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HomeMy WebLinkAboutClinton News-Record, 1974-03-14, Page 44.--C1,INTON NEWS-RECORD, TRUIISDA..;', MARCH 14, 1974 How is a 260-10 bulldozer driver like a 109,4b college co-ed? If you expect the answer to be a joke, it isn't—It's a miracle,' Both can, be blood donors, and each donation is of equal value,. $1ze, strength or sex doesn't matter. Neither does race, creed or _colour. Every .blood donation. is. of equal value. Each can save a life. So the next time you think about the state of the world, and despair that one person can change anything, remember the equality of blOod donations. One donation does matter. Every donation matters. There is something you can do to make the world a better place in which_ to ,live. You don't have .to be wealthy; you do have to be healthi. You don't, have to be as strong as . Tarzan; you do have to be .between 18 and 65 years of age (17 if you're a boy and have Guest opinion your parents' permission). You doni have to be as beautiful as.Helen of Troy; you do need a nice' hemoglobin count. You don't need hours and hours of spare time, you dO need one-half hour each three months. •The Red Cross has been operating the blood transfusion service for 26 years and they haven't lost a donor yet! Being a blood donor isn't difficult or painful or costly (it's not fattening either!) You get a nap on a bed, a free cup of coffee, cookies, and the thanks of all of the clinic workers. But you get something else too. There's no way to beat that warm in- ner glow you get from doing a 'job you know matters. During March, Red Cross month, be a part of the action. Support your local Red, Cross. Editorial Comment . Bulldozers, blondes and :Woad We sell advertising The old men - MI MI all The Jack Scott Column - Stock piling If a loaf of bread is needed,,you go to the grocer; if a roast of beef is required you visit the supermarket or the butcher. If your car needs servicing you take it to the automobile mechanic. If your tresses don't suit you you visit the hairdresser or the barber. Each of them has a product or service to sell, as has everyone in business. However, no one would think of asking for their bread or meat for nothing. Neither would they expect the services of the hairdresser, the barber or the auto mechanic free. We also have a product, as do all newspapers. Our newspaper's product is publicity, delivered to our subscribers' homes and businesses in the form of ad- vertising space. But unfortunately many people expect this for nothing. In this day and age of high costs, run- ning a newspaper is an. expensive business. There's, ritithing.7.!.ici.' indicate • now that the cost' spiral is gOirig to end or even slow down in the foreseeable future. No one picks up any deficit we may in- cur as is the case with the CBC, a direct competitor for advertising revenue, yet needs have very little concern for a balanced budget. The Canadian tax payer will pick up the tab at the end of the year. We are not as fortunate. Our adver- tising revenue must carry the ball in covering overhead costs and replacing equipment. We cannot do this by giving away the prime product we have to sell - advertising. Subscription revenue contributes only a fraction of the revenue needed to defray costs of production. Many promoters seem to have the idea that because it is a charitable or some other worthy cause and because they are working on a voluntary basis that The Post should donate the publicity either in the form of a free ad or with a story that is nothing more than an adver- tising message. 'Countless worthy causes: are promoted by scores,of organizations in,' the area. All of them, in the eyes of their' promoters merit special publicity. And they get it generously - we feel - from The Post. (from the Hanover Post) Sugar and Spice/By Bill Smiley The old bandits were more colorful From our early files . • • • • • • Amalgamated 1924 TILE CLINTON NEW ERA Es tablished 1865 THE HURON NEWS-RECORD Established 1881 "Itit HOW Olt NADA* IN CAP:ADA" Member, Canadian Community Nowspapor Association Clinton News-Record Published every Thursday at• Clinton, Ontario Editor - James E. Fitzgerald General Manager, ' J. Howard Aitken Second Claes Mall regletratiOn no. 0617 HUB Of HURON st, Member, Oats*, Weakly Nowspayme Association P"."' we get letters Have you noticed the big change in the world of big capitalism in the past couple of decades? The personnel in the inner sanctum of 'high finance is just as piratical as that of the rob- ber baron days, but the things' they wheel and deal in are vastly different. The bad old boys, the Fords and the Rockefellers, the J. P. Morgans and the Andrew Car- negies, were giants of. finance, and a pretty unscrupulous lot, from all accounts. They dealt with solid, tangible assets: steel and coal, oil, minerals, railways and banks. Their techniques were roughly similar. Get hold of something as cheaply as possible, and dispose of it for as much as possible. And never pay a working man more than the absolute minimum. A sim- ple formula, but it piled up millions, then billions, Today, their names are con- nected with great philan- thropies, but' when they were alive, their