Decatur Daily Democrat, Volume 62, Number 52, Decatur, Adams County, 2 March 1964 — Page 6

PAGE SIX

“War On Poverty” * In 10-State Area EDITOR’S NOTE: The launched In a 10-state region .’•War on Poverty” will be stretching from Pennsylvania Grade A \\ ( Eggs ] A Kroger K W Medium SIOO jF »•« <doz. *■ —— "* ~ — . Tenderay f Steaks I or T-Bone lb. fl Tenderay Brand Jif Rib Steak a. 79c Z/ Kroger Brand [ Dinner Rolls A K Domn jH Wk Meaty // Boiling Beef lb. 17C Golden Ripe f Bananas I - W I WL Prices good thru Tuesday. TOlu Quantity rights reserved. J'jF inU WWF Z An £££2!! -A®> 30c OFF pIUS S X| Est **>P value fr i g with purchow o(F .> Bak. ’■ I MiXn Bowl ■ A Mixing Bowl h-. 3 Good rt.ru March 21. | x — 30c OFF PLUS v —g| W EA Top Value P Est «P »« uue PI 5U Stamps ; H 3U Stamps < with purchow of 2 Hm. or F IjM with purchow of a Bak. ■ b mor. of S.r~ 7 3/1*“ M Ground Beef lb. 49c bl Mixing Bowl LJ $ Good thru March 3. Kfl JVj-uJB JjjgjjF '"-^ / f? SJ 50c Off w lAA Top Value O Est lO P Value 100 Stamps n 5U Stamps L Hwirt. purchaw of volume 1 *«* purchase •* » Bake [P of th. Illustrated '-’ll *’ S,r¥ * Di «Pv Bible School Library ipg Casserole L. r| Good thru March 3. @s3 °"7 * BaaaaM co i- S r T oiT P <VG2 cout»P» Z 20c OFF PLUS —<4 M nr Top Value £? Est -°P V,lue B 25 Stamps _- ® 3 Ml Stamps 9 with purchaw of volum. 5 £p h| with purchaw of • Bak. of th. Idustrated Eg '• ‘ |sg ■ Bible School Library I 11 Mixing Bowl M Good thru Marek 3. 3 ®°« l *™ **”* *_ H

to Georgia. It is an area whose economy and people once thrived on thousands of coal mines set in picturesque mountain country. , The region is called Appalachia and its 12 million people have seen seen their proud way of life tumble downhill for the past* 20 years, pitching them into a sea of poverty. A United Press International reporter has just completed a 1,200mile swing through the depressed region, interviewing scores of officials and families and piecing together the plight of the largest single concentration of want in this country. The following is the first of three dispatches. By NICHOLAS C. CHRISS United Press International APPALACHIA, Va. (UPD — If they were anywhere in the free world other than these Over 91,000 Served By Social Security More than 91,000 persons were served by the Fort Wayne social security office during 1963, Ruth H. Lane, district manager, said today. This was an average of more than 360 persons each working day, and represents an increase of more than 11% over the previous year. Os this number, 6,417 were claimants for retirement or survivors monthly payments; 783 men and women filed applications to have benefit amounts refigured because the retired beneficiary had returned to work and had earned enough to have his benefit amount increased. 1,193 were claims for monthly payments by workers who have become so disabled that they can no longer engage in substantial gainful employment before reaching retirement age. In addition 19,800 were requests for new or duplicate account number cards and 28,269 were per!Vns seeking general information about old age, survivors or disability insurance benefi ts. Some 32,632 were beneficiaries advising the District Office about changes in their status, such as change of address, starting or stopping work or seeking advice about technical provisions in the law affecting them individually. Although exact figures are not available at this time, it is estimated that more than 45,000 men, women and children living in the eight county area served by the Fort Wayne district office are receiving in excess of $3 million each month in old-age, survivors, or disability benefits from the social security system. Jack Carpenter On Hawaiian Maneuver SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, HAWAII (AHTNC) — Army PFC Jack L. Carpenter, son of Mrs. Juanita Carpenter, 716 Elm st., Decatur, Ind., and other members of the 25th Infantry Division’s 65th Engineer Battalion, are participating in Exercise HIGH TOP 11. a fi v e-week field training maneuver in Hawaii. The exercise is scheduled to end March 6. The men of the division moved from the Island of Oahu to the rugged lava beds of the volcano Mauna Loa; on the Island of Hawaii, for the live-fire and combined arms training exercises. Carpenter, assigned to the battalion’s Company C at Schofield Barracks. Hawaii, entered the Army in January 1963 and completed basic training at Fort Knox, Ky. The 20-year-old soldier attended Decatur high school. 34 Survivors Os Tanker Are Saved HALIFAX, N.S. (UPD—Thirty four survivors from the tanker Amphialos were brought safely to shore today by the Canadian destroyer escort which plucked them from the stormy North Atlantic where their ship split in two. All but two of the Liberian tanker’s 36 crewmembers were rescued Sunday when by chance a Royal Canadian air force plane and the destroyer escort Athabaskan sighted the broken vessel foundering in towering seas 200 miles west of here. Two of the Amphialos’ Greek seamen were lost. The tanker broke in two so rapidly late Saturday that it apparently had no chance to radio for help. By coincidence, the plane and rescue ship were on air-sea maneuvers in the area _ the destroyer esoert only five miles from the stricken tanker. 1 Five of the survivors were hospitalized fop shock and bone fractures when brought > ashore early today. The remainder •were taken to local hotels to rest. ' <’ Sixteen of the Amphialos’ crew spent Saturday night in two lifeboats amid 12-foot waves and 30 knot winds. The other survivors were huddled — aboard the 100-foot stern section which bobbed helplessly on the swells. One seaman was lost attempting to abandon ship and another died shortly after being brought aboard the Canadian destroyer.

