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Thursday, August 31, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN Secure Cab is a good idea if it lives up to its name
The more things change, the more they stay the same is an adage exemplified by Student Senate's revival of the Secure Cah system.
Secure Cab, which began anew earlier this week, is a Senate-financed taxi service that provides KU students with free rides home from bars or campus buildings. This new service is a direct descendant of the original Secure Cab system that began in 1986.
That system, nicknamed "tipsy taxi," gave priority to students who were too drunk to drive. It was threatened with extinction in 1988 when the Union Cab Company raised its rates from $2.50 to $4 per ride.
Senate responded by taking what they thought to be a fiscally responsible step. They replaced the cab with a shuttle system that ran a specific route every night.
The shuttle, sponsored by Corporate Coach of Lawrence,
proved to be a disaster. Because Corporate Coach charged by
the hour and only 11 to 15 students each week rode the van,
the service cost Senate an average of $37.50 for each rider.
As an added embarrassment, the shuttle program shut down last spring after Senate learned Corporate Coach had filed for bankruptcy four months earlier.
Now the cab service has been reinstated with only minor changes to protect against future loss, but at an unsurpassed cost to students of $43,545.60 per year - or $18 for each hour of service.
Jeff Morris, student body vice president, said Senate shied away from the pay-per-ride system because of abuses by both the cab company and the students. Students and cab drivers were both willing to use the system for purposes other than rides home.
Those abuses could have been curbed by keeping a tighter rein on the cab company.
So how, then, does Senate hope to prevent the new system from once again becoming a wasted or abused expense?
Charles Bryan, KU on Wheels coordinator, said a six-week trial period in April and May provided Senate with ridership estimates that made the system seem cost-efficient.
If the estimates are inaccurate or misleading the system could become as costly as the failed shuttle.
Also, by giving priority to students who need rides home from campus, at least between 11 p.m. and midnight, they are duplicating a service already offered by the bus system.
Senate's intentions are admirable. Students deserve the Secure Cab service, and it does hold life-saving potential.
But before Senate spends $43,545.60 of our money, we deserve some sort of proof that it won't be spent irresponsibly, and Senate has yet to offer that proof.
Let's hope this time that Secure Cab will live up to is name.
Crain Welch for the editorial board
Officials act two years late
The federal government, Douglas County and the Union Pacific Railroad should be recognized appropriately for their prompt action this summer. The three combined to install an electric warning system at a railroad intersection north of Lawrence, two years too late.
The intersection was the sight of a fatal car accident on March 27, 1987. The accident occurred when a car collided with a train at the intersection, killing all four University of Kansas students in the vehicle and leaving countless friends and family members in shock.
Replacing the railroad crossbuck sign with an electric warning system this summer ends more than a two-year period during which federal, local and railroad officials refused to act. Despite the pleas of neighbors and family members of the accident victims, the installation of a new crossing sign remained a low priority.
Al Cathcart, Kansas Department of Transportation assistant coordinating engineer, said the action was not belated, considering that Kansas' 200 railroad crossings can only be updated yearly and in order of priority. Comparing the two-year wait for an electrical warning system with national figures, Cathcart said that the signal installation was not tardy.
This excuse is tolerable and insulting. Local industry, including the Union Pacific Railroad, must be accountable for the safety of the public. The unfortunate deaths of four KU students on March 27,1987, more than qualified the intersection as a priority.
Thom Clark for the editorial board
News staff
David Stewart ... Editor
Ric Brack ... Managing editor
Daniel Niemi ... News editor
Candy Niemann ... Planning editor
Stan Diel ... Editorial editor
Jennifer Corser ... Campus editor
Elaine Sung ... Sports editor
Laura Husar ... Photo editor
Stephen Kline ... Graphic editor
Christine Winner ... Arts/Features editor
Tom Eblen ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Linda Prokop...Business manager
Debra Martin...Local sales director
Jerre Medford...National sales manager
Eric Hughes...Creative director
Jill Lowe...Marketing manager
Tami Rank...Production manager
Carrie Slankinka...Asat. production manager
Margaret Townsend...Co-op sales manager
Creatif Doolby...Classified manager
Jeanne Hines...Sales and marketing
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If the shoe fits, it creates an image Stereotypes on campus can begin with a simple, new pair of Birkenstocks
OK, so my Birkentests — my German-styled sandals — aren't the most glamorous shoes available to women in their 20s. They're not stylish and I admit that they aren't the most practical shoes on the racks.
