September 1983

The disc camera (left) is electronic technology's and the Eastman Kodak Company's latest gift to amateur photographers.

The automatic pocketsized camera uses a 15exposure color film disc (below, after processing) that slips into its hatched back (far left).

It has a wide-angle lens system with an exceptionally short focal , length (12.5 mm). Powered by a long-life lithium battery, the camera measures distance and brightness instantly, sets proper exposure, activates a flash if needed, and advances the film while the flash recharges.

SPAN 2 "We Welcome a Competition of Ideas and Values"

by Max Kampe/man

4 A Doctor's Commitment to India

by Pranay Gupte

5

Shaping Young Lives With an Old Idea

by Thomas A. Bass

10 What's in It for the Unions?

by Charles G. Burck

14 Who Protects the Unemployed?

by Joel Swerdlow

16 Talking Poetry Nissim Ezekiel Interviews Michael Harper

20

Wings of the Eagle

by H.P. Mama

28

They Chose India

by Jo McGowan

32 Exporters of Know-how

by Lucien Agniel

36 Batty About Caves

by Bil Gilbert

41 On the Lighter Side

42 Gospel Man

by Steven Kaplan

45 Who Formulates U.S. International Economic Policy?

by John M. Starrels

46 Focus On ...

Front cover-Liane Enkelis Š 1983. Inside front covercourtesy Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, N.Y. 5-7-Liane Kasser. lO-l1-Andrew Sacks. 14Enkelis Š 1983. 8-9-Tom Associated Photographers. 16-Avinash Pasricha. 21 top-courtesy McDonnell Douglas; bottom-courtesy United Airlines. 22-courtesy Boeing Commercial Airplane Company. 24-25-Los Angeles Department of Airports. 27-courtesy" United Airlines. 28-Jo McGowan, except top right by Avinash Pasricha. 32-35-Richard Pasley, courtesy Arthur D. Little Company. 36-38-courtesy Luray Caverns. 39-Scott Lamb. 42-43-Larry Marcus. 44-from A Pictorial History of Jazz.

Inside back cover-Martin Adler Levick, Black Star; Gregory Thorp.

Back cover-Jim Norris.

Photographs:

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed by H.K. Mehta at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encourged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine. one year's subscription (12 issues) 21 rupees. single copy, 2 rupees 75 paise. For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasrurba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi ll000J. See change of address form on page 48b.

Front cover: Jeannie'Ruck,

21, hauls logs from a clogged creek bed, As one .of the 1,800 members of the California Conservation Corps, she also fights fires, plants trees, builds trails and happily does other constructive, backbreaking work for a low salary. See pages 5-9.

Back cover: As part of the

movement to "recycle" old buildings, the Chicago Public Library has been refurbished and restored to its original purpose-and elegance. See also page 49.

A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER If If you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do, You've got to talk to the workers in the shop with you You've got to build you a union and build it strong, If we all stick together, boys, it won't be long-Better working conditions, vacations with pay: Take the kids to the seashore! If

The American labor troubadours of the Thirties and Forties sang of a better day coming through organization and solidarity. They saw an end to the often bitter strife between labor unions and company management.

Those feisty itinerant ballad-makers who celebrated labor's heroes and~ martyrs, who called for justice for the worker, would have been amazed by the relatively amicable state of labor-management relations in the Eighties.

The transition from confrontation to cooperation has evolved over a short period of time, owing to revolutionary changes in the fabric of American society and, more specifically, in the kind of work laborers perform. Only a century ago, half the workers in the United States were engaged in agriculture. Fifty years ago, factories and heavy industries were the leading employers. Today, producers of services provide some 60 percent of the nation's jobs.

The nature of trade unions has also changed. In the 1880s a group of artisans, craftsmen, small shopkeepers and farmers formed the Knights of Labor, first as a secret society, then as a workers cooperative. The Knights held parades every September in New York City. In 1894 the U •S. Congress declared the first Monday in September a national holiday-Labor Day--in honor of all workers. Today's unions, which represent about one-fifth of America s workers, tend to draw their members from specialized occupations; government workers, aerospace technicians and movie stars have their own unions. Ronald Reagan is a former president of the Screen Actors Guild and is, in fact, the first President of the United States who was a member of a union.

I

I

We feel it appropriate that in our September issue SPANshould take a look at some of the profound changes in labor-management relations that have taken place recently, as well as examine the responsibilities of the U•S. state and federal governments to the unemployed (see articles beginning page 10). Our cover story, about the California Conservation Corps, shows how some old ideas about the 'work ethic have been successfully revived in a new generation.

--M.P.

tWeWelcome a Competition of On August 1, 1975, the United States, the Soviet Union, Canada and 32 European nations signed the historic Helsinki Accords.

The Accords, which climaxed the final phase of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), stipulated 10 principles of conduct among nations. They included inviolability of frontiers, peaceful settlement of international disputes, nonintervention in internal affairs, the right of self-determination, prior notification of military maneuvers, cultural and scientific cooperation, free flow Qf information and exchange of journalists. Since then, CSCE has met periodically to review compliance with the Accords and further strengthen the cause of international peace. Following is an abridged version of the closing statement made at the recent CSCE conference in Madrid, Spain, by the chairman of the United States delegation.

After two years and more than ten months of negotiation, we are close to the end of our Madrid meeting.

The American delegation is pleased with the draft of the concluding document that has emerged out of our deliberations. We consider it noteworthy that in a number of respects, such as in provisions dealing with the reunification of families, religious rights, trade unions, terrorism, rights of journalists, access to missions, and Helsinki monitors, the Madrid document goes beyond the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.

We also consider the decision to hold a conference on security and confidence building to be important. This can be a significant step toward strengthening security and cooperation in Europe. The need to minimize the risk of surprise military attack is of great significance to all of us. We welcome a decision to hold such a conference.

We look for a conference that will produce more than vaguely worded declarations. We take very seriously the provisions in the mandate that the conference would concern itself with confidence and security building measures which are militarily significant, politically binding, verifiable, and applicable to the whole of Europe. The conference must complement, and not interfere with, other arms control negotiations.

The United States will take a constructive approach to the work of the conference, and hopes that others will do the same.

Agreement to notify military activities which will take place on land in Europe is an example of the kind of measure we believe could be a valuable result of this conference.

It is also gratifying to all of us that Madrid is firmly establishing the continuity of the Helsinki process. We have done so explicitly; and we are doing so with our decision to hold another follow-up meeting in Vienna in 1986, preceded by a 10th-anniversary meeting in Helsinki in 1985. This continuity is strengthened by a decision to hold meetings, between the sessions in Madrid and Vienna, on human rights, human contacts, cultural activities, the Mediterranean and the peaceful resolution of international disputes.

We must, however, not be blind to the difficulties of the task ahead. These difficulties were dramatized by a first-page editorial in the July 14 issue of Pravda. The editorial sharpens for us not only the real meaning of the Madrid agreement, but its decided limitations as well.

The editorial's theme is the speech made to the June plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee by the leader of the Soviet Union, during which he said: "There is a struggle for the

hearts and minds of billions of people on this planet."

Concerned that the Soviet Union may not be doing too well in that struggle, Pravda urges that Soviet citizens be "immunized" against hostile ideas. Specifically, it aims at religion in the Soviet Union as a danger.

The United States understands the profound seriousness of the inherent contradictions between the Soviet totalitarian system and the system of liberty and individual dignity which is a hallmark of democratic governments. Reaching agreements, such as we did in Helsinki and now in Madrid, does not, by itself, automatically minimize those differences or end the competition.

We intend to be in the competition for "hearts and minds" to which Pravda refers. We welcome a competition of ideas and values. In many ways the Madrid forum has been and remains a vehicle for that competition. What concerns us deeply, however, is that the Soviet Union may believe that it cannot win a competition of ideas and values without the threat and use of armed force and repression, both within and outside its borders.

The Helsinki Final Act and the Madrid agreement are efforts to channel the competition of values within civilized constraints; and at the same time to strive for understanding so that we can learn to live with one another in peace. The fact that these agreements continue to be violated even during this very period of negotiation and agreement is discouraging.

We cannot in good conscience permit a limited negotiating success, important as we believe it to be, to make us forget, much to our regret, that signatures on a document do not necessarily produce compliance with its provisions. The continued fighting in Afghanistan, where more than 100,000 invading troops remain, violating the sovereignty of that unhappy country and abusing the humanity of its people, stands as an affront to the peace we in Helsinki professed to pursue.

The people of Poland remain today subjugated by a martial law which attacked the legitimacy of their free trade union, Solidarity, and continues to keep in internment and imprisonment thousands of persons who declare and champion their human rights.

We have sought and welcome the agreement represented by our decision in Madrid. We do not wish to minimize the importance of that agreement. But we also do not wish to minimize the consequence of undermining such agreements when they are not complied with in letter and in spirit.

What are we to think when at the very time we were'coming to agreement on provisions dealing with religious rights, Pravda Vostoka of Uzbekistan informed us that leading members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church have been imprisoned by government authorities, precisely because of their wish to practice their religion? .

The decline in Soviet Jewish emigration is to the lowest levels since the 1960s, a tragic violation of the Helsinki Accords. An important escape valve has thus been cut off for one of the most persecuted religious groups in that society. We note too, with sadness, that many Jewish scientists and professionals have been stripped of their educational degrees; that the teaching of the Hebrew language brings on police harassment and arrest; and, perhaps most disturbing of all, that extreme anti-Semitic articles are appearing in the Soviet

Ideas and Values' press with increasing frequency.

The picture is no more encouraging when we turn to the very marrow of our objectives, the search for peace.

A Soviet pacifist, Alexander Shatravka, was recently sentenced to three years in prison for circulating a petition calling for the universal abolition of nuclear weapons. The document had urged both the United States and the Soviet Union to scrap their nuclear arsenals. Shatravka had earlier been associated with a group of young people, who, a year ago, had been arrested for unfurling a banner in Red Square bearing only the Russian words for "bread-life-disarmament."

The arrest of these young Soviet citizens seeking peace stands in sharp contrast to the enthusiastic editorial which appeared in Pravda last January hailing antiwar movements in Western Europe as "vital causes of the people." Is it any wonder that we are reminded of a perceptive statement by Clausewitz: "The aggressor," he said, "is always peace loving.

He would like to make his entry into our country undisturbed."

We know that the people of the Soviet Union, like all of our peoples, are peace loving. But we also know from the Pravda editorial of July 14 that Soviet authorities, who are not elected by their people, fear independent ideas and want. their people "immunized" against them. General Aleksel Yepishev, the political head of the Soviet army, recently complained that Soviet youth was being infected by pacifism. To stop independent ideas is a lost cause. Ideas, like the wind currents and the climate, reach all lands and cannot be stopped by artificial barriers.

It is our view that in arresting and harassing those of its citizens who work for peace and universal nuclear disarmament, Soviet authorities not only maintain an indefensible double standard, they clearly demonstrate that the mantle of peace, in which they would like to cloak themselves, simply does not fit their shape, their ideology, or their practices, and it is not simply to one country that we wish to' address these comments.

Similarly, a few weeks ago, more than 300 Czechoslovak young people were clubbed by the police, with many arrested, for holding a peace demonstration in Prague and chanting "We want peace and freedom." And in that country, Ladislav Lis, a spokesman for the Charter 77 Human Rights and Peace Organization, a Helsinki monitoring group, is expected to go on trial soon for his activities. Religious believers are also facing renewed repression for their expressions of faith.

In East Germany, where there is a growing unofficial peace movement that opposes all nuclear arms, including those of the Soviet Union and the United States, young people, many of them associated with churches, also find themselves harassed.

At least 22 members of this group have recently been expelled.

Patches worn on clothing depicting "swords into plowshares," distributed by East German church leaders, have been outlawed as "the expression of a mentality hostile to the state and proof of membership in an illegal political association."

Students wearing the patch were threatened with expulsion from their schools and workers from their jobs.

The irony is not lost on us as we remind ourselves that the statue of peace given by Moscow to the United Nations has the same motif of "swords into plowshares."

A double irony is that the harassment of those who try to

demonstrate for peace stands in stark contradiction to a United Nations General Assembly resolution of last December, cosponsored by the United States, calling on all states "to encourage their citizens freely and publicly to express their own views on disarmament changes and to organize and to meet publicly for that purpose."

Once again, we have words, and we have deeds contrary to those words. We have the continuation of a pattern that has plagued the Helsinki process since 1975, and which continues to plague it to this day.

The question might well be asked, therefore, and many in my country understandably ask, why do we negotiate about words? Why do we seek to forge a concluding document? Why do we enter into an agreement at a time when the repression of human beings in the Soviet Union is greater than at any time since the Helsinki Accords were signed in 1975?

The United States has pursued these activities here in Madrid because the pursuit of peace is too vital, the need for understanding too indispensable, the importance of the Helsinki Accords too great to permit us to be discouraged by the task or by the obstacles we face.

We are convinced that the Helsinki Final Act has within it a formula for peace which is indispensable in this age of potential nuclear devastation. It is our conviction, furthermore, that unless these principles are taken seriously, the Accords will become historically irrelevant: We, therefore, continue to express ourselves on this issue in order to help mobilize a wider goal and political insistence upon universal respect for the Act by compliance with its provisions. Anything less threatens the integrity of our process and of our relationships under it.

We make this statement not to irritate or defend any country. We understand the need for patience in building the structure of peace and understanding among us. We cannot, however, lull our publics into believing that words alone are adequate to erase the pressing threats to the integrity of the Helsinki and Madrid principles.

We earnestly desire to enter into a constructive dialogue at all levels in order to achieve understanding and restore the "detente" contemplated in the Helsinki Accords. We wish to negotiate reductions in arms of all kinds to ease the burdens of military spending on all of us. We wish peace with every state.

We wish to resolve all potential conflicts between us, bilateral, regional and international. We seek to do so on the basis of reciprocity and mutuality.

We appreciate that in order to have a successful dialogue, we must be as attentive and responsive to the concerns of others as we ask them to be with respect to ours. We are prepared to do so.

I, conclude with an extract from a statement issued bY' President Reagan in Washington on July 15: "As Madrid has shown, dialogue, when based on realistic expectations and conducted with patience, can produce results.

These results are often gradual and hard-won but they are the necessary building blocks for a more secure and stable world.

The challenge remains: We must all consolidate and build on these gains; we must ensure that good words are transformed into good deeds and that the ideals which they embody are given concrete expression. Giving substance to the promises of Madrid'and Helsinki remains one of our prime objectives."

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A Doctor's Commitment to India Fifteen years ago a young man just out of medical school left India to make his fortune in the United States, where he became a skilled heart surgeon. But instead of living happily ever after on his six-figure income, Naresh Trehan is coming home ag~in.

