4
Monday, October 1, 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN commen
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
A Palm-Strewn Path
LAWRENCE, Kan. (Special)—Chancellor Archie R. Dykes mentioned Thursday a subject other than funding and continuing education: He said it was wet outside.
For the first time in his four months as chancellor of the University of Kansas, Dykes didn't evade two successive questions and said "I don't know," only three times in a half-hour speech.
Although he was given the opportunity, Dykes also refused to quote statistics indicating Kansas had dropped from fourth to 27th in the nation in terms of per-capita education in the past four years.
He also failed to mention that during the same period Kansas' per-capita income rose 14.4 per cent.
In an even more historic moment, Dykes didn't ask about the health of Kansan editor Bob Gosling to left instructions to say he was ill.
However, Dykes did mention the Easy Access program and possible
financial relief because of continuing education programs.
Rick von Ende, executive secretary of the University, followed Dykes into the room. At all times, Von Ende kept two paces behind and two to the right of Dykes.
When Dykes exited, Von Ende
had to snatch in channes in the
channeller path.
Chancellor Emeritus Raymond Nichols, with a beaming smile that somehow was absent during his tenure as KU's chancellor, attempted to explain to Dykes that Dykes was the chancellor of the UNIVERSITY of Kansas, not the LEGISLATURE of Kansas.
But Dykes whisked Nichols aside, seeking instead a secretary, to whom Dykes gave a list of 1,000 he wanted to send personal jitters.
After the speech, Dykes casually announced his intention to challenge Kansas Gov. Robert Bid for reelection next year.
—The Office Cat
How Many Springs?
Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" was published 11 years ago. Ten full springs have passed since then.
Were we awakened? Or have the bursting springs put us to sleep, waiting for signs of the silence she saw ahead?
Tom McCall, governor of Oregon, has ordered a ban on useless lighting, such as neon signs, in his state. Oregon is the only state so far to have banned no return bottles. McCall has set a precedent that may mean we are awakening.
Yet within the White House, decisions have been made to encourage increased timber production, especially by the easiest, most devastating method—clearpcutting. Our forests seem to have been lost to the infinite demand for timber products.
This is happening as the perimeter of the Redwood National Park is being threatened by ruined drainage from clearcutting. And anyone in the northern Rockies can see that public land there is being turned into a patchwork quilt of less green and more and more charcoal as the logging trucks rumble out.
Nixon's excuses include the newsprint shortage, affecting this
and other newspapers. But Carson's "Silent Spring" didn't mean that the timbre of our voices wouldn't be seen or heard. She said she'd have to lay out because man is losing the capacity to foresee and forestall.
It is a rude awakening to know that rapidly increasing pollution is being met laxly by the Environmental Protection Agency. They are easing regulations in order to walk with the devil to the end of the bridge where they hope man miraculously will have harnessed the sun's energy and found answers to the enigma.
Resources, air, water and land are finite. Man can't live any longer with his old land ethic of conquering the earth. Energy meetings at KU or in the U.N. take off from this understanding but have failed so far to land us in a significantly new place.
Must computers tell us that the hordes will see the grizzly bear disappear from Yellowstone within 10 years? Must we believe the White House forecast that increased sustained water availability fulfill consumers when we can see from trails everywhere the forest laid flat?
We are watching the disappearance of our own community. The cloak washed into the sea toils the insidious silent springs to come.
Margie Cook
The Welsbach Mantle—A Metaphor for Life
Writing a week or so ago about W.R. Cox and the ledger of expenses he kept as an undergraduate at Yale in 1903, I listed an entry of 25 cents for a "Welsbach mantle," and added innocently—"whose purpose I do not know."
By JACK SMITH
The Los Angeles Times
Mr. COON undoubtedly needed the mantle to study by," wrote Lawrence G. Hove of Malbu, "to write notes to all those who knew him involved with, and to find his socks by."
I did suspect that a Welsbach mantle had something to do with gaslights, since I am familiar with today's Coleman lantern mander. I could have looked it up, as many readers have pointed out, but that wouldn't have been as enlightening or entertaining as the flood of reminiscences that have come in the mail.
I also received many definitions of the Welsbach mantle, some of them from dictionaries I have on my own shelves. One word that stands out is the word seems as clear and simple as any;
"Welshbast mantle; a chemically prepared, incombustible network hood for a gas jet, which, when the jet is lighted, becomes incandescent and gives a brilliant appearance. It was, however, the Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welshbast, who invented the mantle.)
