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Show (C3DmWti(BVtilt Review - Wednesday, May 27, 1987 - Page 2 mmm Time to let courts uncover facts in child abuse case will be put together in such a way that justified or not, is tantamount to conviction in a small CThe Lehf case is extraordinary in that it has involved unusual because in the initial . so many people. That's stages of the investigation, evidence was so tenuous that the Utah County Attorney would not file charges Now for the past year, the Utah Attorney General s office has been conducting the investigation, probing and questioning with remarkable tenacity for such a complex case until, finally, criminal charges have been filed. ... Now at last the criminal justice system will allow local residents to determine whether or not the prolonged investigation, and the subsequent turmoil it created, has produced the necessary evidence to prove that a crime was committed. If the court case proceeds through the regular channels, local residents will have a chance to examine evidence rather than rumor, testimony rather than hearsay, and the pieces of this most complex puzzle a jury or i, can determine the guilt or innocence of the accused One of the strengths of our judicial system is th forces society to look at the facts instead of the and eliminates, through the rules of evidence all J?' speculation that has added fuel to the fires of susSJ over the past two years. Cln And now it's time to let the courts do the i0h separating truth from idle talk, rather than feed? that flame which can incinerate reputations. 1 Two years is too long for such accusations unanswered, and it is a shame that adequate evidenf was not gathered until now to bring this particular ca to trial. The consequences of that long period of to little legal action and too much speculation should be obvious to all. All involved would be wise now to step back and Pi the system determine who is guilty before presurnin the guilt of anyone. s j For two years a Lehi neighborhood has been em- - broiled in accusations and counter-accusation- s over alleged instances of child sexual abuse. The case, which started with one accusation has grown to such an extent that, at one point, over 40 children and 15 adults were involved in the official investigation. Prominent community members, for right or wrong, have been linked to the accusations. Homes have been destroyed, marriages dissolved and lives ruined as charges have been made and the rumor mill has ripped at the gentle fabric of this close-kni- t community. Sexual abuse of a child is one of the ugliest of crimes, although it is an offense that is getting more exposure now than at any other time in history. It offends our sensibilities because it involves victims who are helpless to defend themselves against acts that degrade the humanity in all of us. So emotional is the crime that an accusation, High School Graduation ends phase of life By MARCELLA WALKER p.g. blab Here it is the last week of school. This school year moved along at a right good clip. It didn't do that as much when I was a student as it does now. Friday will be a day of glorius celebration at all levels as school is dismissed for the summer. Except those places in the district where they hold year-roun-d school. Although I am highly in favor of year-roun-d school, it will eliminate this one great day of the year, the day school is out which has been a special day since Adam and Eve told the kids they could have the summer off to plant corn and wheat. I suppose that is why the schools have traditionally been closed in the summer, so that kids could help out on the farm. There aren't hardly any farms anymore and where there are they are ofttimes big co-o- which do not hire kids. We used to pick cherries, peaches, berries, apricots, etc., when I was growing up. We lived in the city and did not have our own farm so we went and worked on other people's farms. Farmers cannot get kids to pick fruit anymore. Those kids are missing a wonderful opportunity. The cherry throwing fights were a daily necessity to keep us from dying of boredom as we picked those pesky little buggers. The races to see who could fill their bucket first resulted in terrible arguments because someone else had a "better tree" to pick on than the others. Lunch time did not come soon enough. It was a wonder the farmers ever survived the entire season. verging on the downtown area with their shaving cream, water balloons and honking horns, it will be graduation. It seems only yesterday that I stood with over 500 other graduating seniors and sang, "For all we know, we may never meet again. We come and go like the ripples on a stream . . . ." The tears ran down my face as we sang this, the theme song of our graduation, as well as the school song. The boys wept and the girls wept. It was a time of mixed emotions. We were glad to be out of school but we knew we would miss the good times, the friends and the teachers. It is strange how you can be quite good friends with some kids at school, but somehow your paths never cross again. Your very closest friends you do see on occasion. The others become only a fond memory. When we had our twentieth year class reunion, this sharp looking lit-tle blonde came up to me and called my name, threw her arms about me and I just had time to glance at her name tag. I didn't recognize her at all. - j She had been one of my best frien-ds from the time we were little. I was one of her bridesmaids. But at that time she had been a little chunkier and not so blonde. The only thing that saved my skin was her name tag. I felt so dumb. But she had changed and I had not seen her for a very long time. She was also a grandmother at age 34. She could be a great-grandmoth- er by now and I am just