names produced more curses than blessings. They fought the unions bitterly. They bribed and bullied and stole. They'd have laughed at the idea that their depredations were destroying the ecology. They'd have had apoplexy if someone had suggested something as ridiculous as fringe benefits. It's probably just as well'they have gone, though they were a colorful lot of bandits. Today's entrepreneurs seem to be just as arrogant, greedy, and ruthless, but the things they deal in have changed almost completely. Banks and railways and airlines are still highly profitable, but they are no longer the financial playthings of .a few Men, They have become exceedingly dull, huge bureaucracies with little life or colour in them. The new breed of banditti steers clear of them. Oh, your modern wheeler might take a flurry in oil, but it's more likely to be floating a stock issue than getting the stuff out of the ground. Today's financial magnate is far more interested in the half- world of sports and entertain- ment, than he is in just old things, like mines and such. He still goes where the big buck is, but the action has changed. Nowadays, he's more likely to own a prize-fighter or a string of horses than a chunk of a copper mine. Today's big money is in publishing, radio and television, and sports. And the really big money is in land speculation. Your old- time financier would have been stunned, and envious, could he see the doubling and tripling of money in the buying and selling of plain old land. So, it's in the areas men- tioned that you'll find the modern sharks, in large schools, gobbling up the little suckers and regurgitating them for all the slightly larger suckers. Another big change is in the publicity involved. The magnates of yesteryear were very close-mouthed. They kept their private lives as secluded as possible, retreated to vast homes and tried to keep the press at arms length, Today's maggots (oops, a Freudian slip) glory in the limelight. They are never hap-' , pier than when they have the media speculating about their next deal. They manipulate the press. After' all, every story, every picture, drives up the price of whatever they're selling, and is also gteat for the ego, They'll call a press con- ference to discuss a pending operation for an in-grown toenail. Even P. T. Barnum, the greatest con man of them all, would be green with jealousy if he could see the way some of the modern con artists ' use every trick• he ever knew, and some they've invented, to sucker people into watching a third-rate sports team, or a third-rate prize fight. There's one other aspect of the great scramble for the buck that has changed drastically. That's the relationship with the people working for the big dealers. In the, bad old days, when laissez-faire reigned supreme, it was the accepted custom to grind the worker down, and sweat the very life-blood out of him, to wring the last cent of profit. Today the worm has turned particularly in sports. All you need, if you're a pretty good athlete, is a good lawyer, and you can put the boss through the wringer. Can you imagine the look on the face of J. P. Morgan if someone could tell him that athletes, mere bodies, were pulling in salaries in six figures? This last aspect would seem to be a Matter for sheer joy for most of us—watching the' bosses being squeezed by the workers.. But alas. It won't do us any good, fellow sucker. The boss will merely raise the price of admission and won't lose a nickel of his own money, Sounds like the government, doesn't it. When everything costs them more, they raise our taxes to pay for the increases. When everything costs us more, they raise the taxes as a curb against inflation, Get in line, sucker, for the next increase in the price of tickets. Somehow, with all their faults, I like the old bandits better: I suppose there is not a village in the world that does not have a place where the old men gather under a shade tree ' to look' back down the years and speak of their philosophy. In the village that I know best, there is a bench a few yards south of the general store and post office, a place agreeable even in early Spring to an old man's bones, and I stop there when I can. The world would be a hap- pier place if we listened more to the old men and, in Whitney Balliett's words, their "rumination beneath the elms:" But this is the age of youth-worship. The man of the hour is the man of action. Con- templation is a lost art. It is only in the last year that I have made this discovery. Befoie that I looked on the old men as characters, old dodos lost in reminiscence and so in another world. As most younger men' dd, I grosity un- derestimated the shrewdness and the common sense of their maturity. Then one day I sat on the bench and listened like a 10 YEARS AGO March 12, 1964 Twelve students from CHSS are to participate in an ex- change trip with Milwaukee Nicolet High School. Along with the 12 from Milwaukee there are to be two foreign students, one from Denmark and the other from South Africa. The two students are at- tending Nicolet as part of the Foreign Exchange Service sponsored by the U.S.A. govern- ment. Mrs. Flynn, RR 2, Clinton, had a few pictures