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Show Mop w Ah8wti Hit? What's the most interesting or the most disgusting thing you f ound during Park City Clean-Up Day? 'l: ' . WncBwriDOTMl Bill Coleman , ' . Actually, the most disgusting thing I found was a largepue. r of toilet paper. It was not discernible whether it had been , used or not. Page A2 Thursday, May 26, 1983 1 4 I . f IEoflfittdDiFisaD The Record is dead; long live the Record If you are an avid reader of the local papers, you're probably very confused over all this merger talk. A recent story carried by one of the wire services announced an-nounced that the 103-year publishing tradition of the Park Record would come to an end on May 26. From what we understand, un-derstand, this week's Record follows much the same theme: the end of an era. Meanwhile, we have been telling you that the Park City Newspaper would also cease as a separate publication on May 26. However, our glorious tradition goes back less than eight years, so it's a little more difficult to get nostalgic about it. So what does that give us? Two weekly papers in a mutual suicide pact? Not quite. What we've got, in business parlance, is a merger. Merriam Webster defines it as (a) an absorption by a corporation of one or more others or (2) the combination com-bination of two or more groups. In the new, joint corporation, cor-poration, Jan Wilking, currently the publisher of the Park City Newspaper, will be the controlling partner. The question we have been asked most frequently is, "What are you going to call the new paper?" Our first impulse was to choose a name that somehow reflected the traditions of both papers. We have put a great deal of energy into making the Park City Newspaper one of the state's outstanding weeklies. Similarly, the Record has an unbroken tradition of excellence going back to 1880. So we settled on the Park City News Record. Unfortunately, as is the case with many compromises, nobody really liked News Record. For one thing, the name is bland and redundant. For another, it catered to all the talk about the final hours of the Park Record. Nevertheless, we clung to the News Record until the last possible moment, until two people whose opinions we respect greatly convinced us that we were making a big mistake. One of those people was Steve Dering, the Newspaper's first editor and the man most responsible for its continued existence. Dering argued that we were letting our pride get in the way by keeping the word "News" in the masthead. The only way to continue the tradition of the Park Record,, he said, was to call it just that. The Park Record. The other voice of persuasion belonged to Bea Kummer, Park City's unofficial historian, whose column has run in the Park Record for years. She, like Dering, urged us to keep the name. So that's what we've decided to do. The publication will be known as The Park Record. Period. You will, no doubt, hear criticism that calling it the Park Record will be a hollow claim to fame, since the new publication will resemble the old Park City Newspaper a lot more than the old Park Record, and since the staff of the new paper will be drawn largely from the old Park City Newspaper. Perhaps. But it might be helpful to point out that the lines between the two staffs are not as well-defined as you might think. Nan Chalat, the Newspaper's newest staff writer, was the editor of Focus, a weekly supplement to the Park Record for two-and-a-half years. Teri Gomes, a columnist and contributing writer for the Newspaper, wrote for the Record in a similar capacity for four years. Even Newspaper Editor David Hampshire is an alumnus of the Park Record. In addition, Bea Kummer, the Park Record's columnist and historian, will continue to write for the new publication. The new Park Record will be making a conscious effort to keep its ties with Park City's history. There will be regular stories on people and events that made the town what it is. There will also be items in the new Park Record that neither paper has ever offered. We'd tell you about them, but that would be tipping our hand. Although the merger makes sense from a business standpoint, stand-point, and will result in a better publication than either of its predecessors, we must admit to some mixed feelings. There's nothing like competition to keep you pumped up. It can be exhilarating to find you're the only one with the story; it can be shattering to find you've been beaten to the punch. Max Jarman, the outgoing editor of the Park Record, has been a worthy opponent. If you want to get a feel for the job he has done, just compare the Park Record of today to the Park Record of 10 years ago. But don't get the impression that the new Park Record will be operating in a vacuum. Just down the street from us, in the KPCW broadcast bunker, , is sahotbe pretty fair newsman, Blair Feulner. He'll keep us honest. And we'll try to do the same for him. -DH Anderson Weekly Specnafl KSST Informant fears for his life because of committee's error Washington An important government govern-ment informant in the battle against organized crime is living in fear for his life because of an egregious error by a congressional committee staff. The informant is Frank Beaver, a self-proclaimed