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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1962-03-01, Page 7ME FARM FRONT kuif2ussell ‘t, 2 ,„:0,s 8 1 14 1b 17 35 3b 37 13 12 19 18 ZS 42 43, 48 41 ; 53 56 aeff Zi 23 29 33 29 32. 4i 44 50 tkil 54 57 10 26 31 34 38 47 5Z 55 • ,,,, , WATCHFUL EYE-TV cam- era silently scans movement of copper ore deep in an Ari- zona mine. Device enables, one operator to control sev- eral moving belts. bring the total to 400,000 copies. Fallout on the Farm offers ad- vice to farmers on 'how to avoid the immediate dangers of fall- out from an atomic attack. It. does not go into the long-range prob- lems or the effects on future generations, it describes a nu- clear blast only to make the rec- ommendations understandable, and it emphasizes what can be done to pro tee; family and live- stock during the first :few days after an attack. Waiting For Moon To Do Its Stuff The great total eclipse of Feb. 5 has answered the prayers of American solar physicists. While millions of Asians sought to fore- stall the end of the world with offerings and sacrifices, an eight- man scientific team from the Hight Altitude Observatory at Boulder, Colo., the Sacramento Peak' (N.M.) Observatory, and the National Bureau of Stand- ards hoped to record it photo- graphically from a seashore at Lae, New Guinea. Twice before in the last five years, the U.S. team had traveled thousands of miles to record the totality and capture an unparal- leled view of the solar thromes- pher e, the little - Understood boundary between the visible disk of the sun and the encirc- ling corona. In 1958, rain wash,-, ed out the attempt from Danger Island in the South. Pacific;' a Year later in the Canary Islands, clouds masked the sun seconds before totality occurred. This time the heavens parted: "When we went out to the cam- eras after breakfast," Dr. -John Firor of Colorado eepotted, "it' was raining, At 8 A.M. the rain stopped but there were several layers of cloude. We were feel- ing terrible." Then, at 8'48 two minutes before the 162 seconds of total- ity were to begin -7.- the clouds cledred. The day became night. The pearly White corona leaped out around the black of the moon, Why all the interest i n. eclipses? Firor gives three eeae sons, First, the moon blocks out the Mein light of the sun, and petmits detailed investigations impossible at other tithes, Sec shied the moon is travelling across the face of the sen at 300 miles per second, the catneraS can be set to take thtee pictures a second and give Phetegeaplis of 100-mile areas. Finally, with thiS good, detail and fine resolution, the physical processes that go on in the eine:6'10'0116re can be anal- yzed. ""We,have enough material for decade of studY," Firer Celielticle ed Brown Rats Cost Britain Billions Wanted - a pied piper to charm the legions of brown rats, infesting country areas in. Bri- tain today, Fenland, in particu- lar, is suffering from the worst rat invasion within living mem- ory. In 1960, one of its professional rat catchers, Mr. W. A. Evans, put down eight tons of poison bait. Last year he laid an even heavier trail of rat killer. But still they come, the brown, disease-bearing, hungry hordes, roving over fields and pastures, settling in dykes and penetrating farmyards, potato fields, gran- aries and store houses. Immense, almost incalculable, damage results. These wily thieves devour thousands of tons of pig, chicken and duck food annually. Some Norfolk duck breeders, on the open field system, also suffer heavy losses of young ducks. When in the brooder stage shortly after their artificial hatching, the ducklings are kept for a fortnight behind wire mesh. Rats crawl or burrow un- derneath and sometimes drag the ducklings through the meshes, piece by piece, feasting on them in the process. Some Fen rats, giants of their species, bite cows, as they lie in their stalls on winter nights. This interferes with milk yields, so decreasing dairy supplies. Authorities say that these rat plagues occur in waves. They can. only be combated if every- one in the countryside keeps animal foodstuffs tidy and in ratproof containers or buildings. Wasted foodstuffs on Britain's farms are said to turn in an annual bill of $350,000,000 a year. Rats account for the bulk of it, and in addition they spread deadly diseases among stock. Discount Houses Going. High Hat? Discount houses, which began in vast Sheds littered