Decatur Daily Democrat, Volume 61, Number 208, Decatur, Adams County, 4 September 1963 — Page 11

Wednesday, 'September 4, 19®

‘ — j=| mm j== _ ■V Hr »» aHH J |j ' *' » *J H’'. MS -wjL-rt mt [M 1 - W ,^ r .. I. ~_;|&jgMfeg>J r- iia-.._ ■ « 'HMH' . ' Wrßlfe nils, ' f ■%s? 4 lllJwßr fii ' sHO' |H» ■f INSPECnON TOUR — An excavation at a work site on a road near Mo ” roe > s checked by supervisor Lawrence Noll (right) with department employes Sam Kaehr and Jim Merriman. The trench was being dug to lay a concrete damage tile under the road. —(Photo by Cole)

730 Miles Os Roads In County's System

By Mike Thoele Seven hundred and thirty miles is, by most standards, a long distance — even in today’s ever-shrinking world. It is, among other things, the approximate distance from Decatur to New York. It is also the total mileage in the Adams county road system. The system, a complex checkerboard of north-south, east-west and diagonal roads maintained by county highway supervisor Lawrence Noll and his crew of 24 men, encompasses twelve miles of paved blacktop highway, 181 miles of blacktop-type, asphaltic - concrete road, 530 miles of stone and gravel roads, six miles of mud road and one mile of concrete. Die highway department’s operations are based in a spacious four-year old garage on the north edge, of Monroe. The department’s $90,000 worth of equipment is kept in or near the garage and each morning the 24man crew reports to work there, $375,000 Budget The department has an annual budget of about $375,000, which is taken from the state gasoline tax. Thirty-two per cent of the gas tax funds collected in this county go to the county highway department. The department receives its funds in quarterly allotments. The department’s equipment includes nine three-ton dump trucks, five pickup trucks, one station wagon, three graders, three road maintainers and a host of other vehicles, including tractors and mowers. -The station wagon gnd a number of the trucks are equipped with two-way radios. With this equipment it must , accomplish a two-fold job — daily maintenance of all county roads and annual construction of new sections of paved road must be planned to coincide with traffic flow and the needs of the greatest number of residents. “You can’t put a blacktop in front of every house in the county,” says Noll, “but sometimes that’s what people seem to expect”. He explains that it is not the department, but the county commissioners who decide which roads are to be paved. At any rate, he says, most blacktop roads are either built

;‘) HIMHk . . v {/) j ujHt - '^L - * t mt%, Jwi -v 4* ■ .?./ -T. Jjßß&*ib&ML?' i RT .., : PAPERWORK — County highway supervisor Lawrence NoU (right) and his assistant. Bob Fuhrman look over plans for some of tty work which the department is completing this summer. nrman < V > —(Photo by Cole)

near towns or are constructed to direct outlying traffic into the towns of the county. This is done because city residents, by the very fact that there are more of them than rural residents, pay more gasoline tax, and hence the roads should be laid out so that they, too, benefit from them. Even upon this basis there is virtually no county resident who is more than two and a half miles from a paved road and 75 per cent of the county’s residents live within a mile and a half of a paved road. Department Paves Roads Paved blacktop roads are laid by the department with a paving machine leased from Meshberger Brothers stone corporation. Die machine utilizes a sensitive electronic scanner which enables it to lay the paving material to a one-eight of an inch tolerance, making it virtually ripple-free. The, asphaltic - concrete roads, called blacktop by most people, are made with equipment the department owns and cost about $9,000 a mile. These roads have a special stone base which is put in and allowed to settle through the winter before being coated with special oil sealers and stone in the spring. The stone is added to make a non-skid surface. A new coat of sealer oil is applied to these roads every three or four years This summer’s paving work has now been completed and at present stone bases are being put in on several roads which are scheduled for paving next summer. Sixty miles of road have been re-sealed this summer. The other half of the , department’s work is maintenance — mowing shoulder, cutting side ditches, repairing chuckholes. During the summer months an extra four employes, usually college students, are added to the work crew to' handle the job of keeping the cdunty right-of-ways mowed and clean. Many counties do not even maintain mowing crews. Most of the gravel roads in the county are graded ten or fifteen times in the course of the summer and a few of the more heavily traveled ones are done even more often. The grading usually cbn-

