Banner Graphic, Volume 15, Number 72, Greencastle, Putnam County, 27 November 1984 — Page 6

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The Putnam County Banner-Graphic, November 27,1984

opinion

Editorial Support local merchants If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because we said much the same thing a year ago. But the point is still a very important one. Everyone who appreciates the lifestyle offered by Greencastle and its rural environs realizes that a number of important elements must be present. There must be jobs, of course, perpetuated by a diverse base of business, industry and agriculture. There must be good schools, churches for all faiths and public access to recreational and cultural activities. And there must be planning, by local government and private citizen groups, to assure the growth and development upon which a small town’s future depends. All of these elements are present in Greencastle. But one other vital aspect, frequently taken for granted in towns our size, is the strength of the retail business community - the shops and stores that supply consumer goods. Their inventory ranges from automobiles and appliances to furniture and clothing to the odds and ends we’ve picked up for years at the “dime store.” The Christmas shopping season is as important to the retail business community in Greencastle as it is to shopping malls in Terre Haute or Indianapolis. For some stores, a sizable percentage of the year’s sales -- in some cases 20-25 per cent - are made in the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The resulting impact of money spent in Greencastle affects all of us who live here because local merchants do much more than merely supply goods and services. Our retail businesses provide jobs for local people, they contribute thousands of dollars in taxes and civic donations and they are a very important part of the image that attracts new industry. We’re all concerned, of course, with product selection, the price we pay and the service we get. Those factors are influenced by competition in our free enterprise system, just as they should be. Most of us will visit the shopping malls in Terre Haute or Indianapolis during the next four weeks. But give local merchants a chance to be competitive this year. Consider the price of what you want to buy, but consider too the expense involved in an 80or 100-mile round trip to a mall, the hassle of elbow-to-elbow crowds and the kind of service you’re likely to get after the sale. Sometimes, a price tag alone is not an accurate indication of the wisest, most economical purchase. Weigh all of these factors, then give local merchants all the support you can. Every dollar we spend at home, to a very great extent, remains at home. It is an investment in our own community and the lifestyle we value so much the year around.

Letters to the Editor Open cable franchise for bids

To the Editor: In Livingston, Tenn., (population 3,030) the cable television service gives you 21 channels for $9.50 per month for regular cable plus free FM hookups. Then they offer four pay television channels at $9.50 each a month, or they offer the whole package for $39.95 per mortth for a total of 25 channels. Now I still cannot see why Telecommunications, Inc. (TCI) of Greencastle cannot offer better service and at a more reasonable price. After all, we are paying a very high price for the kind of service they offer -- 10' 2 channels for $8 40 a month Then, if you want 11 1 2 channels, the price goes up to $20.95 per month And if you run into transmission troubles on the weekend (after 5 p.m on P’ridayi you are just, stuck with it until after 8 a m on Monday.

Effort yields holiday beauty

To the Editor: I would like to thank a small but hear ty group of local merchants who gathered on the courthouse lawn on Sunday, Nov. 18, to string Christmas lights in the trees. Tim Smiley of Shuee & Soas, Joanne Gray of Todd’s Ace Hardware, Dave Hurst of Mac’s and Bill arid Kathy Dory of Main Street Greencastle all gave

Signed letters are welcome

The Banner-Graphic welcomes vour views on any public issue. Letters must hear the writer’s signature and printed or typed name, full address and telephone number. We routinely correct errors of fact, spelling and punctuation. All letters are subject to editing, but such will be held to a minimum and the intent of a letter will not be altered. We do not publish poetry or personal expressions of thanks as letters to the editor. Letters containing personal at-

ERIC BERNSEE Managing Editor

LARRY GIBBS Public tor

I would like to make a motion to the mayor and city council to open this franchise up for bids from other cable companies that would take more interest and pride in bringing more reasonable and more variety of programming. TCI of Greencastle wants to give another five channels and add $3 more a month to your already too high bill. And you still would have only 15'/2 channels, pay $11.55 per month and still receive the lousy service that we have been getting for the past several years. I do believe that the only solution to this cable television problem is to open up the franchise for bids to serious and conscientious cable television companies that would provide more reasonable fees and programs and, above all else, better service Maurice 1,. Rader Greencastle

their time so that our downtown might be a more beautiful place for the holidays It is public spirited individuals such as th«-s<- who help make small town living a rewarding exjienerg e for all of as Stephen /ones President, Grecin aslle Merchants Ass<*« lalion

tacks on individuals, libelous statements or profanity will not he considered for publication. Use of initials in lieu of the writer’s full name will be permitted only in cases in which the Banner-Graphic determines there is an appropriate reason. Send your letters to: Letters to the Editor, The Banner-Graphic, P.O. Box 509, Greencastle, Indiana 46135. Letters also may be brought to the newspaper at 100 N. Jackson St., Greencastle.

