The University Daily
University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas
KANSAN
Monday, February 28,1983 Vol.93,No.107 USPS 650-640
JIM MCCROSSEN JR./Special to the Kansas
The Way College of Emporia teaches the biblical interpretations of the center of controversy among citizens of Emporia, But Wc The Way's founder, Victor Paul Wierwille. The college has been followers say their lives have never been happier or more fulfil
KU grad leads The Way as critics tell of dangers
By JULIE HEABERLIN Staff Writer
Smoothly, confidently, former KU football player Craig Martindale ascended last October to the ton of a controversial religious empire.
Hand-picked and primed for the presidency by founder-prophet Victor Paul Wierville, 33-year-old Martindale is blessed and admired by thousands of followers of The Way Inter-
But another, darker side reveals critics and ex-members who contend that the organization's leaders, most visibly Martindale and Wierwille, use brainwashing techniques to snatch the minds and money of vulnerable young people.
They point, among other things, to the first step into The Way, a $200 "Power for Abundant Living Class," where recruits listen to 33 hours of cassettes or watch videos of charismatic, inspiring people.
EX-MEMBERS, WHO have since been腔调 by deprogrammed, said the class was just one of many subtle mind-control techniques used to convince them to deviate their lives
Both critics and The Way do seem to agree on one thing; the organization is growing in numbers and confidence. Way officials refuse to give out exact data, but followers in the United States and 54 other countries are loosely estimated at between 40,000 to 100,000.
Way followers are recruiting at universities across the country, including the University of Kansas. KU students said they had met members of The Way presenting their beliefs on campus, in local bars and at an open Christian fellowship forum at the University.
Way members in Lawrence hold weekly "twig" fellowships, growing branches of the ministry, where they discuss Wierwile's beliefs. Way recruits are invited to attend the fellow-
bars before they are, urged to take the "Power for Attendant Living" class.
"THEY TEACH YOU and encourage you to speak in tongues every minute that you can," said a 26-year-old woman who spent three and a half years in the organization. "It was self-hypnosis; eventually you didn't question anymore. Eventually all you ever believed is what Wierwille taught as it was passed down through the ranks."
She said that Way followers were told that speaking in tongues — words that they are later taught to interpret — would make them spiritually stronger.
The woman, who asked not to be identified because of threats to her family since her parents pulled her out of the organization, said Wierville sought money, power and fame.
"HE'S A SMART cookie; he knows you don't have to get people out on street corners selling flowers to control them," she said. "Martindale is a carbon copy of Wierwille. He speaks the same, moves the same, is very intelligent and motivated."
Others have questioned what they say are anti-Semitic teachings by Wierwile and Martindale, particularly after an Ohio seminar where two books, "The Myth of the Six Million" and "The Hox of the Twentieth Century" were required reading for a course. The books say six million Jews were not killed by Nazis in World War II.
Cathy Crawley, an official at Way headquarters in New Knoxville, Ohio, said, "I'm sure our leaders have stated that they do not appreciate many of the Jews in America giving sympathy and financial aid to support the Jews in Israel."
'Hold mirror to world,' KU grad says
A IN TELEPHONE interview last week from Ohio, Martindale said The Way drew such fierce negative and positive response because Wiesville was ripping away tradition to uncover the
See THE WAY page 6
Rv DAVID POWL &
Staff Reporter
Many MU students did not recognize the famous Kaman's face because they sleep late in the morning. Others remembered only the tornado warning he yelled over a TopaKe radio station.
HE STAYED ON the air three continuous hours, and the station was later awarded the national Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Service in Radio.
"For God's sake, take cover!" he warned Topekans during the tornado that left a 22-mile path of destruction through the heart of the city on June 8, 1966.
Kurtis, the featured speaker at the banquet, was a 1982 graduate of the William Allen White School of Journalism. He began his broadcast career with WBW Radio in Topeka.
Monday Morning
From WIBW, he went to WBBM-TV, a CBs television affiliate in Chicago, as a reporter. Later he was assigned stories in Poland, Rhodesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Kenya, Israel, Italy, El Salvador, Panama, Iran and Japan, as well as various U.S. cities.
Kurtis won 11 honors, including an Emmy and a Scripps-Howard Award, for breaking the story on the effects of Agent Orange defoliant on Vietnam veterans.
He said he started interviewing Vietnam War veterans after a woman brought him a list of men who had unexplained medical symptoms.
"ONE VETERAN, WHO died a week before we visited his home, told his wife she should have seen the fog in Vietnam because it was as thick as the fog in Los Angeles," he said. "One thing led to another, and then we found out about dioxin."
He said that only a few scientists had experimented with dioxin in the early 1970s, but that they discovered that a baby's breath of the chemical could kill a laboratory animal.
Kurtis said that journalists, like teachers, revealed information, and that students should not be afraid to reveal what they learn about the world either.
"Students should strive to hold a mirror to the world," he said. "Hold the mirror firm because it reflects your own image."
While investigating Agent Orange in post-war Vietnam, he also reported on the Amerasian children who were not accepted in their home country.
See KURTIS page 5
Med Center, KU, face suit over electric bills
By MICHAEL BECK
Staff Reporter
The Kansas Board of Public Utilities will file a petition today in federal court charging the University of Kansas Medical Center and three other defendants with defaulting on more than $3 million in utility bills, an assistant city attorney said Friday.