"Obviously," wrote Wilton P. Chase of Granada Hills, "Mr. Coon had to burn the midnight oil, and in his student days the Welsbach gas burner was comparable to the high intensity lamp of today's students, both of which are technological advances over the oil lamps in use when the saying originated."
"When their term of usefulness was over," wrote Helen E. Bear of Long Beach, "they would crumble into ashes, and this was quite frequent, as I remembered."
Several readers knew why young Coon had been obliged to buy two mantles within a year.
"I don't suppose I had thought or heard of one in 50 years," wrote Edith M. Gwinn of Los Angeles, "But I can almost hear my mother saying, 'Ovillle, remember to bring home a couple of Welsh marbles on another one burned out last evening.'"
"A CARELESS HAND turning up the gas," recalled Randall MacDougall of Pacific Palisades, "and afterwards applying the match instead of doing it before, when I could have exploded and a load of white powder where the mandle used to be. My father, who could freeze it and eat it, as we said of his drinking habits in the family, was a notorious destroyer of firearms." The English man much of my basic four letter English I learned such occasions. . . .
"There were two ironclad reasons for not slamming a door when entering the house. One was because there might be, and often was, I am thankful to report, a cake in the oven. The other was the probable cause of all the Welschbant manies in the house."
Gwen Evans of Laguna Hills recalled that her father, hard-pressed to support six children, took a second job "moonlighting" on the Street Light League in a Kansas town.
"He went about the streets at dusk, lighting the gaslights. Again the next day he headed to the town."
this before and after his regular work."
HARRY TANNER of Beverly Hills was a Welschab lamplighter himself while going to school in San Francisco in 1917. "Off Hight Street was Buena Park, ringed around for many blocks with streaklights that flooded the streets. The end was a plot light and a hook. My job was to turn them on at 4 or 5 in the afternoon and off at 4 or 5 in the morning. Once in a while at a late party I would persuade a girl to help me turn off the lights at 4 a.m. It was also a time when wind wished, when a girl would blow rain down High Street, at 30 miles an hour."
Author William R. Cox of Sherman Oaks, whose adventurous outpourings I used to devour in the great age of the pulps, not only remembered that the Welsbach mance gave 'a mellow and excellent reading book' but provided a metaphor for life itself.
"Life is not, after all," he wrote, "a cuppa tea . . . mitt lemon. It is a Welsbach manta, giving that good light until its time wanes, when it flickers, dims and turns to ash."
I'm glad, after all, that I didn't look it up.
Vietnam's Orphans Poorly Treated
By PATSY T. MINK
Special to the Washington Post
WASHINGTON—I cannot share the
greatness of America since the
close of the Vietnam War.
We have just looked into dozens of steel—banded cribs in Saigon and I have held a dying infant, one of the 15,000 or more Vietnamese-American children we left behind to perish or live miserable existences, children we evidently care little
I have seen among the 500 children at Go Vap oraphant infants with bellied boots and skinny legs. I have seen them cling to my husband and me and beog for affection. They did not wear diapers. They lay on the ground of urine, which workers tried to clean up.
I have seen a naked baby girl lying on a cot in the street outside Viet Hoa orphanage. She wasn't alone. The streets and sidewalks of Saigon were lined with such children of poverty. An orphane worker kept watching children inside were clobbered and cared for.
children. They were in their cribs, without toys and without job. They neither smiled nor cried. I was show them lunch: a plate of rice meal strewn with bits of pumpkin.
And at the World Vision Half-Way House Nutrition Center, I saw desperately sick infants being slowly nursed back to health. The babies were released by the Vietnamese orphanages to World Vision because they were dying. When they recover, many are placed for adoption with Americans.
AT DIEU QWRL ORPHANAGE I saw despair written across the faces of 190
One American adoption agency, Welcome House in Pennsylvania, reports that 52 of the 60 Vietnamese infants released to it for adoption died before the months of required paperwork could be completed. At present, 2,000 American couples are languishing on bureaucratic lists, waiting for their "new" child. In fact, Washington that only 867 of the orphans came to America last year—while 1,000 left South Vietnam for other nations.
But these and many other infants placed with American families may never arrive. They may not live long enough. They may be killed by paperwork.
