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PAGE 2 — WEST CRAVEN HIGHUGIITS — JUNE 29. 1989 V, AIL Our Opinion INDS @ Why Was Not A Compromise Sought On Minimum Wages? The South Siapped Again As Democrats Choose Team by: Call L Roberson t There is nuthini; in this world that I enjoy more than a long, hot, undisturbed hath. It is n luxury that relaxes and soothes a tired mind and body. Hut I did not nlwnys like to bathe. As a child, I remember being dragged to my bath kicking and screaming by both a mother and grandmother who even then, some times had to solicit the help of a passerby. Getting me clean must have been a nightmare for my mother in those days. Today, I stay so long in the tub that I resemble a wrinkled red prune when 1 nimlly do emerge. The history of battling is ns interesting ns a bath is cleansing. I once took it for granted that the whole world alwayscleaned up with soap and w.iter. Never in my wildest dreams did I realize, until a few years ago, that bathing was so complicated for so many people. Some bathers, long ago. spent more time in bath water just for one bath than my mother-in-law’s cucumliers being pickled all summer by the oldest recipe in the house. Bathing is a through-the-ages luxury as well as serious activity for cleansing, ritual, relaxation, nourishing and conditioning. Visit most any store today to witness the hundreds of accessories just for a bath. Beautiful women h-ive always had their personal bathing rituals. Cleopatra bathed in absolutely nothing but the milk of horses, which shebelieved kept her skin smooth and soil. Nero’s wife did the same. When she was finally asked to leave Rome, she took 40 horses with her for this purpose. Chinese queens added oranges to their baths for invigorating fra grance. Marie Antoinette used buttermilk in her baths, also steep ing it with wild thyme and marjoram. Madame Tallien, acclaimed beauty from the age of Nepolean, fdled her tub with pounds of squashed berries, and other women of her time used the oils of mil lions of crushed rose petals added to their water. Mary Queen ofScots bathed in pure red wine. Her entire tub was fdled with it. The Romans tossed sprigs of lavender into baths to scent the water and disinfect it. Community bathing was popular in those days too. The entire town bathed together in one large pool without concern to clothing or discretion. In the summers of my youth, we had no indoor bathroom, and thus relied upon wash tubs fdled with hand drawn water in which to bathe. Winter meant moving the tubs to the pantry floor which was first lined with newspaper to absorb the splashes. But, in the sum mer, my mother sat the tubs out in the back yard and filled them with water which was warmed by the sun as we worked in the fields all day. When we got home that night, my four brothers and I would each have a warm bath waiting. I remember when our bathroom was finally installed, 1 crawled into that huge tub and thought I had died and gone toheaven. But no bath will ever compare to the one 1 took in a ditch at the back of my daddy’s farm. I was 17 that summer, young and carefree and given over to constant fits of spontaneous living. I flung my clothes across a vine and stepped into a foot deep of ciystal clear water. A swift little current moved the water around in tiny whirlpools. Clean sand packed the bottom. For lather, 1 used wild soapwort plant growing along the bank. A handful rubbed vigorously in the water provided all the suds 1 needed. Lush ferns curtained me from the rest of the world as I bathed in luxuiy divine. Crystal water, blue skies over head, and the warmth of the sun as my drying towel. 1 will never forget that special bath, and often long to escape to such glorious freedom once again. Bathing. A through-thc-ages luxury that involves a great deal more than just soap and water. President Bush gave a clear-cut warning to Congress that if it sent him a bill embodying a minimum wage of $4.55 per hour, he would give it a quick veto. He did exactly that. He vetoed the bill within the hour after re ceiving it. Now it is impossible for us to know what is right, what is wise, and what is practical when it comes to how much to pay for la bor. We do know that many small business operations will be hurt at $4.55 per hour. Now President Bush said clearly that he would approve of a bill setting the minimum wage at $4.25 per hour. Thus, there is a 30 cents diflerence playing a big role in the thinking involving the pres ident and Congress. Of course, the presidential veto could be overridden if two-thirds of the voting members of each house cast their ballots to override. But that is most unlikely to happen. ’The veto surely will be sus tained, if not in the House, it will be in the Senate. What concerns us right now is why Congress would spend all the time debating and passing a bill calling for the $4.55 per hour mini mum wage when a certain presidential veto stared them squarely in the face. Why was not some compromise sought? We do not know what the president would do with a half way point of $4.40 per hour. But such a compromise apparently was not sought and not discussed. In