THE ADAMS COUNTY ROAD SYSTEM — All the roads depicted in this map except the heavy black lines, \vhiCh represent state and federal highways, are maintained by the county highway'repayment. Die heavy dotted lines represent all the blacktop roads in the county. The department paves about nine miles of road each summer. 1

tinues until the ground freezes. The graders are also used to cut and maintain side ditches along the roads. Thaw Causes Trouble The spring thaw each year brings, with it a host of troubles and work for the department. When the ground begins to soften, cracks and holes often develop in spots where’ water has penetrated the pavement and expanded as it froze. A quick thaw, accompanied by much sunshine is hardest on the roads. This spring, despite the disastrous preceding winter, the roads fared fairly fairly well because the thaw came slowly accompanied by rains and cloudy weather. One of the biggest problems in the maintenance of the hard-sur-face type roads is mud. When mud is tracked onto these roads by farm vehicles it causes the portion of the road beneath it to creeks and drainage channels dries and hardens. This is the prime cause of chuckholes in hard surface roads. Bridges are another important facet of the department’s works. Some 1,100 spans cross the rivers, creeks and drainage channels which meander through Adams county. In recent years much effort has been expended toward improving these bridges. In the last seven years the department has widened or improved 103 bridges. A number of other bridg-

THE DECATPIt DAItY DEMOCRAT. DECATUR. INDIANA

es have been let out on contract for ’ improvement. State law requires all jobs over SB,OOO to be contracted. Bridge repairs and construction' are not financed by the gas tax funds, but are paid for by the cumulative bridge fund, a 20-cent levy assessed against all county taxpayers. Commended By Purdue The department also stacks up very well beside other county departments throughout the state. It has been commended several times by the highway division of Purdue and frequently county commissioners and highway superintendents from other counties, come to inspect the Adams county system. The Adams county roads and the percentage of blacktop roads which the county has compared favorably with any other county. The department also ranks high in the amount of work it is able to complete in the summer season. It averages about nine miles of new blacktop paving and 12 bridge jobs per summer. j—| Attend Semico j Tbit I • t Week j at four own : elaci : if worship j f PHONE 3-4338 *• »n?rt »M» # nnv I

0 ; 0 I Modern Etiquette I By Roberta Lee 0 0 Q. If you are entertaining a couple for a week-end, should you plan entertainment, for every second of the visit? A. No. Never regiment a guest every second he is under your roof. He needs sometime open when he can make his own plans. Maybe he would just like to be alone. We all do sometimes. Q. Our family physician is quite a bit older than we are, and he always calls us byxrnr first names.Would it be all right for us to call him by his first name? A. Unless you have known him all your life and possibly exchange social visits, it is better not. You could possibly, however, begin calling him “Doctor Torn" or “Doctor Jim.” Q. Isn’t it the girl’s privilege

PUBLIC AUCTION SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, at IP. M. Two miles East of Decatur on U.S. 224, one mile South, and one quarter mile East. - TRACTORS - 1957 WD — 45 with-wide front end , 1949 International “H” - FARM MACHINERY - A.C. 3-14" plow w/throw away shares; IHC 2 row corn planter; J.D. 13 hole grain drill on rubber; Belle City corn picker; 1943 A.C. No. 60 combine w/recleaner; T IHC tractor mower; 2-IHC tandem discs —7 on side 16" blades; New Idea horse-drawn manure spreader; 2 section harrow w/evener; spring tooth harrow; 10' spike tooth drag; J.D. No. 953 heavy duty wagon w/16' grain bed (14" wheels); rubber tire wagon w/16' grain bed (15" wheels); wooden wheel wagon; 2 wheel trailer w/stocu’c rack; IHC 2 row cultivators; Dunham 10' single packer; IHC Little Genius 2-14" plow on rubber; IHC rotary hoe; Feed grinder (burr); 6 drive belt; 5' Case horse drawn mower; Clipper fanning mill; pump jack w/motor; smooth roller; Case hay loader; 8' McCormick grain binder; 2 hole hand corn shelter; platform scales. 200 BALES STRAW - String-tied 32' Universal elevator with engine Camping Trailer — sleeps four Moto riding lawn mower SOME FURNITURE — Many miscellaneous articles too numorous to mention. Terms — CASH MRS. PHILIP HEIMANN, OWNER Sale conducted by WILLIAM F. SCHNEPF, REALTOR — AUCTIONEER Auctioneers - William F. Schnepf and Gerald Bixler Clerk — Jack Schnepf Phone 3-2918 * 3-9147 Not Responsible for Accidents,