starting out having my gran dchildren. Of course, I am way tr young to have any . grandchildren. She is my fact I am older by about fivemJ So, as you can see, it happens vr don't see kids that you were real close to, maybe some of them it will never see again. It is funny , always mean to. You tell each (ft you will not lose contact, noma what. But life takes you on differe trails. You can never go back. In yearbooks, the kids right he at dear old P. G. High, write "Q me this summer and lets have a u ty" or "Lets do lots of fun things 4 summer." They never do. We didn't either. It probably hi always been that way. Abel's probably told Cain's, "Let's j together this summer for a ne game of kick the rock" and thentk never did. Maybe that was summer Cain did Abel in, something. You never know. One boy wrote in my yearboi "You are a neat gril. Stay It way.". He had completed tat years of school and still could n spell "girl." It 'really makes wonder. .;; Here is my toast to the new PGE graduates: Have a blast this si mer because next year it is colli) or work, work, work. Don't married for at least two years. 1 to go to a college of some kind, if it is parttime. You'll need it to j through this old world. "Stay as sweet as you are." It is probably the last time you'll Ik that, cause no one writes that college yearbooks. Here's ton Good luck! Another result of fruit picking can sometimes hit you in your older age when you least expect it. I had a lit-tle thing grow on the side of my nose. When I went to see Dr. Bezzant he informed me that it looked like a skin cancer and it was. I asked him how come I got such a thing. I was not one to spend all my time lying out in the sun. He asked me if I had picked fruit when I was a child. I said I had. He told me that that was probably the cause. You would think that in the tree you would be in the shade, I suggested. He said, "Sorry, a lot of sun gets through those branches." I figured he should know because he is not only a doctor but the son of a fruit farmer. So far, though, I am the only one out of all the kids I picked fruit with who has had a cancer develop, that I know of. In addition to Friday being the last day of school and all the kids con-- i . ( letters to y the editor J Thanks to PG EMT's To: Mayor David Holdaway and City Council Members I would like to express my ap-preciation to the Pleasant Grove City Emergency Medical Services, to the Mayor and City Council, who make this service possible and particularly to those people who responded to a call on April 23 at approximately 8:30 a.m. on West Center Street. They are as follows: Dave Vickers, Julie White, Steve Brande, Ann Topham, Gloria Swenson. These people acted quickly and professionally and are a credit to their unit and to Pleasant Grove City. Without the help of the above people and groups, the heart attack that I had could very well have turned out differently. Thankfully, I am now on the road to recovery. Thank you for having the service and such competent people available in time of need. Mark W. Golding Orem Story Pharmacy moves into Nortons Editor: To our many friends and valued customers. We will be changing our place of business from the Story Pharmacy at the Pleasant Grove Medical Center, 76 S. Main, within the next couple of weeks. We are moving into Norton's Food Store and will be operating a pharmacy under Norton's name and address. We thank you for your local support and valued friendship the past 24 years. We hope that you will come and see us there. Joyce and Keith Story H People, Politics & Policy j Graduation began in 1974 By E. MARK BEZZANT In two days about 250 young people will be taking their last steps as students of Pleasant Grove High School. Each one of them will have earned the necessary 27 high school credits to be awarded a diploma from the Alpine School District and in particular, Pleasant Grove High School. While many of you are reading this article these students will be picking up their caps and gowns to take them home for a final pressing prior to the night of nights. At the time I am writing this article about 50 of those 250 young people are scurrying about finalizing work necessary to earn the final portions of credit. It was in the fall of 1974 that these young people entered the public schools to begin what for some has been an adventure. For others it has been an ordeal. Still, for others it has been like being sentenced to hard time with no parole. For most it has been a mixture of all or more than the above. Who could count the tears, the joys, the anticipation, the hopes, the dreams, the disappointments, and the achievements since the fall of 1974? If anyone could measure this it would be the students themselves. Good parents would, also, have shared in much of these things. Not everyone who started school in 1974 will graduate Friday night. It is difficult at this point to determine just what percent of the original class will not graduate this year. Many have moved and finished their schooling in other places. One sur-vey indicated that of those who were short credit at the end of the ninth grade, only 25 per cent of them would finish high school with their class. Most who do not quite finish now will do so in the next five years. The senior class, led by President Susan Liddle, will leave a concrete Viking head in the grassy area east of the football field. The head will lie next to the concrete letters which spell "Vikings." Much more important than this concrete remin-der of the Class of '87, is the legacy of achievement that has followed them through the years. Awards assemblies, such as the one held last Friday at the high school, are good reminders of the multitude of great things these , young people have accomplished. An increasing number of them will