Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, October 22,1980
Policy in good hands
As far as a restrictive Regents banner policy is concerned, the ball once again is in the University of Kansas' court.
The Kansas Board of Regents banner policy has been used to restrict the display of banners at University-sponsored events. Sometimes the policy has been abused.
For more than a year, KU governance groups had discussed the policy amid disenchanted students who had displayed banners. The University then appointed a Blue Ribbon Committee, which recommended that the vague policy be more specific.
After examining the committee's report, the Regents decided Friday to let KU make its own changes and adot its own policy.
To say the least, the banner policy has
been the subject of much controversy. At last May's Commencement, an ugly confrontation between police and students led to the arrest of 12 people. These disturbances all revolved around a vague, confused policy.
KU officials now plan to have a new policy by the end of the semester. It is imperative that the entire University community help formulate the new policy.
The University already has a foundation on which to build the policy—the report of the Blue Ribbon Committee. The majority of students and faculty members want the policy changed. That spells doom for the old, confusing policy.
An end to the banner saga may finally be in sight.
Wichita's hockey may thrive despite icy welcome in K.C.
There was a Kansas sports first in Wichita month. It has the makings of a good trivial game.
The Edmonton Oilers and the Colorado Rockies—though few people north of Newton probably realized it—played the first Holiday Home game in the state's history at the Kansas Coliseum.
It was no idle event. The exhibition was played to herald the return of professional hockey to Wichita, after a 41-year absence with the birth of the Central Hockey League's Wichita Club. Edminton moved its top farm club from Houston to Wichita in the summer.
Hockey great Gordie Howe was there. Wayne Gretzky, the NHL's top scorer and most valuable player last season, was there. Gov. John Carlin was there. Commemorative gifts were given to all fans. One person won an all-expense paid European vacation.
This area, sports cynics throughout Mid-
BLAKE GUMPRECHT
America repeated after the game, simply will not support professional hockey.
They shake their heads and point to the area's recent hockey history. They've said it before.
In 1974, the NHL awarded an expansion franchise to Kansas City, Mo. Less than two years later, the expansion Scouts—after being merely 8,000 people a game—moved to Denver.
During the next three years, two minor league hockey franchises failed in Kansas (C)
Now Wichita is trying where Kansas City failed. The cynics chuckle and point out that Wichita doesn't even have a year-round public hockey rink. Wichita, they say, simply doesn't have the 2,600 fans a game needed for the team to break even.
The Blues, a St. Louis farm club, arrived in 1976 and left nine months later. The Detroit Red Wings then moved their top minor league team to Kansas City. They, too, failed miserably, averaging only 2,500 fans at each game and sometimes drawing fewer than 4,000-seat Kemper Arena. The team moved to Glens Falls, N.Y., after two seasons.
But Dick Regan knows better.
A Wichita native, Regan remembers well the pre-war days when the Wichita Sky Hawks of the old American Association regularly packed them in to the 5,500-seat Alaska Ice Palace downtown. Wichita's population was a little more than 100,000 then.
The Sky Hawks, a farm team of the Chicago Black Hawks, sold out nearly every home game from 1935 to 1939 before the team was forced to fold when Canada entered World War II. Most of the team's players were Canadians.
Regan was not even 10 years old then. Today he is the manager of Frontier Ice Arena, the city's only arena, which operates nine months a year.
"Hockey really caught on here," he says.
"It was hot stuff. I think it will catch on again."
I was raised old the Alaska Ice Palace. Back then it cost only a quarter to sit down in the clubhouse. Hawk games. But you had to get at 6 o'clock (for an 8 p.m. game) just to get a seat."
Hockey continued to thrive in Wichita during and after the war on the semi-pro teams.
But in 1963, the Alaska Ice Palace was torn
down so a high-rise apartment complex could
be built in Wichita in 1988, when Frontier was built.
Indeed, it appears that Wichita just may have been a hockey town without a team to support. Owner-general manager Larry Gordon was convinced of that last winter.
The U.S. Olympic team played two games last January in Wichita against Central Hockey League teams, selling out the 9,632 seat Kansas Coliseum for one of the games played by the United States. The games came before the Olympic team's gold medal performance in Lake Placid, N.Y.
"I was in the league office in Dallas one day when I saw the financial returns for those two games sitting on a desk," said Gordon, Edmonton's general manager at the time. "I thought there must have been a mistake. NHL teams don't make that in a game."
Houston, meanwhile, was averaging just 1,700 fans at each game in its first season as Edmonton's top farm team. Edmonton joined the NHL in 1979 after the demise of the World Hockey Association. The Oilers were charter members of the WHA.
