The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 68, No. 267, Ed. 1 Friday, September 7, 1990 Page: 4 of 16
This newspaper is part of the collection entitled: The Baytown Sun and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the Sterling Municipal Library.
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THE BAYTOWN SUN
Friday, September 7, 1990
Opinion
Sun editorial
This weekend
to be exciting
f ■ The coming weekend promises to be an excit-
I ing one for Baytown and other area
A residents.
Friday night, the Robert E. Lee Ganders, the Ross
S. Sterling Rangers, the Barbers Hill Eagles, the
■ Crosby Cougars and other teams in this area will
; begin what hopefully will be successful football
| seasons.
Also on Friday, the Texas Gatorfest will begin in
Anahuac and continue through Saturday.
Last year, 13,000 attended the Gatorfest. Nearly
: 20,000 are expected to attend this year,
j The Gatorfest coincides with the opening of alliga-
j tor hunting season. One of the highlights of the fes-
; tival will be the Great Alligator Roundup. More than
200 hunters are expected to compete for the $500
for bagging the largest gator.
There will also be events for the entire family,
| including a queen contest, a gumbo cookoff, the Ga-
| tor Chunkin’ contest and a street dance.
, ; On Saturday, ceremonies rededicating the refurb-
ished Battleship Texas will be held at San Jacinto
Battleground Park.
■- Gov. Bill Clements will deliver an address at 11
! a.m. to mark the opening of ceremonies. Several
! elected state and national elected officials are sche-
duled to attend.
!;• The tall ship, Elissa, an 1877 iron braque, will
also be present for the event.
Free tours of the Texas will be conducted from
1-8 p.m; Saturday.,
Hopefully, area residents will attend* one or more
these events this weekend.
From Sun files
t • ^ 7 7T 7'~"~“
Explosion rocks
■ Mont Belvieu, ’70
-.......... ..——---
A lesson from Grandpa
Bubba Lee Sterling and his buddies, Sher-
man and Earl, were sitting down at the feed
store the other day, watching fanners and
other folks who bring their dogs down for
the free dipping on Saturday morning.
This is something Bubba Lee does every
Saturday morning if his schedule allows.
He’ll pull up in that old topless pickup truck
of his and drop the tailgate, take a seat and
chew on some straw ’til someone arrives to
chew the fat with.
Bubba Lee Sterling is easily entertained.
Anyway, Bubba Lee’s buddies, Earl and
Sherman, came along and joined him, then
Bubba Lee’s sister, Debbo, pulled in, pack-
ing her little dog on her Harley.
Just like old home week.
Debbo was real glad to see the guys since
she hadn’t thanked them yet for the wedding
gifts they’d sent when she married Animal
over at the county jail a few weeks back.
A fishing enthusiast, Earl had presented
the blushing bride with a pair of hip-waders
while Sherman, always a joker, enrolled the
young lady in OdorEaters Anonymous
which gave her an automatic two-year sub-
scription to the OdorEater of the Month
Club.
Anyway, after Debbo got her little dog
a
7 . i ' 7'
Jane
I 7,^ ; '
Howard
dipped, they all sat around the back end of
Bubba Lee’s pickup and had a chat.
The subject turned, in a timely fashion, to
hunting:
Dove hunting season opened Sept. 1 and
Bubba Lee’s buddies wanted him to come
along on a hunting trip to blow away some
birdies.
But Bubba Lee said no way.
He said he had a pretty good reason for
that. While he is an avid deer hunter, he has
an aversion to shooting birds.
It all goes back to his grandfather and a
certain mockingbird.
Bubba Lee’s grandfather taught him and
Debbo to hunt.
As soon as they were old enough to own a
gun, the old man bought them each little
.22s, showed them how to use them and laid
down some ground rules.
Grandpa said there was only two reasons
to kill something — for food or to rid the
world of a varmint.
Well, right off the bat, as boys will do,
Bubba Lee went out and broke the rules.
He shot a mockingbird.
What made it worse, he said, was that hi?
grandfather witnessed the killing.
