The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 68, No. 212, Ed. 1 Thursday, July 5, 1990 Page: 4 of 14
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4-A
THE BAYTOWN SUN
Thursday, July 5, 1990
SUN
EDITORIAL
Much too quick on
plutonium trigger
11 Ihe Pentagon is urging U.S. Energy Secretary
I James D. Watkins to reopen the Rocky Flats
JL nuclear weapons plant in Colorado immediately
so that it can resume production of the plutonium
triggers that go into new missile warheads. But
Watkins’ scientific advisers say that the plant isn’t
ready and can’t yet be run safely. He should listen
to the scientists.
Watkins shut down the Rocky Flats plant last
November, after he discovered that it had been run-
ning for years in violation of a wide range of health
and safety and environmental laws. Cleaning up the
mess that previous administrations created there will
take many years and cost the taxpayers billions. But
the plant can’t be closed permanently, because what
it makes is needed for the national defense. The
question is whether that need is currently as urgent
as the Pentagon claims.
Some reforms have been instituted. Rockwell Inter-
national Corp. is no longer in charge of the plant,
and a new management team has been brought in.
But the panel of advisers that Watkins set up to
oversee the work at Rocky Flats reports that the
staff hasn’t been fully retrained yet, the waste dis-
posal system isn’t working as well as it should be
and there’s vtot of plutonium stuck in the air ducts
that ought to be cleaned out. All in all, the advisers
say the plant probably won’t be ready to go back
into production before the end of the year.
As the chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, Sen. Sam Nunn, points out, there’s no
risk to national security from stretching out the sche-
dule for upgrading those Trident armaments.
From Sun files
. Hebei presented medals
for Vietnam service, ’70
From The Baytown Sun files, this is the way it was:
55 YEARS AGO
Goose Creek City Commission votes to raise C.W. “Red” Gran-
tham’s salary to $125 a month. The city superintendent is in charge
of street cleaning, repairs and maintenance and substitutes for City
Marshal Ed Dickens every other Sunday and on holidays.
S.C. Howard, J.H. Norris and Joe Sumner are named to the Goose
Creek tax equalization board.
45 YEARS AGO
Ray Holbrook, Jr., son of Irma Holbrook, is in the Navy training
center at San Diego after passing a highly competitive examination
for radar training. The 1944 graduate of Robert E. Lee High school,
starred in track in high school and at Texas A&M.
G.B. Jordan, Mont Belvieu lumberman, is the new president of
the Mont Belvieu Lions Club.
McDowell Perry, Highlands Volunteer Fire Department chief, is
honored at a farewell banquet. He is leaving to serve in the Armed
Forces.
35 YEARS AGO
City Council holds a public hearing on annexation of a water
district in Cedar Bayou. Boyd N. HilL chairman of a Cedar Bayou
civic committee, speaks in favor of the annexation while Gerald
Fortney, attorney for the water district, opposes the move.
Henry A. Scarborough is the new president of the Mont Belvieu
Lions Club.
20 YEARS AGO
Army Sp. 4 Carl Hebei, son of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Hebei Jr. of
Baytown is awarded the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross and the Purple
Heart for his actions in and around the Tay Ninh area where he
worked with the Vietnamese Airborne Rangers and Cambodians as
an American adviser from October 1969 to April 1970.
Lt. James M. Richards III is awarded the U.S. Air Force silver
pilot wings in graduation exercises at Moody Air Force Base in
Valdosta, Ga. He is a 1965 graduate of REL and a 1969 graduate of
Texas A&M.
Gordon Smith, president of the Roseland Oaks Civic Association,
said a group of Roseland Oaks property owners will appear before
the city tax equalization board.
The city of Baytown issued twice as many building permits in
June as in May but construction is still more than $1.5 million below
the total for the first six months of 1969. Among permits in June:
Green Acres Convalescent Center, 100-bed nursing home; Central
Baptist Church, $57,000 student center, Gene Branscome, $368,000
addition to Westwood Village Apartments; Joe Aylor, $393,419 ad-
dition to Barcelona Apartment Village.
