Summer Session Kansan
51st Year, No.9
LAWRENCE, KANSAS
Friday, July 12. 1963
KU To Orientate Foreign Students
About 60 foreign students from 23 countries arrived here yesterday to begin an eight-week orientation in preparation for entering colleges and universities across the country this fall.
Gerhardt Zuther, assistant director for the orientation center and assistant professor in English, said, "The program is a general one designed to acquaint students with the American academic and cultural life with special emphasis on improving their use of the English language."
ALL THE students speak English, he explained, but not all are fluent. Therefore, for the first four weeks, students will attend five hours of English grammar, pronunciation, comprehension and writing classes each morning and work with tape recordings in the sound laboratory part of the afternoons.
After arriving in Lawrence, the students were met by 10 counselors, graduates and seniors from KU, and Texas and Indiana Universities, who showed the new students around the campus and to their living quarters in Gertrude Sellards Pearson Hall.
The counselors, headed by Robert Kahle, assistant instructor of English, will aid in the orientation, Zuther said, by being "informal companions." Besides accompanying the students to social events, the counselors will help students with personal matters "not covered by the formal program such as taking them to church or showing them where to find laundries."
BEFORE dispersing on their various schools, each student will have been a weekend guest in the homes of families in a small town and also in a larger city such as Kansas City.
In addition to these "home stays," the students will take field trips to the capitol in Topeka, and probably to the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., where in the past Harry Truman has welcomed the students, Zuther said.
Other activities scheduled include formal dinners and guest speakers at the Kansas Union, where the students will also eat all their meals on a special "meal-ticket" system in the cafeteria, films depicting different parts of the U.S., plus dances and picnics. The students will also have access to the University swimming pool and other recreation facilities.
GUEST LECTURERS will speak to the foreign students on everything from mass communications in the U.S. to racial disputes in an attempt to acquaint the students with the United States and American universities.
Sept. 4, the students will head for universities across the nation including Northwestern, Harvard, Cornell, Auburn, the Universities of Michigan, Chicago, California and Pittsburgh.
APPREHENSIVE OUTLOOK—A girl watches as a nurse at Watkins hospital loads a hypodermic syringe with serum to check for tuberculosis. The girl is among the prospective freshmen next Fall who are participating in KU Previews.
Millions in U.S. Will Witness Total Solar Eclipse July 20
NEW YORK — (UPI) — On July 20 the solar system will put on its greatest show—a total solar eclipse that will be visible in varying degrees from every part of North America.
Tens of millions of Americans and scientific groups from a half dozen countries will observe the phenomenon which will come near to matching the celebrated North American eclipse of 1930.
Natural Life Authority Warns Time Running Out for Grasslands
By Linda Machin
If Congress wants to preserve the natural animal life and vegetation of the old grassland prairie by establishing the 31st national park in Fottawatomie County, just east of Tuttle Creek Reservoir, they had best hurry, according to E. Raymond Hall, of KU.
Hall, director of the KU Natural History Museum, along with Gov. John Anderson, Rep. William H. Avery, Sen. James B. Pearson, and Henry Jameson, president of the Prairie National Park Association and Abilene newspaper publisher, spoke in favor of the park at a hearing July 8, in Manhattan. The hearing of the sub-committee on Public Lands of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, was held to help determine whether a grassland prairie national park should be located in eastern Kansas
"Through the past 90 years, the United States government has set aside samples of most of the major types of vegetation and animal life, such as the Sequoias in California and the Everglades in Florida."
IN AN INTERVIEW, Hall explained his views:
As yet, he said, no sample has been set aside of the tall-grass area of 400,000 square miles stretching from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico and from western Indiana to eastern Kansas.
ACKNOWLEDGING the cattlemen and ranch-owners of the area affected, who are the principal opponents of the park site, Hall said:
"And I sympathize with the cattlemen not wanting to give up their land, but one must remember." Hall continued, "that the first purpose of a national park is to preserve, unimpaired for the benefit of future generations, a natural scene that permits only natural changes to take place."
"Of course, the area is 99 per cent privately owned and there is always to be expected objection when private property must be used for the public good.
HALL SAID that already over half of the tall-grass area has been impaired by cattle raising. Grass experts have confirmed that lands grazed by cattle no longer have the natural proportions of its original grasses. Hall said.
