Banner Graphic, Volume 16, Number 125, Greencastle, Putnam County, 9 January 1986 — Page 2

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The Putnam County Banner Graphic, January 9,1986

‘lf anybody can turn post office around, he can’ c. 1986 N.Y. Times News Service WASHINGTON Albert Vincent Casey, an avuncular Bostonian with a reputation as a tough man with a gin rummy hand who has a sharp eye on the bottom line, is no stranger to fiscal crisis. As chairman and chief executive officer of American Airlines for 11 years until his retirement at the age of 65 last February, he turned an ailing corporate giant into both a money maker and something of a model of fiscal efficiency. In nine months the airline went from a loss of $35 million to earnings of S2B million. On the strength of Casey’s early performance in the American Airlines job and a reputation for tough-minded business practices, Gov. Hugh L. Carey appointed him in 1975 to the newly formed Emergency Financial Control Board to impose austerity on New York City’s hemorrhaging finances. He stayed in that job less than a year, but the legacy of the seven-member commission of which he was a founding member is a city that stands on its fiscal feet, aggressively upright. “If anybody can turn the post office around, he can,” said Lowell Duncan, vice president for corporate communcations for American Airlines, based in Dallas-Fort Worth, where Casey moved it from New York in 1979. Described as a man of infinite Irish charm, more than intimate with the Blarney Stone —“He’s got a million one-liners, a million,” said Joseph Stroup, another airline spokesman he is also known as a hard-nosed executive who will wield an ax with relentless efficiency if the ink turns red. Casey, who has been in retirement less than a year from American Airlines, maintains a home in Dallas. He presided over the airline’s move to Dallas-Fort Worth from New York. He remains a member of the board of directors and of its parent company, the AMR Corp. It is said to be typical of Casey’s confidence and exuberance that he took the job in 1974 with sparse, if any, background in airlines. Casey joined American after serving for eight years as president of The Times Mirror Co. of Los Angeles, publisher of The Los Angeles Times. In that capacity, he helped diversify the company into such ventures as cable television and systems for flight training. That was his closest previous touch with airplanes.

Supervisor who 'cracked' kills family, self

ELK POINT, S.D. (AP) A Farmers Home Administration supervisor who killed his family and himself was frustrated because his efforts to go by the book had failed to help farmers faced with foreclosure, friends and clients say. “When things didn’t work out the way the book said he just cracked,” said Dave Swanson, an Elk Point farmer. “The general feeling of everybody I’ve talked to today is that his job killed him.” Bruce Litchfield, 38, shot his wife and two children with a .22-caliber pistol Wed-

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nesday, then went to his office and shot himself in the head, said Union County Sheriff Eugene “Bud” Rasmussen. Litchfield died about two hours later at a Sioux City hospital. The bodies of Litchfield’s family were found in their beds when authorities went to notify his wife, Laura Ellen, 42, of the office shooting, the sheriff said. The children were identified as Christine, 12, and Allan, 9. It was the second such shooting in the troubled farm belt in a month. On Dec. 9, a

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ALBERT CASEY, Postmaster General

“He played a very important role in diversification,” including the acquisition of Long Island’s Newsday, The Dallas Times-Herald, the Dallas television station KDFW, and book and magazine properties, said Robert F. Erburu, chairman, president and chief executive officer of The Times Mirror Co. “He certainly deserves and receives a lot of credit for all of that,” he said. As a successor to Casey at The Times Mirror Co., Erburu credits him with high intelligence, a good grasp of business problems and “a very, very determined” approach to solving them. Like others, Erburu mentions a “very outgoing and charismatic personality,” saying, “People like A 1 and A 1 likes people.” At the same time, Casey can be pointed. In an article on deregulation of airlines, he wrote in 1975: “A naive and dangerous idea is abroad in the land the notion that a major change in airline regulation can somehow yield, as if by magic, better service and lower fares for everyone.” A native of Boston who still lapses easily into what an Los Angeles Times editor called ’’Boston streetwise joshing,” Casey was graduated from Harvard in 1943 and served three years as an Army lieutenant before returning to Cambridge to earn a master’s degree in business administration.