with. Army surplus goods, are far from mori- bund, They, grossed an estimated $4.2 billion last year, expect to hit $5 billion this year. Nonethe- less, there is evidence that the mushrooming industry is increas- ingly weighted down with the props and circumstances of r- espectability. Items: The nation's discount operators held their first trade fair last month in Chicago. "Plain pipe racks," the symbol of loev overhead, are vanishing from many of the 3,300 discount houses across the U.S.A. And new outlets in the works-aboUt 1,000 are scheduled to be built this year will be indistinguishable from suburban department stores, with wide aisles, attractive, dis- plays, and earpeting. Bidding for ever more of the rival department stores' custom,' ers, discounters are offering ever more services. Shoppers can now ge,t clothing fitted and appliances serviced,. In many stores, they can even buy on time. Perhaps most telling, E. J, Kor- vette, Inc., the discount giant whose $180 million sales led the field last year, 'will opeti a store lie Match on New York's fancy Fifth Avenue-in the very build- ing long occupied and just vacat- ed, by that arbiter of furniture fashions, W. & S. Sloane, which has moved farther downtown, What of Korvette'S application to join the protective Fifth Avenue "Association? "KorVette intends to run this store like any other department stote," ehetigged spekesinan„ One leceird riteniber added; "I'd• rather hava tiler!!. With tie than against tii." i§gt* o 1962 Harvesting Ice From. The River Icing, day came as a welcome break in the drab monotony of these dark days. lea was a neees- eitY, not a luxury, with us. My father was a wholesale beefdealer long before the days of the big Chicago packers, Every Menday he drove to Reading, a Matter of five miles, boarded a train for Boston, took a horse-ear to Brian, ton and there at the stockyards bought a bunch of wild Texas steers, Drovers brought them on the hoof over country roads every Tuesday in the safety of the night, reaching our place Wed- nesday morning, With January my father kept Close tabs on the river for all the ice he would need. "The, Old Farmer's Ahnanac" was carefully read and weather signs were studied, I think I can quote more weather ere rhymes than any superstitious old Yankee living, They really weren't superstitions, They were compiled observatiOns of years of New England weather patterns, For our purposes we liked best An ice cake of twelve by four- teen inches, We had no equip- ment for planing, so we watched the formation of ice on the cove in the Ipswitch River for the proper thickness. The ice had to be piled tier on tier in the tall icehouse and must be, of uniform thickness to pack well, to pre- serve an even balance and pre- vent sliding. As the tiers got beyond a man's reach a horse drawn pulley was used. The job of handling the horse fell to my brother, It sometimes went into Febru- ary before we could get sufficient thickness to harvest. Once it went into March. That year the river failed to produce ice thick enough to bear the weight of horses and the necessary machinery, We had to harvest in Swan Pond-that little jewel of a lake secreted in the deep pine woods a mile back of our house, There in the se- cluded shade of the tall forest trees we harvested 29-inch ice- a difficult thickness to handle and a long hard pull over rough wood roads for the horses. But 'January was the usual month for icing, The ice house itself packed 150 tons, the dry storage at one end of the long barn cellar took about 50 tons, and the refrigerator box held 23. So, as a matter of simple arithmetic, our harvest was 228 tons. And it was handled in a night and a day. Preparations at the cove began the day before harvesting the ice, If snow had fallen on top of the clear crystal,, it had to be scraped. This was done with horses and scrapers in the after- noon. The horse-shoes all had to be sharpened at the blacksmith shop three miles away. It needed, sharp calks to prevent them from slipping on the pond ice and to give them purchase on the slip- pery snow-packed road from the cove to the hill - a pod half mile. At midnight the ice plows started work scoring the pond. By morning the 24-inch blocks were plowed, ready'to be broken up into 12-inch cakes and floated by pike pole down the channel and lifted or skidded into the sleds backed down to the river bank. Each sled carried a load of 20 Upsidedown