The Rev. B.D. Nisbet Jr„ pastor of First Christian Church, and his
family will be leaving July 15. Nisbet will become pastor of the First
Christian Church in Ashland, Ky.
Buck Young
Pelly people different
I believe I have known for many years
that people from Pelly were different from
those raised in Goose Creek and old Bay-
town. Not better or worse, mind you, just
different. But, I did not realize to what
extent and how deep this difference went
until I started writing these columns for The
Sun.
Well, the “Pelly Rats” started coming out
of the woodwork, or wherever they were
hiding. I received letters. I received phone
calls. I was stopped in the stores and on the
streets by people who wanted to talk about
Pelly and the “old days.” And, in most
instances, these people, male and female,
started the conversation or letter with, “I’m
a Pelly Rat” or “I’m from Pelly, too.”
I began to wonder why all these seeming-
ly rational people had such a strong attach-
ment to a place like Pelly. What caused this
strange phenomenon that I call “the Pelly
mystique?” „
It started many years ago when the school
grounds at Anson Jones Elementary, Horace
Mann Junior High and Robert E. Lee Senior
High were literally “battlegrounds.” Fights
were quite common between kids, both boys
and girls, from Goose Creek and kids from
Pelly. These fights generally resulted from
remarks made by the kids from Goose
Creek. All kids from Pelly were “oilfield
trash” and their homes were “oilfield shan-
ties.”
One day in the late 1920s, a mass free-
for-all started on the grounds of Anson
Jones. The teachers and the principal, Mr.
Bruce, broke up the fight and marched all
the Pelly boys to the office. When Mr.
Bruce took off his belt to punish the boys, he
was threatened with a beating of his own.
He sent the boys home, but in a short
time, his office was filled with angry Pelly
parents. An understanding was reached
rather quickly and at the next school
assembly, Mr. Bruce warned all the students
that name calling would not be tolerated. He
also pointed out that Anson Jones and
Horace Mann sat on Pelly soil and that
Goose Creek students were guests of that
city.
By the time these students graduated to
Horace Mann, the term the Goose Creek
boys used had changed from “oilfield trash”
to “Pelly Rats.” The results were the
same—busted knuckles, busted heads, and a
trip to the principal’s office. Mr. Nelson
started giving detention hall to the “Goose
Creek Dumb Ones,” the name the PeHy boys
used, and the fights subsided on the school
grounds.
The railroad tracks between the school
and the White Star Laundry became the
battleground after school hours until it
became somewhat painfully apparent that
the Pelly boys always stood together. If you
fought one, you fought them all. And, the
Pelly boys were usually the better fighters.
At Robert E. Lee, the fights were less
common. The boys from old Baytown
usually sided with the Pelly boys and the
numbers were now stacked against those
from Goose Creek. And, the name “Pelly
Rats” had become somewhat a term of
endearment. Its use now just provoked a
prideful smirk.
By the time World War II rolled around,
men were using the words “Pelly” and
“Pelly Rat” as nicknames, and it seemed that
no matter where you went throughout the
world, like Kilroy, they were there, too. My
cousin, Tilmon Baker, told me of walking
past a line of movie-goers on Market Street
in San Francisco in the early 1940s and
having a sailor standing in that line call out
to him, “Hey, Pelly.” It was a kid known as
“Tackhammer” who lived on “Lover’s
Lane" in Pelly. And in a SeaBee camp in the
Philippines, he was summoned to a chief
carpenter’s tent to discover that the chief
was a man from Pelly named Robert
Wakeland, whom Tilmon had not seen in six
or seven years.
The late Col. Henry Dittman, who served
in the U.S. Air Force for almost 30 years,
was known throughout the service as Pelly
Dittman. He received the nickname while
attending Schreiner Institute after graduating
from Robert E. Lee in the 1930s and before
going to Texas A&M. According to Ruth
Dittman, her husband had no middle name
or initial and did not particularly care for for
the name Henry. The letters from home
were mailed at the Pelly post office by his
mother and the postmark prompted the
people at Schreiner who passed out the mail
to start calling him Pelly Dittman. The
nickname stuck and wherever the colonel
traveled after completing pilot training, he
was known as Pelly.