Reversing the traditional "brain drain," Dr. Trehan is bringing a dozen other doctors with him. They are starting in New Delhi what may be the most comprehensive heart institute in the Third World. It is to be a prototype of a medical institution for developing countries-not only treating patients but also researching the special conditions in poor countries that cause or

The Intergovernmental Committee for Migration (ICM), formed in 1951 to help solve the postwar problems of displaced persons in Europe, and internationally known for its work in organizing the transport of refugees to new homes, is also engaged in a less well-known but important program of reversing the brain drain in the developing world.

ICM's "return-of-talent" program usually takes one of two forms; reduced fares for returnees, or complete payment of the costs of transferring migrants to developing countries, ineluding the cost of supplementing salaries for a period, to maintain the approximate level of previous earnings in Europe or North America.

Until recently, ICM's efforts in the recruitment and transfer of skilled workers and professionals from industrialized countries were directed at Latin America. Since 1964, it has helped more than 27,000 doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers and skilled workers migrate to a number of Latin American countries.

Buoyed by the success of their program for Latin America, 29 ICM member-states recently initiated a talent-transfer program for Africa, and hope to start similar programs for other parts of the developing world.

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exacerbate heart diseases.

The institute represents an unusual arrangement. Staff members will be sent regularly for free training at the hospital where Dr. Trehan now works, the New York University Medical Center. And physicians from the New York facility will go to New Delhi to perform operations and instruct the Indian staff. These services will be donated.

In addition, each physician selected by Dr. Trehan to return to India has agreed to donate half of his time to the Heart Institute. The institute will be a nonprofit facility with 200 beds and is expected to treat more than 50,000 patients a year.

The plan is that treatment will be free or for a modest fee.

"Most of the Indian doctors I know in the United States would love to return to their homeland," said Dr. Trehan, a slim, pleasant man of 36. "Like myself, most of ICM recently set up an office in Nairobi, Kenya-partly funded by the United States. The office's primary task is to identify and contact government agencies, universities, research institutions, private and state enterprises all over Africa that could benefit from the expertise of African nationals or persons of other nationalities working in Europe or North America.

The first ICM return-of-talent project in Africa, funded by the 10-nation European Community (Ee), calls for the interregional exchange and integration of 200 qualified African nationals at a cost of $3.3 million. It is estimated that 70 highly skilled persons will be recruited, transported with their dependents and integrated into Afric;an countries by the end of this year, the remainder during 1984.

The movement or return of highly trained personnel from the indu~trialized world to developing countries can make. a key contribution to their economic and social development, says Professor Adkbayo Adediji, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa. "For example," he notes, "Africa is the best endowed of all the world regions in energy, land, water, mineral and other natural resources .... It is Africa's inability to exploit those resources that represents the greatest stumbling block to our development."

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these doctors have reached a. point in their professional lives where they don't have to worry about making a livingthey are successful and they are financially well-off. Our concern is more about whether top-rate medical facilities are available, and whether we can get to practice the kind of medicine we want."

Dr. Trehan, who performed nearly 3,000 open-heart operations in New York, had received several offers from Indian hospitals to come back and teach or supervise. But he felt that their facilities lagged by 20 years or more behind U.S. medical centers. So he decided to start a new institution.

He approached well-to-do acquaintances in India and the United States and gathered commitments totaling almost $15 million-the cost of setting up the new institute. He said continued donations will cover operating costs.

The doctor then persuaded the Indian Government to donate about Ilf4 hectares of choice property in the capital.

Construction is under way and the institute is expected to open in about two years.

With its state-of-the-art equipment, the facility will have a computer tie-up to the New York Medical Center. Indians will no longer have to travel abroad for treatment of complicated heart diseases.

When he first shared his plan with Third World friends in New York, they were incredulous. "You could never live in India again, after a comfortable life in the United States," said one. "You will never make as much money in India as you do in New York," said another.

"I felt that for me to stay on in the West and keep on being commercially successful would be missing a unique opportunity," Dr. Trehan said. "I felt that to stay on in America would be in a sense morally fraudulent, when I was needed in India. Nothing that I'd do in New York would really measure up to the challenge of creating a new medical system altogether. We have the commitment and the motivation."

What he did not mention was that returning to India would mean a considerable financial sacrifice. But, as Naresh Trehan himself put it, the challenge supersedes commerce.

0 About the Author: Pranay Gupte is a frequent contributor to the International Herald

Tribune.

Teaching skills no more exalted than the proper use of an ax and shovel, paying paltry wages for backbreaking work, the California Conservation Corps has a long waiting list of applicants who want to join. The Corps instills in the young the work ethic-and pride.

On a trail near the summit of Mount San Jacinto, near Los Angeles, the California Conservation Corps (CCC) is at work.

Using rock hammers and shovels, a crew of young men and women lays a stretch of riprap-crushed rock and fill-over the steep, zigzag pathway. A teenage girl and her father walk up the trail and stop to catch their breaths. "I had no idea somebody actually did this sort of work," says the girl. Joe Schroeder, busy cutting stunted trees off the sides of the trail, explains to the girl about the CCC and its backcountry projects.

"When you're old enough, you ought to join," he concludes.

"It's really a lot of fun."

Schroeder is the 19-year-old son or a tennis professional in Palm Springs, California. A bright, energetic youth, he was working the night shift at a doughnut shop when he decided to join the 1,800-member CCC. "When 1 told my friends 1 was joining the Corps, they said to me, 'You're crazy, man. You'll have to work your tail off.'" Schroeder laughs. "They didn't understand. That's what 1 wanted to do."

The organization's motto is "Hard Work, Low Pay, Miserable Conditions." It teaches skills no more exalted than proper use of an ax and shovel. It pays minimum wage for backbreaking work. But with a waiting list of applicants, and nearly unanimous praise from the legislators who fund it, the California Conservation Corps is obviously doing something right.

The name intentionally evokes the original Civilian Conservation Corps which employed 2.5 million men from the depth of the Depression in 1933 until 1942. Its first enrollees started work that would soon affect the land, forests and waterways of every U. S. state and territory. With up to 15 million people unemployed and America in dire need of land conservation programs, the CCC enjoyed tremendous popularity. The men lived in 4,000 camps and earned $30 a month, out of which about $25 was sent home. One hears few testimonials nowadays to the work they accomplished, but in nine years the original CCC planted more than 2,000 million trees, constructed thousands of kilometers of trails and access roads, and spent 6.5 million days fighting forest fires. As a result, annual losses from forest fires dropped to their lowest point ever.

Today's California Corps fights 200 blazes yearly, and members grow close to three million trees from seed and plant them each spring. They clear streams, build trails, construct parks and restore landmarks. Some specialize in newer alternative-energy projects such as building solar hot-water systems.

For their Herculean labors, Corps members receive Spartan quarters in residential camps and a daily regimen that starts with a 3-kilometer run at 6 a.m. Women make up more than a third of the Corps and everyone does the same work and wears the same uniform of high-topped boots, cotton pants, tan shirts and hard hat. Women's dormitories are separate from men's, but there is absolute equity in working conditions. All members are on call for emergencies, 24 hours a day.

This "ecological militia" operates out of 26 centers that include recycled hospitals and fire stations, an old naval barracks on San Francisco's Treasure Island, and a former resort near San Diego. But most of them are located out in tHe deserts and mountains.

Strung 1,600 kilometers between the borders of Oregon and Mexico, these CCC camps have their quirks and specialties, but they also share a common identity.

They are neat, if not spiffy. Work is the order of the day, but morale is high. Food is plentiful and competition friendly in the afterdinner games.

There is spirited rivalry among

Above: Firefighter Eileen Macken chooses¡ a quiet moment to write her daily diary, a Corps requirement. Right: Jeannie Ruck (left) and leader Leatha Harris feel elated at the end of a day of clearing ponds.

the camps. The firefighters, sleeping several to a room and on constant alert, claim to have the hardest assignment-disputed

by Corps members on "spike" (a term used by loggers meaning "temporary camp") in the desert or engaged in clearing logjams out of streams. Both the energy conservation crews and the "solar gypsies"-so' named because they live and work out of six converted buses-vie for recognition as the "Einsteins" of the Corps. As for the best cuisine, Placer Fire Center offers tasty vegetables from the garden, and San Francisco does well

by Asian foods.

Uniforms are optional after a nine-hour workday, and

anyone can visit a nearby town, if there is one, on weekends.

But daily life for Corps members in camp is run on a no-nonsense schedule with five inviolable rules: no drugs, no alcohol, no violence, no destruction of state property and no refusal to work. Enrollment is limited to one year, except for those hired for a second year as crew leaders. The average stay is five-and-a-half months, with only two out of ten recruits spending the entire year. These figures are slightly misleading; they neglect "positive attrition," which includes leaving the Corps for full-time schooling or a job. The California Conservation Corps has developed a credible reputation: businesses and

state agencies hire its graduates.

To join the CCC one has to be between the ages of 18 and 23, a resident of California, and willing to work. Candidates sign a statement of consent, which reads in part: "The CCC is a WORK program. You will do dirty, backbreaking work; and no one will thank you for it. ... You will work in rain, high winds, intense heat, snow, mud and cold mountain streams. Above all you must accept supervision. You must follow instructions."

Joann Payan, 21, was active in a social club when she joined the CCC. "I've never done anything like this before," she said, "and I have my mind set on doing a good job."

Along with a curriculum of night classes and a requirement that everyone without one get a secondary school diploma, Corps members are required to keep daily journals. Payan had just finished training as a firefighter and was on her way to action in Los Angeles County when she wrote: "The CCC is a pretty cool place if you like the outdoors and hard work. If you're looking for an air-conditioned room and no sweating, you're in the wrong place."

Kathy Hastings, 19, was employed cleaning houses for a developer when she saw the following advertisement in the local newspaper: "Women and men-18 to 23. Fight fires, build trails, plant trees, fight floods. The California Conservation Corps has a job for you (if you can handle it)." "I made more money in a week cleaning qouses than I do now in a month," she told me. "But I wasn't haVing fun." ,,' I drove out into the S~n Joaquin Delta one day to meet a CCC crew sandbagging leyees. There were 2,400 hectares flooded, and I found the eaves of barns and houses barely visible above the water. The air reeked of hydrogen sulfide bubbling up from rotting crops, and the work of securing the levees with stakes, wire, sandbags and plastic was as dirty as any promised. Lunch break was also a time to write, and an affable young man showed me his journal. The first entry read: "My name is Ed Wallace and the reason why I'm here is because I was out of work for six months and I found my life going nowhere. Every day I would get up at 11 o'clock and watch television for two hours."

The most recent entry in his journal began: "For the first time I actually saw the flooded Delta. It really is a disaster. We tied together phone poles all day to put them in the water, string them out and anchor them where the water gets shallow.

When the wind picks up and makes waves, the telephone poles should stop the wave action."

The first Wednes.day of every month the Greyhound bus station in Sacramento fills with some 300 new Corps members arriving from around the state. After a day filling out forms and being measured for uniforms, these young men and women are

Corps members help one another with their high school courses at the San Bernardino Center.

bused again to the CCC Training Academy outside of San Andreas. In a former youth detention facility, they spend three weeks learning how to use handtools, fight fires and follow instructions from wake-up call at 5:30 a.m. until lights-out at 10 p.m. Those who survive this part of the CCC ordeal will be assigned at random to a "home" center, where life should seem friendlier, .even if the schedule remains the same.

On "intake day" in Sacramento I saw a white-haired woman waving good-bye to her son, Bryan Rosetta. "I'm so glad to see him go," his mother said. "He's the youngest of the three and it's time he was off on his own. My brother was in the original CCC, and it made a man of him."

For many of these young people this will be their first job, if qot their first time away from home. Friendships will make up a good part of their experience in the Corps, and letters from camp to camp often count as daily writing assignments.

Women drop out less frequently than men, and Hispanic women fare best of all. Suzanne Anderson, director of training, delivers a speech to new recruits. "The roles are changing," she says. "It's time for women to step out and help. You can put on mascara and curl your hair, but you can also learn to use a pickax and a brush hook. It's okay to cry around here, so long as you cry and work at the same time."

There is much else that changes or is left behind on joining the Corps. Like cars. When a job at any restaurant or doughnut stand will give you enough money to keep a car on the road, why leave it behind and head for the backcountry of California to build trails by hand and clear logjams out of streams? As Eddie Soto puts it, "I want to get my secondary school equivalency degree and learn some skills. It's the only way I'm going to get anywhere."

The history of the California Conservation Corps reaches back to the administration of then-Governor Ronald Reagan, who in 1971 founded the Ecology Corps as an alternative service program for conscientious objectors to military service. Its functions were later transferred into the more broadly based CCc. The Corps foundered for a number of years and was facing calls for its early abolition when Brien Thomas Collins was appointed director in 1979. An Irishman from New York, Collins turned out to be an administrative genius with a knack for promoting talent and generating enthusiasm. Beyond Collins' leadership, it was actually a number of state disasters that catapulted the CCC into the n'?ws. In 1980 the Corps fought flooding throughout the state. Wearing their hard hats emblazoned with "CCC" at every camera angle, night after night on the television news, Corps members appeared to bail out the sinking ship of state. Later that year the CCC made news when it fought major fires in Southern California.

It was actually a more quixotic event that once more mobilized the CCC en masse. The Corps had already performed heroically in fires and floods. Now came flies. In 1981 there were two major alerts against an infestation of flies which destroy fruit crops. Nearly 1,000 Corps members were mobilized and became involved in tree stripping. They slept in tents and public buildings until their work was finished. For weeks, laboring 11 hours a day, seven days a week, the CCC stripped 530 tons of fruit by hand in a 520-square-kilometer area.

Later that year John Dugan, who had been second in command, took over the Corps. Also a New York Irishman, he

As part of training, a member paints an antique locomotive at the San Bernardino County Museum. had walked a police beat in Harlem for three years before joining the U.S. Army, where he served with distinction. His CCC program has moved forcefully into teaching skills. After one of his speeches to new Corps members at the Training Academy, he remarked to me, "You saw what was out there.

That audience was fraught with failure. But all you have to do is reach down, pull out their character, give them a little self-esteem and direction, and they'll flourish."

Dugan counters charges that the program costs too much. In six years the CCC has employed 17,000 young people and returns to the taxpayer $1.65 in benefits for every dollar spent.

"CCC-type programs are an idea whose time has returned," he says.

Robert Burkhardt was a plumber and circus juggler before he started work at the CCC, although he also held a doctorate in education. Now he is its chief deputy director, and at one point in my travels I found myself spending four days on horseback with him, riding the High Sierra trails above Yosemite Valley. He was making a tour of the 60 Corps members who each summer provide the National Park Service with half of all its backcountry crews in California.

The skill of trail building, using only handtools and muscle,

is' nearly a lost art. Mark Meleason and Myra McCracken explained the theory of it as we walked over some of their recent work. "To build this causeway," said McCracken, pointing to a corridor of rocks laid on a granite ledge, "required a lot of hauling rocks from point A to point B. We dug in this wall of boulders, and then secured keystones at the head a'nd foot of the causeway, before moving another few tons of material to fill it up with alternating layers of crushed rock, sand and dirt."