former "hit man" and arsonist for a Philadelphia pornography boss named John Krassner. In 1979, Beaver helped federal agents go after underworld figures in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. He did it to get a break from the government in a pending arson trial. It's always a risky business when a member of the mob decides to "sing." But Beaver's cooperation with the FBI remained a secret for three years. Then, last spring, the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, chaired by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, investigated the Labor Department's efforts to crack down on organized crime. The committee staff obtained documents that detailed Beaver's role in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia investigations. The documents were made public without being sufficiently "sanitized." Beaver's name was deleted from the material made public, but details were included that made his identity perfectly clear at least to the underworld associates he had betrayed. be-trayed. Within days after the committee issued a press release, Beaver began getting threatening telephone calls. Bricks were thrown at his home. Snapshots arrived in the mail of his two children as they waited for the school bus near their home. Beaver moved, but the harassm-." started up again a month later. He tried to enter the Federal Witness Protection Program and assume a new identity, but his wife refused to brrviJ, all contact with her 70-yijr ' ; mother. Beaver asked the Justice Department Depart-ment for $4,000 to relocate his family. He decided to give up seeing his wife and children and asked again if he could join the witness protection program. His request is still pending at the Justice Department. Meanwhile, Beaver's life has been coming apart. "My life is totally ruined," he told our reporter Jock Hatfield. "It's gotten to the point where my own son is afraid to ride with me in the car. I've lost my job. My wife wants a divorce. I never know when somebody is going to stick a shotgun through my kitchen window and blow my family away." Government investigators who worked with Beaver agree that his contributions were invaluable. For example, he carried listening devices to a meeting with pornography king Krassner in Philadelphia. During the conversation, Krassner admitted having hav-ing ordered the bombing of a competitor's pornography shops. But the investigation never bore fruit and for a reason that can hardly bring comfort to Frank Beaver: Krassner was murdered before he could be brought to trial. Brass hat airlines: The recession has brought hard times to commercial airlines. One big airline went bankrupt, bank-rupt, and others are operating close to the edge. But there is one airline that doesn't need to worry about competition, lack of customers or high labor costs. It's the fleet of 9,000 planes the Pentagon operates for the special use of the military brass. If the Pentagon's private airline needs money, it just reaches into the US Treasury, test year, the VIP ?!:," cr i t the taxpayers $62 million to Cindy David gr in the basement of the Blue Church Lodge there was a g: large number of old beer bottles. I'm sure there were some g: 16-year-olds having a good time down there, g: i ft . 'ivy it J ill ::;v:::::::::::::: DonPutman .." I found a brand-spanking-new pogo stick. It was still m the plastic. Susan Penn &1 A rock attached to a three-foot rope. You can use your ima- gij gination what that was used for. hi it u. i 1 1 its?" s , 1 is JessReid The old barbed-wire cemetery fence was still lying there (it was replaced by a more permanent structure last year ) . Marion Cooney It's a tossup between the dead bird and the two used Pampers. Pam-pers. Speaking of tossups, I almost tossed up after that myself. ISP, Trim Guns do kill people The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Vessey, for example, apparently considers himself too important to fly in commercial planes like ordinary mortals. One day, he was in a hurry to get to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. So his staff spurned a small, T-39 jet and ordered a larger C-140, which flies 10 knots faster. General Vessey saved 15 minutes on his trip to Nebraska, and it cost the taxpayers $12,400. Another general flew from Fort Hood, Texas, to Washington for a promotion ceremony. He took his wife and kids along. The trip cost the taxpayers more than $5,300. Another general hailed a T-39 air taxi to fly himself, his wife and two other officers to Los Angeles, with a stopover in Las Vegas. Cost: $10,000. And a civilian official got the Pentagon's air service to fly all the way from Washington and pick him up in Detroit just to fly him back to Washington. The round trip cost $1,578. A commercial flight from Detroit to Washington not only would have been faster, it would have cost the taxpayers only $95. Headlines and footnotes: Things have changed in the public schools over the past 40 years. At that time, educators cited talking in class, chewing gum and making excessive noise as the three most severe problems with students. A recent study says the top three offenses are rape, robbery and assault. Federal Trade Commission regulations regu-lations requiring funeral homes to post prices are sailing along smoothly after seven years of rough seas. Congress has finally refused to veto the regulations, despite heavy lobbying by funeral home directors. 