U.S. Department of Education now stronger, here to stay: Bell

By EDWARD B. FISKK c. 1984 N.Y. Times News Service Secretary of Education T.H. Bell has announced that he will step down from the Cabinet post Dec 30 to become a professor at the University of Utah. In an interview after his resignation last week, the 62-year-old career educator spoke about his tenure as a cabinet member. Following are excerpts from that interview. q. You have hinted that during your tenure as secretary of education you had some behind-the-scenes disagreements with other members of the administration over education policy. What were they? The budget levels were a constant problem At one point David Stockman (director of the Office of Management and Budget) was proposing a budget level of $9 billion. Keep in mind we’re now at $lB billion. We disagreed about cutting the education budget that sharply. q. What was the administration saying about the role of education when they asked for that kind of a level? What is being said is that education is a state responsibility, and we ought to reduce dramatically the federal investment, q. Do you agree? No, I don’t. We ought to avoid by any means picking up the responsibility for the general operation of education. What we ought to maintain, though, is our traditional responsibility for special student populations that need supplementary assistance. Q. Any other areas? I think we need to have a fairly significant on-going research effort, which, incidentally, has been a battle-ground with the National Institute of Education (the research arm of the department) I think that we need to carry our fair share of the responsibility for such programs as impact aid (to schools near military installations), and down through the years we have supported vocational education. Our oldest funded program has been vocational education, and I don’t think we ought to move away from any federal presence there. Q. Are there new areas of federal involvement you would like to see? I proposed, unsuccessfully, that we try to provide an incentive to attract academically able students into teacher education through federal scholarships. It would contrast with traditional student aid in that it would be merit-based rather than need-based. A great deficiency in. high-talent people is a problem right now for American education, and I thought that an incentive in that area would be helpful. Q. Did you try to sell this to OMB, the White House or both? Both. I tried hard to persuade Stockman His concern and I understand this - is that if you start a new program of this sort, then it grows and grows and we never keep the budget in balance. q. What else did vou try unsuccessfully to sell? I wanted to provide some incentive money in areas of university level research equipment. The equipment that we have is getting so obsolete, and I thought if we had some funding here that could be matched, we could get a lot of leverage on our dollars. It’s a critical problem now, not only to our economic well being but to our national security, q How big a program did you have in mind? I was talking about SIOO million. q. What did you do when you lost these arguments? II sounds a little bit trite, but I felt I need to be a square shooter In fact I’ve opposed items that Congress has come to me about that were some of the very same items that I had argued lor The Talented Teachers Act, for example, is quite similar to the proposal that I submitted to OMB and couldn’t get through I was asked to go up on the Hill and testify on la-hall ol it,and I refused q Even though you were working behind the scenes for exactly the same thing? Up until I get approval from the administration, I felt it would be a treacherous thing I also wanted to have some limited funds to try to use some federal leverage on the career ladder, or master teacher, play I was able to use some of my discretionary funds, but that was extremely limited q. President Reagan came into office seeking to abolish the Department of Education but ran into considerable opposition. What’s going to happen in the next four years? I think the department is here to stay, and I don’t believe that there’s going to be any kind of a major push to eliminate it The watershed event on that was the Republican convention in Dallas and the debate that went on with the platform committee. The decision was made not to include abolishment of the department in the Republican platform q. Does the department look any different today than it did four years ago at the end of the Carter administration.’ I think it’s much stronger. It’s recognized as an entity that’s giving leadership and direction for American education in a

‘I never dreamed the commission report would have the impact that it had.’ -Terrel H. Bell

posture that recognizes that governance and the prime responsibility for financing is with the local and state levels. I give the president a lot of credit. There are many who are critical of the Reagan administration and don’t like to hear that But the president has used the power of the Oval Office and spoken out so many times on education. q. There was time, for the first year and a half or so of the Reagan administration, when the White House seemed to think of you and the department as a political embarrassment. Then all of a sudden you started going with Mr. Reagan on Air Force One to visit schools. What happened that you suddenly become a political asset instead of a political liability? The positive response that came to the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education (in April 1983) was surprisingly strong, q. Did it surprise you as well? Yes. I never dreamed that the commission report would have the impact that it had. There was an almost universal outcry: “Let’s do something, let’s take action, let’s save our schools, let’s strengthen our education system.” That came from all of our political leaders, not only the president; governors and people on the Hill and key leaders and state legislatures. q. You're a career educator who spent the last four years in the service of an administration perceived by many of your colleagues to be anti-education. Were there some times when you felt you were unfairly roughed up by some of these colleagues? Yes, and I was surprised by that. I can remember in the fall of 1981 at a meeting in Washington with the chief state school officers. They were upset over what they felt was going to be the outcome of the Reagan administration. I don’t think they were being deliberately or maliciously unfair, but I felt they really displayed a lack of awareness of the situation that I was facing. q. What about some of the college people? The same thing. I felt that they just didn’t have an awareness or a sensitivity of the fact that I was a member of a Cabinet. The president won the election I didn’t win it and he asked me to join his team. I felt that there could have been a little more sophistication about my situation. q. Did the “far right” cause you a lot of problems during your tenure as secretary? It’s been a terrible problem. I had people join my staff, that I interviewed, that were strongly recommended by others, that afterward I learned had their own agenda. Ed Curran, the director of the National Institute of Education, wrote a letter directly to the president recommending that his agency be abolished. Another was Dan Oliver, the general counsel for the department, who met with the chairman of the National Council on Educational Research and wrote an opinion that enlarged the powers of the council. This, in effect, put the council’s executive director, whom they’d appointed, in an administrative position over the director. This was done by the general counsel without my approval or support, and it was a tremendous headache for me. q. How did you handle it? 1 asked that he be reassigned. q. As you look back over your nearly four years as secretary of education, what would you say was your major accomplishment? I guess it would be appointing the National Commission on Excellence in Education, q. And how about your biggest disappointment? My biggest disappointment has sort of come in two directions at the same time. I've been disappointed at my failure to persuade very intelligent critics from the right that I wasn’t a traitor, and I’ve also been disappointed, keenly so, that I haven’t been able to persuade the National Education Association to support the merit pay or master teacher reforms that I just think we need in teacher personnel administration. If we don’t get it we’re never going to have a teaching profession that I think we must have.