of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant in her home this week. Mrs. Flynn purchased an old second-hand chair from Wholesale Fur- niture and Appliance, Clinton last fall. This week Mrs, Flynn found an old wallet in the chair's stuffing. Inside the wallet there was $542 in Con- federate money dating 'back to 1861, 1862 and 1864 of the American Civil War days. The bills were all marked "First. Series" and carried many phrases On them. One signature ' on a bill was that of Duncan Richmond. Marilyn Marshall, RR 1, Kirkton, has been awarded one of four 11-week Junior Farmer Travelling Scholarships to Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The scholarship, which is sponsored by the Ontario department of Agriculture, is the highest award given to a member of the Junior Farmers' Association. , 25 YEARS AGO March 12, 1949 Miss Ruby V. Irwin, a'Clin- ton merchant, is having a won- derful time on her boat cruise which began the first part' of February. So far, ,she has visited Buenos Aires, Allen." dna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Trinidad, the Canal Zone, Jamacia, Cuba and many other places. She is expected home within a fortnight. Huron County farmers pur- chased a number of bulls at the auction sale held in Toronto. William Turnbull and Son, Brussels, paid $810 for the grand champion bull at the disciple to two sep- tuagenarians. One of the men, aged 78, had brought along a clipping of a philosophical essay by George Santayana and read a par- ticular paragraph that had ap- pealed to him strongly. "I am happy in mental idleness with manual work," Santayana had written. "I envy the housemaids, so com- mon in Southern Europe, who sing as they scrub. I feel that there is something sane and comfortable in the old women who sit knitting or turning over the roasting chestnuts at the street corners. I like to spend drowsy hours drawing, cleaning or making something or even mending my clothes, Pleasant is solitude among manageable things." This, said the old man, was a good lesson in contentment. He, himself, he said, had just returned from : spending two weeks with 14,s` daughter and son-In-law and their three children in the city and it had been a disturbing experience. "They aren't contented show which preceded the auc- tion sale. R.E. Thompson RR 2 Clinton purchased a good Hereford bull, a son of the famous "Peter Mischief" bull. Mr. and Mrs. J.A. McCool, Windsor, visited over the weekend at the home of the lat- ter's father. Thomas Miller, Londesboro, who celebrated his 80th birthday on Sunday, March 13. Mr. Miller has retur- ned with them to Windsor for a short visit. H.H.G. Strang, Hensall, past president and director for Huron, Perth and Bruce Coun- ties on the Ontario Crop Im- provement Association. direc- torate was presented with the trophy for the highest aggregate in the show. In second place was ' Fred Bell and family, which consists of his seven children, who helped prepare the entry. • 50 YEARS AGO March 13, 1924 Clinton's oldest native-born citizen attained his eighty-fifth year on Saturday. Mr, Gibbings received many messages of congratulations on this oc- ' casion but owing to the fact that he has not been in the best of health the usual birthday gathering was postponed until a later date. • people," he said. "They've not learned to find happiness in simple things. Their whole life is spent looking into the future, worrying about a promotion for the husband and more possessions for their home.' I was glad to leave." "The trouble with most people," said the second old man, "is that they do not know what they want from life. They don't stand back from them- selves, as it were, and make an assessment of what they have and what they want." The first old man, who af- fects an air of magnificent can- tankerousness and is the best- refit! man I know, said, "This is the age of discontent. I grow weary of reading that people of these days are under great mental stress and that 'the times' have made them unhappy. Writers make it sound like a disease of cattle. Yet the truth is the same as it, has: always been: 'a man must . find happiness for himself, as an individual, and not expect to inherit it." "That is true," the other Mr. Fred C. Elford, well- known poultry expert in this area, is leaving early to attend a conference in Spain. He also expects to attend the British Empire Exhibition in London. His wife' and sister Mrs. Birks will accompany him. The old Hospital on Victoria Street has been sold ,to Mrs. McCallum of town who will get possession shortly. It is the .in- tention of the purchaser to run a boarding house and serve meals to the general public. Last Friday, Miss McTavish, nurse, sold her home to Mr. John Merritt, of London who gets possession the middle of May. Mr. Lutton is now living in the house till May. The Hon. GeOrge S. Henry, Ontario Minister of Public Works and Highways has an- nounced a change in the method of financing the plan- ting of trees along public high- way. Instead of sending out its own workmen he says the Government has a scheme Whereby farmers planting trees in front of their own property will be bonused so much per tree for planting. 