Section B She Warren iRecorii Section B
Wednesday, April 13, 1988 J ? Wednesday, April 13, 1988
Sporting the finest in winter wear, these sheep at Environmental
Diagnostics in Paschal! were herded together last week to wait their
turn under the professional clippers of the Alfred Armstrong family
of Doe Hill, Va.
"Not too close around the neck" could well have
been the instructions this sheep would have given
could he have communicated with his shearer.
At last, It's almost over. The shearing process produces between
seven and eight pounds of wool per sheep. Were the sheep not sheared,
they would naturally shed some of their wool, but would enjoy nothing
near the comfort brought by the annual shearing.
Text:
Kay Horner
Ph0t0S:
Phyllis H. King
Tools of the sheep-shearing
trade are given a momentary
respite.
Shearing
550 Sheep
Grazing serenely in the rolling
green pastures of Environmental
Diagnostics in Paschall on the
Warren County-Virginia line are
550 sheep who have no trouble
discerning the arrival of spring.
The coats that have kept them
warm through the winter months
become a burden long about the
end of March and by April the ar
rival of Alfred Armstrong and his
sons from Doe Hill, Va. is greeted
with enthusiasm? well, as much
enthusiasm as a sheep can
muster.
Alfred Armstrong has been in
the sheep-shearing business for
35 years. Until several years ago,
when he thought he would settle
comfortably into retirement,
Armstrong kept a ledger on the
number of sheep whose coats had
fallen to his clippers. The number
was 160,000. Armstrong didn't
retire and the number continues
to grow.
The Armstrongs, who spend
about two months a year shear
ing sheep, work between eight
and nine hours a day fortwo or
three days to complete the shear
ing process at Environmental
Diagnostics, a division of Bur
lington's Carolina Biological
Supply.
In addition to shearing, the
sheep are also given three
shots? one to prevent foot disease
and two to prevent miscarriages
among the ewes.
For the shearing process, three
men man the clippers, one packs
the wool, three assist the packer,
and five bring the sheep to the
shearers and take the newly
shorn animals away.
The sheep are identified by
numbered ear tags and charts
are kept for each animal.
The wool, which this year filled
22 150-pound bags, is taken to
market in Kenbridge, a southeast
Virginia town in Lunenburg
County.
And for the record, the En
vironmental Diagnostics animal
family is not without its one black
sheep, whose wool never makes
it to market. Wool from the black
sheep cannot be dyed and is vir
tually worthless to anyone except
the black sheep who wears it.
Patterns Of Memory Prove Interesting
By ALEXA WILLIAMS
"How could I forget?" you ask,
after a memory lapse left your
rent check unmailed, or your pur
chased groceries still at the store,
or your coffee pot bubbling away
in an empty house?
But Dr. Thomas M. Hess,
associate professor of psychology
at North Carolina State Universi
ty, asks a different question:
"How do you remember?"
If you think your memory is
less sharp than your daughter's
or your grandson's? or worse, if
they think so? Hess says you
may be just practicing a more
memorable way to remember.
Hess is interested in patterns of
memory. With the aid of a two
year, $100,000 grant from the Na
tional Institute on Aging, he is
conducting behavioral studies to
And out how people use their
knowledge to remember things.
Hen tested young adults ( 18 to
SO years) and older adults (OS to
80 years) to compare memory
patterns of the two age groups.
NCSU students and alumni were
subjects in the laboratory
experiments.
Scripts about everyday occur
rences, such as going to a
restaurant, are read sentence by
sentence on a computer screen by
participants in the project. Both
age groups read faster the
sentences about routine
aspects? looking at the menu,
ordering the dinner, paying the
bill.
Both groups remembered these
routine details less well than an
unusual but related occurrence,
such as the script character's
walking up to pay the bill and
finding he'd left his wallet at
home.
Hie age groups differed in their
memory of unrelated details that
were not essential to the script
such as the character's putting a
pen in his pocket. Young par
ticipants had better recall of this
type of detail, showing, Hess said,
more use of memorizing by rote.
Older adults were less suc
cessful in recalling the odd,
unrelated detail. Hess attributes
this to older adults depending
more on their experience to
remember and tending to screen
out unnecessary things.
Hess said that he used scripts
of routines familiar to both age
groups to get past generational
differences. He has made about
15 studies over six years, with 40
to 120 participants in each study.
Hess said he is not sure how
valid his laboratory results will
be in predicting memory in the
real world, and he wants to make
field tests of natural memory.
Recall of things that are in
teracted with may be more spon
taneous, he said.
Hess believes older adults use
more memory props, such as
notes to themselves. "But that's
adaptive," Hess said. "Older
adults may notice lapses of
memory more than younger peo
ple and attribute these lapses to
aging."
Although Hess has not finished
his research on memory pat
terns, he sees no behavioral
reason healthy older adults can't
go on remembering.
Kevin King Harris has been
selected as a member of the
Outstanding College Students of
America.
Harris, a senior at East Caro
lina University in Greenville, was
chosen for outstanding merit and
accomplishment as a college
student.
The honoree is the son of
Bernard and Helen Harris of
Nor Una. He is the grandson of
Mrs. Helen Hicks, also of
Norltna.
There's just no dignified way to shear a sheep, but the animals of
fer little resistance as the shearer moves them hind and fore to ob
tain the closest shave possible.
The wool is packed In bags that hold between 150 and 100 pounds,
the weight of the wool of about 20 sheep. Young Mark PerUnson, son
of Luther Perkinson, farm manager of Environmental Diagnostics,
annually has the responsibility of dropping himself into the bags on
top of the wool and, simply put, Jumping up and down to ensure that
the wool Is tightly packed.
The wool goe? to market tn Virginia nd the iheep (oea bark to the
pasture ? uiitil ant yew.