Deb Gruver
Editorial board
And then them.
The other day, a fellow journalist said to me,
"Himm. Birkenstocks. Great shoes. But pretty ugly."
There aren't too many Birkentests walking the halls of the School of Journalism. A real shame.
My friend was sporting a spanking-new pair of white Nike Air shoes — cross-training shoes, I think. Not so glamorous either, but a little more practical, I suppose.
While he can wear his shoes running or during a fierce racerback game, I can wear mine with socks, casual dresses and skirts, too. His Nikes would look a little displaced under a flowing rayon skirt.
Anyway, it took me a long time to take the plunge and buy the $68 sandals.
At that time, I was in my used-to-be-bright-green Hi-Tec hiking boots, not positive I was ready to make a switch. I spent the summer as a camp counselor in Rocky Mountain National Park and had grown fond of my boots. My loyal boots took me hiking with a 75-year-old park service ranger, rock climbing, up Long's Peak and around camp, too.
Finally, I walked into the shoe store and glanced cautiously around some before I did anything more than say, "I'm just looking."
But reality is reality. There aren't many mountains in Lawrence and although they're comfy shoes, I felt a little pretenuous walking around pretending I was hiking.
"Can I help you?" she asked. The duty of any successful saleswoman.
I told her that I wasn't sure which type of Birkentocks I wanted — there are about 30, you know. Nor did I want what color I wanted. Black is unusual color, but I'm trying to break that habit.
So I botally tried on the style with a strap on the back. Too much like a regular shoe.
I still can wear wool socks in my new "hippy-
shoes."
So the saleswoman, wearing purplish Birken-stocks, approached me when I no longer looked so reluctant.
I decided to go strapless and looked at Birkenstocks with three buckles, but they were a bit too busy, and anyway, I didn't know about having to be responsible for three buckles.
What about velcro Birkenstocks? Hmmm.
I settled for the "Arizona" style. Two buckles.
Simple beige. Forms to fit.
The saleswoman eagerly told me that I could come into Footprints and have them recored free of charge. That should be done every year or so, I guess.
Cork shoes. I guess it's not a concept everyone understands.
But they come in these nifty little boxes with lots of German writing. Five semesters of German and I still can't read the language.
What is really interesting, however, is the image you get for free when you purchase these unusual shoes.
Suddenly, people think that you're a Grateful Dead fan, spend a lot of time at the Glass Onion and study English Lit or something
think that should harm me to some stereotype.
So what's the point?
Just as my friend in the cross-training shoes is and the women sporting white sneakers with the blue label are.
So what's the point?
I've joined the Birkenstocks race. People seem to notice the shoes and just as we tie ties to sorority women, I'm probably being placed into some neat, tidy category. I don't necessarily mind labels, but I'm more than just one type of person
I hate the Grateful Dead and will graduate soon with a degree in journalism. Although I do spend a fair amount of time at the Glass Onion, I don't think that should nail me to some stereotype.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I haven't changed much since I walked into the store and spent grocery money on sandals.
An ancient sage said it was better to visit a house of mourning than a house of rejoicing. I don't know about that, but the obituary can be a lot more instructive than the birth announcements. Three recent ones are bound together by a common theme:
▶ Deb Gruver is a Lawrence senior majoring in journalism.
Recent deaths share similar theme
Mickey Leland, the congressman from Houston, was 44 when he met death in the land he called The End of the Earth: famine-striken, war-riden, refugee-ghenaed Ethiopia. He had been there before — enough times to be criticized for paying too much attention to distant disasters and not enough to his own district. Yet he kept coming back and bringing others. Why?
Maybe it was something that happened on one of his first trips. Visiting a refugee camp, he saw a little girl "who looked to be about 70 or 80 years old — a skeleton of a person with a thin layer of brown skin draped on her, who had just a faint breath of life in her." He asked one of the officials about the child. "While I was talking to him," he would recall, "she died. I can see her face right now. Everyday I see her face." One of Mickey Leland's favorite phrases was from another ancient sage: He who saves a single life, it is as though he saved an entire world.