Lone Tree, lowa, farmer with $600,000 in debts killed his wife, another farmer and a bank president before committing suicide. “As far as I’m concerned, he kept me in farming for another year,” said Swanson, adding that Litchfield would go out of his way to help, doing things farmers didn’t ask him to do. Swanson said he called the FmHA office early Wednesday to talk to Litchfield and was told he was on the phone. A short time later, Litchfield’s secretary called back to say her boss had shot himself.

Teen-ager mourned as heart gives new life to girlfriend

PATTERSON, Calif. (AP) - The funeral for a teen-age boy who donated his heart to his ailing girlfriend was a celebration of “a moment that is both joyful and sad,” the boy’s priest told 400 sobbing relatives and schoolmates. A single red rose surrounded by baby’s breath, tied with a scarlet ribbon on which was writte, “With Love, Donna Ashlock,” rested on the white coffin of Felipe Garza Jr. as mourners crowded into a church here to remember the boy who wanted to make sure Donna would live. “Today, we have a concrete example of a heart being left behind. Let this death, let any death that touches us, be just as much a hope to let life continue,” the Rev. Thomas Cargo said in his funeral sermon Wednesday. Donna, 14, and Felipe, 15, attended the same high school in this farming com-

Reagan orders Libyan assets inside U.S. frozen

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Reagan, intensifying his efforts to tame Col. Moammar Khadafy, has ordered all Libyan assets in the United States frozen as a further blow at the economy of the terrorist-tainted North African country. The action, taken Wednesday under a declaration of national emergency, will deny Libya access to hundreds of millions of dollars in property and bank assets, a senior administration official said. U.S. sources, asking not to be identified, said it could prompt Khadafy to seize the assets of American oil companies, believed to be worth about S4OO million, in Libya. Reagan’s purpose is to stop virtually all American economic activity with Libya and to force the 1,000 to 1,500 American workers there to return home. The economic sanctions are in direct response to attacks last month at the Rome and Vienna airports by terrorists that the State Department linked to Libya. Five U.S citizens were among the victims. Briefing reporters on a 12-page “white paper” that accused the Khadafy regime of sponsoring 59 incidents of violence since late 1979, a department official said Wednesday evidence that Khadafy supported Abu Nidal, a renegade Palestinian, was circumstantial but convincing. However, the official acknowledged under questioning that the United States had no “smoking gun” of the sort that would stand up in a court of law. He said the link to the group was based partly on Khadafy giving sanctuary to Nidal and because of training facilities for terrorists located on Libyan soil. The Voice of America plans to beam special broadcasts to Libya to inform Americans there of Reagan’s order to “leave immediately” or risk “appropriate penalties on their return” to the United States. Since relations were broken in 1981, contact with Washington is limited.

Litchfield was very good at his job, Swanson said. “He was worried about everything he had done for everybody, and it didn’t help them. I think that the man had a lot on his head.” The Rev. Marvin Ketterling, who accompanied police to the Litchfield home, said he had read the suicide note Litchfield left onnhis office desk, but could not remember the exact contents. “It was to the effect that ‘the pressure of my work got to me,”’ he said.

munity 75 miles southeast of San Francisco. Felipe’s half-brother, John Sanchez, 20, said the Garza family believes Felipe had a premonition of death when he told his mother about three weeks ago, “when I die, I want to give my girlfriend my heart.” He had just learned that Donna had heart disease. On Saturday, a blood vessel burst in Felipe’s head, leaving him brain dead. He was placed on a respirator until the transplant the next day. Donna was reported in “very good” condition late Wednesday at Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center in San Francisco. At the funeral, the mourners overflowed Sacred Heart Catholic Church, still decorated with yuletide trimmings poinsettias, wreaths and five Christmas trees.