75 YEARS AGO March 16, 1899 Ford and Murphy have sold their butchering business to agreed, "The things that make people unhappy are greed and ambition and envy and they are not characteristic of any age. The 'difference is that nowadays people do not look inward to themselves for the answer. They diagnose their trouble As something universal and without a cure." "They had a poll in Britain," said the other, "in which one out of every -10 boys at univer- sity said that they felt sure they could qualify as inmates of mental asylums. That's the sickness of today. And they run to the psychiatrists to .get a name for it instead of looking for the causes within them- . selves." "They could find it in San- tayana or, better, in Thoreau," said the other. "It takes a struggle and a lonely one to get a set of values." So they talked on, themselves the pictpre of contentment, yet each a man absolutely alone in the world, existing on an austere pension and possessing very little but the clothes on his back. Mr. Charles Wilson who takes possession Monday. They have been in partnership for about four years and have built up a good steady trade. Goderich harbour is to be deepened so that it will be possible to admit the largest grain vessels now trading in the upper lakes. Under this im- provement, Goderich is expec- ted to become headquarters for the manufacture of flour, both for home consumption and ex- port to Europe. Mr. Robert White of Grey is to be working in the summer with Ed Walters and has moved into the house formerly occupied by Mrs. Cudmore in West Tuckersmith. Miss Pearl Evans, youngest daughter of. Mr. George Evans of the Chemical Salt Works in Goderich, received a photograph of the Canadian Knight Sir Charles Tupper af- ter presenting him with a bouquet of flowers. Mrs. W. Smith left Chicago on Feb. 28th, after a long visit with her daughter) Mrs. Field of that city. There was no snow in Chicago until Mrs. Smith was leaving and it followed her all the route. She then stayed in London for awhile and retur- ned home on Monday last. Save, it s Dear Editor: I was with the grade eight class that made a tour through the town hall of Clinton, and I- can't understand why anyone would want it torn down, 'The auditorium, though falling apart now, must have been beautiful years ago. Maybe a 14 year-old girl would not understand, but I feel it could be beautiful again. "What would we use it for"? you ask. Well, it could be used for badminton tournaments like it was before, dances, fo young people and grown-ups, o other things that might corn up. meetings, it could be used for that too, if you could take tim to put up a few tables and chairs. The courtroom could moved to the auditorium, and moved out again if a dan takes place. What is now th courtroom could' be changed into offices. ' I know that the fire depart- ment is 'cramped for space, bu I'll let someone else get idea for that. These are just the ideas of 14-year-old, but I hope you'l take them into consideration. know many grownups has+ 'never been in the town hall an those who have, might feel th same way about it as I do. Yours Sincerely, Bonnie Van Kiesen, Clinton. Preserve it Dear Editor The February 28 issue of th News-Record poses th question concerning the fate o the Town Hall. That building and many other commercia buildings in town, have th distinctive architecture o another era, and aestheti value of considerable merit. Unfortunately, many of these buildings have been modified in order to 'make them more functional and modern, and the resulting appearance is unfor- tunate. The photograph of the Town Hall illustrates the point. Although not a resident of Clinton, I am here frequently, pay wages and taxes, am in- terested in the town, and therefor submit a suggestion for consideration. Let the town fathers and merchants look at what has been done in Niagara on the Lake and then ask them- selves if they wish to accom- plish a similar result here. I am confident the historical society would be delighted to assist with appropriate ar- chitectural guidance. What a great centennial project this could be. Cordially, W.D. Heintzman President Sherlock- Manning Piano Co. Limited, Collect 'it Dear minor: This is a letter of thanks to the people of Clinton for being so generous in their con- tributions to the Canadian Heart Fund during our present campaign and also a sincere thank you to the Order of The Eastern Star for the wonderful job they did in canvassing the townspeople. To date, in total, we have received $711 from Clinton which will go a long way in helping us reach our overall Middlesex-Huron objective. The research work being done by the Heart Foundation is of increasing value in our time and those of you who have sup- ported us so generously can rest assured that your money will be put to good works. Yours sincerely, O.M. Fuller Chairman London Chapter. Hetwollsoord waders Nis en- couraged to uprose their opinions In letters to the editor, however, web opinions do not necessarily represent Hie opinions of the Neese-ReoOrd. Peudowime may be used by letter writer, but no Mier we be published unties It can be verified by phone. Remember, you can't regulate the weather, but you can your driving, says the On- tario Safety League.