to Prevent Peeking migr 3 COB ANOMM gel 02310mH MOW mig 0 MIENNEMOW MUM : WMU1V MEM MA Oil ODD ' UMW : MB 0E0 BM ' BOO Mu UMW@ 1100 Op ECO MEM MOO IMMO 0= MO min OEM migEOUME MUM on MUM blecke., about two tons to the trip. We usually had six two- horse sleds, seven if we could get them. And It was steady procession all day long of horses with proudly tossing heads cone SOWS of their gleaming buckles and polished harness, 0910red plumes On their bridles blowing in the brisk air hauling the load- ed sleds, the, teamsters shouting, encouragement, gay bells jang- ling, Strange as it may seem, every string of bells Is distinctive ' yet all chime and blend harmoni- ously. What magic there is in a string of sleigh bells! With cold white winter in the sky! The colder the day the better men and horses liked it, When the thermometer registered around zero the ice dried as soon as it left the water. It could be han- dled all day without the men even dampening their clothing, It slid well and, presented no problem. But if the mercury, as sometimes leapPened, ' climbed above the freezing point it spell- ,: ed tremble, eA theewater would leave two Or three feet of thin ice near shore to be bridg- ed with planks, clothing get wet and sogy, and men got thilly and morose, writes Elizabeth Hay- ward Gardner in the Christian Science Monitor. The high point of the day was reached at. 12 o'clock, The men knocked off work; bits were re- moved from the horse's mouths and feed bags tied on, Man and beast alike needed respite. The men trooped somewhat self-consciously into the old kit- chen where my mother had been busily at work all morning, A little sheepishly they dipped hot water from the copper broiler built into the back of the big stove, washed at the old iron sink and made a stab with a comb or a brush at the mirrored wall pocket. Bashfully they filed into the Middle Room where the long table waited. Martin Hayward never had any trouble getting men to har- vest the ice (though it was a job not well liked by teamsters). His wife always had a dinner they remembered from. year to year. I can smell now the mouth- watering odors, see the long table with its snow white cloth, the English china with its brown Chinese pagoda pattern, and live over again the pleasure my mother took in feeding twenty- five hungry men. Four big chines of fresh pork came from the oven, roasted to a tender golden brown perfection, quarts of good golden gravy for the snowy potatoes bursting their brown jackets, winter- squash, savory onions, fresh-baked bread or, better still, raised biscuits with generous slabs of butter, pickles sweet and pickles sour, chili sauce, piccalilli, apple, grape and barberry jelly from the cel- lar shelves. And for dessert the old New England standby no one could make better than my moth- er-berry slump, a steamed pud- ding swimming in blue-berries, drowned in vanilla sauce. To bal- ance the sweet a glass of cold apple cider from the barrel in the cellar. No man got up from that table hungry. The bells- again began their gay chimes as the endless pro- cession of iceladen sleds moved once more. As the evening star blossomed forth in the sunset sky the men once more trooped into the kitchen for the final act in the icing day parade-the pay. Then the crew of tired but happy men followed their bells down the hill and homeward, The great day we had all been waiting for was over. The ice crop was housed, for another year. We were assured of the means to preserve the meat, the milk, and the vegetables' which would feed a vast number of people in the city r of Salem for twelve months more. DRIVE WITH CARE ! WI:. Avenue was in agreement With one old-line die:cow:ter at last month's Chicago convention, 'The word discount has been mu- tilated,' he grumbled, "it doesn't mean. what it did before, Now It's just a newer mode of retail- ing." The mode is spreading, more- over, to the hard-pressed depart- ment stores, Monroe JaS,StS, pres- ident of the trade fair, said: "In department stores where they never had bargain basements he, fore, they now have them, Where they had them before, they now advertise them." "You know," said Larry Goodman, Chicago discounter who is trying to or- ganize a discounters' trade asso- ciation, "some department stores operate on less overhead than discount stores." There can't be many, Dun & Bradstreet, surveying 154 dis., count houses, found the median rate of return on