. Devere, general manager of Midland’s operations in central Illinois, is a veteran of the open copper mines of Arizona who came to Illinois five years ago. He is in charge of three mines on some 50,000 acres of land Midland owns or controls. “Hey, I think Midland Coal is a darn good neighbor,” he says. “Strip mining was bad. They did rape, pillage and plunder, but that has changed. I think the reclamation taking place in the last
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“He will not be chief of the Cabinet,” Carter said pointedly. “I. will be chief of the Cabinet. He will not be the chief of the Congress. The Congress is an independent body. ... Hamilton Jordan will be chief of the White House staff.” Carter’s appeal for public support for the windfall profits tax came a few hours after a major setback in the House for part of his energy program. The House abruptly halted debate on legislation giving him standby authority to ration gasoline after unexpected adoption of an amendment sharply limiting his flexibility. Carter said the House action “illustrates the timidity of the Congress in dealing with a sensitive political issue.” “I need your help,” he said. “I need the help of the people of America.” In an opening statement, the president pointed to proposed amendments that could slash revenues from his oil excise tax by $55 billion in the next decade, denying him the money to launch a $142 billion energy program centering on a search for alternatives to petroleum. “This is a democracy,” he said. “Your voice can be heard. Your voice must be heard.... Please speak to the Congress of the United States and especially to the United States Senate, which still has the responsibility to act.” Two Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee, which is now studying the windfall profits bill, were not impressed by Carter’s plea. “We want to work with the president, but we’re not going to be intimidated,” said Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas. And Sen. William Roth of Delaware, alluding to Carter’s meeting Tuesday with the committee, said that then, “he was offering us the olive branch.” But the news conference remarks, Roth said, made the president seem “more like a candidate.”
10 years is dramatic.” Devere admits the firm has been able to grow only 70 bushels of corn per acre on its own reclaimed land, half the usual yield, but he says that should improve with time. “There is no way to reclaim this land without doing irreparable harm to something that took hundreds of thousands of years to create,” said Barry Weber, a commodities broker who owns with his family about 1,000 acres of prime Knox County farmland. “I think they are shortsighted, misdirected, selfish and are conspicuous consumers capitalizing on the greed of certain people.” In recent months, the battle has escalated to a modern-day range war. Communities have gone to court, sought regulations from local officials and jammed town meetings. The Knox County Farm Bureau h as issued a statement condemning the mining operation, ana several cities, including • Oneida, have called for a moratorium until Midland proves it can restore the land. *• The state, which earlier this year gave Midland permission to build a haulage road and begin mining another 1,000 acres, has called a public hearing later this month. Midland’s move onto prime farmland comes at a time when the nation is short of fuel and when Congress is passing legislation encouraging alternatives to oil as an energy source. Illinois ranks fourth in the nation in coal production, much of it from the southern counties. The coal in central Illinois is medium sulfur coal found just below the surface in slender stratas. On top are the tama and muscatine soils that blew off the glaciers millenniums ago and settled over the Midwest, creating extremely fertile land. Farmers like to brag that the land in Knox County has never had a crop failure, not even during the Dustbowl days. Coal companies began buying up mineral rights after the turn of the century from farmers having hard times. “They got most of their land that way, offering maybe $125 an acre and $1 a year,” King said. “That's the way the coal companies got a foothold here.” Strip mining’s early, unregulated days have left a bitter legacy of unsightly spoil banks and eroded and abandoned pits in the area, but Devere says all that has changed. "It won’t be the same because we have torn it up,” he admits. “But we will bring this land back to approximate yields it had before if we are given the time and a chance to do it.” Mayor Andy Main of Oneida is worried because Midland has offered no proof it can restore the land, only a promise. He is worried because he remembers the promises of other coal companies that stripped the countryside, then disappered.
HEW to investigate
WASHINGTON (AP) - The federal government wants to know how many sterilizations of young people it has helped pay for in violation of rules that bar such practices. The Health Care Financing Administration said in a special report Wednesday the government spent $49.9 million for 142,742 sterilizations between Jan. 1,1977, and March 31,1979, under the Medicaid program.
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About 2 percent of those were performend on persons under 21. Since 1974, federal rules have barred reimbursements for sterilizations performed on ; mentally incompetent persons ; or those under 21. HCFA administrator Leonard D. Schaef- ; fer ordered regional units of the ; Department of Health. Education and Welfare to find out how many sterilizations the government helped pay for.