"The trick in building something like this," said Meleason, "is that you want it to last 50 years, and you want it to look natural. We spent nearly two weeks here, but we hope people walking down the trail won't even notice what we've built."

During a month traveling through California looking at CCC camps, I attracted unsolicited testimonials from many people who have been helped by the Corps. Judith Alexander owns a house on the north coast of Marin County, which suffered torrential rains and flooding in 1982. "Over a meter of mud filled the streets," she told me. "My neighbors were losing their homes and everything they owned. The first people to reach us were a crew from the CCC. With more storms on the way, they spent two weeks sandbagging our houses and clearing mud out of the streets. They were like angels or elves. I don't know where they slept at night, but there they were every morning, out to save our houses."

One day Clark Emch, director of the nearby CCC center, and I hiked to the summit of Mount San Jacinto, a 3,247-meter peak rising straight out of the desert. He wanted to look at the work being done by Joe Schroeder and his crew. "We were sleeping on the job," joked Schroeder, "but when we saw you guys coming up the trail, we quickly laid a kilometer and a half of channels and runoffs."

They were rebuilding a section constructed in the 1930s by the original CCC, and all along the trail we passed varied evidence of the old Tree Army at work: a boiler rusting in the woods, a mule-drawn scraper, a rescue shelter made out of rocks and moss chinking. "We've forgotten how to build like this," said Emch; studying the shelter.

While the Corps members explained to me how they run this project, we looked across the smog-filled desert. This vast stretch of ancient sea bottom is controlled by a patchwork of state and federal agencies, all of them vying for CCC crews.

The Corps promotes a freewheeling system of swap and barter, where the National Park Service provides tents, and the CCC, in turn, builds them a radio tower; or the town of Yucca Valley gets a new playground for giving crews classes at night. "I just wish we could do more," one of the crew commented. "Like build a park from the ground up."

The language of the California Conservation Corps is remarkably old-fashioned, full of words such as "character" and "responsibility." People talk earnestly about the integrity of work, even the art of it. But mainly what I saw at the CCC camps were young people doing work. They restore parks in the Mojave Desert, cut trails in Yosemite and fight fires in the Sierra. With this physical labor as a backdrop, members of the Corps have earned the right, as few others have, to talk about D the value of work.

About the Author: Thomas A. Bass is a free-lance writer and frequent

contributor to Smithsonian magazine.

What's in It lor the Unions;J Pressures of unemployment and foreign competition are beginning to make management and unions willing to examine cooperation as a means of survival.

American labor leaders have by and large had little use for well-intentioned schemes to make them partners with management. In the words of Thomas R. Donahue, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, most have been "the worst kind of nonsense," perpetrated either by "pied pipers who promised 'no supervisors, no assembly lines' or romantic academics espousing European-style codetermination."

Either way, says

Donahue, "they set everyone's teeth on edge."

But a remarkable turnabout is under way. Unions are becoming almost as interested as companies in innovative efforts to give employees more say about how they work-schemes like quality circles and quality-of-worklife systems that solicit their ideas and accord them a status akin to partnership. Union leaders who used to worry that their members

Joe Gaston, president of United Auto Workers Union (second from right), had been accused of selling out to management when he first advocated worker-management cooperation.

But his idea caught on so well that he was re-elected by a large marKin.

would accuse them of selling out to management have been surprised to find that this new kind of cooperation has raised their standing with the rank and file.

The United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers of America, the Communications Workers of America, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and the Telecommunications International Union-together representing a fifth of the nation's organized workers-have signed national labor agreements committing themselves to plans for bettering worklife. The United Rubber Workers, the Bakery, Confectionery, and Tobacco Workers Interna-

tional, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and others have quietly supported local units that try new ways of cooperating with management.

Still others are watching cautiously, and nowhere are national union leaders speaking out against the concept. Even William Winpisinger, the International Association of Machinists president whose militant rhetoric about the folly of cooperating with management brings to mind the fire-brands of the British labor movement, considers quality of worklife an issue apart-an improvement, he says, that he's been fighting for all along.

A good deal has changed since those days when the pied pipers came tootling through. Managers increasingly see that workers want to take their jobs seriously, and to be taken seriously by their supervisors. Today's quality-of-worklife concepts are far different from discredited schemes of the past: They offer clear benefits to both workers and management.

Adversity has helped make labor leaders readier to examine old orthodoxies.

Unionized labor's share of the total work force has been declining for years, and its leaders are beginning to suspect that labor-management cooperation holds interesting possibilities for reversing the decline. Trapped nonetheless by their past adversarial posturing, many leaders remain uncomfortable about collaboration-particularly since experience has taught that management-inspired programs usually result in work speedups or manpower reductions.

During the early 1970s, for example, the major steel companies and the United Steelworkers agreed upon a bold plan to fight the growing threat of imported steel: Joint labor-management committees would sit down together to reason out ways of raising productivity. Lloyd McBride, now the Steelworkers' president, remembers well the first of those meetings he attended as a staff representative at the Granite City Steel Co. "The management guys came in and said, 'Well, we want to talk about the productivity of this operation,'" McBride

recalls. "'Down in this department we could eliminate this job and that job, and over here we can have so-and-so double up because it's not very busy.' Our committee sat there for a minute, and then one of our guys got up and said, 'Well, that would create some problems for us. But the problems would not be so great if we could get rid of your brotherin-law down there who's not doing much, and Smith's cousin who's just sitting around and hasn't done a goddamned thing for years. If we could get rid of those problems, it's really going to improve our productivity. ", The nepotism McBride remembers in that plant wasn't a way of life in most steel mills, but the confrontational attitudes were: The entire productivity program was soon abandoned.

At about the same time, the United Auto Workers (UA W) was trying to develop a plan jointly with General Motors (GM) to deal with roughly similar problems. But the approach was entirely different. GM had become increasingly concerned about the restiveness of its .work force and aware that traditional ways of boosting productivity were of only limited use when workers came in late or failed to report at all. Its organizational-development staff, headed by a thoughtful psychologist named Delmar L. "Dutch" Landen, was determined to find ways to get workers more involved in their work. Irving Bluestone, then director of the UA W's GM department, saw an opportunity to advance his own longheld belief that unions could cooperate with management to advance the workers' responsibilities and stature.

Bluestone was a maverick within his union-his fellow officers thought he was making an enormous mistake-but he pressed on with his views. The company and the union began to talk about the possibilities in 1972, and in the 1973 contract negotiations they signed the first national quality-of-worklife agreement in the United States.

That agreement has become the model for just about all the others undertaken since. Nowhere in it did the word productivity appear; the underlying premise was that management would seek its rewards from such improvements as higher product quality and lower absenteeism, which might be expected to spring naturally from a more satisfied work force. All

the quality-of-worklife undertakings were to be strictly voluntary, and none would be used unilaterally to raise production rates or reduce manpower requirements.

The systems that evolved have been almost as diverse as the plants that practice them. But all have given workers more control, and opened up communications with supervisors.

The U AW's years of experience have done much to persuade others in the labor movement that joint programs with management can serve the interests of both sides. "They're a strong union and nobody's patsies," says John W. Shaughnessy Jr., president of the Telecommunications International Union, whose 60,000 members are mainly Bell Telephone workers. "They've given quality of worklife a lot of credibility."

Like managers, labor leaders cannot always quantify the gains from such changes, but local disputes and grievances-a sure barometer of labor relations-are down dramatically. Just about every national settlement in the auto industry has produced protracted guerrilla warfare as local units struggle-sometimes for many weeks-to resolve disputes. The 1979 settlement broke with tradition. At GM, a half dozen locals settled their problems even before the national contract was concludedastounding, say bargainers on both sides of the table-and 63 others wrapped up matters simultaneously with the national agreement or a few days afterward: Virtually all were at plants with active quality-of-worklife efforts.

Labor leaders have been no less surprised than managers by the benefits of employee participation. Like the foreman who cannot believe that workers have useful ideas, the old-line militant shop steward cannot imagine how cooperating with management will advance his own career. But like the foreman, the union representative can become much more effective in his job once he learns how to take advantage of the new system. "Participation creates a new role for him," says Donald F. Ephlin, who is director of the UA W's Ford department. "The committeeman becomes more than a committeeman; he becomes a coleader with management of a program that is bringing new status to the employees."

The typical shop-floor leader has to

spend most of his time on grievancesanswering members' calls, writing up complaints, and nagging foremen for weeks or months to get responses. In some plants, grievance backlogs run into the thousands. "I tell people they should weigh them rather than count them," jokes UA W President Douglas A. Fraser.

Most are generated by a misanthropic minority and are often inconsequentiala burned-out light bulb or an overflowing trash can-but they vent deeper discontents. Union representatives are often frustrated by such pointless exercises, but are nonetheless compelled to fight for their constituents.

Where employees become participants, the grievance load invariably goes down. The general atmosphere of the plant improves, and many of the issues that might become grievances can be resolved informally. A broken toilet might not be repaired for a week when the union representative has to bring it to management's attention in writing. But if he can drop a word in the foreman's ear, and the foreman can dial plant maintenance on the spot, the plumbing gets fixed in a hurry.

The floor representative's own quality of worklife goes up under such circumstances-as does his rapport with the people he represents. "If I'm part of a process where we're talking things out, I'm spending more time getting acquainted with the members and building personal relationships," says Willliam Horner, who retired from the U AW last year after serving most recently as Bluestone's administrative assistant for developing quality-of-worklife programs.

The practical r~sults have done much to allay unionists' fears that employee participation would make the local leader superfluous. Quite the opposite: Leaders in quality-of-worklife plants find themselves politically more popular than ever.

To date, according to UA W leaders, virtually every slate of the union's officers who campaigned by supporting an established quality-of-worklife effort has won.

Many union leaders feared that labormanagement cooperation would undermine the collective-bargaining system, the very foundation of the U.S. labor movement. After all, nothing could be farther from the spirit of the bargaining table than a process in which both sides wrestle with mutual problems by putting

their best ideas forward at the start of a discussion. Some unionists worried that management would use quality-of-worklife programs to chip away at benefits won through bargaining. Others took precisely the opposite view: They saw participation as a way to squeeze out gains they failed to get during negotiations.

In practice, the lines between combat and cooperation have remained remarkably clear. Few managers or labor leaders in the auto industry have tried to abuse the compact, and none has succeeded.

Yet neither side feels constrained to shelve issues that cannot be resolved cooperatively. GM and Ford are relentlessly pressing the UA W for wage concessions-and the U AW is mincing no words in telling the companies where to go. "When we get an issue where both sides feel they're right, we get our mad on," says Bill Horner. "At the extreme, we prepare for a strike or even go out.

But someday it's resolved. Then the union and the company have to ask each other whether they want to continue the warfare or go back to cooperation. Invariably, we agree it's a better life to go back."

Old suspldons do not die easily, however, and unions that have recently committed themselves to pursuing shopfloor collaboration are proceeding with care. The agreement the United Steelworkers signed with the industry's nine major producers set up so-called labormanagement participation teams that will function at the department level (rolling mill, shipping department, and so forth).

These teams will have a charter to discuss practically any issue that might come up-with the important exclusion of grievances or matters negotiated in the contract.

Cooperation is an especially alien notion in the rough-and-tumble, highly authoritarian atmosphere of the steel mills.

Here only a few teams are functioning so far, and they are still regarded as experimental even though workers in nearby departments who nave seen the results are clamoring to be included. As McBride says, "It takes careful planning and training to prepare both sides for

these new roles." Neither the industry nor the union wants to risk a reprise of the earlier fiasco.

Cooperative efforts in autos and steel were unquestionably spurred by the crises those industries have faced. No comparable threat from foreign competition has confronted the communications industry, but labor and management have found themselves in extraordinary agreement about their long-term needs. When the Communications Workers of America presented its quality-of-worklife proposal at the 1980 contract negotiations, says President Glenn E. Watts, "AT&T's [American Telegraph & Telephone] counterproposal was so close to ours that we were quite surprised." Unionmembers were increasingly frustrated by what they call job pressure. In its efforts to raise productivity, the company was scrutinizing performance through a microscope. Some techniques were extreme indeed-listening in on operators to judge their efficiency or ringing absentee workers at home to confirm that they were sick when they claimed to be.

AT&T was no less eager to break with such procedures; it believed that making jobs more satisfying would yield productivity gains over the long run. "The company has made a decision to accept the union as a limited partner," says Michael Maccoby, director of the Project on Technology, Work and Character in Washington and a guru to both sides.

"But in return it is getting a much higher level of cooperation, more flexibility as far as technological change is concerned, and the potential for huge savings by increasing managers' spans of controlbecause fewer of them will be needed to supervise the workers."

Thoughtful labor leaders are tantalized by the idea that participation may help them resolve some profoundly troubling union problems. No major labor leader in the U.S. today has illusions about the relationship between corporate profits and the well-being of his constituents.

But down in the ranks, it's usually a different story: The myth remains widespread that corporate resources are somehow limitless, and labor's claim on them consequently open-ended. Labor leaders may have felt they could afford to encourage this nonsense for their own political ends during times of rising prosperity, but many are now faced with

the unpalatable job of telling their members why demanding less will be good for them. They find it hard to explain the facts of life to the membership until-as with Chrysler-an afflicted enterprise is on the brink of collapse. Even then, leaders cannot do much to break the momentum of the old party line; writers of the UA W newsletter Solidarity still churn out broadsides telling auto workers they are impoverished, despite what they hear from the "big-business-controlled media."

Many labor leaders now hope-though they do not like to say so explicitly-that members who become participants will figure out the economic realities for themselves. As McBride puts it, "Workers with more information can make better decisions about union policies."

liS indeed seemsto happen where management has shared financial information with the workers, as at many auto plants, and where local leaders overcome their own fears about being accused of selling out to the company.

"It's not getting in bed with management-that's the clarification you need to make," says William "Red" Hutchins, president of United Rubber Workers Local 87 at GM's Inland Division in Dayton. "We have to stop looking at whether we're afraid somebody will think we're taking a wrong position just because we want to see the company make money. If the company doesn't, it's hard for us to go back and negotiate increased benefits or wages." While Inland is not operating in the crisis atmosphere typical of many automotive operations these days, the union leaders are looking warily to the future. Dayton has lost its share of employers in recent years, and as Hutchins says: "We don't want to become another Frigidaire, or Dayton Press"all of which have cut back or closed their plants in the city. "We're starting early to keep that from happening." The division's worker-participation effort began just over three years ago.

Opinions are still divided about whether employee participation is a threat or an aid to new organizing efforts.

In some nonunion plants, management has used it to resolve discontents that

might have brought in a union. Yet some leaders believe it can give unionism new leverage in attracting the unorganized.

"Where you run into a 'no union' attitude, it's because the union is seen as a belligerent and aggressive outfit coming in to upset the established work relationship," says Shaughnessy of Telecommunications International Union (TIU).

The TIU's California local has won 13 elections over the past few years in Pacific Telephone Co. offices by eschewing the classically confrontational rhetoric offered up by its rival, the CWA (Communication Workers of America) local.