What caused this peculiar behavior?
We’ll look into that tomorrow.
This is the first in a two-part series about
Pelly, based on Buck Young's speech at the
Bay Area Heritage Society annual dinner.
t)
Lois Rodriguez
In good oP summit time
With the International Economic Summit
coming to Houston, the city feels obligated
to look its very best — to show off
everything that makes Houston and this
Harris County area the wonder that it is. So
why all the emphasis on the cowboy.
I understand that the delegates to the
economic summit were given a care pack-
age, complete with a cowboy hat and boots.
Margaret Thatcher in a cowboy hat? Now
this I’ve got to see — and I probably will all
over the national and international news.
Houston has, for so long, tried to shed its
cowboy image (without abandoning the
fascination with it). The city’s fathers (or
mothers since the town is almost completely
run by women) had decided to play up the
Space City image.
So why the cowboy boots and hats?
Rodeos and cowboys will always be a
part of Texas and Houston. It’s part of the
heritage for the native Texans. But sophisti-
cation and technology are also a part of
Houston — a part far more crucial to the
city’s worldwide standing than rompin’ and
ropin’.
The fact that 32 foreign governments
maintain trade, investment and tourism
offices in Houston is important, or that the
Port of Houston is ranked second among
U.S. ports in foreign tonnage. Or consider
the Texas Medical Center . . . Johnson
Space Center . . . Houston Alley Theater
. . . Houston Ballet . . . Houston Grand
Opera . . . Houston Symphony Orchestra
. . . international art collections like the
Menil Collection ... the real people who
make this city. These are all good points to
be emphasized.
I’m sure that the hosts of the summit will
Jack Anderson
give attention to a vast amount of Houston’s
more notable offerings.
Really, the cowboy image is just a
harmless way for Houstonians and Texans
to maintain their own identity, espcially
since Texans are blessed in that the state is
more like a separate country.
But despite the space-age advancements
and international trade and culture, the
novelty of cowboys and barbecue will
probably be the most memorable part of a
trip by any non-Texans.
Hopefully, though, the guests of the
economic summit will walk away realizing
that cowboy is only a state of mind for a
majority of Houstonians and sophistication
and technology are the reality.
Lois Rodriguez is a Sun columnist and
news reporter.
They call it ‘farmgate’
WASHINGTON — A handful of thirsty
corporate farmers are robbing the taxpayers
and the U.S. Treasury of millions of dollars
in cheap irrigation water because federal
regulators refuse to do their job.
Big Western land owners have managed
to sop up most of the benefits of a public
water program that was designed to help the
little guy.
Large landowners used to skirt the 160-
acre limit by leasing their big farms in
pieces to smaller operators. Congress caught
on in 1982 and tightened the rules. At the
same time, Congress acknowledged that the
160-acre limit may be too strict, and raised
the maximum to 960 acres.
The big fanner simply changed their
tactics. They now organize their land in a
them net to produce,” David Conrad of the
National Wildlife Federation told us.
Phil Doe, who used to head the Bureau of
Reclamation office that wrote the water
rules, told our reporter Melinda Maas that
the agency is as guilty as the farmers. “The
water users and regulators have a cozy
relationship paid by taxpayers,” Doe said.
“Many bureau officials go to work for them
Atnhe turn of the rentury, Congress patchwork of trusts, partnerships and corpo-—(the^fanning industry) when they leave
BIBLE VERSE
“Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted
among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.”
Psalm 46:10
decided to encourage family fanners to
make the Western desert bloom. The Bureau
of Reclamation was established and water
projects cropped up all over the West to
irrigate family farms. The promise was that
the taxpayers would pay part of the water
bill. In its naivete, Congress thought that if it
set a 160-acre limit on the farms that got
subsidized water, only small farmers would
benefit
But Congress didn’t reckon with the
ingenuity and greed of corporate farms, nor
did Congress imagine that the Bureau of
Reclamation, which was supposed to regu-
late the program, would crawl in bed with
the big farmers.