THE DECATUR DAILY DEMOCRAT, DECATUR. INDIANA

United States, millions of people living in the depressed Appalachian states would be eligible for foreign aid. Aid they have received, in the form of welfare checks and charity and for 20 years the region has been slipping downhill. It has largely swept away this dike of dollars in a plunge to widespread hunger, inadeequate housing and deep despair. Within 10 years, three out of four of the highlanders in the Cumberland Plateau, most of them ex-coalminers, will be on relief. In some areas, families have been on welfare for three generations. Had Little Wark Such a family is that of Joseph Riley Muncy at-Stone Coal Hollow in West Virginia. Riley has been on the dole for much of his life, and now his -son William Riley Muncy and his grandson Joseph Riley Jr. are on charity too. ‘I hain’t never had no work worth to speak of,” drawls the elder Muncy. “Right now I’m a drawing SSB a month. Buddy, you can’t hardly live on thAt little bit of money. “I can’t do nothing for my boys. And my boys cain’t do nothing for me,” he said. The trouble is coal, a depressed industry in a depressed region. Once a boom area, ever turbulent, the mountaineers of the Appalachian region once mined millions of tons of coal from the hills and mountains. But over the years a hard pressed coal industry has switched to automation in its fight to meet the competition from natural gas and oil. Automation Takes Over Hundreds of thousands of coal miners, who know no other occupation, hav6 become jobless because automation makes it possible for mines to employ only a fraction of their work force of a decade or two ago. Many miners have tried to earn a living by working in the “dog hole” mines, small, inde-

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pendent non - union operations which use trucks instead of railroads to haul out the coal. A miner who works in a “dog . hole” is immediately blacklisted by the union. He goes to the mine only as a last resort and receives less pay and no fringe benefits. The mines are often unsafe Hardest hit are the coalmining regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. ' Appalachia also iniludes parts of Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania Ohio and Maryland. Proud, hardheaded and often reluctant to leave the mountains he loves, the brooding coal miner, his patient wife and their flock of children have been shunted from the mainstream of the nation’s economy and onto the treadmill of subsidized poverty. Somber Statistics The statistics are somber. In 1947 there were 450,000 mining jobs in the region. By 1962 that figure had dropped to 162,000 and it is still dropping. Two million persons have left the region since 1940. Os those that remain, 1% million over age 25 are illiterate. Welfare checks and food handouts have become away of life foj more than 5 million people in Appalachia’s hills and hollows. “These people are among the finest in the world, but relief handouts are destroying them,” says Harlan, Ky. hotel owner Jack Anderson. “They need a cure, not a treatment and time is running out.” Unlike the “New South,” the Appalachia region is still tied to a kind of one-crop economy: coal. The Old South tried and finally overcame its subservience to King Cotton. But the South was wide open to new industry and new people and new ideas. Appalachians are bottled up in coves and hollow, encircled and interwined in a fortress of mountains and hills that defy access to new industry or new people.

Inertia Replaces Incentive Inertia has replaced incentive. Apathy is widespread. Children stay home from school because they have no shoes. A region that once was among the most abundant in the nation is prostrate. The brightest hope for many — and there are many others who shrug and look with skepticism — is President Johnson’s sl.l billion war on national poverty. The region will be the first battleground. A long range development plan has been proposed by the President’s Appalachia Regional Commission (PARC). The estimated expenditure is $5 billion to be spent over 5 to 7 years. Only a long range program can save the area, say the people of Appalachia. The PARC program cites these problems in the Appalachia: 1. Lack of access to and within the region. 2. A technological inability to utilize the area’s natural re-« sources of coal, timber and arable land. 3. Lack of control and exploitation of Appalachia’s, torrential rainfall. 4. Inadequate sources to train and retrain the youth. Training For Jobless Quality Photo Finishings All Work Left Before 8:00 p. m. Monday Ready Wednesday at 10 a. mHolthonse Drag Co.

To pump new economic Hood into the region, PARC has proposed a network of roads, reforestration, exploiting the rainfall, new uses of coal within the region (possibly in stream generating plants), development of a recreational area and training sot the jobless. While most of the unemployed coal miners live in rural areas, it is a non-rural population. The terrain is un-

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suited to farming. The unemployed highlander is a destitute coal miner, not a poverty stricken farmer. He has been surveyed, reported, itemized and tabulated in reams of statistics by government and private agencies, he now looks to Washington for an answer, partial though it may be, to the problems that have made himo a forgotten man in a land of plenty.