(Like AT&T operating companies, the union locals have considerable discretion over their own operating styles.) Pushing joint labor-management committees that will head off problems before they turn into grievances, the TIU organizers have won over workers who previously resisted representation.

For most union leaders, worker participation is still too unfamiliar to embrace.

But many who want to learn more about it are seeking counsel from specialists in labor-management bridge-building like Maccoby, Ted Mills of the American Center for the Quality of Work Life in Washington, and Jerome M. Rosow, president of the Work in America Institute in Scarsdale, New York. In 1980 Rosow's institute organized the Productivity Forum to provide a neutral ground for corporate executives, labor leaders, and government and educational managers to meet and discuss measures for improving working relationships and productivity. The AFL-CIO and five unions' are now regular members of the forum.

Even four years ago, only a rare labor leader would let himself be seen joining executives in an organization with "productivity" in its name. But given the current climate, unionists-like managers-cannot afford to overlook any possibility for strengthening their institutions for combat in the marketplace. As Glenn Watts of the CWA observes, cooperating with management may appear to expose a union to high risks, but some form of cooperation is essential for the long-run survival of both parties. "The only real risk," he says, "is if the union does not participate."

0 About the Author: Charles G. Burck is on the board of editors of Fortune magazine.

In today's media-dominated-America, the unemployed enjoy high visibility.

Newspapers describe in depth what has happened to their lives, and television carries close-ups of their faces as they testify before congressional committees.

Wnlike the Great Depression of the ~ 1930s, when no one knew exactly how many workers were unemployed (the U.S. Government did not compile official statistics until after 1940), even the smallest fluctuations in current unemployment receive banner headlines.

Unemployment also dominated the 1982 congressional elections. A recent Louis Harris poll reported that 83 percent of the American people believe that the unemp oyment situation is "very serious."

That' the type of figure no politician can safe \ ignore. Thus, amid the oebate over eco omic policy, defense spending and bud~et balancing, Republicans and Democrats alike are seeking answers to three basic questions: (1) What is being done to assist the unemployed? (2) What changes within the work force are contributing to this unemployment? (3) What can be done?

Each of the 50 states has an elaborate system of unemployment insurance com- . pensation. The Federal Government collects money from employers to support . this program, and, in times of pr.olonged •~ crisis, the U.S. Congress has provide(l •••. - a mtHjons of dollars in additional funding.One need tlO bOKtoo ar back into American history fa ~ l~e.ius what an achievement the comp~ion progi:~m is. In 1932, three years stock market crash that precipitated the Gr~at Depression in the United States, nL}!.lh state of Wiscon~in had such a program.

The Federal Government had nothing, and the American Federation of Labor (AFL)-the nation's largest and dost powerful labor organization at that tiJpe-had been opposing compulsory nemployment compensation because AFL leaders saw it as an undesirable "handout. " \. The U.S. unemployment compensatIon insurance system, approved in 1935 9Y Congress, 10 to 1, and signed into law' 6y President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is built upop important principles that have survived intact into the 1980s. "Unemployment insurance is not a welfare program, although a large portion of its

benefits do go to the poor," former U.S. Secretary of Labor George P. Shultz (now Secretary of State) wrote in 1977. "In the first place I unemployment Insurance payments are.not 'needs tested' benefits. A worker ,otherwise eligible does not become tineligible suAplv because family ipcom~ieTalp.s, high' due, for example, to eaming& of' a selfemployed spouse. Moreover, the theory of unemployment insurance is that an unemployed worker should b~ able, for a time, to withhold his labor from the market while seeking a line of work and a rate of pay" comparable to what he previously enjoyed."

Jt is! difficult to overemphasize the change this legislation made in American life. After 1935, concludes the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relati ns (headed by former Democratic New Yor'(. City Mayor Abraham Beame) in a February 1980 report, "The unemployed were not solely on their own, nor was there any longer the assumption-so common in the past-that personal failing, rather than national economic performance, was at the root of their distress~ Temporary financial aid had become a matter of 'right,' rather than a handout or an act of benevolence."

Since 1935, the number of workers covered and the extent of coverage have repeatedly been increased. In the 1940s, .returning World War II veterans became eligible for benefits; in the 1950s, employees of the Federal Government joined the unemployment compensation system; and, ...by 1977, 97 percent of all wage and salary employees in the United States were covered. Today, more than 87 miUlon workers are insured.

Nationally, unemployment payments are now being made at~a yearly rate of million, with many workers also eligibl fa other social welfare programs.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that with every 1 percent increase in unemployment the Federal Govern-. ment alone spends an additional $3,000 million to $4,000 million on unemployment benefits, $500 million on food stamps, $100 million to $200 million on medical care and $100 million to $300 million on other assistance programs. ~ccording to figures compiled by the AFL-CIO (the AFL and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955 to become AFL-CIO), nearly 5.6 million people, or 47 percent of those currently •

I

-

.s~,

unemployed, are not receiving benefits. in the number of unemployed. Both are They In<<lude small farm or household factually correct, a situation that has workers, recent school graduates, and prompted economists to suggest a possioth&'s who never were eligible for unem- ble rise in the level of "natural" unemployment benefits. ployment-defined

by The New York The debate that goes to the heart of Times as "the minimum unemployment American politics is: Does prime respon- rate at which the economy will.remain in sibility for serving and protecting the balance arid the inflation rate will neither citizen lie with the states or with the¡ speed up nor slow down." As recently as Federal Government?

The position 1978, the full employment and balanced politicians take on unemployment com- growth act, cosponsored by a strong labor pensation reform generally follows their ally, the late Senator Hubert H. Humanswer to this larger question. Conservaphrey, cited a 4-percent "natural" unemtives favor freedom for states to set their ployment figure. Now, President Reagan own standards; liberals support a says that the level of essentially irreducinationally uniform approach. ble unemployment is closer to 6 or 6.5 Conservatives and liberals, whatever percent, and Walter W. Heller, a leading their other differences,. now agree that economic adviser during the Kennedy enormous-and historically unique. and Johnson years, says it's around 5.6 changes are occurring in the U.S. work percent. force. According to U.S. Department of Thus, from the President and Congress Labor statistics, the number of American have come P. variety of proposals aimed workers has jumped from 64 million in not necessarily' at solving the fun1950 to 111 million in 1982; the increase dam ental unemployment problem but at since 1976 has been 500 percent greater helping the unemployed. than during the previous quarter-century. f These measures include public works Employment in the United States be- and public service jobs, changes in unemtween 1976 and 1981 rose from 71 million ployment insurance laws to discourage to 99 million. seasonal lay-offs, allowing people to The principal reason for this large work part time while collecting unemincrease in the American work force is ployment benefits, subsidizing jobs for the post-World War II baby boom. "Each those who have been unemployed for time the boom generation climbed into over 26 weeks, and lowering the minian older age group, the unemployment mum wage (now at $3.35 per hour) to rate shot up," notes journalist Landon Y. encourage the hiring of the young and the Jones in his 1980 book, Great Expecta- unskilled. tions: America and the Baby Boom GenPublic officials generally agree that eration. In the decade from the mid-1960s little can be done to reduce unemploy. to the mid-1970s, Jones points out, "the ment until economic recovery is average net growth in the number of baby achieved. Disagreement exists on how boomers seeking jobs doubled to 1.7 best to achieve this recovery. But there is million a year . ,The overall work force little argument over the need to avoid was expanding twice as fast as the pop- measures that would cause inflation to ulation." worsen again. "Inflation is now almost¡ Adding to the demographic disruption universally considered a problem of mahas been the entrance of women into the jor importance, even more so than the marketplace. In 1940, for example, only problem of unemployment," noted social 14 percent of the married women in the analyst Herman Kahn. If we recognize United States worked outside the home. that much unemployment is structural, Today, the figure is 52 percent. Working then we can appreciate that no amount of women contribute to employment pres- economic recovery will bring back certain sures, but they have also helped alleviate jobs: This is particularly true in the U.S. unemployment-related distress. A recent automobile, steel and textile industries.

U.S. Department of Labor study, for A member of the Harvard Business example, shows that 70 percent of the School faculty recently warned, for examunemployed are in families where some- pIe, that to compete internationally in the one else is working. automobile market, U.S. manufacturers Politicians in power like to stress the will have to employ only half the number growth in total work force. Opposition of workers they now require. The attenleaders, in turn, tend to focus on growth tion being focused on structural unem-

ployment results in part from recognition that the United States is now primarily a service, not a manufacturing, economy.

Structural unemployment also necessitates massive retraining of workers.

Evidence that new technology does generate jobs is not difficult to find.

Youngstown, Ohio, in the nation's industrial heartland, has an unemployment rate of 20.9 percent. Stamford, Connecticut, revitalized around electronics, has 3.5 percent unemployment.

Thus, the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee has been examining the possibility of federal financing for corporate retraining programs, in exchange for which corporations will promise to hire the trainees.

State governments, unions and large corporations have also recognized the need for retraining. In California, for example, the state government, the U.S. Department of Labor, the United Automobile Workers Union and General Motors have jointly contributed $10 million to a retraining center for 8,400 autoworkers.

Likewise, the Ford Motor Company is setting aside five cents an hour per worker for retraining programs, and is planning to establish a nationwide network of training centers.

Some experts say the huge armynumbering millions-of illegal workers now settled in the United States, is a factor in U.S. unemployment. The Labor Department estimates that for every five jobs taken by illegal immigrants, one American is deprived of work.

Shortly after the conclusion of World War II, as the United States faced the perceived danger of renewed depression and high unemployment, Congress passed the Employment Act of 1946, making it the law of the land that the "policy and responsibility of the Federal Government is to promote maximum employment. ... " As the United States struggles to deal with current economic difficulties,¡ there is much debate-some bitter and emotional-about how best to proceed, and about whose pain deserves the most immediate attention. But at no time during this debate has any top official, legislator or political leader spoken out in favor of breaking the commitrhent to full employment.

0 About the Author: Joel Swerdlow is afreelance

writer and coauthor, with Frank Mankiewicz, of the book Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation of American Life.

Talking Poetry Ezekiel: Mr. Harper, the first question I would like to ask you is about the ethnic focus of your poetry. My experience of reading the poetry is that it keeps coming up, and very often plays a kind of dominant role. I feel that our readers of poetry in India have been introduced to this more or less recently, so they may not know as much of it as they should.

Harper: Well, I think an Indian audience ought to understand that American literature has been a segregated literature.

There are shared traditions but there are also binary streams.

And one of the things I have always tried to do to what I call the sacred texts is to interpret and revivify the continuum. AfroAmericans have a literate and literary tradition; it might not be widely known among a general American reading audience, but it does exist in the black community.

When does it begin?

I would say that it begins with someone like Frederick Douglass, a great public figure and a man who wrote three autobiographies, who was a slave, taught himself how to read and write, became an abolitionist and finally a statesman. And then you have other historical figures like Booker T. Washington who wrote an autobiography, and of course the pivotal The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, which was published in 1903. It is probably the single most important definitive statement on the Afro-American experience.

What are its main concerns?

Du Bois talks at length about the double consciousness, what it means to be a black person and at the same time an American.

He deals with the question of the veil, which in his mind was an apparition, a metaphor for white supremacy. And in addition to that he discusses the sorrow songs, the spirituals, as a repository for the values of Afro-American experience.

Would you care to mention a few more texts?

You have James Weldon Johnson:s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Johnson also edited an anthology of American Negro poetry. There is Jean Toomer's Cane. There is Sterling Brown's Southern Road. And then you have Lee and David, The Negro Caravan, published in 1941.

We also have something, which I think is a misnomer, called the Harlem Renaissance-I would call it the new Negro movement. We have Richard Wright with Native Son and Black Boy. We have Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and the poetry of Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Do you relate to all this through your own poetry?

I think that the tradition with all of its various strands has components, aspects which I share and which are basically assumptions on which one operates. I mean, I was born in New York City, I moved to Los Angeles with my family in my teens,

I basically spent my high school and college years in California, and then I went to Iowa. I taught on the West Coast, and I was in many ways considered a very provincial poet, simply because I wasn't in the mainstream, I wasn't in New York City.

Those were the early years, from 1951 to about 1961. And then during the Sixties I went back to teaching, got married, lived in San Francisco, taught, and wrote my poems privately. I think I was influenced by American jazz music. I was also influenced by numerous contemporary poets. The influences are more difficult to find simply because I was trying to put into language the personae, the personalities, the historical landscapes of people who I knew were alive and well but didn't see in the literature.

Would you define, then, from the early Sixties onward, what has been the prevailing trend in your work?

I am one who has responded to events, and I'm very much an American poet in terms of trying to develop a fulcrum or balance between the past, the understanding of the past, and the present moment. Also, what are likely to be the preoccupations of the future. I think that Americans are a bit insecure at the "who I am/what I am" level.

Right. Then how do you relate to the larger world cultural scene?

Both European and American poets at some stages have been influenced by Eastern culture, they've responded to one or another fashion of the day. Have you had any feeling for these in the course of your own development?

When I was a student, an undergraduate, I had the advantage of studying with Christopher Isherwood. He was of course very much interested in Eastern philosophy. He was not only a teacher of mine but he exposed me unknowingly to people like W.H. Auden. What I mean by exposed is that he would teach a course in 20th-century British literature and he would bring to class W.H. Auden and Aldous Huxley. Isherwood was very good to me in many ways because he introduced me to Stephen Spender, to "Encounter magazine; he tried to help me get my work published. He was a good example for reading widely.

This was before he had any kind of following at the'level of worksl;1op writing in the college and university scene.

What other reading did you do?

I read, among other things, books like the Ramayana, as an undergraduate. I read Buddhist philosophy, Hindu philosophy, and I practiced the haiku. I read Zola and Flaubert. I was interested in world literature simply because I was attracted by myth, by folklore and so on.

Didn't Eliot come into the picture?

Everyone has to mention T.S. Eliot. I read his criticism and Ezra Pound; they took me into, among other things, Chinese

Nissim Ezekiel (far left), 58, distinguished Indian poet arid critic, is a professor of English at the University of Bombay.

Michael Harper, 45, author of seven books of poetry, is professor of English at Brown University in Rhode Island.

poetry. But Yeats was the person I looked upon as a model. I think he was for me the consummate poet. We're not talking about his ideology, about his preoccupations, automatic writing and aUthat, but the attention to folklore, to Irish mythology, to form. It was Yeats that got me to read William Blake.

everybody was wntmg in rhyme and meter. I went to the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, studied with Donald Justice and Paul Engel; these were people who had not as yet begun to experiment with open forms themselves. Yeats had taught me all I needed to know from a formal point of view.

Did you find you did not allow yourself to beprejudiced by political and other views held by Eliot, Pound and Yeats, the three figures you have just mentioned?