fact, under the circumstances, labor would have been served better had Congress gone along with what the president said he would sign which was the $4.25 per hour wage. We read the arguments in Congress that “the veto is ofTensive to the working people of America.” But we wonder which one is most guilty of being offensive, the president for his veto or the Congress for its failure to try to reach a practical compromise. If one cannot realize a whole loaf, then a piece of loaf is better than none at all. The present minimum wage law is set at $3.35 per hour. It was set at that figure in 1981. Mr. Bush in his veto message says that the $4.55 per hour bill “will hurt those it is designed to help.” He also says that it will ham per the young people in their quest for jobs. This is the first major issue to be vetoed by President Bush. Know ing that a veto was sure, it seems that Congress has placed itself in a hard and fast position whereby compromise is out of order. A lot of time andefforthave gone into a measure which just about everybody realized that failure was coming. The veto is a powerful weapon. Congress is a powerful legislative force. When the two clash, America is not served too well as a rule. A compromise on this issue appears to us to be both wise and practical. Nero fiddled, Rome burned, and those who supposedly held posi tions of leadership stood by as voting spectators and watched the blaze. We speak of the new Democratic party team elected in the United States House of Representatives. For some time now, rank and file Democrats in the South have held the feeling that they were being pushed aside, looked upon as unneeded, and actually told to get out of the way and let the liberal train take over. The newly elected Democratic team in the U.S. House consists of Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, Majority Leader Richard Ge phardt of Missouri, and Majority Whip William Gray of Pennsylvania. This is one of the few times in this century that a Southerner has not been in the top echelon. In 1973 Majority Leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana was killed in a plane accident in Alaska. Back in 1920 for a short while the South was unrecognized on the team. It has now happened again and at a time when the Democratic party needs the South far more than the South needs the Democra- tic party. Admittedly, the rank and file people of the South tend to be more conservative than the New Englanders or the people living along the mid-Atlantic or Pacific coast. All the members now of the Democratic leadership team are liberals. There might be more to the story than really meets the naked eye. After all, in the last election the old Confederate states, as they are often called, voted for George Bush for president. If the election was a case of recognition of states, then if the states of the South are to be punished for voting for Mr. Bush, then let it be said that the home states of the present team also supported Mr. Bush over Michael Du kakis. Washington, Missouri and Pennsylvania were all in the Bush column. ’Then as the team was being elected, we find no stories regarding any effort on the part of Southern congressmen to gain recognition for an area which step by step is being relegated to a political step child. And surely we do have some mighty capable congressmen liv ing in our part of this nation. If this be a liberal versus conservative fight, then let it be adngit- ted that the liberals have won by a landslide. But Democrats can never win the presidency again by casting out the conservatives. So long as Democratic presidential candidates are the hand picked choices of Senator Ted Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, and people of that political faith, then the South will continue to resist at the polls. Right now in our Congress, insofar as the South is concerned, we have no one in a leadership post. The talk making the rounds of “oh, well, we are going to create a leadership post and name a Souther ner” hardly suffices. The South does not need something it has not earned. The South should not want a position given to us merely for the looks of the picture. Bassin* with the pros Letters To The Editor Southern Seen By l^RRY MCGEIIEE A lingering myth about the Civil War is that the South was solidly united in favor of secession—with the exception of West Virginia, east Tennessee, and portions of the non seceding southern states of Mary land. Kentucky, and, Missouri. However, judging from the fact that some states seceded much later than others, it has long been sus pected that anti-Union sentiment was not ns universal ns assumed. Daniel W. Crofls has put statistics l>ehind those suspicions in Reluc tant Citnfederates (University of North Carolina Press, 19ft9). This is a study of the Upper South pro unionists who resisted secession right down to the wire, until after Ft. Sumter was fired U|x>n and war declared. The election of Lincoln was not the straw that broke the camel’s back, but the calling of 100,000 northern trocips probfibly was. This book is masterful proof that little about the War w’as black and