"I wasn't pleased with Houston," Gordon said. "Climatically, it was tough to get the players to concentrate when it was 95 degrees outside in mid-session. They'd rather be sitting by the pool or playing golf. Then I came to Wichita, and there was 12 inches of snow on the ground. That's when I decided to move the team."
Enthusiasm for Wichita's third professional sports team has been high ever since. The poor attendance at the NHL exhibition seems to have been a rare exception.
More than 7,000 people entered a contest to name the team last summer. And club officials figure to have little problem achieving their goal of selling 1,200 season tickets and coupon books. About 700 were sold, and 22-64 game coupon books will be sold all season.
Attendance at the Wind's second and third exhibitions, furthermore, averaged 1.600.
"I don't think we'll have any problem breaking even here," Gordon said. "We've gotten a great reaction. If we can draw that many for two exhibition games, there's no reason we can't get 2,600 once the season begins."
Gordon casts off reminders of the recent failures of hockey in Kansas City.
"When you get involved with a place like Kansas City or Houston that already has major league teams, you tend to have a problem with the nomenclature 'minor' he said. "They tend to shy away. But we shouldn't have that problem in Wichita."
Certainly everything seems to be going the way of the Wind thus far.
The Wind, for instance, is the first Wichita professional team since 1974 to obtain a contract for coverage of all games, home and away. In addition, the season opener at Tulsa was televised on stations in Wichita, Oberlin, Garden City and McPherson.
"It's just a matter of time," Wind coach Ace Bailey said. "I think hockey will really go over big here. The people are beginning to like it and they're getting involved.
"I've been in other places where hockey was new. They didn't think hockey would survive in Washington, D.C., but we got it going. It's just a learning process."
The Wind doesn't play its first regular season game home until Nov. 5 against Tulsa, but already 6 kids have signed up to play in the Wichita Amateur Hockey Association.
Likewise, Dick Regan is beginning to notice changes.
Letters Policy
Just wait," Regan said, "until we get some cold weather."
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is afar from the university, he/she should include the writer's class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit letters for publication.
MARKBELTNEUZMCNOWGWSLPORE @MARKBELTNEUZMCNOWGWSLPORE
Grandpa's death stirs faded memories
He is now part of an irritable past, my grandfather. One moment, like all the moments that make up our lives, was final for him. His death last week was the last say in a relationship with far too much distance and far too few words. But I cannot rewrite the memories; I can only trust my pen to cleanse the regrets and the late-tears.
The memories beat down hard when death had ended the chance for a kinski not yet begun.
I search for reminders that Grandfather was more than just a long distance phone call and a Christmas card to Arlington, Va., that I was just the youngest grandchild and far away.
My memory answers with scenes from my grandparents' home: tulip bulbs in the basement, pictures of windmills on the walls and a beautiful villa where my immigrant from Holland in 1905 at the age of sixteen, they said at his funeral. I knew Grandfather was Dutch, the very house breathed his heritage, but I heard no stories of Holland. There were many other stories that accent that cut through Grandpa's English.
In a society that prides itself on putting miles between families, we had little in common but convenience and conversation. I was too young to have made these days; soon I would be too old to take the time.
They said at Grandfather's funeral that he was a naval engineer who designed and built ships. I remember that Grandfather gave us a model of a Dutch ship, but I didn't know why. They said Grandpa was a fun-loving man who sang in a barbershop quartet and played the violin. I
remember sheet music on my grandparents' piano and a violin case in the corner.
Some said at Grandfather's funeral that they were sorry they never knew him. I with a keen sense of humor saw them laughing.
There are happy memories of a red-checked and smiling grandfather, but they flicker faintly, and like old photographs, they are dimmed by time. Time steals from those slender and few memories; they free before the closer, colder memory of the last time I saw Grandfather.
He was in a nursing home in Iowa, but home in Iowa was out of place. The reality of him in a wheelchair inside the nursing home was in incongruous with the strong, independent grandfather I had known. The jolt of moving auteur more than 50 years in Arlington was told in the lines of his face and the curve of his back. Painfully aware of the marking of time, I studied carefully, committing his features to deliberate memory that could outlast the ravages of time.
A feeling of belonging comforted me as I watched him—a feeling that I was looking at a part of myself. I saw myself in the full curve of his Dutch cheeks, still stained a slight pink, and
in the soft round shape of his face. His brown eyes mirrored my brown eyes. Dark eyebrows, still rebuffing grayness, crested his eyes. They were a heavier version of the thick eyebrows that we had earlier in our scarred ol. My pup nose was traced from his, my snout a suggestion of his plumper double chin.