No. I was aware that Pound, for example, had his problems with fascism, etc. I know he had these theories about economics, and he was an anti-Semite, and for that matter probably so was Eliot. The problem I think that's important to me is that Eliot as a myth maker was not so new to me simply because his whole fragmenting principle I had already seen in jazz music. I had seen people seemingly fragment a statement and bring it together and coordinate it in different kinds of ways from a musical point of view. Also Eliot was not very interesting to me as a playwright. He's not really, from my point of view, a lyric poet, he's much more successfully a dramatic poet. There was no way that anyone could go to school in the 1950sand 1960s and not be influenced by the whole new critical approach and the primary dramatic focus of Eliot. I was lucky enough to have not gone to a very good undergraduate school, in terms of reputation, and so I was able to read widely on all kinds of things. I also had spent a considerable amount of time studying the work of artists who were not necessarily famous but were good technicians, people who would now be considered regional. I'm talking about Weldon Keyes, for example, or Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and people like them.

How important are questions of craftsmanship and technique in your own actual writing of the poem?

I think they are very important but at the same time I am a person who had decided that I was not going to be a workshop poet. The voicings that come through in my poems were not going to be limited to the mannerisms of schools. I think there is a formal quality to the way in which I break a line or organize a stanza. If you were to read my work from the point of view of the metronome, you'd find a certain kind of counterstatement. I feel today that a poet's responsibility is to revivify classical forms, to bring new life to them.

Did those writers actually influence you?

I don't think they were very influential in terms of my own growth. When Ginsberg appeared, I thought that his orientation was very useful to. me, but he didn't have the kind of elegance I had seen in so much of the best writing of AfroAmericans. I can't say Ginsberg was influential in any important way. And I must say that I kind of pride myself on this, that I was never a member, I'm not really a joiner, I never have been. Then the Sixties hit me in Berkeley, California. I was living there. I felt the impact of the Watts riots of 1965 and then of the Chicago 1968 Democratic convention, the protests against the Vietnam war. I was pretty much free-lancing, which is to say I was not a joiner. At the same time I was interested in and participated in SNCC and CORE, following major figures, people who were important. I'm talking about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Also the rhetorical devices which were used by political commentators, people like Norman Mailer who wrote Superman Comes to the Supermarket, about the Democratic convention of 1960. I was also trying to find out whether I really wanted to write in rhyme and meter when

In those terms, what is your view of the present American poetry scene, specifically as reflected in the major literary and poetry journals, American Poetry Review and others?

Well, first of all I think American poetry is reeling under great losses. There have been five, six, seven really distinctive premier voices that have been stilled: Robert Lowell, James Wright, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Hayden.

Richard Hugo recently died. These losses are going to have an impact on the language and on the culture in many hidden ways. So America is under a strain because many of the people who should have ¡Iived longer and served as a kind of plateau of influence over the next two or three decades are no longer there. There's been no replacement for Auden. Auden was a great technician. Auden was not, from my point of view, a very influential poet after The Shield of Achilles, for me personally, but he was such an incredible craftsman, he could do anything.

And poets I think learned from him. John Berryman's death-I think we're still in the process of trying to make some kind of sense out of that. In the American literary scene, there is a general tendency to at least look at rhyme and meter as a way of solving poetic problems again, where we had fora long time overindulgence in open forms or whatever.

They just took the open form for granted, in other words.

That's right. And I think they've got to go back home and do their homework. That's the first thing. The second is that I think since poets in America are generally not listened to, they can pretty much do anything they want to. I'mean, you know, poets don't go to jail for what they write. They're very seldom read. Many people are trying to get into The New Yorker, get paid three, four, five dollars a line, so they can pay their rent.

Much of the perception of American poetry comes from out of New York and New York publishing, but the fact is that the

United States is an incredibly diverse country. Many local and regional kinds of groupings and individuals are coming to light.

toughness one has to have in being not only critical of the academy but oblivious to ~eing understood in it.

But how would you relate these observations to two questions which could be of interest to poetry readers? One concerns the poet in the academy, and I imagine every poet has some views on that. The other is the relationship of the poet to a general poetry-readinl? audience, whether this relationship is direct or oblique, whether the poet is indifferent to it or broods over it.

Well, my first point is that I don't think the American poet can be oblivious to a general audience even though he or she postures as though not interested in it. The fact is that there are two aspects to the issue. One is that the poet at the compositional level, at the moment. of composition, is basically only doing the work for himself. The presentation, which is to say the way in which you decide to publish or the collection that you choose to make, is a different matter. That involves orchestration, statement and audience. I think we have to realize that so much of our own expression is caught up in the quest for self-knowledge and self-identity. I think Robert Frost is a great example and so is William Carlos Williams. They're both people who were very much concerned with identity.

Williams wrote that marvelous collection of essays In the American Grain. He said history for us begins with murder and enslavement, not with discovery. And Frost, some of his greatest poems were short, concise, and had a kind of resonance of the whole democratic promise:

You teach as well as write. Are you also interested in practicing criticism as a critic, not only as a poet?

Much of the talk of critical schools, structuralism or semiotics, or what has been called under an umbrella name postmodernism, this is essentially shadow boxing. I think that the responsibility of the critic is to teach people how to illuminate, how to read literature. The poets and writers are the makers, the critics are the interpreters, and I think that you can't put the cart before the horse. So much of criticism is basically in a very small enclave, a handful of people speaking to themselves. But there are critical statements which I think have made a difference to the way people look at literature. I'm talking about people like Northrop Fry. But so much of the writing in the critical schools is basically very inflated.

It is late at night and still I am losing.

But still I am steady and unaccusing.

As long as the Declaration guards My right to be equal in number of cards, It's nothing to me who runs the dive, Let's have a look at another five.

Now, this is not the Frost that most people concern themselves with. Everybody feels comfortable with "Stopping by Woods on <l Snowy Evening" or "Design" or "The Death of a Hired Man," but Frost at one level or other and late in his life was concerned about polity and about this great common denominator.

In literature we communicate with ourselves in order to communicate with others.

Yes, but Americans are very naive about the relationship between literature and society. They still believe that some great change can come about, they have this extraordinary optimism which in the hands of a great and eloquent spokesman might have some impact. But generally speaking it's going to be swallowed up.

Could it be also merely a desire to take one step at a time? You get published, and then you get invited to read your poems, and this is more direct contact with a particular audience that has come to hear you, and it always means something satisfying to most poets. Could it be that instead of expecting social change, what they are doing is taking one step forward so that their name, in a sense, is spoken about? It's a kind of presence they are demanding.

I .would make a distinction between entertainment and performance. I think when one performs one makes a presentation of the best that is in the work. A poet who has come to some prominence, let's say he's had a book published and it's been favorably reviewed or whatever, should be very much concerned about what his contemporaries in the field think about his work. He should not be so much concerned about the audience response. He should be careful to get a good feedback from his equals.

Where does that argument lead?

American poets have to understand that the national life is something which they can influence by form and by eloquence.

The great American poets have always done that. I'm talking about someone like Walt Whitman, for example, who is also I personally always find that I vary the choice of poems, to some the poet of the Civil War. The great moral commentators, such extent subconsciously, because of the kind of audience that's as Melville and Whitman and ... going to listen to the poems. Now, if I take the most complex poems thatl have written and if I am reuding them at a university But can they be located in the university and still be Melvilles and department, I have no inhibitions whatsoever, but if I have a large general audience, I am inclined to take the lighter poems, Whitmans?

This is a very interesting question. I think there is, and I'm the more lyrical ones, and sometimes funnier or wittier ones, so going to use one of Ralph Ellison's phrases, an antagonistic that there is some relief for the audience and greater communicacooperation here. So many people find themselves having to tion over a period of time. And sometimes I've asked myself earn their living in the university. The best poets are going to whether this is playing to the gallery. manage to do their work, no matter what. Minor and In part there is a certain kind of credibility in taking that stance, journeyman poets are going to find themselves giving in to the but I also think that one should never misunderstand or kind of foolishness characteristic of the academy. I don't mean misrepresent one's audience. There might be one person out to say that the academy is not useful, but I think no great poetry there in that audience whom basically you are there to speak to, has been written in the American scene out of the academy. and so I would say you should resist the presumption to tone Therefore, American poets had better develop the kind of down the presentation because you think the audience is not

We Assume: On the Death of Our Son, Reuben Masai Harper In 1915 my grandfather's neighbors surrounded his house near the dayline he ran on the Hudson in Catskill, NY and thought they'd burn his family out in a movie they'd just seen and be rid of his kind: the death of a lone black family is the Birth of a Nation, or so they thought.

His 5'4/1 waiter gait quenched the white jacket smile he'd brought back from watered polish of my father on the turning seats, and he asked his neighbors up on his thatched porch for the first blossom of fire that would burn him down.

They went away, his nation, spittooning their torched necks

Blacks in frame houses call to the helicopters, their antlered arms spinning; jeeps pad these glass-studded streets; on this hill are tanks painted gold.

Our children sing spirituals of Motown, idioms these streets suckled on a southern road.

This scene is about power,

in the shadows of the riverboat they'd seen, posse decomposing; and I see him on Sutter with white bag from your restaurant, challenged by his first grandson to a foot-race he will win in white clothes.

I see him as he buys galoshes for his railed yard near Mineo's metal shop, where roses jump as the el circles his house toward Brooklyn, where his rain fell; and I see cigar smoke in his eyes, chocolate Madison Square Garden chews he breaks on his set teeth, stitched up after cancer, the great white nation immovable as his weight wilts and he is on a porch that won't hold my arms, or the legs of the race run forwards, or the film played backwards on his grandson's eyes.

terror, producing love and pain and pathology; in an army of white dust, blacks here to testify and testify, and testify, and redeem, and redeem, in blacK smoke coming, as they wave their arms, as they wave their tongues.

We assume that in 28 hours, lived in a collapsible isolette, you learned to accept pure oxygen as the natural sky; the scant shallow breaths that filled those hours cannot, did not make you f1ybut dreams were there like crooked palmprints on the twin-thick windows of the nurseryin the glands of your mother.

We assume the sterile hands drank chemicals in and out from lungs opaque with mucus, pumped your stomach, eeked the bicarbonate in crooked, green-winged veins, out in a plastic mask; A woman who'd lost her first son consoled us with an angel gone ahead to pray for our familygone into that sky seeking oxygen, gone into autopsy, a fine brown powdered sugar, a disposable 'cremation: We assume you did not know we loved you.

Reprinted from Dear John. Dear Coltrane by Michael S. by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Harper

Reprinted from Song.'! Want a Witness by Michael S. Harper by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Š 1972 by Michael S. Harper.

going to be receptive. Sometimes, academics are not your best audience. Sometimes academics are looking for ideas and not for the kind of industry, the kind of mechanics, you know, which comes across as eloquence. So many people think that because Frost wrote simply he was simpleminded. So we have a difference between the mode of presentation and the intent, and I think any poet's responsibility is to not prejudge the audience.

Fine. And now, before we close, is there any statement you would like to make to an Indian audience?

I think that there's a kind of naivete in the West about what it is that determines the quality of human'life and what are its barometers. The cyclical nature of so much of the Third World tends to intimidate. What you have to do is get beyond awe, beyond even reverence, and to begin to examine it at the level of its assumptions. Also, to ask why it is that myth and history have such a compelling hold on us. You know Yeats once said that memories are old identities. And a place like this, India,

has very old identities. They're tactile, you can feel them. This is not an urban society by any means. All you have to do is get into an automobile or into a train or bus and venture out into the rural areas and you learn that instantly. The trip tells you something about the temporal nature of this whole kind of industrial phenomenon.

I don't mean to put that phenomenon down, I think that it has some things to teach us, but the assumptions about balance have been put on the shelf, probably in a dangerous way. I don't want to be romantic about a place like India because India has enormous problems in terms of scale, and so does Africa. I mean the whole business of feeding oneself, and all of that is something we can't turn our back on. I think all the same that the human situation is the province where writers are going to have to live and work. And as Robert Hayden, one of my mentors, said in a poem to a young artist, after a student had said he believed in astral projection, Hayden's answer was that all poets are fallen angels and belong in the pit with everybody else, and their efforts at eloquence and everything else begin there.

D

magine a diverse range of airliners-the Lockheed Constellation and ¡Super Constellation, Boeing Stra, to cruiser , Douglas DC-6 and DC-7, Martin 202 and 404, and Convair 440-all being promoted in a single advertisement. Rather unlikely? That was precisely what had happened in the heyday of piston-engined airliners during the 1950s. "The best airliners in the world are made in the United States," that ad had proclaimed; it was placed by Convair as a service to the entire U.S. industry.

That was the time when America's aircraft industry supplied almost 90 percent of the world's commercial aircraft. For example, Air-India's requirements were well met by Constellations and Super Constellations, while Indian Airlines started its life with a fleet made up mainly of DC-3s.

Things have changed since then. Of those five companies, today only Boeing and McDonnell Douglas remain in the commercial aircraft field. Douglas, manufacturer of airliners, had merged with McDonnell, which made only military planes, making it one of America's largest aerospace¡ companies.

But one thing has remained unchanged. The best airliners in the world are still made in the United States.

And the country continues to be, by a wide margin, the world's largest manufacturer of commercial aircraft.

During 1983, Boeing expects to deliver 11 B727s, 81 B737s, 25 B747s, 26 B757s and 51 B767s to its customers all over the world-an impressive performance for one of the industry's worst years. At the end of 1982, Boeing's firm backlog of unfilled orders for commercial aircraft totaled $14,913 million-an astronomical figure, even in these days of skyrocketing inflation. Boeing has consistently accounted for over half the world's commercial aircraft market share, and manufactures five different types of commercial jet aircraft. No other company manufactures more than two.

A major reason for the U.S. industry's dominant position is the very large home market. Indeed at one time, exports were merely regarded as extra bonuses, and the domestic market could absorb almost every aircraft built by the industry. Today, that is no longer the case;

Opposite page: Super 80 (above), an updated version of the small DC-9 introduced in 1965, and the new Boeing 757 (below), both incorporate some of the latest technology, and are rated among the sturdiest and most fuel-efficient jet aircraft of their class.

American airlines must vie for the world's skies in competition.

There is now not only a major European market for which the manufacturers have to fight, but also an Asian market. Robert P. Norton, vice-president of the Boeing International Corporation, says of the latter: "At present, the Asian market is a little below the European one, but is growing much faster, and could overtake Europe during 1985-90. In another five years, Asian airlines could be buying ,aircraft worth about $3,000 million annually."

Interestingly, the U.S. home market remains virtually inviolate. No U.S. airline will buy a foreign aircraft if one is available at its doorstep. Indeed, Eastern Airlines, with 30 A300s, is the solitary exception. Similarly, in Europe, the European conglomerate Airbus Industrie is very well entrenched. The Boeing 767, which competes head on with the Airbus Industrie A310 (a shortened and updated version of the A300), has been sold to date to only two European airlines-Britannia and Braathens SAFEwhich have ordered only two aircraft each. Naturally, U.S. aircraft that face no competition sell more easily in Europe. Thus the main uattle is being fought in Asia.

