Viewpoint
The Battalion Wednesday
Texas A&M University may 31, 1978
Gramm’s the man
It’s going to be a close one.
The 6th Congressional District race between Texas A&M economics pro
fessor Phil Gramm and Dallas attorney Ron Godbey is going down to the
wire for this Saturday’s Democratic run-off election. The Battalion’s vote
goes to Phil Gramm.
Gramm has worked hard for almost a year to win retiring Congressman
“Tiger” Teague’s House seat. He has made himself available to the people he
would represent in Washington. But more importantly, he has taken a stand
on almost every important issue facing America today.
Voters know where Phil Gramm stands on more government
bureaucracy — he’s against it; on a stronger military — he’s for it. Gramm
understands the economic principles that can make this country work. He
has an established record in Washington as an economic expert.
Ron Godbey has not been as open with voters.
As primary candidate Don McNeil said in endorsing Gramm after the
primary: “I feel I know Phil Gramm well. I know where he stands on the
issues. I listened to Ron Godbey for eight months and I don’t know where he
stands on anything.”
For that reason our choice is Phil Gramm.
OF homestead no longer so safe
By R. MICHAEL PATTERSON
United Press International
Rural America has become vulnerable to
crime for exactly the reasons it was consid
ered safe — its supposed virtues, peace
and isolation. Hundreds of small com
munities and thousands of farms and
ranches across the nation’s heartland are
becoming easy targets for thieves.
“You name a commodity and they’re
stealing it — grain, fruit, vegetables, farm
equipment, livestock,” said Ken
Cheatham, director of local governmental
affairs and safety for the American Farm
Bureau Federation.
THE LATEST FBI crime report — a
preliminary one for 1977 — showed a 4
percent drop in the overall level of serious
crime. But it dropped only 1 percent in
rural areas, where it previously had been
rising at a disproportionate rate.
Cheatham said rural crime is increasing
two to two and a half times the rate of
urban and suburban crime, costing more
than a half billion dollars a year.
“The criminal is moving his base to rural
areas,” said Cheatham. “He’s finding out
that police forces are smaller and less ex
perienced out there.
“He’s also finding out that there’s prop
erty out there that has value. He’s working
in isolated areas that are more accessible
to being ripped off without being seen.”
“There is a clear message in current
“crime statistics,” said the Law Enforce
ment Assistance Administration. “Cities
no longer have a monopoly on serious
crime.”
HERE ARE THE reasons:
— Farm houses are often miles from the
nearest neighbor, making it less risky for
the criminal to be seen. Their isolation in
creases the response time of law officers.
— Sheriff s departments, the traditional
enforcers of law and order in rural areas,
are understaffed, underpaid, overworked
and often undertrained. Rural areas have
only 1.1 officer per 1,000 persons, com
pared to 2.2 in suburban areas. And de
puties’ salaries average only $8,930, com
pared to $10,214 average starting salaries
for urban policemen.
Commentary
— Criminals are finding that farms con
tain not only valuable household goods,
but expensive equipment and machinery
that are nearly impossible to trace.
— Improved law enforcement has made
it harder for the criminal to operate in the
city. Instead, he can drive out to the coun
try during the day when most people are
away from the house, ransack the premises
and disappear among the hundreds of
motorists driving into the city.
A Rogers County, Okla., woman who
did not want her name used said:
“THEY BROKE IN the back door and
took everything that wasn’t glued down,
except the furniture. They took the stereo
and the tape decks, the radio, the TV and
jewelry and guns. They emptied the
drawers.”
“We re simply outnumbered by the
people doing the stealing,” said Fresno
County, Calif., Sheriff Harold McKinney.
“Anytime, day or night, most of our offi
cers are at least 50 minutes away from a
crime scene and we can’t answer all the
calls because we just don’t have a large
enough staff.”
McKinney said his greatest problem is
with an estimated 8,000 heroin addicts
who reside in the county and “most of
them turn to crime to support an average
$40 per day habit.”
Dennis Emerson, assistant to the presi
dent of the Florida Farm Bureau Federa
tion, said $20.5 million worth of property
was reported stolen in rural sections of the
state in 1976 and less than $5 million was
ever recovered.
“AND THE AMOUNT reported prob
ably only represents a fraction of what was
stolen. Farmers and ranchers are probably
the world’s worst about reporting thefts,”
he said.