If you had set out to find a congressman as different as possible from Mickey Leland, who was a black, liberal Democrat, a good choice would have been Larkin Smith from Mississippi's Gulf Coast — a white, conservative Republican. He had come up steadily through the ranks of law enforcement in Mississippi after starting out as a deputy sheriff in Pearl River County. At 45, he was in his freshman year in Congress when his plane went down in Mississippi a week after Mickey Leland's crash in Ethiopia.
Paul Greenberg
Syndicated columnist
These two were bound by more than the circumstances of their death. Each had a cause. At the wake for Larkin Smith one bright arrangement of red and white carnations stood out. It was from 20 prisoners at the Harrison County jail in Mississippi, who remembered that sheriff Larkin Smith had started a vocational training program — so they would have a trade when they got out. He treated us with respect, one of the inmates recalled. Larkin Smith, too, had remembered the least of us.
William B. Shockley wasn't in Congress; his contribution was much more influential. Shockley had earned a Nobel Prize in physics for his part in creating the transistor, the little gizmo that has changed the way the world operates, communicates and calculates. In but recent years, he had been noted for work of less-than-Nobel caliber. He
had taken all his accumulated expertise as a professor of electrical engineering and applied it to biology with predictable results; some cockamami theory about intellectually inferior blacks reproducing faster than whites and reversing evolution. Shockley's only claim to intellectual respectability in his later years was his being hooted down by student audiences who had forgotten what freedom of speech was all about. What do you suppose Mickey Leland made of Shockley's theory? If he had time to notice, he probably just smiled that mischievous smile of his and got on with work.
Poor Shockley was quoted years ago as saying that his theories on race were much more important than his work on the transistor — an indication of what had happened to his sense of proportion. He was said to have been still sifting statistics and preparing papers until a few days before his death on the Stanford campus at the age of 79. William B. Shockley had spent his golden years going from fame to notoriety, science to fixation, relevance to relevance. The last line in his obituary in the New York Times read, "Stanford University said no services are planned." After a lifetime of effort, a brilliant scientist had managed to make himself one of the least of these, our brothers, consumed by an obsession as wasting as any famine.
Paul Greenberg is a syndicated columnist.
LETTERS to the EDITOR
After spending four eve-
nues and one sunbaked afternoon this past week watching the resurrection of the 1989 hopes of the Kansas City Royals, I thought there could be few miracles left as the season slides into the pennant races of September. After reading Elaine Sung's empty-headed harangue of Pete Rene, I find, quietly mirau-
Hall for stars, not saints
Quite apart from her annoying habit of arguing with an omnipotent "you," Sung stated that because Pete Rose "figured he could go around batting on baseball games" and "got around to thinking he was above the rules," that his entrance into the Baseball Hall of Fame should be jeopardized. However, in her superficial analysis, Sung ignores the fact that Cooperstown was never intended to be a hall of canonized saints, but rather a shrine for the greatest who have played the game of baseball. If the same standard that Sung wishes to apply
lously, that someone has done such a poor job of arguing the case against Rose that I feel compelled to defend him.
In no way do I condone or defend the activities of Pete Rose. But.
to Pete Rose were applied to all other admissions to the Hall, it would be absent the likes of Babe Ruth, Tyr Cobb and others.
Sung also ignores the fact that the commissioner of baseball had knowledge of Rose's activities since 1983 but chose to do nothing about it until now. If I had read Sung's drive all year, and at year's end all collegiate sports editors who wrote poorly were forced to eat fast food for the rest of their lives, then I would feel that I had contributed to Sung's lifetime diet of Big Macs because I would have tacitly approved of Sung's deficient writing style by not commenting on it.
whatever befalls Rose, he was one of the greatest ever to play the game of baseball and is deserving of enshirment in Cooperstown. Besides, if we believed, as Ms. Sung seems to, that in addition to hitting the curveball, baseball players must now be saints, then the world of baseball would be left with a few players from Brigham Young University and a collegiate sports editor who doesn't write well. What a dull place that would be.
Mitch Connell Phoenix, Ariz., graduate student