This is not to underrate the continuing dominance of the U.S. airline industry in the world. As J.E. Steiner, former Boeing vice-president of Technology, pointed out sometime ago, "About 40 percent of the world's total air transportation (including the Soviet Union) lies in the United States, which is only occupied by 5 percent of the population." The position today is not very much different. The U. S. airline industry has an annual turnover of around $35,000 million, has about 350,000 personnel on its payrolls and serves a network of about 300 airports.

(Additionally, there are about 14,000 small general aviation airports linked to the major ones by light aircraft services. ) No account of America's airlines can overlook ~he

Wings of the Eagle

Deregulation of the U. S. airline industry has led to effects of the U.S. Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. It has led to cut-throat competition that has pushed many airlines to the brink. A few, exemplified by Braniff, have gone beyond the brink. But it also led to the emergence of 86 new American airlines that hope to benefit from deregulation to get for themselves a slice of the airline industry cake. Many of these new airlines are efficient and slim. Moreover, they do not have to contend with trade unions.

However, the scene is not one of unmitigated disaster.

Even in 1982, which was a lean year for the industry, a number of U.S. airlines did extremely well. USAir led the industry with a net profit of $59.1 million on a turnover of $1,200 million. Little Southwest made a profit of $34 million on sales of only $331 million. Among the other U.S. airlines that did well in 1982 are Transamerica, Piedmont, PSA, Ozark, Northwest and Frontier. Interestingly, while a number of smaller carriers have done very well, the giants of the industry continued to lose.

Deregulation has also resulted in a "more responsive and efficient airline industry," to quote the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board's Office of Economic Analysis. It concludes that "productivity is improving as efficient carriers grow, as inefficient carriers contract, and as industry sheds costly practices that were nurtured during 40 years of protective regulation."

The greatest impact of deregulation has been on air fares within the country. On routes with little competition, passengers are actually paying higher fares than before. But, on most of the long-haul routes, where competition is fierce, the fares can only be described in one word-peanuts.

The inevitable fare wars are as spectacular as any other form of mortal combat known to man.

How else can one describe PanAm's offer of a special unrestricted one-way fare of $99 on all its domestic routes for a one-month period, January 10 to February 10, 1983?

The offer was continued, on selected routes, for some more time thereafter. By comparison, the current oneway fare between Miami and Los Angeles, or between New York and Las Vegas, is $278. While competing carriers could not afford to jump onto the bandwagon, they could afford even less to be left behind. With fares such as these, airlines could not even cover their costs even if they could fill up every single seat on every single flight. From New York City PEOPLExpress, for example, charges only $19 to Syracuse N.Y.; $29 to Boston; $39 to Columbus, Ohio; and $49 to Jacksonville, Florida.

John S. Bliven, senior vice-president and head of the Banker's Trust Company's Airline, Airframe and Aerospace Division, recently pointed out that as of October 1982, almost 80 percent of all U.S. airline fares were discounted, "with some discounts cutting full fares by as much as 62 percent."

The chairman of Air Florida had once remarked: "Why would rationally managed carriers act like a flock of

lemmings, hurtling themselves to suicide over the cliffs of unremuneratively low fares?" Neither he nor anyone else seems to have an adequate answer to this day. One factor that makes such a situation inevitable is that in a market with a multiplicity of carriers, it is impossible to make them all agree to a more rational fare level-and then to ensure that they all adhere to it.

As a result, they suffer from heavy fare discounting on account of gross overcapacity, and are burdened with unprecedented interest charges that threaten their survival. In 1982, Eastern Airlines alone paid $150.4 million in interest. But the intensity of the competition has also forced them to shed their excess fat. Costs have been held firmly on the leash, and there have been unprecedented efforts at innovation in the marketplace to lure existing traffic and also to generate new markets. These include such gimmicks as PanAm's Gold Pass, TW A's Frequent Flight and Eastern's Frequent Traveler bonus schemes to entice passengers to fly by their carriers more often. The bonus may be free mileage on that airline, unlimited travel over a certain period, a free weekend in a hotel, or a discount on car rental. The "giveaways" are most attractive.

Yet other airlines offer discounts on their tickets for the purchase of a certain make of car or even a particular brand of camera. Where can all this lead? "I look forward to the day in the near future when the consumer may get a free ticket to Los Angeles for every five tubes of toothpaste he buys," said a leading airline analyst, only half in jest.

Competition has also improved service to the passenSafety is the primary concern for any airliner. A vast array of sophisticated electronic instruments in Boeing's new 757 and 767 helps crew members fly the aircraft at the best configuration, speeds and altitudes, and all but rules out the chance for pilot error.

greater efficiency, better service and falling.air fares. ger. Executives whose companies can no longer afford first-class air travel for them, can now fly business class.

For a few dollars more than the coach fare, a business passenger gets almost first-class treatment. Another bonus for the passenger has been that he can get tickets at his home through mail or at his bank; he does not have to go to an airline's or a travel agency's office.

As a result of all this, U. S. airlines today offer some of the lowest fares anywhere in the world, and about the best value for money. Most important, they have achieved this without cutting corners .â&#x20AC;˘A.~s a result, they have one of the best safety records in the world.

Despite all the blandishments that U.S. airlines offer to the air traveler, the number of passengers on several major, regularly expanding routes like New York-Los Angeles have, for the first time, sharply declined due mainly to the recession. That leads to a rather disturbing question. What would have happened if the airlines had not cut their fares, stepped up their quality of service, increased their frequencies and, in general, offered the passenger a carrot that he could not refuse? Has deregulation helped to avert a possible catastrophe for the airlines?

The subject continues to be controversial, but many leaders of the airline industry feel so.

It is also more or less agreed though that if there is to be any order in the marketplace, there will have to be at least some limited form of reregulation. Till then, the airlines will continue to give away more than they can afford to-possibly more than they need to--to attract the passengers.

Most recent trends indicate that the U.S. airline industry has caught its first faint glimpse of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. George W. James, senior vice-president, Economics & Finance, Air Transport Association, recently said: "The U.S. 1983 passenger traffic could exceed the previous record level of 317 million passengers, achieved way back in 1979." There is likely to be an increase in the revenue earned this year, totaling about $39,000 million, compared with $37,000 million in 1981. An operating profit of a few hundred million is expected for 1983, compared with a loss of $420 million in 1981 and $680 million last year.

Among the other causes for optimism are the decline in overhead expenses through vigorous cost controls, downturn in fuel prices, interest rates and a general fall in inflation levels. All these have resulted in a decline in the airlines' break-even load factor to a new low of 59.9 percent. (Each one-cent change in the price of fuel per U.S. gallon-about 3.7 liters-makes an overall difference of $100 million to the U. S. airlines.)

Also, there has been a sizable decline in orders for new aircraft-a helpful sign in the fight against overcapacity.

Ultimately, the increase in the flow of passengers may soak up the excess capacity, and allow the airlines to charge more remunerative fares. One company, American Airlines, took a vital step in that direction last March

when it reduced the number of fare types to just four-first class, coach, economy coach and supersaver.

More important, it set up a more rational tariff structure based on distance flown-with the longest flights having the lowest cost per seat-kilometer. It appears that other U.S. airlines are following American Airlines' example.

Indeed, the trend now is to match the fares of competing airlines, rather than to try to improve on them. At the same time, the regular fliers continue to be offered bonuses and inducements. As an example, Air Florida offers regular commuters a booklet of 12 tickets between two specified points, for the cost of 10.

What else is in it for the passenger? Whatever may happen, he stands to gain, unless the airline industry just collapses in its attempts to woo him.

Should the American Airlines arrangement work out, the passenger can be certain that he is paying no more than the one sitting next to him. The reduction in the number of fares makes it easier for him to decide on the fare that is best suited to his needs, and which carrier gives best value for money. Many of the restrictions that had formed an inseparable part of the earlier jungle of fares, are also on the way out. While passengers may no longer get the unrealistically low $99 fare that PanAm had offered, a number of existing fares have been reduced due to this rationalization, while some others have been increased. The era of no-holds-barred fare wars, that would ultimately harm the passenger's own interests, is rapidly drawing to a close.

Despite the upturn, however, it will be years before the airlines again think in terms of profitability. The billion dollar plus losses accumulated over four consecutive years will not just go away.

What has all this got to do with the U.S. aircraftmanufacturing industry? It is axiomatic that when the U.S. economy catches a cold, its airline industry gets pneumonia. In that condition of financial health, there would be few buyers for commercial aircraft. Indeed, the near-term prospects are not very bright at home or abroad. This was put quite unambiguously by a U.S. Department of Commerce study, with the rather terse comment: "During 1983 (U.S. commercial aircraft) shipments will decline further to an estimated 236 units with a value of $9,100 million-about half the total for export.'

These aircraft deliveries would be below the 250 shipments in 1982-which were in turn only about half the 1981 figure."

In 1982, the world's airlines ordered only 33 new high-capacity U.S. aircraft of all types-about 10 percent of the 1979 figure. One manufacturer received firm orders in 1982 for just 17 aircraft-along with cancellation requests for 11. That means a net sale of only six aircraft all over the world in the whole year. In a cyclical market that fluctuates wildly between feast and famine with the regularity of a periodic law, such peaks and troughs are inevitable.

(Continued on page 26)

L.A.lnternational Airport Expands

By the end of this decade the Los Angeles International Airport will be handling 40 million passengers annually. That's 7 million more than its current capacity. To cope with this expected boom in tourist traffic, the airport has undertaken a massive $700-million expansion and improvement program which will be complete by the middle of next year-the diagram shows how the central terminal area will look then.

The project's major features are a $123-million expansion of the five-level West Terminal for international passengers (upper left in the diagram), construction of a $31-million

T-shaped Terminal One for domestic tourists (upper center), remodeling of existing terminals, expansion of public parking capacity from the present 18,170 vehicles to a projected 27,000, and the building of a second-level roadway around the terminal loop. The new airport will be highly efficient in terms of design, people and aircraft capacity, facilities, and energy considerations too. Extensive use of skylights will provide natural daylight-and save energy. Double paned glass will reduce heat loss and lower sun load. The expansion program is well timed.

Los Angeles is the venue for the 1984 Olympics.

Experts estimate a world demand of some 7,000 new aircraft in the next: But what of the future? Boeing's projections show a commercial jet transport market worth $119,000 million (in constant 1983 dollars) over just the next 10 years. Another manufacturer anticipates that in the next two decades, the world's airlines will require as many as. 7,000 new aircraft-about one a day. Overall investment by the airlines would exceed $300,000 million.

Apart from meeting the requirement for a 5 to 6 percent annual traffic growth, airlines will also replace a number of aged jetliners still in service worldwide.

Airlines will buy not only large numbers of newgeneration aircraft but also derivatives of existing ones.

Among the latter, the 12-year-old Boeing 747 has no competitor-and may never have one. Development of a competitive aircraft would cost over $3,000 million, leading to an astronomical unit price. Moreover, it would have no market monopoly. By 1982, more than 60 of the world's top airlines had ordered 586 of these aerial behemoths. Among them, Air-India has a fleet of 10.

When bigger aircraft are required, they will prefer derivatives of the 747 in the interests of commonality and economy.

The latest 747-300, with an extended upper deck, is the tenth version to fly. (The upper deck, 7.1 meters longer than on earlier 747s, can have 96 economy seats-almost the capacity of Boeing 737.) It can seat 496 passengers, while in its SR (short-range) version, capacity would be a mind-boggling 624.

Don't be fooled by its ungainly appearance. The Boeing 747-300, with its most efficient high-speed cruise of Mach 0.86, is the fastest subsonic airliner in the world.

It is also unique in offering a choice of three different engines-made by Pratt & Whitney and General Electric in the United States and Rolls-Royce in Britain.

But this is only the beginning. As the demand for capacity again goes up, Boeing could "stretch" the upper deck along the entire length of the aircraft, or give the aircraft itself a stretch, to increase capacity to, say, 780 seats. That version, of course, would require a totally new wing, new engines, cockpit arrangement, and a host of other innovative changes. Through a process of continuous improvement, it would evolve into a totally new aircraft, differing from the present 747 in everything except, perhaps, the 747 designation. New versions of the aircraft could continue in production well into the 21st century.

The two U.S. high-capacity trijets, the TriStar and DC-lO, were not that fortunate. They found themselves squeezed between the more productive 747 at the upper end and the more economical A300 twin jets from below, resulting in a rapidly diminishing market. Many will regret the passing of the Lockheed TriStar from the scene. It was technologically the most advanced of first-generation high-capacity aircraft-apart from being the most elegant.

No recent orders have been received for the McDonnell Douglas DC-lO, but its production line will be kept alive by 44 KC-IOs, a cargo-tanker version of the airliner.

However, the company is developing a very advanced

version of the DC-lO, designated the MD-100. (Incidentally, this change spells the end of the famous "DC"Douglas Commercial-designation, which had been synonymous with excellence in commercial aircraft design for a half century.)

The MD-100, when ready around 1986, will combine the short fuselage of the DC-lO-lO with the large wing of the DC-10 -30, and carry up to 270 passengers over long ranges of more than 8,000 nautical kilometers. Its engines-advanced versions of the Pratt & Whitney PW 2037 or the Rolls-Royce RB211-535H4-will probably be the most fuel-efficient units in service on any aircraft. For the first time, an aircraft of such size, and powered by three engines, is_being designed for a two-man cockpit crew. That could save almost a million dollars in crew salary over the service life of each MD-100. Fuel economy will be another strong point of the MD-100. Its seatkilometer cost will be 5 percent better than for the much larger Boeing 747-300. (Normally, the larger aircraft have the lower seat-kilometer cost.)

An airline executive making an after-dinner speech told his audience that he had some good news and some bad news. The good news was that the new-generation aircraft could lead airlines to profitability. The bad news was that most airlines just won't have the money to buy them. The executive was talking of Boeing company's new twin-engine 211-seat Boeing 767 and the 186-seat 757.

Simultaneously developing two totally new aircraft, each costing over $1,000 million, must have taxed the resources of even a company like Boeing. To reduce costs, Boeing introduced some commonality in their designs, particularly in the cockpit. "The cockpit displays for the two are identical except for the layout above the windshield," explained Robert Norton during a recent flight on the 767. "Pilots on one aircraft can be qualified to fly the other after only four hours of classroom training," he added. The feel of the pilots' controls is identical for the two, despite the difference in size. For airlines like Delta and Transbrasil, which have ordered both aircraft, this is a tremendous advantage.

Norton claimed that fuel burned by the 767 per seat-kilometer is "at least 35 percent less than for earlier medium-range aircraft." An airline that replaces older aircraft with a fleet of 10 Boeing 767s, would saye up to $25 million a year in fuel costs alone.

Passenger response to the 767 has been enthusiastic, partly because of its unique twin-aisle cabin with sevenabreast seating. Thus six out of seven passengers in each seat row have ,either a window or aisle seat in the tourist section. What is more, the unpopular center seat, which hems a passenger in between two others, need not be used till 85 percent of all seats are occupied.