while, and even the Confed erate gray came in many shades. Some of that ambivalence is evi dent in Ray C. Colton’s The Civil IVar»« the Wtv/er/i 7*er/-i7orie5 (Uni versity of Oklahoma Press, 1959), recently re-released in paperback. Colton concentrates on Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah. Ex cept for a few popular western n»o- ries, not much attention has been given to the War out on that farflung frontier. He finds evidence that the Confederates tried to enlist Spanish-Americans, Mexicans, Mormons, and the Indians in win ning that territory and forcing Cali fornia, by isolating it, to secede, too. Then, w’ith the gold and silver of the area in southern hands, the War could be financed and won. We know how the story ends, of course, but it is go(Ml to discover the forgotten ar mies of the West. 7'hc Rlernentif of Confederate De feat (University of Georgia Press paperback, 1989) is a good book to imve if you eiyoy ponderi ng why the War was lost or what might have been if certain things had not hap- ))ened ns they did. It is also a go^ Ikook to have ifyou missed the larger and more expensive hardback, Why the South LoRt the Civil War, of which this is an abridged version. This one reads almost ns well as the first, for half the price. Tlie impor tance of militaiy strategy learned at West Point plays a vital role in the assessment, ns does the factor of wrill-power. R^ Gragg has put together a rather unusual book, Illus trated Confederate Reader (Harper & Row, 1989). He uses extracts of letters, diaries, and memoirs from soldiers, many of them ordinary sol diers of the line. Each selection is il lustrated with photographs from the period, carefully matched with the text. Just the assembling of the photos is commendable research, but Gragg has gone beyond that, of ten finding photographs of the ac tual writers themselves, in their un iforms. The words take on special flavor when one can see the writers behind them. For more visual images from the Civil War, thereisAn A/6umo/‘Ciw7 War Battle Art (An Applewood Book, 1988). The selections are well cho sen, mostly from drawings and prints, with a few photographs. Un fortunately, the paper used is an iv ory- color and has no gloss to it, which blurs the black-and-white sketches. Furthermore, many of the prints of the Currier & Ives type were originally in color but are not shown that way here. One gets a nice feel for what art there was and appreciates that there was more of it than we have thought, but the feel for how it actually looked is lost in transition. The same publisher makes quick amends by offering a small but at tractive little book that is really a re print from the Civil War days. It is called Hospital Sketches (Applew ood Books, 1986), and it is by Louisa May Alcott, better know as the au thor of Little Women. It appears to have been first published about 1863 and reissued in 1869. Drawn from her letters, these are impressions from Miss Alcott’s months ns a volunteer nurse. Walt Whitman had his own descriptions of the same hospital rooms Miss Al cott served. If one recalls how very reluctant were both sides of the War to allow women to serve ns nurses and how primitive the medical ser vices were, despite the efforts of the new Sanitation Commission, the book is especially poignant. It is a northern version of that Atlanta railway yard hospital made famous by Scarlet O’Hara and Prissie. Charlie Reed remembers the day he pulled into a service station to fuel his truck when a stranger, rec ognizing him as the winner of the 1986 BASS Masters Classic, asked him where he’d been. Reed answered that he didn’t know. Worse than that, he wasn’t really sure where he was, either. Td been on the road driving or fishing different tournaments for 30 straight days,” remembers the po pular Johnson Outboards Pro Staff member, ‘and 1 was totally ex hausted mentally and physically. I really couldn’t remember where I’d just been, because all the days had started becoming just a blur.” Welcome to the real world of pro fessional tournament bass fishing. ‘It’salifeoftravel,of driving 12to 16 hours a day to get to a tourna ment,” explains Reed, ‘followed by six physically grueling days of fish ing, followed by another long drive home. ‘You don’t fish professionally for the money. You do it because you love the competition, the challenge of fishing, and the learning experi ence it provides.” Reed fishes 12 professional tour naments annually, and in so doing puts a minimum of40,000 miles on his outomobile and boat trailer. He spends between four and six months worth of nights in motels. He spends the same amount of days standing in the bow of his bass boat, regard less of the weather. ‘My wife Voljai fishes the ladies professional bass tournaments,” says the Johnson pro, ‘and we each go to the other’s tournaments to lend support. We do rigorous calis thenics each morning, as well as a lot of walking, to stay in good physi cal condition. I also do light weight training.” One of the biggest problems Reed has is schedule adjusting, since his and Voljai’s tournaments often run in consecutive weeks. ‘I can remember being in New