Emerson said one major problem in
Florida is theft of tires from tractor trailers
left parked overnight in citrus groves.
“We re talking about 18 wheels. They’re
ripping off tires like it is going out of
style.”
He said the proximity of ocean ports
enables criminals to have a piece of
machinery aboard a ship sailing to Central
or South America before the theft is even
discovered.
Most farm equipment is not identified
with a serilized number, making it ex
tremely easy for the criminal to pass off
stolen goods and difficult for law enforce
ment agencies to trace it to the original
owner.
The AFBF and Craig Beek, director of
the Iowa Bureau of Investigation, have
developed a nationwide “owner applied
number” system. It is a 10-character
number that is stamped on the equipment
to identify the owner. The numbers are
fed into the National Crime Information
Center computer.
OTHER FARMERS ARE mixing iden
tifying strips of confetti in with their grain.
“We know of cases where a thief has stolen
grain, found out it was marked grain, and
pulled off to the side of the roads and
dumped it rather than be caught with it,”
said Cheatham.
However, many farmers, who do not
view the crime problem with alarm, are
reluctant to spend the time and money to
protect their property. “It takes a very
conscientious mind to go out and mark
your equipment, and a lot of our members
just don’t think it’s that big a problem
yet,” said Gordon Hibbard, a Kansas Farm
Bureau spokesman.
“Everybody still thinks that the rural
area is a relatively safe place to live and
raise a family. Our rural people are real
trustworthy about keeping doors un
locked. They’re probably too naive.”
Law officers do not blame farmers dis
tressed over low crop prices for the crime
problem. Lubbock County, Texas, Sheriff
C.H. Blanchard said none of the suspects
arrested by his men in rural crime has
been a farmer.
“THESE CRIMINALS JUST know this
equipment is hard to trace and that we are
understaffed,” said Jack Sessums,
Sunflower County, Miss., sheriff. “They
have better radio equipment than we do.
They know where they are while we
don’t. ”
In Steuben County, N.Y., a local farm
equipment dealer built a loading ramp to
back up and unload equipment. The next
night, someone had backed up a truck and
stolen two tractors.
“In certain rural areas, the problem is
getting acute. Crime prevention measures
within urban areas are driving rural crime
to the country and they’re having a hey
day.”
Remembering Robert Kennedy
BY DAVID S. BRODER
WASHINGTON — It is ten years ago
this week that Robert F. Kennedy died,
and the memory of that slim and beguiling
man refuses to fade. Countless times these
last ten years I have caught myself think
ing, “How Bob Kennedy would have loved
this! Wouldn’t this infuriate him?
Wouldn’t that have made him laugh?”
What is it that makes one politician, of
the many who have moved across the
stage, so cherished? Not the intimacy of
the relationship, for it was not of that
character in my case. But the sense that he
was — or, more accurately, was becoming
— someone very special, calls him back
to mind.
He was the most paradoxical of people.
A damnably difficult man to interview—
given to long pauses, vacant stares,
fingernail-drumming, almost anything but
the conventional give-and-take of
journalist-and-public official.
He rebelled against the formal con
straints of that stylized transaction, as he
did against many other conventions. But
in ordinary conversation, he was some
thing else — loose, funny, angry, outrage
ous and infinitely variable.
His distinguishing quality was his capac
ity of what can only be called moral out
rage.
“That is unacceptable, ” he said of many
conditions that most of us accepted as
inevitable — so long as we and ours were
spared their damage. Poverty, illiteracy,
malnutrition, prejudice, crookedness,
conniving — all such accepted evils were a
personal affront to him.
As his vision widened, from its early
concentration on organized crime and
labor racketeering to the social problems
of this and other lands, his moral energy
was not — like most others’ — diffused and
weakened. It was a weapon he brandished
afresh on each occasion, startling a roomful
of smug medical students one day, chal
lenging a television panel the next. It was
a force he could not discipline — did not
want to discipline — and at times, it drove
him to exhaustion and incoherence.
What made him something other than
the strident scold he could have been were
two other qualities — a love of life, of dogs,
children, family, friends and fellow-
creatures, and a gift of unforced, self-
mocking humor.