Another plus point is its range. "The 767ER (extended range) is the longest range twin-engine airliner in the world," Norton emphasized. It can fly nonstop on routes like London-Bombay-till now unimaginable for a twin.

The 767-300 "stretched" aircraft has about 40 more seats, with provision for a further "stretch" when the market

!wo decades-almost

one a day.

requires. Boeing has also announced a "Combi" versionto carry freight in the rear of the main deck. Thus a complete family of 767s is offered to meet a very wide range of airline requirements.

"The Boeing 757 is absolutely the most fuel-efficient new jetliner in the air today," proclaims an advertisement to its latest generation with some justification-thanks engines, advanced wing design and a comparatively lighter, narrow-body fuselage. The 757-200 burns about 15 percent less fuel per seat-kilometer on a 1,850kilometer flight than the bigger 767. In terms of overall fuel efficiency, the 757's advantage is as high as 25.2 percent.

While 757 sales currently lag behind those of the 767, the position should be reversed soon. The 757 has a very large potential market of 2,000-plus aircraft in the next two decades, and seems to have no competitor in sight.

Almost every current jetliner has a choice of engines to widen the market. All 757s currently have the RollsRoyce RB211-535 engines, though from late 1984, the all-new and somewhat more efficient Pratt & Whitney PW 2037 will also be available. While the "early bird" RB211 has currently captured seven of the eight airline orders for the 757, the PW 2037 should fare much better in the future.

Remember the small DC-9 that went into service way back in 1965? It is now well past the thousand-aircraft sales mark-and is no longer "small." Known as the Super 80, its latest version is fully 13.2 meters longer than the earliest Series 10 aircraft. McDonnell Douglas has given the Super 80 a thorough facelift as well. It now has more fuel-efficient Pratt & Whitney engines. Digital electronics in the cockpit reduces crew workload and improves airplane economy of operation. These and other improvements bring the technology of the Super 80 closer to that of today's other aircraft.

The sixth member of the DC-9 family, the Super 80 was the sales success story of 1982. McDonnell Douglas received orders in quick succession from American Airlines (20), TWA (15), Alitalia (30), Finnair (3) and Midway Airlines (2). A straightforward sale to the debt-ridden U.S. airlines was unthinkable, so McDonnell Douglas and the engine company Pratt & Whitney worked out an innovative leasing arrangement that shows no red ink on those airlines' balance sheets and poses no risk to them. These deals helped the manufacturers to avoid a production slow-down, and the airlines to get badly needed aircraft.

On the other hand, the $l,OOO-millionAlitalia deal was a straightforward sale-the largest single commercial transaction in the history of McDonnell Douglas. The DC-9 was the second airliner to break through the four-digit sales barrier. The first was the Boeing 727 trijet, but its production will end in mid-1984 with the roll-out of the 1,832nd aircraft.

By contrast, the Super 80 marks the start of a new family of aircraft that should continue in production at least up to the 1990s. The next memoer is the Super 83,

A peek into the past: the world's first airline stewardesses before their maiden flight as "sky girls" on Boeing Air Transport, then parent company of United Airlines.

with a range extended by 35 percent to 4,750 kilometers.

Further in the future is the smaller and shorter range Super 90-by no means the end of the line.

Indian Airlines have 27 good reasons to be happy with its narrow-body jets-and they add up to the largest Boeing 737 fleet in Asia. Few aircraft since the venerable DC-3 have better earned the accolade "workhorse." On Indian domestic routes, the 737 routinely serves such difficult airports as Leh, located at over 3,000 meters above sea level. Total sales are already past the four-digit level-the third aircraft to have achieved that distinction.

The 737 has taken over from the 727 the title of "world's bestselling jetliner.'" In 1982, a bad year for aircraft sales, a total of 72 new orders were received.

While the 737 has had very generous infusions of new technology over the years, its most important development is the forthcoming stretched 737-300, scheduled to roll out next January. The new aircraft will have the very economical CFM-56 high bypass ratio engines, and an advanced structure that should be more than 900 kilograms lighter than a conventional one. Digital avionics in the cockpit will also be far more advanced than in any comparable aircraft. In addition, there will be some new technology transferred from the Boeing 767 and 757.

Indeed, so complete will be the transformation that the 737 will be a virtually new aircraft. It will be the quietest and most fuel-efficient aircraft in its category-consuming 22 percent less fuel per seat than current 737s.

The U.S. commercial aircraft industry has withstood unprecedented economic difficulties as well as competitive pressures remarkably well. With the new-generation aircraft recently developed, as well as the very wide range of existing types, it should be able to at least hold its technological lead, if not improve upon it, as well as upon its share of the world market.

D About the Author: HP. Mama, a Bombay-based free-lancer specializing in aerospace, contributes to numerous Indian and international magazines. His book, Man in Space, was published this year. He is a fellow of (he British Interplanetary Society.

o

The author, an American woman who has made her husband's country her home, sets out to discover what some compatriots who took the decision many years before her are doing.

Americans in India, like Indians in America, seem to find each other without conscious searching. The number of fascinating American women I have come across in India is quite daunting. For the purpose of this article, I finally chose apoet, a social worker turned development activist, a teacher of natural childbirth and a community health worker. (I had to leave out a linguist, a physicist, a political activist and an

RUTH HARNAR says quite plainly: "Oh, I wouldn't work anywhere else. Where but in India could I have such scope and freedom?"

Born in India in 1919 to missionary parents, Ruth lived here till the age of 12, when she traveled to the United States with her parents for the first time. It turned out to be a much longer visit than they had planned. The church her parents worked for was unable to afford the expense of sending them back again. But in the 12-year-old Ruth, the idea of returning to India was already taking shape. By the time she was 16, she had decided to become a nurse and an ordained missionary and return to the country she regarded as her true home.

After receiving her B.A. and nursing degrees from Johns Hopkins University, she tame, on a Portuguese liner via Africa (this was 1944 and Europe was at war) to India. Ber first task was to learn Hindi; she spent a

year acqumng her now dazzling proficiency at a language school. Her mission, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), then sent her as science tutor to the School of Nursing in Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh, the state where she had lived from the age of five till her departure to the United States.

Ruth had never taught before and here she was not 'C?nly required to teach, but in Hindi.

"My first lecture was a disaster," she remembers. "I was so unsure of myself that I decided to write the whole thing out and just read it. I forgot how qUIckly one can read. I had a 50minute period to fill but I had said everything in half an hour!"

After seven years in Bilaspur, as tutor and administrator, she returned to the United States to further her education.

She earned a Masters in Nursing Education, a teaching degree, and finally a Doctorate in Education, all from Columbia University.

art historian. The list was just too long.)

For anyone living and working here, India-by turns frustrating and wonderful, magical and mundane-is a remarkable experience. Each of the women I interviewed felt strongly about the effect India has had on her life and work.

The changes it has wrought have been deep and long-lasting, the dimension it has added has become almost essential....

Back in India, at the Rajkumari Amrit Kaur College of Nursing in Delhi, she taught some of the crucial sciences basic to nursing. With firsthand experience of the actual conditions many of the nurses would work in, she taught them the essential art of improvisationhow to make an incubator out of wooden crates, with a kerosene lamp as the source of heat, how to make agar out of meat, how to recycle, how to make do. Indeed, a large part of her work has been to adapt the training of health care workers to conditions in rural India. She has worked extensively with the Indian Government and the Indian Nursing Council in revising the curriculum for training auxiliary nurse midwives and the program for hospital nurses. A completely new nursing curriculum, designed by her with a sociological/psychological approach, is now being used by 20 schools recognized by the Indian Nursing Council.

In 1975, Ruth joined the Voluntary Health Association of India based in Delhi, and through it, was able to translate her ideas about health care into reality. "As long as health care services remain centered in the city hospitals," she says, "the rural population, by far the majority in India, will be cut off. Our whole purpose is to help bring health care to the villages."

Ruth spends up to 24 days of each month traveling to the villages, "training the trainers," those people who will in turn teach others to be village health workers. She believes that the village health worker and the auxiliary nurse midwife, who live with the people and are a part 0,ÂŁ them, are the most important parts of the rural health care system.

Ruth Harnar's energy at the age of 64 leaves one breathless.

When I last met her, she was fresh from a three-week consultancy with the World Health Organization and packing for

her next excursion down the length of the country to the south (by second-class sleeper, of course), but first she had to meet with representatives from the United States Agency for International Development who wanted her assistance in preparing their program for the training of auxiliary nurse midwives. As she related all this to me, she was busy collecting spinach, parsley, swiss chard and celery from her garden (which she tends herself) for me to take home. It was a quiet day.

and bangles on her wrists and we watch as her sense of time changes: From a place I cannot name I watch myself now, tomorrow, it happens forever-

Judy returned home after three months, but India had left its mark. In 1975, she and her husband came back, intending to stay only a year. But she resigned from her teaching job in America, and eight years later, they are still here.

Soon after returning here, Judy attended a literary seminar in Simla, where she lives much of the year. There she met a well-known novelist from Karnat"ka, U.R. Ananthamurthy. His work had been JUDITH KROLL was eight into English by years old when she began writ- translated A.K. Ramanujan, who had also ing poetry. By the time she was 16, she knew this would be her translated a collection of Kanlife's work. India didn't enter nada poems, Speaking of Siva, the picture for some time, but which Judy had admired for when it did, it took her by some time. These bhakti poems storm. Her first visit was in were written in 12th-century 1969, as a new bride, here to Kannada by medieval saints meet her husband's family and who, through argument, song, see the country in which he was debate, prayer and narrative, born. One result of the experi- tell of the different stages on ence was a whole set of "India the path to realization.

Judy, fascinated by the poems" which were included in her first collection of poetry, In poems, asked Ananthamurthy if there were other good transthe Temperate Zone, published

by Scribners in 1973. The lations available. "No," he said. poems are contained in the "And there are thousands of second section of the book and these poems. Why don't you differ sharply from those in the translate some?"

But how on earth could she first. The earlier poems deal without knowing Kannada? with purely American images.

The plan was fairly simple: The first of the India poems is appropriately titled "Not Although he spoke excellent Thinking of America," and sud- English, Ananthamurthy wanted to write creatively only denly we are transportedFloating across the lake, in his native Kannada. So they would lotuspads upturned with the would collaborate-he give her a literal, word for word blank look of clover, translation and she would rento the Shalimar Gardens, full of der it all in poetry. Mean. "water-channels, marble pavil- while, she would also study the Kannada language on her own. ions."

The pastel valley a landscape of "Reading these poems is endlessly exciting-they are very rest subtle, exquisite renderings of for minds too tired to rest by mystical experience. I keep themselves.

I underthinking, 'Yes-now stand,' only to find my view is We accompany her on "A Walk still limited.

Just when I think In India" "down the dusty roadl I'm on solid ground, it falls to the fields of the marigold away and underneath is a whole farm." She wears a sari now,

other level of meaning." The saint-poet she is concentrating on now is Akka Mahadevi, who speaks of herself as Siva's bride. One of her poems Judy has translated thus: Brother, 0 brotheraren't you a fool?

longer I live here-life here softens you up and prepares the ground for big changes. You become more open to all kinds of possibilities once you have to give in about the small things, once you have to stop insisting on how things should be."

Is it within your reach or mine to resist the love-god's arrows who has conquered fourteen worlds?

JAN CHAWLA does work that

is quite independent of .where she lives: Whether in India or America or anywhere in beWhile the horse stumbles, tween, women have babies in do you fight the same way. Her work is to the leaping lion? make the experience of childbirth easier, more rewarding The battle you lose today and more spiritual for her will tell tomorrow. clients. Her interest in pregnanTill you conquer yourself, cy and childbirth grew out of don't take up arms. her own experience. She began And don't dare turn your teaching exercise classes for back on that enemy called pregnant women when, six months pregnant with her first Our lord child, she was frustrated in her white as jasmine. lawn search for¡ such a class in Apart from having such a Berkeley, California. After her profound¡ effect on her work, son Ishmael was born, she beliving in India has brought gan taking courses on the techmany personal changes as well. nical aspects of labor and child"India has completely changed birth. She has now designed her me," Judy says. "For one thing, own course of exercises and I've .had to let go of a lot of breathing techniques for natuthings I never even considered ral childbirth.

Her second child, Kachina, negotiable.

"Take, for example, the was born in an alternative birth in San Francisco kinds of 'security' I was used to center in America: seat-belts in auto- attended by midwives. Jan's mobiles, living within a few husband (an Indian engineer) minutes of a really good hospi- and son were both present. "It tal, or having a telephone (and a was one of the most wonderful telephone system that always experiences of my life," she says now. "I was the one in works!). Till I came to India, control-I was able to act just it always seemed so important as I wanted." to leave a telephone number Soon after, the .Chawlas where I could be reached 'in case something happens.' But made the decision to come and in India you've got to let go of live in India. Jan's husband was such requirements. And it's eager to be with his family liberating to discover what you and Jan was not entirely unwillcan do without, that what you ing to try life in a new country. thought was indispensable was Very soon after their arrival in Delhi, she met a woman who a kind of trap.

"Living in India, I've been was pregnant and wanted to have a natural delivery. Jan forced to give up preconceptions about what I need and taught her what she knew and soon after was approached by how things are. Maybe that's the woman's obstetricianconnected to why coincidences and magical events seem to would she be willing to offer happen more and more the regular classes for her clients?

Sensing a growing demand for her services, Jan began two series of classes at her house in Sunder Nagar in New Delhi.

The one for couples includes technical and psychological descriptions of pregnancy and childbirth; the husband is taught how to coach his wife through labor and delivery.

Breathing and relaxation techniques are practiced by both.

The second series is for mothers only, and is a time for practicing the exercises, but also for discussion.

Since 70 percent of Jan's clients are Indians, the question naturally arises of the cultural problems in discussing such intimate and personal subjects as pregnancy and birth. "Most of the women I see come alone.

Their husbands are- generally not comfortable enough to discuss these things with a strangieror to be present at the birth."

On the¡ other hand, "The Indian men who do come are very special," Jan adds. "I find that they tend to be much more sensitive to children than Western men are. India is such a child-centered country-the fathers seem to reflect this."

Working in India is not without problems for Jan, the big-. gest being the isolation she faces. As one of the very few in the country providing such services, she has virtually no peers with whom to exchange information and discuss her work. In the United States, where natural childbirth is now a popular movement, she had free access to journals, lectures and advanced courses as well.

But working here does have its advantages. "I learn so much from the women I teach. They tell me about their culture, their families ... often they come with their mothers or mothers-in-law and from them I learn about traditions and customs surrounding birth."

But childbirth is not her only involvement. Jan is now taking courses in counseling to better serve the couples who come to her. She also works closely with a Delhi women's organization,

Saheli, and along with three Indian women of the group, is writing a book on the changes women go through when they become mothers. She is also active in her children's school, the British School Society, where her most recent effort has been to have Hindi included as part of the curriculum.