Bubba Lee said the old man made him
bring the bird to the house, pluck it and
clean it. Then Bubba Lee’s grandmother
cooked that mockingbird up and that’s what
little Bubba Lee had for supper.
Had to eat every bite of it, he said. ;
Actually, as Bubba Lee recalled, the bi*d
didn’t taste that bad, but coming after the
whupping he got for shooting it, it was all he
could do to choke it down.
He never forgot that lesson and nevef shot
another mockingbird — or any other bird.
Sign him up for the first deer hunt, he told
Earl and Sherman, but leave him out of arty
dove hunt plans.
That was one of Grandpa’s lessons that
left an indelible mark on Bubba Lee
Sterling.
Jane Howard is a Sun columnist and
reporter.
U.S. has poison gas arsenal
From The Baytown Sun files,
this is the way it was:
| 45 YEARS AGO
George Derrick, Earl Smith
and Daniel Boney are injured in
a car wreck on Evergreen Road.
Cedar Bayou School Board
approves a 15-cent increase in
property taxes, says Melvin
Parker, president of the board.
A charter committee, recently
elected to frame a home rule
charter in Pelly, will be led by
Mayor Ed Cleveland, chairman.
Other officers are O.O. Dorris,
L.R. Kurtz and Sam Davis.
Charles Fred Ramsey,
Eugene Scott and T.M. Perry
are new Eagle Scouts.
Mr. and Mrs. Joe Merka
observe their 50th wedding
anniversary.
35 YEARS AGO
! Services will be held tomor-
row for Henry Enax, 60, Bay-
town policeman who died
yesterday in a hospital in Hous-
ton. His badge, No. 6, will be
retired by the department.
; f, Mose Sumner, retired Bay-
town merchant, will fly to
Washington tonight to be the
weekend guest of Israeli Prime
Minister Moshe Sharett, who is
now visiting in this country.
School enrollment in the dis-
trict reaches 9,040. School offi-
cials report that crowded
conditions prevail in the third
grades at Cedar Bayou and
Travis elementary schools.
The school district here
registers 11,672 students.
Craig Townsend of Baytown
will teach this fall at the Univer-
sity of Texas.
Mrs. Ray Helpert serves as
chairman of the annual coffee
for Plumwood Garden Club.
Mrs. E.V. Mickle is co-hostess.
20 YEARS AGO
An unidentified type of liqu-
fied petroleum gas, vaporizing
as it escaped from a pipeline,
expodes in Mont Belvieu, forc-
ing the evacuation of a large
residential area. “We were just
lucky the wind was from the
west,” said Mont Belvieu Fire
Chief Clark Harmon. An eas-
terly wind would have carried
the gas into the middle of the
town of Mont Belvieu. Injured
in the blast were Mrs. Roger
Howard and son Dale, who live
in a frame house just east of
Highway 146. They are patients
at John Sealy Hopsital in
Galveston.
Services will be held tomor-
row for pioneer resident Mattie
May Ilfrey Kilgore, 84, who
was one of the oldest members
of Cedar Bayou Methodist
Church. She had been a member
of the church since 1896.
WASHINGTON — It’s the near future in
the Middle East, somewhere in the northern
reaches of Saudi Arabia. One of the jittery
contingents in the multinational peacekeep-
ing force takes a shot at an Iraqi reconnais-
sance plane in the Khafji region and kills
several of Saddam Hussein’s ranking martial
aides.
Saddam blames the United States and
fires off an astonishing reaction. He shells
American warships, cruising in the Persian
Gulf, with mustard gas. Five hundred U.S.
sailors are burned in the process; some of the
victims are struck blind, all of them develop
grievous body blisters, and a few will even-
tually die.
Now the question is what can the United
States do? It doesn’t have the ground capa-
bility in place to invade Mesopotamia, its
jetcraft have already been having technical
difficulties operating in the desert atmo-
spheric conditions, and the surgical use of a
nuclear device is ruled out, owing to interna-
tional political pressures.