WE HAVE LONG BEEN a compassionate people, particularly after great tragedies. One need only recall the Marshall Plan after World War II or the war relief led by Herbert Hoover after World War I. But we have yet to show such compassion for these American fathered children, their unloved reminders of an unloved war.
It would not be very difficult to do. A simple first step would be to end the adoption paperwork by issuing special notice of its removal, and the bureaucracy is not to be moved.
The Department of Health, Education and Welfare says that the children will be well cared for in Vietnam and that "Southeast Asia is not a mixed parentage." But in all my discussions in Vietnam I found no one who thought that the black Vietnamese-American orphans, if they survived, would have been so badly abused that the indication was that this was also true of the half-white children, whose "foreign" features were so obvious. More than half of the sickest, most neglected, close-to-home children, centers I visited were interracial babies.
I HAVE ALSO been told that the Vietnamese government does not want us to adopt these children, that American adoption would be viewed by them as an insult, a a threat to their identity, the sisters could not care for their own. I found no such attitude in Vietnam.
The deputy minister of the South Vietnamese Ministry of Social Wellfare was very clear. The government will not stand in our way if we follow the proper procedures—adoption procedures that are no more complicated than they may well be less one-on-one than ours.
At present, the adoption paperwork must be done in triplicate—once for Vietnamese adoption, once for federal immigration and once for the state. For one American couple, the paperwork weighed nearly a pound. The orphanage workers watch the children wait and many of them die while they are—in the words of the ‘bureaucats’—being adopted.
THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT offered immediate citizenship to French-
Vietnamese children following French withdrawal from the Indochina war, and they offered free education for the children in France. Surely America can take the small but important step of eliminating federal paperwork for these orphans.
That isn't all we can do. At a halfway center operated by the Catholic Relief Center in Vietnam, I saw a new girl's vocational school that had been built by the government. It was a government was doing similar things. An American Aid official's reply: We should not do for them what they must do for themselves. I was also told that we do not even provide funds for the international food which is surplus food, which is fast running out.
VIETNAM IS A NATION in agony whose economy is fragile. The adults suffer just as the children do. The American Embassy staff pointed to the suffering everywhere and asked, "How can we single out just the wrong people?" Should help should not one if we cannot help all. The answer is simple. It is far better to start action somewhere than to let children die.
There are some things we cannot do. A number of the 134 orphanages in Saigon are unwilling to release their children for adoption. Their reasons vary. Most claim a reason of abuse, but many say that the religious think it is God's will that the children stay with them. Some will allow adoptions but demand the name and address of the adopting parents—a request which may be difficult to fulfill, international adoptions agencies, which fear the families我 be hounded for donations.
These problems are outside our jurisdiction. But many children are available and within our power to help. We cannot pretend that to wait two more years for an answer will merely let the children grow two years older.
We cannot ignore the fact that these small lives are fragile, that time is crucial. If we make these children a political issue, ripe for debate and stalling, we will kill them with words and neglect as efficiently as if we had purposely destroyed them.
The writer is a Democrat member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Hawaii.
U.S. Trade Gain Illusory?
American Consumers Pay for Devaluation Side-Effects
By JOHN F. LAWRENCE
The Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON—The cure that's worse than the illness, devaluation of the dollar is having serious side-effects and the consumer is paying dearly for him.
The two devaluations, in 1971 and early this year, were supposed to ease the strain on the dollar caused by too many imports and two few exports. The moves appear to be doing that. But what's also becoming increasingly apparent is the effect they are prices of a wide array of products, American-made as well as imported.
So far, government experts have made little progress in assessing the real effects of austerity on employment and economic boom is disturbing normal trade patterns. But a Los Angeles Times sampling of major industries and government agencies found that the value of the dollar has played a role in cuts.
—Adding anywhere from 10 per cent to 36 per cent to the cost of products like radios, binoculars and bicycles that are either no more or less assembled largely from foreign components.
—Permitting American auto companies to raise the price of their new 74 model small cars by $200 to $300, a move that will not drive up the price of imported cars.
—Creating shortages that are triggering price increases for food and clothing. Devaluation plays a role in this by making it easier for foreigners, with their currencies worth more, to bid for U.S. supplies. That has been intensified by the world boom.
'THERE'S NO QUESTION there are these initial adverse effects, and we've had a great success of Brodman, an economist for the Cost of Living Council, part of the administration's
economic controls mechanism. In short, he said, "Devaluation has been good for our balance of payments but it hasn't been good for the war on inflation."