Divorce impact Difficulties of adult children coming to light By ANDREE BROOKS c. 1984 N.Y. Times NEW YORK - The youngest child is off at college; the older ones are preoccupied with their independent lives. Why, then, are they all so upset to hear that theii parents are getting a divorce? Because they face a host of hidden difficulties in adjustment that are only now being better understood by professionals. “We have given the problems of the adult children short shrift in the past,” said Tamara Engel, a family therapist in New York. “The expectation on both sides was that as adults it was no big deal. But that’s not necessarily so.” The professionals examining the impact of parental divorce on these young adults report that they are often devastated. The most common reactions include anger, mourning, shame, disillusionment and even outrage at being unfairly burdened when they have enough problems. “Suddenly everyone’s crying over the phone,” said Linda Bird Francke, who interviewed many such people for her recent book “Growing Up Divorced” (Fawcett, paper, $3.50), “arid you are being sucked back into a series of tensions, conflicts and burdens you thought were over All this is related to the loss of an intact family with which to join at the major milestones of life. Said Miss Engel: T remember one pregnant woman who burst into tears when she suddenly realized she wouldn’t be sharing the joy of that grandchild with both parents together. It was the shattering of a fantasy .” Mourning over a lost way of life may also make the adult children less likely to show up for holidays. Barbara Huey, an executive search administrator in Houston, recalled how her son, who was 21 years old when she divorced three years ago, refused to come home anymore on major festivals. “He complained that he had no real family or home to come back to,” she said. “He had a point.” What makes homecoming at holidays especially difficult for older children, Miss Engel explained, is the loss of traditions that had seemed immutable: “For years it was your father who said grace while your mother watched from the other end of the table. Suddenly it’s all gone.” Others are angry because they feel ashamed. “It’s embarrassing to see your 60-year-old father running around with a woman young enough to be your sister, Mrs. Francke said. Resentment, the professionals say, can also be generated by the need to assume an unwelcome burden. “Older people often have a harder time making new connections,” said Dr. Clifford Sager, director of famjly psychiatry at the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services in New York. “So it’s the children who are left to provide emotional support for the parent who is now alone.” The children say a late divorce often opens agonizing questions about the true state of the family in the past. “You wonder, was it all just an illusion that we were a tight family?” said Eduardo Levy-Spira, a 25-year-old foreign correspondent whose parents were divorced a year ago. “Did they stay together just for you?” On the other hand, divorce can be beneficial for the young adults involved. “It can force a young person toward greater self-reliance,” said Dr. David King, a Houston psychologist, “especially the kind who should have been more mature by this point." He tells about a married patient in her late 20s who had two children but had remained too emotionally dependent upon her parents. Not until her parents’ divorce, he said, did she seem to take charge of her life. If tension has for quite some time beset families in which a divorce occurs, the change may enable the children to build new relationships with their parents individually. “There had been so much friction for so long it became hard to talk to either of them," recalled Daniel Nissim, a microcomputer analyst from Hartsdale, N.Y. “Afterward I could get closer to each parent.” Sager, the psychiatrist, warns divorcing parents not to make adult children feel responsible for the timing of the divorce.“ Don’t say you only stayed together this long because you wanted to wait until they were off at college," he said “You will just make them more resentful." Finally, the professionals advise, be prepared for them to become partisan, at least for the first few months. "It’s very common for adult children to choose sides,” said Irwin Sollinger, a psychologist in Westport, Conn. “They may see one person as the victim and feel very protective of that person in a way that wouldn’t happen if they were younger ”