capital was 19,6 Per cent-nearly doeble the rate for department stores-although the discounters' 1.3-cent profit on a $1 sale is slightly less than their rivals' 1,7-cent profit, But as overhead edges up and competition stiffens, discounters can look for some tougher times. Many agree with Edward J. Kleckner, who runs the Bell Dis- count Department Store in. Wau- kegan, Ill. He noted: "There's going to be a shakeout . . Only the best, the real merchants, will remain." Mrs, Helen Webb, New York management consultant specializing in discount retailing, observed that the field's "main flaw . . is lack of professional- ism," She has been asked to help discounters who jumped into the field from such occupations as chicken plucking, pharmacy, and scrap-metal dealing. "The discounters are going to need experienced personnel," agreed Irving Mills, president of the Govco discount house in In- dianapolis. "But they have to stay lean and hungry. If they be- come too much like department stores, top-heavy in executives, there will be another round of retailing - discounters discount- ing discounters." This "Game" Could Kill Millions It is no secret that U.S. Stra- tegic Air Command crews - and no doubt their Soviet counter- parts - constantly rehearse their deadly roles: Scrambling upon a simulated alarm, flying 36- hour missions, and "bombing" an assigned objective. Every element is as realistic as possible, with one obvious ex- ception: There is no practice over the real targets. Now, the Air Force's deadly game has been given an added refinement, Within the last fif- teen months, the Air Force has quietly planted two fields of tele- phone poles in Isolated prairies in the Western United States. One is 70 miles southeast of Rapid City, S.D., and the other is 25 miles northeast of Glasgow, Mont. Each field contains 180 poles and covers 4 square miles. Each pole is topped by prism- shaped aluminum sheets 4 feet square. By adjusting the reflec- tor angles in a carefully calcu- lated pattern, ground teams can duplicate the "radar image" of any city in the world. The trick is not unlike the flashcard patterns of college football cheering sec- tions; instead of a school insig- nia, however, the SAC patterns show rivers, factories, and entire cities. Which cities are the pilots and bombardiers practicing on? "Pro- tocol wouldn't allow me to be specific," a public-relations of- ficer answered, "but you can use your imagination," Children are wonderful mimics. They'll act exactly like their pa- rents, no matter how hard you try to teach them manners. Rev. R, 15. Warren, B.A.? B,* The Obligation to be .Trotitto1. fxedus. 3045; Matthew Ag1 33.350 got 6945a Memory Seleetion: thy, words.thoo.shatt he Justified, and by thy words thou ebelt be con,. doomed,. Matthew P:07, The nin t h commandment is often disregarded; sometimes carelessly, sometimes deliberate- ly, We have heeome so accus- tomed to blurring the truth to suit ourselves that the white of truth and the black of falsehood have intermingled to form a grey, Let us consider a few ex- amples. A man who has just ta- ken some heavy drink, tells his wife that ifthey call him to go to work, say that he is out. Now, he is 'out' alright, 'knocked gut% But he is giving instructions that are intended to •deceive, and that is lying. A call comes from the hospital to come, that the sick one has taken a turn for the worse. The next-of-kin arrives to find that the loved-one died half an hour before the call was made. Now what is gained by telling half the truth, and holding back the most significant part, We know there are circumstances when such information should not be delivered by phone, Why not just summon the person to the hospital without any misrepre- sentation. Authorities are try▪ ing to check misrepresentations in advertis- ing. Claims for the product are so often made that are contrary to fact. Many people are de- ceived, In the United States some tobacco companies have had to make drastic changes. Liquor companies are very wary. They do not make such claims as: "Guaranteed not to lead toward alcoholism," "Will make you a better driver," "Will improve your morals," "Will make you save your money for things you need." They do not make such claims. They just urge people to buy their brand. Propaganda is often a type of lying. Many people are gullible, prior to an election. But the ma- jority don't go to political meet- ings any more because