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Neither side wants war, Tripoli newspaper says

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) The statecontrolled media said Libya’s local governing bodies support the use of military action and suicide squads against the United States and Israel “wherever they exist,” but a top official said he thought neither side wanted war. An English-language weekly newspaper in Tripoli, Al-Islamia, said Wednesday local governing groups called People’s Congresses were meeting in emergency sessions to discuss President Reagan’s decision

A senior administration official, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said liquid assets of the Libyan government in U.S. banks and in the branches of U.S. banks overseas primarily were involved in the freeze. “I want to stress that this is a freeze, not a seizure,” the official said. “These assets remain the property of the Libyan government.” He said the Treasury Department had not asked U.S. allies in Western Europe to have their central banks take similar steps, but they would be welcomed. So far, despite repeated entreaties, Britain, Italy, West Germany and other governments that do business with Libya have resisted U.S. efforts to isolate the country economically. The State Department’s sweeping indictment of Libya accused Khadafy of operating an unspecified number of camps to train terrorists and of employing “surrogates or mercenaries” against

Unfounded AIDS fear among third of U.S., Blood Bank poll finds

WASHINGTON (AP) - More than one-third of Americans surveyed believe they could get AIDS from donating blood, says a new poll sponsored by blood bank officials who hope a national information campaign will quell what they call unfounded worries. A report on the survey, released today, also said more than half of Americans believe they would be at least somewhat likely to get the deadly disease if they received a blood transfusion and 81 percent would prefer blood from family or friends if they needed it for an operation. “The dissemination of accurate information is key in calming such fears,” said the report to the American Association of Blood Banks from the Washington-based polling firm Hamilton & Staff. “Currently, less than a majority of Americans know blood banks test blood for the AIDS antibody, yet when informed of this process, nine in 10 feel more secure about the nation’s blood supply,” the report said. Federal health officials say less than 2 percent of the nation’s 16,000 known AIDS cases resulted from transfusions a percentage they say is sure to drop because of blood screening tests begun last year. And there is no chance of getting the disease from donating blood since

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to end all economic ties with Libya. The groups “decided to fully turn to fighting units and suicide groups against the (U.S.) administration and the Zionist enemy wherever they exist,” the paper said. “Zionist enemy” is the Libyannmedia’s term for Israel. But a well-placed official in Libya’s Information Ministry said, “I don’t believe either Reagan or Khadafy wants a war, because if it starts, for our side or the other, it can only end in disaster.”

moderate Arab and African leaders who have ties to the West and refuse to fight Israel. For the first time, the department said Khadafy had provided Iran with T-55 tanks, anti-tank and anti-aircraft artillery, ammunition and Soviet-built SCUD rockets to use in its protracted war with Iraq. Also, the report said, Libya supplies arms and money to Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq. Khadafy was not accused of engaging in terrorist activities against the United States, as the Libyan leader threatened on Sunday to do if his country were attacked by Israel or the United States. The report said King Hussein of Jordan, who has restored ties with Egypt and is pursuing Mideast peace talks, and President Saddam Mussein of Iraq, who has re-established relations with the United States, “are almost certainly on Khadafy’s list.”

needles used for that are sterilized in advance and used only once, the officials say. The blood bank officials said they were preparing public service announcements for a national educational campaign on the subject. There have been scattered reports of blood shortages in the past year, and sometimes local officials have blamed fear of AIDS. But worries of a national blood-shortage emergency seem to have eased greatly since introduction of the screening tests. AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, attacks victims’ immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to various other deadly diseases. More than half the known victims mostly sexually active homosexuals or intravenous drug abusers have died so far and no one is known to have recovered. The poll said 18 percent of respondents consider AIDS the nation’s most serious health problem, behind cancer’s 31 percent but ahead of the 13 percent for heart disease and lesser percentages for all other ills. “The public’s concerns over AIDS are much more emotional than factual,” the report said. “Misperceptions abound when an issue is put in such a context, and this could cause an unwarranted negative environment of public opinion in which blood banks must operate.”