Terms — CASH

Von Braun Defends Project In Space

—Man And Space—(EDITORS: Why should America preas for manned conquest of the moon, and is it being done at the expense of vital projects such as cancer research? Cape Canaveral Bureau Manager Alvin B. Webb Jr. relinquishes this week's column for an exclusive report on this Issue by Dr. Wernher Von Braun, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Ala., and perhaps America's most famous space scientist.) By DR. WERNHER VON BRAITN Written For UPI CAPE CANAVERAL (UPI* — While our nation's manned spaceflight effort is just getting its second wind, some Americans are having second thoughts about the program. President Kennedy proposed a stepped-up program for the United States in 1961. The announced goals were approved overwhelmingly by Congress, and hailed excitedly by a space-conscious public. Now the first summer blooms of success are fanned from the eminently successful Mercury program, and there is a lull in manned launchings while project Gemini develops. And in unmanned exploration, each Mariner probe and each Echo, Telstar, relay, Syncom and Tiros satellite seems less miraculous as launches become more routine. The wedding of modern science and space is undergoing a period of adjustment experienced by every young married couple. It begins when the carefree honeymooners settle down to building their air castles. Those first rapturous days of marriage gradually become tempered with logic as the young couple works, pays bills and develops a well -rounded pattern of living based on their means. Personally, 1 am delighted to see so many people talking about space today. It is a healthy sign of the vitality of our enthusiasm. 1 have been asked, for instance, why we do not cancel project Apollo and use the money for cancer research. The fact is simply that cancellation of Apollo would not assure that the money would be used for finding a cancer cure, nor, if applied, that money alone would

to select the table when entering a restaurant with a male escort? A. No; she should allow her escort to do this. Q. A girl friend and I were visiting in a home recently, and the hostess passed around a box of candy. My friend looked at each piece carefully before selecting one. Wasn’t this bad manners? A. She was perfectly entitled to select the kind that appealed to her—provided she didn't take too much time doing it. Q. What should I provide for a font at a home christening? A. A silver bowl usually, but if such is not available, a crystal bowl or a china bowl with a ring of flowers or ivy around it will serve very well. Q. I’ve received a marriage announcement from the family of a girl whom we know only casually. Am I supposed to send a gift? A. A marriage annuoncement never requires a gift.

speed the discovery. This extremist viewpoint oversimplifies the complex process undergone by Congress in appropriating funds to meet the numerous demands of our citizens for the varied services of the federal government. Such a radical shifting of funds would require crystallization. of public and political opinion to the effect that project Apollo is all wrong and should be abandoned; that cancer research is the essence of survival and it should be expanded; that there is an either-or choice between the two; and that more money is the solution to a cure for cancer. The facts for developing such an opinion do not exist. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s broad approach to space exploration has been soundly conceived. Project Apollo is an integral element of that plan. Apollo is not an end in itself, but a means of furthering exploration, an epic by-product of our expanding technology, economy and position of world leadership. The need and desire for a cancer cure are great, and lots of money is already being spent on this worthy cause. In fact, some research scientists fell that a major breakthrough — not more money — is needed here. As is often the case in basic research, a genius with a little luck will probably discover the needed scientific link, Einstein evolved his t henry of Velativeity with only a pencil and nc pad. He gave us a scientific breakthrough that made many new things possible — the atomic bomb, the nuclear submarine and, seme day, travel to other planets. I To create a revelation costs no great sum of money. Money is peeded, however, to exploit a scientific breakthrough, to make worldwide, practical use of the revelation. NASA can spend only a fraction of its budget for pioneering research. Most of the funds go j into the engineering technology that is based on research, results j of the past. Thi* is costly in manpower as well as dollars. When the great space debate is resolved, I feel certain that the public will continue its supjiort of a space exploration program that does justice tef our country's | resources, capabilities and responI sibility for world leadership.

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——..i——.. ~.. LONDON BLlTZ—"Unusuar is typical British understatement for this sporty creation by Honald Patterson of London. Ensemble features matching black patent leather boots and pillbox hat. QUALITY PHOTO FINISHING All Work Left on Thursday Ready the Next Day, Friday, Before Noon HOLTHOQSE DRUG CO. Trade in a good town — Decatu