So the Pentagon orders a retaliation in
kind. The United States shoots canisters of
hydrogen cyanide at the headquarters posi-
tions of the quarter-million troops massed
along the Iraqi and Kuwaiti borders. Then,
for good measure, it drops a choking agent,
on an installation further inland, and warns
that Baghdad could be next.
Impossible? Admittedly, the scenario is
most unlikely. Yet with all of the recent anx-
iety regarding Iraqi’s cache of chemical
weapons, there has been relatively little at-
tention given to the other side of the story:
Tom
Tiede
The U.S. military also has massive reserves
of what Wipston Churchill called “the hel-
lish poison.”
The United States is bound by interna-
tional agreements not to use the chemical
bombs. The nation adheres to a 1925 Geneva
Protocol that outlawed the deployment of
toxic agents. But the protocol did not prohi-
bit the manufacture of the weapons, and the
result is that the United States squirrels them
away for “defensive purposes.”
Right now the Department of Defense has
a reported 30,000 tons of deployable poi-
sons. Much of the material is warehoused in
steel drums at eight locations in the country
— from Aberdeen, Md„ to Umitilla, Ore. —
and the rest is sealed in munition casings on
Navy ships and at Army and air bases ar-
ound the world.
The casings are said to include millions of
artillery Warheads, everything from mortar
rounds to 155 howitzer shells. And there are
loadings for, almost 500,000 rockets as well.
The United States therefore has a much lar-
ger chemical arsenal than Iraq (it is second
only to the Soviet Union) and a far greater
delivery capacity.
Pentagon authorities say the U.S. stock-
pile includes all of the most hideous kinds of.
battlefield chemicals. Blistering compounds,
choking compounds and nerve compounds.
The choking weapons, for example, bum
through organ membranes, cause internal he-
morrhaging, and the lungs can fill up and fail
with seeping muck.
Pentagon officials say the nerve gases are
the worst. They cannot be seen, or smelled,
usually, and they act merely by touching
skin. Iraq was charged with repeatedly using
deadly mustard gas during its 1980s war
with Iran, but not nerve gas — which it also
stockpiles. The nerve agents can destroy the
human nervous system and generate rapid,
torturous death.
The lethal power of the nerve agents was
amply demonstrated in Utah during the
1960s. Some gas was accidentally released
into the winds at the Dugway Proving
Ground, and thousands of grazing sheep
were killed. The slaughter astounded the na-
tion, and led to a 1969 White House prohibi-
tion on the production of poison weapons.
The prohibition was not to last, however.
There were too many worries that the So-
viets were taking advantage of it by building
an overwhelmingly superior accumulation.
The Pentagon argued that the United States
had to have more weapons to maintain its
deterrence credibility, and Congress author-
ized new manufacturing in 1987.
United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
Spouses becoming lobbyists
YX7 A CUTXTnTAM rP • ^
BIBLE VER$E
“For with God nothing shall be impossible.”
—Luke 1:37
*
Wi)tPagtoUm i§>tin
Leon Brown....................................................................Editor and publisher
Fred Hartman...............................................Editor and publisher, 1950-1974
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Wanda Orton................................................................,........Managing editor
Bruce Guynn...........................................................Associate managing Editor
ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT
Russell Maroney................................................ Advertising manager
Debbie Kimmey................................................. Classified manager
CIRCULATION #
Gary Dobbs..............................................;.............................General manager
Circulation manager
PRODUCTION
Gary Guinn.......................... Production manager
Lynne Morris............................................................Composing room foreman
Tha Baytown Sun (USPS 046-180) ■ entered as second daw nailer at the Baytown. Texas Post
Office 77522 under the Ad o( Congress ot March 3,1879. Published afternoons, Monday through Friday
and Sundays si 1301 Memorial Drive in Baytown, Texas 77520. Suggested Subscription Rales: By
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on request Represented nationally by Coastal Publications. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to
THE BAYTOWN SUN. P.O. Box 90, Baytown. Tx. 77522.