From the beginning, it was clear that devaluation would mean that imported goods would cost more. Less recognized was the broader effect on U.S. inflation—an effect that now has some experts concerned lest the competitive advantages the United States to gain in world markets will be diminished by continuing increases in costs here.
That's not to say the experts are calling devaluation a failure. For years, the United States had been running a serious trade deficit, paying out more dollars to foreigners than it was receiving in foreign currencies. Now, the trade figures, assisted by the Treasury Department and machinery experts, have reversed in recent months. There's some hope the United
In fact, there's some talk that the dollar may have been devalued too much.
States may achieve a trade balance for all of 1973.
At the same time devaluation is creating headaches for the inflation fighters, it is also causing a failure to slow imports of some items. In part, this reflects the fact American consumers are so used to paying ever higher prices that we are going right on buying imported goods.
THE PUBLIC WAS never warned, however, just how big a price it would have to pay in terms of domestic inflation to achieve this switch. In effect, Americans are suddenly paying for years of free spending on cheap foreign goods while the prices and other costs skyrocketed above those of foreign manufacturers.
Take cameras, for instance. Imported camera prices are up at least 20 per cent and it has not had any effect on consumer spending together an annual study of the camera
One surprise is the speed with which importers have been able to sidestep the devaluation. They had been buying from Japan and parts of Europe most severely affected by the change in currency relationships. They are now getting the same products from other lands that didn't revalue much.
industry in New York.
HENCE, AMERICANS who used to be shod in Italian shoes now are finding themselves walking around in products from Brazil, Argentina and Spain. So far the average American shoe has a cap per cent of the American market, up from 36 per cent last year and 30 per cent in 1970. Not only that, but the average factory cost of an American-made shoe has risen 50 cents a pair in the last year to $8.02 while the average arrives at $4.22, only 36 cents higher.
In industry after industry, officials bemoan the fact that the Japanese have been so successful in importing goods.
Griff and the Unicorn
bv Sokoloff
problem by investing in new plants in Taiwan, where the current relationship with the dollar has changed little. The problem is likely to figure heavily in future world monetary discussions. At the conference of the International Monetary Fund currently being held in New York, it is the currency relationships of the major nations that still have center stage.
MORE DISCOURAGING than the fact that some industries aren't seeing softer competition from abroad is the reaction of the U.S. manufacturers in some industries
Autos are a prime example. Before devaluation, imported cars held a price advantage of several hundred dollars under the same model that they came in with new small cars of their own and closed much of that gap. It was wiped out early when the Nixon administration imposed a surcharge on imports, which devaluation, which had the same effect.
That increase means that instead of undercutting the imports (the Pinto actually cost less in 1973 than the Toyota, for instance) there's a good chance that in the 74 model year, they'll be priced more nearly the same again.
Now, with the foreign models up sharply in price, the U.S. producers are focusing much of the government-approved price of the new product into Pinto, for instance, will have a bottom-of-the-line price of $2,292, about $200 more than the 73 models. Add in the cost of previous options that the bargain-hunter now must pay for equipment and the new price is $271 higher.
AUTO PRODUCERS say their price increases are necessary for a number of reasons—rising costs, more safety and pollution equipment, for example. They also argue that they'll still be able to beat the imports at the higher prices.
"We were limited by capacity—we ran out of small cars to sell in the last model year," explained one top auto industry analyst. The industry is boosting small car production 22 per cent in the "74 model year," he estimates.
THE BIG QUESTION is what will happen if economic growth cools. Will U.S. producers begin holding the line more on prices as competing hard with the rest now?
Nonetheless, he said, "Any austite person would assume that if there had been no devaluation, we wouldn't have boosted prices this much."
The world economic boom may be to blame for much of the unexpectedly severe inflationary effect of devaluation. It means foreign producers don't need to push hard to keep their markets in the United States—they have enough demand close to home to meet their plants busy. Similarly, U.S. producers are operating in many cases at capacity.
To date, the signs that devaluation will be to influence such efforts are inbound.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays in March and September. $15 a semester, $10 a year. Second class payment paid by tuition fee. Second class payment rate: $1.5% a semester paid in student activity fees. Advertised offered to all students without regard to academic status. Presumed paid are not necessarily those of the University. Admission is not required.
NEWS STAFF
News adviser  Susanne Shaw
Editor Bob Simison
BUSINESS STAFF
Business Manager Steven Liggett