On a trip through California in the au
tumn of 1966, he was, in each succeeding
speech, drawing a sharper line between
his own growing condemnation of the
Vietnam war and the policies of the man
who had succeeded his brother as Presi
dent. The tension within him and in his
entourage was reaching the breaking
point.
He was in a packed field house at Sac
ramento State University, the emotion of
the student audience at the point of ignit
ing. A young woman rose from the au-
deince, shouting, “Senator, sign my peti
tion, please.” She forced her way
forward — the audience and the press all
expectant.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a petition to the Post Office De
partment to send Christmas packages to
the soldiers in Vietnam postage-free,” she
said. He signed with a flourish, and, in the
same instant, said to the crowd, “Another
courageous decision.” No one else, I
think, would have found quite that way to
break the tension.
He cared passionately about his family,
his country and this world — and was
prepared to play his part in the drama of
his times, no matter what it might be or
what it might cost.
He wrote in the book he published in
1968: “Every generation has its central
concern, whether to end war, erase racial
injustice, or improve the condition of the
working man. Today’s young people ap
pear to have chosen for their concern the
dignity of the individual human being.
They demand a limitation upon excessive
power. They demand a political system
that preserves the sense of community
among men. They demand a government
that speaks directly and honestly to its citi
zens. We can win their commitment only
by demonstrating that these goals are pos
sible through personal effort. The pos
sibilities are too great, the stakes too high,
to bequeath to the coming generation only
the prophetic lament of Tennyson:
‘Ah, what shall I be at fifty,
Should nature keep me alive.
If I find the world so bitter.
When I am but twenty-five? ”
He was 42 when he died, and his legacy
allows no lament.
(c) 1978, The Washington Post
Inside the ’world’s richest club’
By STEVE GERSTEL
United Press International
WASHINGTON — Members of the Se
nate now have suffered for the first time
the harrowing agony of laying bare then-
personal finances. Nobody got hurt.
The forms, which senators were re
quired to fill out and then make public,
were designed in such a way that not even
a certified public accountant could figure
out the exact worth of any individual.
Washington Window
Senators only had to list the value of
specific holdings — their home, stocks,
land and others — by category.
Category IX, as an example, had to be
used for any holding between $2 million
and $5 million.
But there was no way to tell if that IX
holding represented $2 million or $5 mil
lion or somewhere between those two fig
ures.
Most senators took advantage of this bit
of camouflage, although a number made
public their exact assets and their exact
liabilities. A few even attached a copy of
their income tax returns.
If the form was designed primarily to
provide the public with information that
could disclose actual or potential conflicts
of interest — as it was — it either failed or
none exists.
It finally devolved into a gossip colum
nist’s delight and a race to see who the
richest senator might be.
Predictably, the forms showed there are
a number of multi- and multi-multi-
millionaires in what has been often de
scribed as the “world’s richest club.”
The consensus seems to be that the
richest senator is either one of two
freshmen — Sen. John Heinz, a Pen-
nyslvania Republican, or Sen. John Dan-
forth, a Missouri Republican.
That should not be surprising.
John Heinz, the third, is the heir to the
Heinz ketchup, pickle and other stuff for
tune.
The Danforth fortune derives from
Purina Ralston, which keeps animals well
fed and, obviously, allows Danforth to eat
well too.
Danforth is probably somewhat ahead of
Heinz due to a $3 million loan that Heinz
made in 1976, which he lists as an asset.
He loaned the money to his own cam
paign committee to help him get elected
to the Senate and campaign committees
are notorious for their inability to .pay
back.
Financially, it was a rotten loan. Politi
cally, it was excellent.
The most curious form advanced was
the one filed by Sen. John G. Tower, the
mini-sized Texas Republican.
According to the report. Tower owns
absolutely nothing. No home, no stocks,
no land, no savings. His liabilities are
three personal loans which at the most
would total $15,000.
An addition to the form filed by Tower
shows, at least, that the senator is not
homeless. His wife owns “our dwelling,”
Tower said, and he has no control or
knowledge about her professional or busi
ness activities or “her seperate estate.”
Another interesting sidelight, which
shows that the rich also have troubles, can
be found in the form filed by Sen. Harry
Byrd, D-Va.
Byrd, a millionaire, had to borrow
$25,000 from Shenandoah Valley National
Bank — at 9 per cent interest — to pay his
income taxes.