graduate with college credit on their record. Tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships have been awarded to graduating seniors. One out of every three seniors will be walking away with scholarship money to offset college expenses. The trophy cases have been crowded with symbols of victory. Long held school records have given way to new records once thought impossible. The most important achievements are the individual ones. These are the ones by a young girl who had to finish her final school work from a hospital bed. It would have been so much easier to throw in the towel. These are the victories by the kids who, faced with helping support their family, continued to go to school. These are the kids who over-came fear to dance and act before packed audiences. These are the individual victories won by kids who fought the odds and became the first to graduate in their families. These are the victories of students, who with the help of many, turned around and came through. These victories are captured in the fact that the school was led by a girl student body president for only the second time in school history and by a girl senior class president. Their election symbolized the spirit of the Class of 1987. As these seniors take their final hours of class, it would be unfitting not to honor their teachers. Each child would normally have over 40 teachers during their 13 years of school. I never cease to be amazed at the influence and impact an excellent teacher can have on a child. The greatest tribute goes to the parents and guardians of these 250 .. or so students. Until you have raised a teenager you never know what it is like, and every child is different. To you cousins, grandparents, uncles, aunts, special friends and neighbors, no one can minimize the part you have played in these young people's lives. In the final analysis, raising kids is a team effort, and you who have been part of the team deserve to celebrate with these great young people! Next fall the Class of 2000 begins kindergarten. Mixture of old, new sometimes fails the editor's column It is supposed to be a marvelous mixture, this wedding of stone-ag- e typesetting technology and state-of-the-a- rt, leading edge computer wizardry. But as with most marriages, at times the relationship is tenuous at best. For a couple of years now we have been using computers as word processors to drive our typesetting equipment. It's a nice compromise between using modern technology with older equipment. At the heart of the system is a little blue box called, oddly enough, a "black box" by people who enjoy confusing the rest of us. We just call it an interface, since that sounds fancy without any of us- really knowing what it means. It's blue metal and about the size of a shoe box. It sits on top of our typesetter and changes the com-puter message, coded with appropriate symbols to tell the typesetter what to do, into the instructions that make the type in our newspaper look neat - all justified and everything. That way, the words are only typed once, by the person who writes the story. Before, the person would write the story on a typewriter, and then a typesetter would type the story again on the typesetting equipment. classified program and heats the cocoa. For most of those years, the system has run smoothly, too smoothly, so smoothly that we were very comfortable with the system. And anytime you get comfortable with anything that relies on silicon chips to get a job done, you are asking for trouble. Actually, typesetting, along with everything else, has come a long way since Johan Gutenberg invented moveable type. And we are still miles ahead of the hot metal days just by having a photo-typesette- r. But computers are doing the same thing to publishing as they are to most everything else - altering the way we work almost daily. With laser printers, digital type, video terminals and all those other fancy innovations, the business of newspapering is changing daily. The problem with every one of those changes is they make you more reliant on technology - and the technology isn't foolproof. Just look at last week's thun-derstorm. One little flash of light-ning, the lights flicker in the office, and this marvelous interface is sud-denly of no more use than the shoebox it resembles. And we're back in the stone-ag- e of phototypesetting again. Like most other people tw advantage of computer ItcM to make a buck, the company built the interface no longer ft We did, fortuitously, trick A former employee of the cwnpu who thinks that if he mum! exact incantation while hoMJ interface over a pot of be1 blood, he may be able to a work apin. . We're not holding our bn In the meantime, the m still comes out, thanks to i degree to another Interface up to an even older typesetter- - which runs at about the svV as the old hot metal types-an- d to a larger degree W Karen, our typesetter j 1 now has to do double duty this all work. J And every time thectajlij' and the lightning starts down, we turn off aU the po wait for the storm to pass, w power glitch, and we could w, other interface. . j Then we'd be back to wn stories out by hand. ( And believe me, my could not stand that kind l0After all, that's why invented moveable type place. By MARC HADDOCK You can see the potential for saving time if you eliminate one of those typings. The interface has allowed us to push back our deadlines because things could be done faster, and we've tried to accommodate people who just didn't get a wedding to us on time. We've even gone to typesetting the classified ads through the interface, with a new program that counts the words in the ad, mails the bills and creates the text to generate the om Town Till! Mil IIS ,L T"ER aJTI lailJ1 1 1PROBLcEiMrrsWlTftifstJ JpfW ykgl Policies? 6 |