He was an unrealized heritage, my grandfather, who clung to his Holland rukes, to an old-fashioned Dutch as aged as his well-worn舵. He also remembered him as reminded him of wooden shoes from a long-age Holland. After home became Iowa, I still might have learned about him, and he might have learned about me. But time is its own length, and Grandfather did not wait. Grandfather it was spilling to an end.
When he spoke to me that last day together, he spoke to me not as his grandchild, but as the father of us.
"How old are you?" he asked, his question not so much for me but for youth.
He briefly looked away, and when he looked back, his face was shaking with emotion and old age.
"When I was 21 I thought I could lick the
food he said to swallow and anger finished
what he had eaten."
Fear of what life was for him and what it would be for me shuddered through my mind. But I a next-of-kin stranger, could offer no understanding—only the indignity of plausibility and the insecurity that control. The nursing home did not need my tears. Nursing homes have enough tears of their own.
Letters to the Editor
To the editor:
TV harms obvious, even without research
Undoubtedly Ted Lickigt's generalizations presented in his Oct. 2 column about television are a bit broad. Certainly his accusations extend to television, which is still valuable, but quite limited and debatable research.
And, rather distingibly, his proposal to eliminate commercial television broadcasting seems an extreme solution (most of us are not willing to rewrite the laws governing laissez-faire just yet). These weaknesses in the stress points of his argument, weaknesses highlighted by James Todd's letter of Oct. 10, I readily concede.
Fine, all facts, deal with facts—always facts.
Dash the facts, now! vent onto the unsteady
Nest.
What is your stand, Todd? Do you recommend a continuation of the principles that govern television programming today, or do you not? That is the essential argument, not Lücktgie's apprenticeship into journalism. No stammering now, out with it!
I don't need to wait 10 more years for researchers to label 1960 television (and years prior) as having been harmful to society. I see the majority of it as fantastical in content and artless in quality. How can melodrama and comedy buried in absurd present itself as useful for young, maturing minds (assuming that the mature mind is too insulted by the sophomorish level of most television programs to consider them entertaining?
What is your stand, Todd?
Understand, I am not necessarily referring to programming intended for children. Explain to me the value of a device that, for the most part, relies on vegetated acceptance for its popularity. We thoughtfully analyze television's misinterpretation of everyday life, it would likely change in content.
But that's the point, isn't it? Nobody cares to watch ordinary life on the screen. Don't think about it, just shut up and watch. DON'T THINK, WATCH!
See? See the man in his fast car! See his nice clothes? Aren't his clothes nice? Watch him drive fast, very fast, oh so fast. And see his big house on his big ranch in some big state somewhere in Mexico? Who's that woman? Isn't she pretty? She's so pretty. Yes, of course; dear.
all women should look like that. Yes, yes, we'll have a ranch, too.
The size of America's television audience is tremendous. The exposure that aired advertisements can receive is equally as great. The resulting profits - corassal. With these profits serving as an incentive, I can't see how ad effectiveness could be concerned with the quality of the programming.
"It don't matter how you get em to watch.
Chawlee. Just 'get em to watch.'
You, Todd, may wait for the researchers' statistics to emerge. Yet frankly, today's television and its entracing effects on viewers greatly frighten me. I must admit, however, that I am not going to deal, yet offer no immediate solutions. I suspect that it is simply up to what the public wants.
Paul Dorrell
Olthe junior
Olathe junior
Candidate speaks out
The Kansan is to be commended for its interest in the upcoming election, its coverage of campaign events and its reporting about candidates. He has written articles on newspaper stories, however, and I would like an
To the editor:
opportunity to correct a few things in your recent editions.
In the Oct. 6 issue, it seems the impression was given that I believe the most important part of representing a district is helping individual constituents in their relationships with state government. I do try to help people in this way, but my primary role is that of legislator.
An Oct. 10 story reported that 1 cautioned students against going directly to the legislature with budget requests. I certainly do not want to be on record as advising students against lobbying for the universities. Students of Kansas and other groups have done a fine job lobbying for the universities.
The question was whether I would support a bill to channel back to the KU School of Law additional tuition money paid by law students. My answer was that if tuition fees and the disposition of them are not set by statute at the present time, I would advise students and faculty members to avoid involving the Legislature in internal affairs of the university.
One of the other stories quoted me as saying I have three sons. I have two sons. Some grammatical errors in quotations attributed to me were not my words.
Thank you for your kind consideration.
State Rep.. 44th District
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