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Top of the News
Campus
Graduation invitations on sale
Texas A&M University students who plan to graduate this summer
may order graduation invitations in the Student Finance Center on
the second floor of the MSC. Invitation orders will be taken Monday
through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. until June 16.
Economics workshop this month
Teachers and administrators from across Texas will be at Texas
A&M University June 5-30 for a summer workshop on the American
economic system. The workshop is sponsored by Texas A&M’sCen
ter for Education and Research in Free Enterprise. It will host ap
proximately 50 participants from Texas school districts.
State
Villa's widow to visit Laredo
The widow of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa will leave her
Chihuahua, Mexico home to visit Laredo June 7 to celebrate her 86th
birthday, Felix Garcia, local director of the Texas Good Neighbor
Commission announced yesterday. Luz Corral Villa was invited by
Garcia, who flew to her home and visited her during the Memorial
Day weekend.
Effects of paraquat to be studied
The National Institute of Environmental Health has made a grant
for Dr. Miguel Medina, associate professor of pharmacology at the
University of Texas Health Science Center, to study the effects of the
highly toxic herbicide paraquat on the lungs of marijuana smokers.
Paraquat, used to destroy marijuana crops in Mexico, has caused
much concern to American smokers recently because it purportedly
has a direct and damaging effect on the lungs.
Memorial Day deaths decline
Fewer persons died on Texas highways during the long Memorial
Day holiday period this year than did the same time last year, the
Department of Public Safety said Monday. The number was just
about average for any long summer weekend, the department add
According to the DPS, 36 persons died on the state’s highways during
the 78-hour Memorial Day traffic death count. Forty-three died last
year during the Memorial Day holiday weekend and in 1976 51 per
sons died.
Texas stays neutral
Nation
Gleason hospitalized for tests
Entertainer Jackie Gleason, complaining of chest pains, has been
hospitalized in Chicago for the second time in a week for tests.
Gleason’s ailment forced a cancellation of the stage production “Sly
Fox” at the Blackstone Theater. Gleason had the lead role.
Investigators looking for source
Medical investigators hope to find the source of an outbreak of
Legionnaires’ Disease in Bloomington that killed three visitors to the
Indiana University campus and infected four more. The first inves
tigator from the federal Center for Disease Control was scheduled to
arrive yesterday to begin the search, requested by university officials
once the Atlanta-based center could confirmed the disease during the
weekend.
Court against ambulance chasing
The Supreme Court, in separate opinions yesterday, cracked down
on so-called “ambulance chasing” by lawyers. Ruling 8-0 in the case
of a Cleveland, Ohio, lawyer suspended indefinitely for soliciting two
personal injury cases, the court said it is constitutional for bar associa
tions, with state authorization, to punish such actions.
CAB proposes less regulation
The Civil Aeronautics Board, launching a new experiment in re
duced federal regulation, proposed yesterday that the airlines them
selves be allowed to decide whether to serve a particular route. The
CAB said it plans to try the new approach for the first time this
summer in creating nonstop routes between the Oakland, Calif.,
International Airport, an under-used field across the bay from San
Francisco, and up to 15 other cities across the nation.
Arizona rockslide kills man
A rockslide at the ruins of the Navajo National Monument, the
largest Indian cliff dwelling in Arizona, scattered a campsite with
debris, killing one man and injuring two others. The National Park
Service said a geologist would be called to investigate Monday’s slide.
Weather
Mostly cloudy early this morning becoming partly cloudy in
the late morning and remaining through Thursday. High
today near 90, low tonight upper 60s. High tomorrow near
90. Winds from the southeast at 15 mph. 20% chance of
thundershowers this afternoon.
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Texas took a neutral stand yesterday on whether the Supreme
Court should grant the request of an indigent inmate facing execution
that the justices appoint a lawyer to prepare his appeal. Billy Hughes,
convicted of murdering a Texas highway patrolman, sent a simple
letter to the clerk of the Supreme Court last week requesting ap
pointment of a lawyer. The Supreme Court has steadfastly refused
such requests for a lawyer to prepare an indigent’s appeal to the high
court, although in some cases it appoints counsel to present argu
ments for an indigent whose appeal already has been accepted for
consideration.
The Battalion
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