Mexico with Voljai where she won a national tournament,” says Reed, ‘but I had to be in Missouri the next day to b^n mine. “There wasn’t any way to drive that distance, so we hired someone to take my boat for me, and we flew out as soon as Voljai’s tournament ended. ‘On another occasion, Voljai’s tournament in Arkansas ended on a Friday and we had to be in New York for mine Saturday. Again, it was a case of getting someone else to drive my boat up while we flew. “There really are times when I wake up and can’t remember which city I’m in, or which city I’ve just left.” The satisfaction in such a hectic travel schedule comes in the recog nition from youngsters who not only ask for autographs but who also re quest fishing information, says Reed. “For me, signing just one auto graph and seeing a young angler smile is enough to forget all those long hours of driving or standing up there in my boat fighting waves, heat or rain,” says the Johnson pro. CANCER INFORMATION SERVICE AT DUKE 1-800-4-CANCER Let us help y ou }tei the facts. Free. Dear Editor: Over the past several weeks I have had several calls from consti tuents about the new Safe Driver Improvement Plan that was based on legislation we passed during the 1987 session of the General As sembly. This legislation made sev eral important changes in North Carolinalaw that affectour automo bile insurance. One of the most important things thischange makes is that it exempts most minor traffic violations from the Reinsurance Facility recoup ment surcharge, provided there is a clean driving record for the previous three years. This ‘forgiveness” of minor violations for people with safe-driving records is important in protecting you from drastic auto in surance premium increases. Another provision of this new law protects consumers who now wish to pay the out-of-pocket costs for minor property damage they cause with out being subject to the Facility re coupment surcharge. This means that ityou have a fender-bender and you feel it would be better for you to pay for the property damage rather than have the recoupment sur charge, which is 41 percent, added to your outo insurance premium; you will still be charged insurance points based on the amount of the property damage, but the insurance companines can no longer add the surcharge when you choose to pay this cost instead of filing a claim against your insurance. This new plan addressed a prob lem that many rural consumers had complained about revising the rat ing factors to reduce the cost for peo ple who regularly commute more than 10 miles to work. Other changes that consumers had requested include an exemption for law enforcement officers, fire men and rescue squad workers from the recoupment surcharge on their personal auot policies when they cause accidents while responding to emeigencies. I felt that based on the number of questions coming into my office many of you would be interested in knowing more about the Safe Driver Improvement Plan. Ifyou have any questions or would like more infor mation, please feel free to contact my office. Have a good week. Rep. Beverly Perdue 3rd House District A Gift that remembers... ^ When you lose someone dear to you-or when a special person has a birthday, quits smoking, or has some other occasion to celebrate-memorial gifts or tribute gifts made for them to your Lung Association t help prevent lurtg disease and improve the care of those suffering from H. AMERICAN LUNG ASSOCIATION Th« Cnr umas Se«i Ptoot * P.O. Box 1407, GrumMe. NC 27835 CRAVEN COUNTY NUSINESS AND SERVICES Tolar & Son Garago Ovmet k Opoioiot tools Toloi Custom Eilijutt t Muffltrs Rudlitor ■ Transmission ( Motor Sereict Hwy 17, 3 milpo North of Vancoboro 24 Hour Wrockor Sorvico 244*12S3 ^ tM MIQOit ST. m« aiaii, ma. mm* ttLtFHONt «l7-4eM Gjoux Q^lamonJ£loxe 244-1381 H. M. B. Morris Plaza Vanceboro Complete Family Insurance Coverage Form Life Florist OFFICE 244-2S19 After Hours Call: Elva 244-1036 Jean 244-0847 Eve Ann 637-4437 For Information about advertising in the Business Dlreotory ... Call Gene King 946-2144 West Cravsn Highlights Craven County’* Family Waakly Naarspapar P.O. Box 487 Vanceboro, N.C. 28586 (Main St. Across From Post Office) Publlthad Each Thursday Aahlay B. Fulrell, Jr. Publisher Mika Voss Editor Poilnust,.: Swrd wJdrw, Chang,, Ig: Wart Craven HIghlighI, P.a B« 47 VaiKcbora, N.C. 2(Sa»OW7 Edith Hodgaa Office Manager Office Hours Mon 8:30 am -10:30 am ’Thurs. & Fri. 8:30 am - 5:00 pm Tolaphona244.07S0orM6.2l44 IN-COUN’TY RATES Single Copy 25* 1 Year $7.36 2 Years *11.55 3 Years *15.75 OUT-OF-COUN’TY RATES 1 Year >8,40 2 Years *12.60 3 Years '16.80 Abov* Ineludot N.C. Tax. Payable in advance. Subscribers desiring their Highlights termi nated at expiration should notify us of this intention, otherwise we will consider it their wish to conti nue to receive the paper and they will be charged for it. U.S.P.S. 412-110 Second Class Postage Paid Vanceboro, N.C. Member: N.C. Press Association 1-1
West Craven Highlights (Vanceboro, N.C.)
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June 29, 1989, edition 1
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