of the frequent presentation of half- truths. Promises, yes; but little emphasis on th cost. Each party is conceited about their own ability. I would like to see an election run, keeping the ninth commandment in mind, and also the Golden Rule. Undoubtedly some individual politicians en- deavour to do this, But the over- all -picture is not a good one. SPRUCING UP-M i ha i lovitch, a Russian wolfhound or borzoi, gets the brush from Mrs. M. Malone, his owner, in Windles- ham, England Dog was en- tered in London show. END OF THE ROAD--The main highway between Areo and Blackfoot, Idaho, was cut ay flood waters, The Northern Rocky Mountain's worst floods in memory have left 6,000 persons homeless in six Western states. Idaho, where 4,000 have been driven from their homes, has been hit the hardest. In thie nuclear age strontium 90 has o.nome a household term and its possible contamination o', milk has been the subject of widespread speculation, Is there a danger? With each glass of milk that we drink, are we running the risk of radio- active contamination? The answer is an emphatic no! The safety of our milk supply is not in jeopardy, Why, then, have scientists teamed up to determine methods of removing strontium 90 from milk? And why focus attention on milk, rather than other foods? One reason for using milk as a measure of strontium 90 is that samples can be taken throUghout the year representa- tive of a large volume of pro- duction over a wide area. Thus, it is common to see figures about the ,strontium 90 level in milk. a 4, 11. There is another important consideration. People are dis- turbed about strontium 90 in milk because of the large con- sumption of milk by children. Actually, milk is one of the safest foods so far as strontium. 90 is concerned. Cows take into their systems only five per cent of the strontium 90 they ingest and secrete only a fifth of that five per cent in their milk. The danger of humans getting strontium 90 from milk produced by cows eating contaminated grass is infinitesimal compared with the danger from humans eating leafy' vegetables which have had the same amount of contamination. * * * Furthermore, strontium 90 is depcisited in the bones, as is cal- cium. The more calcium one eats, the less strontium 90 will be taken up by the bones, Since milk is high in calcium, this is a further safety factor as far as humans are concerned. * * * Canada pioneered research in the removal of strontium 90 ftom milk. Three year's ago, Dr. B. B. Migicovsky, a scientist on the staff of the agriculture depart- ment's research branch, discov- ered a method of removing this long-lasting contaminant. T h e United States Department of Ag- riculture became interested in this Canadian research and car- ried it through the pilot plant stage. Under,Dr. Migicovsky's system, upwards of 98 per cent of the strontium 90 that gets into milk can be removed. It is a highly teclutical filtering process whiCh leaVes treated milk relatively un- changed with respect to compo- sition and flavor. The method in- volves the use of certain Chemi- cals known technically as ion- exchange resins. Preseht levels of strontium 90 in the world are so minute they can hardly be measured. The need to remove it from any food product does not exist today. It is :still comforting to khoW that should the need ever arise,. Dr. Migicovsky's technique for' ridding. Milk of this component Of radioactive fallatt could be quickleeput into effect on ft coin- therbial beets, * Valhi* ein the, taint is to be reprinted: This "beet free book- let, prepated bysthe Canada lie- Pertinent of Agriculture et the request of the Emergency tires Organization, has been ih steady derriatiel cation, in APril f 1961. The' first 200,000 copies' have been Tdise tribute& arid English, and Erendet editierie will be reprinted RIG IJULLY-DOtil What' look' like betWeeti two mechanical` monsters actually is the result Of freak accident. The small bulidOzer Waa being used to help Weidbl. &tell the Niter OS If fried to lift Re block-lend boorii, This boorri Was too heavy, and the Weight lifted the cub off the dibUnd, With the little' one trailing behind iri Dallas, TeX, CROSSWORD 121 1:.7pn°.dnaborigine person to a chUreh ging so. Resolving 35. Con terriptible into elements 10, Better looking (slang) PUZZLE 11. Mournful 111. Recreational , 26, 39 stilt Snow runners ACROSS 57. 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