Earlier this month, an older and wiser
House of Representatives voted to change
the rales to prevent the big corporations
from scamming the government. A similar
bill is pending in the Senate. But judging by
the record of the corporate farmers, they will
soon find a way to get around the new
restrictions, and the Bureau of Reclamation
will look die other way.
rations, each owning 960-acre farms.
In one case, eight “farmers” signed up for
subsidized water from a water district in
California. The names were different, but
the phone numbers and addresses were the
same. Each claimed to be a separate farm,
but in reality one land company was sucking
up cheap water for 6,730 acres.,
Wade Hill, 63, grows potatoes, lettuce
and wheat on 160 acres in the San Luis
Valley of Colorado. He irrigates his farm
from a private water project txrilt nearly 100
years ago, and it bums him up to see
wealthy farming corporations stealing subsi-
dized water. Hill says he can’t compete
when he pays for his own water and the big
companies hit up the taxpayer for the bill.
Hill has a word for what’s happening —
“Farmgate.”
To compound the scam, $830 million of
the $2.2 billion a year the taxpayers spend
on water subsidies goes to farms that raise
surplus crops — crops that America doesn’t
need. “American taxpayers are paying far-
mers to irrigate crops that we’re also paying
government
Doe claims that the Bureau of REclama-
tion protects its friends by writing flimsy
rules. When Doe tried to tighten those rules,
he was transferred. He now works in a toxic
waste unit an area he knows little about.
ARMED WITH JUNK — It’s a good
thing that superpower tensions have eased,
because if the United States ever went to
war, it would have to rely on a junkyard for
supplies. Pentagon investigators say the
milrtary inventory is loaded with junk,
including counterfeit and obsolete parts. We
have reported in the past about schlock
operators who have sold the military coun-
terfeit bolts for everything from tanks to
airplanes. Now is seems some of those
bogus bolts were recycled. One California
firm has been convicted of falsifying tests
on bolts it sold the government. The real
scandal is that the firms bought the bolts at
Pentagon surplus auctions and then sold
them back to the military.
United Feature Syndicate
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Today’s highlight in history:
On July 5,1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law
the National Labor Relations Act, which provided for a National
Labor Relations Board, and authorized labor to organize for the pur-
pose of collective bargaining.
On this date:
In 1801, American naval hero David G. Farragut was bom in
Knoxville, Term. • v
In 1810, showman Phineas T. Bamum was bom in Bethel, Conn.
In 1811, Venezuela became the first South American country to
declare its independence from Spain.
In 1830, the French occupied the North African city of Algiers.
In 1865, William Booth founded the Salvation Army in London.
In 1940, 50 years ago, during World War II, diplomatic relations
were broken between Britain and the Vichy government in France.
In 1946, the bikini swimsuit, designed by Louis Reard, made its
debut at a fashion show in Paris.
In 1947, Larry Doby signed a contract with the Cleveland Indians,
becoming the first black player in baseball’s American League.
In 1948, Britain’s National Health Service Act, which provides
free government-financed medical and dental care, went into effect
In 1950, Private Kenneth Shadrick of Skin Fork, W.Va., became
the first U.S. fatality in the Korean War.
In 1975, the Cape Verde Islands officially became independeOt
after 500 years of Portuguese rale.
In 1977, Pakistan’s army, led by Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq,
seized power from President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto was exe-
cuted in 1979.
In 1978, a Soviet “Soyuz” spacecraft touched down safely in So-
viet Kazakhstan with its two-member crew, including the first Polish
space traveler, Maj. Miroslaw Hermaszewski.
In 1983, Harry James, the swing-era bandleader and trumpet
player, died in Las Vegas, Nev., at age 67.
In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the 70-year-old “ex-
clusionary rule,” deciding that evidence seized with defective court
warrants could be used against defendants in criminal trials.
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Brown, Leon. The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 68, No. 212, Ed. 1 Thursday, July 5, 1990, newspaper, July 5, 1990; Baytown, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1043939/m1/4/?rotate=90: accessed June 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Sterling Municipal Library.