In the area originally, Hall said, there were 850 native flowering plants growing in natural proportions, some of which are disappearing because of cattle grazing. "For instance, in some areas, Blue Stem may be taking over Indian grass due to grazing."
The government only wants to set aside a fraction of one-tenth of a per cent of the total tall-grassland area, Hall said. Seven years ago when the park service narrowed the
pursued park area down to three Kansas sites, including the Pottawatomi area, there was "immediate, enthusiastic and spontaneous correspondence" with officials. Hall reported, by persons who had grown up in the area and want it preserved.
HALL REBUTTED the argument by park opponents that if such tall-grass lands were allowed to grow unchecked, there would be vast grass fires. He said:
"If left to nature, the tall-grass would not grow unchecked because natural numbers of native animals such as bison and elk would graze the land."
He added that even certain portions of the grassland park would have to be "burned over every 50-60 years because fire is considered a natural process and some natural plants thrive in such areas."
Hall emphasized that areas for a prairie national park are quickly dwindling. He mentioned that at one time the whole state of Illinois had been in the tall-grass area.
Some years ago in Illinois, a bill in the state legislature to set aside a sample of tall-grass prairie was well on its way to passage when a member asked to inspect some suitable sites. Then it was discovered that the last one had been plowed up several years before.
THERE WILL NOT be another eclipse of the sun visible in any part of the United States until 1970. And not until 2017 will a solar eclipse be visible to so many Americans as this month.
Those living in a 60-mile-wide path stretching from Anchorage, Alaska, across Canada's Yukon, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec to Bar Harbor, Maine, will see the dark mass of the moon completely blot out the sun.
In the blackout path, the only light left will be a sickly yellow corona around the moon, equal in intensity to a half-moon's glow. Stars will twinkle in the momentary, unnatural night, birds will cease to twitter, and the air will cool and fill with eerie rippling shadows.
THOSE LIVING outside the belt of totality will see a partial eclipse, ranging from 92 per cent of total in Boston to 26 per cent in Los Angeles. But record crowds are expected to turn out from coast to coast to see the heavenly spectacle, which fortunately falls on a summer Saturday between late morning on the West Coast and late afternoon on the East Coast.
Maine and Quebec, the most densely populated areas in the blackout path, are girding themselves for a tremendous influx of visitors bent on seeing the total eclipse. The Maine Department of Economic Development estimates that more than 200,000 persons from other parts of Maine and out-of-state will descend on central Maine for the two hour performance, climaxed by two minutes of darkness between 5:42 p.m. EDT and 5:44 p.m.
The American Museum-Hayden Planetarium warns eclipse watchers to protect their eyes against the harmful solar infra-red rays by looking through two thicknesses of black and white photographic film which has been exposed to the maximum density. Dark glasses or
smoked glass are inadequate for peering directly at the sun and cannot prevent possible permanent damage.
TOKYO OBSERVATORY scientists will make the initial observations of the eclipse, which will first be noticeable at sunrise in Japan, and the University of Kyoto will send a scientific team to Alaska. Also in Alaska will be delegates to the American Astronomical Society's convention near Fairbanks, especially timed and located to coincide with the eclipse.
Scientists will be checking and re-checking various aspects of eclipses, including fluctuations of brightness, polarization of light in the outer corona, variances of geomagnetic and earth currents, radio characteristics of the ionosphere, and deflection of starlight by the gravitational pull of the sun. The latter, verified during previous eclipses, is a confirmation of Einstein's theory of relativity.
Eventually, scientists expect to observe eclipses from space vehicles that will be propelled beyond the Earth's contorting atmosphere for more perfect measurements and photographs.
THE ECLIPSE will provide even the layman in the path of totality with some exciting sideshows visible to the naked eye. In the instant before the Sun is entirely obscured, small flashes of light—called Baily's Beads after an English astronomer—will be seen around the forward edge of the moon as the last rays of sunlight shine through lunar valleys.
Some lucky observers may see the heaven's most beautiful sight—"the diamond ring effect." This occurs when one radiant blast of light, like a baroque sunburst, continues to shine through a deep canyon on the rim of the moon after all other sunlight is cut off.
During totality, viewers may see angry scarlet jets of flame leaping thousands of miles out from the Sun's surface against the pale background of the corona.