1983 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. Nuclear disarmament, let us concede, con-cede, is going to take some time. While we're waiting, it might be prudent to set to work on another urgent problem: domestic disarmament. disarma-ment. Today, in this nation that calls itself civilized and god-fearing, there are 150 million firearms in domestic hands. More than 20,000 Americans are killed by guns every year. That's one murder every 24 minutes. In the family of nations, we are a violent, bloody-awful people. Our gun controls are the loosest, our homicide rate the highest. In a typical year, the British have eight or 10 handgun murders. The city of Tokyo has only four or five handgun murders a year. Our statistics are unspeakable. And the more lax the laws of the state, the more people tend to shoot one another to kingdom come. It's a dangerous obsession, America's Ameri-ca's fascination with guns. Some say it's a sickness. Certainly there have been few more sickening sights on television this month than that of President Reagan addressing the National Na-tional Rifle Association. Gun-control laws, he told the clearing throng, do not reduce crime. He is wrong. And one suspects that the president knows he is wrong. But his conservative constituency constit-uency clings to its idiotic rationale that "guns don't kill people, people do." People pulling triggers, they need to be reminded. The trigger-pullers are getting younger and younger. In the Los Angeles public schools there are more than 200 gun-related "incidents" every year. Last year, four 13-year-old boys were prosecuted for handgun murders in California. Gun laws are easiest in the western and southern states. Those are the states, according to the latest FBI crime report, that accounted for 63 percent of the nation's homicides. The president, when discussing the wounds he received at the hands of John Hinckley, likes to point out that Washington has one of the nation's strictest gun laws. He forgets to . mention that Hinckley acquired the gun for $50 in a Texas pawnshop. If every state had laws as stringent as Washington's, it's doubtful that Hinckley Hinck-ley could have found a gun for his mission. Every opinion poll since the shooting of President Kennedy has shown more than 60 percent of the public favoring sterner gun controls. But the NRA boasts that within 72 hours it can produce half a million letters to Congress opposing any sort of gun legislation. Our Congress, rarely noted for moral courage, quakes before this barrage. Dozens of gun bills are introduced each year, and none of them requires that every hunter and rancher turn in his rifle. But the NRA assures its membership clearly a simpleminded lot that the sacred thrill-killing of deer and pheasant each autumn would be outlawed by any gun-control law. On the very night television was showing the president wearing a silly hunter's cap promising the NRA to resist all forms of gun control, we also saw a band of paramilitary zealots drilling in Georgia. A new book, "God, Guts and Guns" (Putnam), says these vigilantes train with semiautomatic handguns, such as the military .45. Army rifles, such as the M-14, are popular, and cartridges can be had for "just pennies," thanks to military surplus. The Pentagon thereby encourages en-courages such outlaw groups. And so does the president by appearing before the NRA and telling the members what noble work they are doing. With a $40 million portfolio, tax-exempt status and a gun-nut in the White House, the NRA can look forward to a great year. . . unless we all keep reminding our congressmen that guns DO kill people! 1983 Harriet Van Home Distributed by Special Features Syndication Sales M Park City ewpaper: Subscription Rates, S8 a year in Summit County, SIS a year outside Summit County Published by Ink, Inc. USPS 3787-3000 Publisher Jan Wilking uitor David Hampshire Advertising Sales Jan Wilking, Bill Dickson, Jim Finegan . Business Manager Marion Cooney Graphics Becky Widenhouse, Liz Heimos Staff Writers Rick Brough, Nan Chalat Contributing Writers Bettina Moench, Jay Meehan, Marion Cooney, Curtis Willey Typesetting Sharoq PaJ1 Dixie Bkhop Subscriptions & Classifieds Knn Fahey Darkroom & Photography Jm SByder Distribution , . Dusty Rhoades Entered as second-class matter May 25, 1977, at the post office in Park City, Utah 84060, under the Act of March 3, 1897. Published every Thursday at Park City, Utah. Second-class postage paid at Park City, Utah. Unsolicited manuscripts and photographs are welcome and will be considered for publication. However, the Park City Newspaper will assume no responsibility for the return of such material. All news, advertising and photos must be received prior to the Tuesday noon deadline at our office, 419 Main Street in Park City, by mail P.O. Box 3688, Park City, Ut. 84060, or by calling our office (801) 649-9014. Publication material must be received by Tuesday noon for Thursday publication. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to the Park City Newspaper, P.O. Box 3688, Park City, Utah 84060. |