Kathy Peters, a Kansas City, Kan., assistant city attorney, said the state of Kansas, the University of Kansas, the Med Center and the Board of Regents would be named as defendants in a lawsuit spawning from a faulty electrical meter at the Med Center.
The Kansas City, Kan., City Council approved the petition Thursday night, she said. Its members were concerned about it.
No trial date can be set until the defendants
answer the charges, she said, but the law requires that they respond within 20 days after the filing of the petition.
RICHARD VON ENDE, executive secretary of the University, said yesterday that he had not received a copy of the petition. He said he assumed the state attorney general's office would decide which state agency would defend the case.
Peters said the petition stated that a faulty meter did not register $3,077.728 in electric bills. She said protective plastic, which prevents electrocution during meter installation, was not removed from the grounding screws on the meter body to prevent electrocution the Med Center's electrical consumption.
Von Ende said that it was the BPU's responsibility to maintain the meter, and that the defendants should not have to pay the bills when the malfunction was not their fault.
However, citing civil rights laws, the BPU said the defendants were discriminating against taxpayers by not paying the utility bills, Peters said.
Adding to the complexity of the trial, the BPU signed an agreement last year releasing the state from all utility bills if it paid the BPU $133.489.
BPU officials had said they thought the money was a partial payment, but the state said it was a total release.
THE BPU TRIED to return the money to the state, but Patricur Hurley, Kansas Secretary of State, insisted that it be returned.
"When they realized what they had done."
Hurley said, "they were in a state of shock."
The Kansas Joint Committee on Special Claims, which met in December to hear the case,
Melissa Biechman, Wamego senior, and Ron Sutherland, graduate student in electrical engineering, enjoy themselves at the Fifth Annual Brazilian Carnaval. The carnival was put on Saturday in conjunction with the first anniversary celebration of the Holiday Inn Holdome.
Reagan's policies hurting the country, Hart tells Democrats
Today will be partly cloudy with a high in the mid-to upper 30s, according to the National Weather Service in Topeka. Winds will be from the south at 5 to 15 mph.
Tonight will be partly cloudy with a low in the mid/up upper 38s.
Tomorrow will be partly cloudy, with a high in the mid- to upper 50s.
By JEFF TAYLOR
By JEFF TAYLOR Staff Reporter
"TOPEKA — Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart unloaded a shell of criticism Saturday toward President Reagan's supply chain and rigid stance on increased defense spending.
"Ronald Reagan is certainly going down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible president," he said. "I opposed Kemp-Roth and the trickle-down theory from the beginning."
Hart, a U.S. senator from Colorado, supported his negative views of supply side economies by telling Kansas Democrats that Reagan's policies would further harm the economy.
Hart, who was born in Kansas and graduated from Ottawa High School, was the main speaker at the Democrats' annual Washington Day Dinner.
BY REFUSING TO drop the third phase of his proposed federal income tax cut and by insisting on the build-up of U.S. arsenals, Hart said, Reagan his worsened the recession.
Reagan's political philosophy has left the
country with a trillion dollar deficit, he said, and has aided the wealthy and hurt low-income and unemployed Americans.
"Homeless people are wandering our streets and sleep in cars or boxes and huddle on grates for a breath of heat," he said. "Middle-class workers have the interest rates to buy a house Workers cannot find a job."
Hart, who is running for the 1984 Democratic nomination, also said the Reagan administration was not taking arms control seriously, even after Vice President George W. Bush ordered an arms control talk in Geneva, Switzerland.
Hart said he wanted the country to guarantee its security with weapons that would be the most effective, not the most expensive. He did not want to allow the weaponry he would favor or reject as president.
HE SAID he wanted to be a president remembered for housing the homeless, and not the MX missile.
Hart said he wanted to negotiate with the Soviet Union on limits for nuclear arms and pledged to see that nuclear arms would never again be used.
Hart said the country needed the kind of bold leadership that Franklin Roosevelt had offered.
Hart said he was the first presidential candidate to reject contributions from special interest political action committees, and said other presidents had owed their selection to him.
"In the 1983, the task was to break the grip of paralyzing ideas about a do-not-government and a see-nothing foreign policy," he said. "Half a century later, in the 1980s, the task is to break the grip of narrow, negative agendas and special interest in government in Washington."
BECAUSE HE HAD watched leaders trying to run the country with shop-worn policies, Hart said, he announced his candidacy for the governor of the state Cantilef little more than a week ago.
Before the dinner, Hart said he would
gratefully accept Walter Mondale or John Glenm,
other democratic presidential hopefuls, as a
Hart said old remedies for curing the country's ills would not soothe the problems of an advanced, technological society where public policy mistakes could lay off millions or trigger
On other economic problems, Hart said he favored Reagan's payment-in-kind program for farmers, but said that some tax problems would require the program would usually serve farmers.
Reagan's crop-swap would give surplus government grain to farmers who kept part of it.
HART SAID FARMERS needed more government financial support to reinforce a weakened agricultural framework, in which a rash of forcissions have plagued small farmers
He told the crowd of Democrats that he wanted the United States to be a strong exporter and that he did not think food should be used as a foreign policy weapon.