MEMBER OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
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it or not otherwise in this paper and local news of spontaneous origin pubished herein. Rights d
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LETTER POUCY
Only signed tetters will be considered for publication. The Sun reserves the right to condense Mars.
WASHINGTON — Two-career marriages
mean members of Congress have a new eth-
ics problem — their spouses.
No longer does the congressional wife sit
at home pouring tea for other wives. The
congressional “wife” may now be a congres-
sional husband, and spouses of both sexes
come to Washington with political savvy —
in some cases professional backgrounds —
that propel them into the city’s second most
prominent profession — lobbying.
Most of the spouses who make a living as
lobbyists claim they dutifully steer clear of
professional pillow talk, but it’s hand to ima-
gine dinner table conversation that doesn’t
mention either spouse’s workday.
Take Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. He is a
leading advocate for farmers and has consid-
erable clout on agricultural issues through
the Senate committees on which he sits. His
wife, Ruth Harkin, is a lawyer specializing
in agriculture. She does some lobbying and
represents clients in the farming business.
Mrs. Harkin told our associate Scott Sleek
that nobody ip her law firm — Akin, Gump,
Straus, Hauer and Feld — lobbies her hus-
band. Maybe not, but they have done him a
whopper of a favor. The law firm repre-
sented Sen. Harkin in a libel suit. He still
owes the firm $162,000, and the firm doesn’t
Jack
Anderson
Today in history
Blitz on London
begins in 1940
Fifty years ago, on Sept. 7, 1940, Nazi Germany began its initial
“blitz” on London during World War II, raining bombs on the
British capital every night for more than two months.
In 1533, England’s Queen Elizabeth I was bom in Greenwich.
In 1986, Desmond Tutu was installed as the first black to lead the
Anglican Church in southern Africa.
In 1987, Erich Honecker became the first East German head of
state to visit West Germany.
Today’s birthdays: Heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey is 82.
Producer-director Elia Kazan is 81. U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-
Hawaii, is 66. Actor John Philip Law is 53. Actress Susan Blakely is
42. Actress Julie Kavner is ,39.
seem to be in any hurry to collect.
Akin Gump defended Harkin in the suit
arising from his 1984 campaign. An aide to
his opponent sued Harkin for libel when
Harkin issued a press release accusing the
aide of improper campaign activities. Harkin
won the suit. a ...
The senator insists he’lf pay the legal fees,
but the way he plans to do it is raising eye-
brows on Capitol Hill. Harkin opened a trust
fund and is soliciting contributions to pay
the- bill. As a bow in the direction of propri-
ety, Harkin says he won’t take any of the
money until after the November election.
Harkin said he consulted the Senate Ethics
Committee all along the way and got ap-
proval, but the question still remains: Should
a senator be in hock to a lobbying group,
especially one that employs his wife and
whose attorneys have given him generous
campaign contributions?
Harkin isn’t the only lawmaker with a
working spouse, but some are more careful
to avoid die appearance of influence ped-
dling. Anne Bingaman, wife of Sen. Jeff
Bingaman, D-N.M., is a lawyer with a big
law firm that also lobbies. But Mrs. Binga-
man sticks to the legal work and doesn’t
lobby.
The firm handles issues that lap over into
Bingaman’s committee work in the Senate,
but so far the couple has been able to avoid
questionable entanglements.
That isn’t easy. The temptation to cash in
on family ties is strong. Pam Kostmayer,
who is legally separated from her husband
Rep. Peter Kostmayer, D-Pa., says she has
experienced it first hand. Her ■communica-
tions firm helps clients who have an issue to
push before Congress. But instead of directly
lobbying Congress, the firm stirs up grass-
roots support in a congressional district and
gets voters to pressure their representative.
She said he has rejected potential clients
who have come to her hoping for inroads
with her husband.
Berry’s world
v’ *
© 1988 by NEA. Inc
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Brown, Leon. The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 68, No. 267, Ed. 1 Friday, September 7, 1990, newspaper, September 7, 1990; Baytown, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1044463/m1/4/?q=technical+manual: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Sterling Municipal Library.