SHAYMALA HIREMATH is¡ perfectly at ease in the tiny hamlet of Medleri, a village in Karnataka, which she now calls home. "But I did grow up in a village!" she says. "Or close to it. Granted, it was in Iowa [a midwestern farming state in the U.S.] but I am convinced that it's easier for me, a rural farm kid, to come all the way from America and settle in this village than it would be for a city kid from Bangalore to come and do it. I know this life."

She not only knows it, she seems to thrive on it. Since she was in college, Shaymala-or Mavis as she was then knownhas constantly thrown herself into different cultures, seeking "every opportunity to define myself in relation to people who were very different." The opportunities have ranged from a semester in an all-black college, where she was the only white student, to a summer in Tehran, Iran, to two years in Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps volunteer.

It was after her stay in Africa that she first visited India. "I loved it immediately. It was so nice to be in the developed world again! After Africa, being able to go to restaurants and movies was a real treat."

But it was the people who really won her heart. "People here are more helpful and hospitable than anywhere I've ever been."

After leaving India, she found herself comparing everything to it. "It's nice, but it's not India," she would sigh.

In 1971, while living and working as a social worker in

Chicago, she' met, through mutual friends, her future husband. Not surprisingly, he was from the country that fascinated her most-India.

He was determined to return home and in fact would quiz all potential girlfriends before getting too involved. "He'd say 'What do you think about living in India?' and they'd leave. I didn't." It took them until 1977 to begin making concrete plans for their return. They both wanted to do developmental work. Her husband made an exploratory trip to India to investigate various possibilities and to take the advice of development activists the field. already working 1978 was spent discussing their ideas with like-minded friends, as well as raising the funds with which to begin. In 1979, after resigning their jobs they arrived here with their two small children, Raj Kumar and Sheila.

They had decided to settle down in Karnataka, the state her husband was from. After extensive touring and meetings with the villagers, they finally chose Medleri as the place to live. Actually, Medleri chose them. "We had decided we would only move in where we were invited-people of Medleri asked us to come." And so the India Development Services (IDS; was born. It is funded both by small personal donations frqm Indians and other supporters living abroad and through grants from large international development agencies.

"Our work," Shaymala explains, "is to teach people to be self-sufficient. We want them to know they can get what they need without being dependent on the government or anyone else."

Some of the many projects IDS has begun are a sheeprearing concern; training in such traditional crafts as blacksmithing, carpentry and leather work; a health project; and a dairy cooperative run entirely by women. The last is a special concern of Shaymala's. "We've found that it's better when the

in

women have the money-they tend to spend it on their families while the men tend to spend it on themselves."

Because of her language barrier (she speaks very little Kannada), Shaymala's work is more with the IDS staff than the villagers. In addition to writing grant proposals, handling the accounts and dealing with funding agencies, her prime involvement is with staff training. "All I'm here for is to help people to think. I rarely suggest the answer to a problem. I encourage the staff to discuss it among themselves and invariably they find the solution on their own."

The Hiremaths' children, Raj Kumar, 7, and Sheila, 5, are being brought up like any other children in Medleri. They attend the village school, wear local clothes, speak fluent Kannada-they are quite indistinguishable from the others in the village. They are being raised as' Lingaites, her husband's religion to which she converted after her marriage. Also after marriage she changed her name from Mavis to Shaymala, took to wearing the sari exclusively and stopped referring to her husband by name (in conversation he is always "my husband"). "I see these things as side issues," she explains. "But in this village they are very important. If I want to be accepted here, if I want my work to be effective, I can't offend the sensibilities of these people. I can't be different from the other women here-I' mean, any more different than I already am!" she adds, smiling.

In each of these four women, one senses an unusual contentment. They are each not only successful in their work and happy in it (a rare thing itself), but they have accomplished this in a foreign country. They have managed to overcome the difficulties of language and culture to make India their home, and, perhaps more important, they have been accepted by the families and communities to which they no~ belong.

0

Exporters of Know-how At Arthur D. Little, Inc., the international research, engineering and management consulting firm located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a visitor soon encounters the prevailing motto: "Hardly anything is none of our business."

If at first this seems only a trite label, wait a while. Watch what's going on. Catch the sense of excitement. Immersed for a time in the hum and hustle of activity, one finds it easier to share the conviction of the motto.

Arthur D. Little, Inc. (ADL to initiates) employs 1,200 experts, in almost every conceivable field. They handle annually about 4,000 assignments worldwide covering a wide variety of interests. OIdtimers will tell you that an ADL expert once made a silk purse out of a sow's ear, just to destroy an old maxim.

Assignments have included setting up a national 'telecommunications system for Saudi Arabia; improving agriculture for Togo; introducing the chocolate chip cookie to Italy; evaluating the impact of environmental regulations on the copper industry for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; helping Colombia and Venezuela create a jointly owned sugar company; and assisting Egypt to increase the benefits from tourism at Luxor, while still preserving the antiquities.

In addition to these, 20 years ago, ADL pioneered in producing a course of instruction for clients from developing countries which cut through theoretical jargon and got to the heart of management problems-in short, a business course that taught managers how to produce and how to manage.

The impetus for creating this program came from the Government of Nigeria,

lome A. Fossas of Puerto Rico makes a point at an Arthur D. Little seminar.

whose leaders asked that on-the-job training available in their country be replaced with a comprehensive educational program for middle management in the United States.

What was needed, the Nigerians suggested, was a graduate-degree program that would produce top-flight management personnel in just one year-rather than the two years required by universities. In addition, the program should be geared to practical, rather than theoretical, solutions. ADL quickly produced such a course and soon got it firmly established and accredited.

In 1971 this brainchild, Management Education Institute, Inc. (MEI), became an ADL subsidiary-and presented its educational mission in a separate charter. Two years later MEI got authority to award a

master of science in management degree from the state of Massachusetts to those who successfully complete the II-month program.

In 1976 MEI became an accredited member of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges-and so recognized throughout the world. It had been .carefully evaluated by qualified educators and found to meet the highest standards. The MEI faculty numbers about 35, all on part-timt: status and drawn mainly from ADL's fulltime professional staff. The breadth of knowledge and understanding they derive from active involvement in consulting, research and teaching outside MEI enriches course content and curriculum design. The composition, orientation and collective experience of the nontraditional faculty (that is, no seniority, tenure provisions, etc.) uniquely meet the needs of MEI students

JosephJ. Voci, president of the Management Education Institute and a vice-president of ADL, speaks to a class.

and provide the flexibility the institute needs to fulfill its objectives.

The dean and vice-president of MEI is Dr. Arnold K. Weinstein, who joined ADL in those positions in 1980. From 1970 to 1980 he had taught at Boston College as associate professor of management. He is the author of two books and many articles on international marketing and management. As do most of the top executives at MEI, Weinstein teaches a class, where his enthusiasm spills over and arouses his students.

One student, from a developing nation with a tightly controlled economy, was asked why he chose to study in a capitalist country. His answer: "Here at Arthur D.

Little, they have instructors with practical experience. They know how to manage.

What they teach us works-in any society.

Look, we don't waste time arguing about which system works best, socialist or capitalist. In a capitalist society, they talk about profit and loss. Elsewhere the terms are surplus and deficit. But both sides know that profit or surplus is desirable while loss and deficit must be avoided. The important thing is learning proper management-and that's what I'm getting from this school."

What the students are also getting is practical application of the case-history method, a step-by-step examination of solving real business problems.

A case in point: A class under the direction of Professor Piero Telesio examined problems arising when the host government asks a private, foreign company to renegotiate a contract-after a sudden

change in the government's leadership.

Telesio, who holds a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, moderated a discussion between volunteers designated to plead the case for the government and the oompany.

The hypothesis followed these lines: The company had a contract to mine copper; the market for copper worsened, squeezing the company's profits and the government's share; after a change in government, the new leader proposed a new contract to improve the country's financial position.

What should the company do? Was the government entitled to nullify the existing contract?

The exchange among the students was fast and heated: "If the company wants to continue mining copper, it had better renegotiate."

"If the company refuses, the government

could nationalize it."

"Yeah, but if the company pulls out its personnel, who is going to mine the copper?"

"You could bring in some mining experts!"

"Hey, when those experts see what happened to their predecessors, do you think for a minute they'd come to help?"

"How about just confiscating the company?"

"Then the mining of copper grinds to a halt. Everybody loses."

It remained for Susana M. de la Puente, a Peruvian analyst for Corporaci6n Financiera de Desarrollo, to propose a constructive course for the new government: "If the contract had some years to run," she said, "I think the government should keep it in effect. Renegotiation could be achieved during that period-with no interruption in revenue."

The class ended in a congenial uproar, with students waving their arms in excitement as they grappled with the real problems of the business world. MEI instructors always emphasize (as do the instruction materials) that such cases offer only a basis Below, Eleazar Moreno from Venezuela (left) is absorbed in discussion with Apirat Ratanaparadorn of Thailand; opposite page, Chanza H. Simuyemba from Zambia raises a question.

for classroom discussion-not an illustration of effective or inept management of specific problems. As they left the classroom, the students continued to argue the merits of opposing views in small groups.

Who are these students? For the most part they come from developing nations.

The average age is about 30 to 35. Some are self-supporting, some are aided by families or friends. Others are sponsored by the companies they represent or by their national governments. About one in nine receives support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In this class, four students had individual scholarships from the Ford Foundation, the Organization of American States, the United Nations and Arthur D. Little, Inc. The men and women who have completed the program hold responsible positions in their respective countries in banking, agriculture, industry, as well as in the ministries of industry, economic planning, finance, foreign affairs and tourism.

The tuition costs almost $10,000 for the ll-month course. Living expenses are extra.

Most students live in housing close to the ADL compound and use public transportation to and from classes.

The course consists of more than 700 hours of classroom instruction. In addition, there are visits and workshop sessions sponsored by companies in the Boston/Cambridge area. The program also includes supervised field .rips to public and private organizations primarily in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. To develop and strengthen a participant's capacity to make real-life management plans and decisions, the three-phase program combines lectures and group discussion with the case method and simulation exercises based on ADL's professional experience.

Phase One encompasses one week of orientation followed by courses dealing with basic management concepts and techniques, the foundation for the rest of the program. Phase Two comprises functional skills in management and development, a two-week field trip and-to synthesize the various management disciplines taught in Phases One and Two-an integrated case series. Phase Three includes courses in advanced management practices and economic planning, and a comprehensive case series which applies and integrates all of the skills learned in the three phases. The final phase

enhances MEI's uniqueness by glVlng participants the flexibility of electives in economic and industrial development, international business, or energy resource management.

How does MEI assemble its talented student body of middle-manag~ment personnel?

ADL has recruiters who tour South America, Asia, Europe and Africa, following up leads and interviewing talented young personnel and their employers. There are six characteristics of prime importance for admission: significant work experience in general management activities, strong personal motivation, potential for growth in general management, problem-solving or analytical ability, a quantitative background, and facility in the English language.

In addition, applicants must demonstrate both academic and management potential.

Successful participants generally have business, economics, engineering or scientific backgrounds.

MEI's greatest asset by far is word of mouth-the word of the alumni who have taken the course and gone on to promotion and success upon return to their native countries. Many of the 57 graduates of the class of 1983 say they heard about ADL's program to train middle management from someone who had graduated from the school. What the new student hears from the old is often intriguing.

For example, a recent Liberian graDuate of MEI despaired of passing his final examination because he had suffered a broken arm and was wearing a cast on examination day. That student, Lindsay Haines, decided the problem was urgent enough to consult directly with Joseph J. Voci, president of MEI and a vice-president (and more than 30-year veteran) of ADL. "How can I take my test wi.en I can't write?" Haines asked. "Don't worry," said Voci, "we'll find you a secretary and you can dictate your answers to her."

That particular solution, however, was sounder in theory than in practice, since ADL secretaries are very busy. In the end, President Voci, with Haines at his elbow whispering answers, took the dictation.

Haines passed with flying colors. And President Voci supplied new meaning to the company's motto.

0 About the Author: Lucien Agniel is a prolific and accomplished free-lance Elkins, West Virginia.

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There is something especially addictive about what might be called nature sport-hunting, fishing, falconry, birding, mountaineering, white-water canoeing and other pastimes of that sort.

One reason may be that the challenges are infinitely open-ended and no accomplishment can ever be certified as ultimate. Nobody has ever perfectly flown the perfectly manned goshawk, caught the ultimate trout or defeated a river. There is always a sense that there remains more to know and experience, and these possibilities beckon as ever greater depths do the rapture-seeking diver.

There is no clinical way of ranking various recreations but, of the nature sportsmen I have been around, cavers, as a group, seem to get higher, so to speak, and generally display the most obsessive behavior. These are not the seven million or so Americans who annually buy tickets to take guided tours of commercial caves, which often are wired for gaudy lights and organs, but rather the few thousand enthusiasts whose passionate pleasure it is to find, descend into and squirm about in wild caves. (The difference between wild and commercial caverns is somewhat like the difference between meeting a bear in a circus and coming upon one in a blackberry thicket.) Sometimes these people call themselves spelunkers, because the formal study of caves is speleology. But if they do they are regarded derisively by hard-core addicts, who always say they are cavers and that their spor~ is caving.

Mark Twain's hero Tom Sawyer was lost while exploring a cave, and a good bit of archeological evidence makes it clear that our fascination with big holes and mazes in the ground is au ancient and enduring one. Still, not until after World War II were there enough chronic cavers to make this a discrete, identifiable recreation in the United States.

Personally I think a cave is a kind of environmental drug, which can distort and play tricks on our senses in almost hallucinogenic ways. The sensation isn't always pleasant but it is different from that associated with any other terrestrial habitat.

On the surface, we are rarely without some light sources, direct or indirect.. But in caves, it is truly dark. Caves aren't so perfectly silent, there being occasional sounds of dripping water, streams gurgling, whispering bat wings and faint air currents, but in comparison to the surface, sensual stimuli are few and weak. Also, in caves the range of weather changeswind, precipitation, temperature and humidity--is greatly narrowed. (The temperature of caves, insulated as they are from temporary meteorological influences, is approximately equal to the average annual temperature of the surface above them. In the great American cave belt stretching from the Blue Ridge Mountains westward through the Ozarks most caves are always in the bland 13° to 16°C range.)

Aboveground there is a chaos of sights, sounds, smells,

feelings and movements which bombard us so constantly that we often don't respond to or even recognize them individually.

Caves give some respite from this, but for the same reasons are, paradoxically, quite stimulating; the properties of the things that do exist in caves, such as a tiny salamander or the slow dropping of water from a soda-straw stalactite, seem to be perceived and recorded with a supernatural clarity. Because there are so few background distractions, there is a heightened sense of one's interior-of the workings of mind, emotions and imagination. The overall effect is a sense of consciousness being expanded and altered. For some, the experience becomes truly addictive.

At present Tom Aley is perhaps the most prominent and professional American field speleologist. He and his wife, Cathy, a limnologist (a student of bodies of fresh water, especially their biology), are the proprietors of the Ozark Underground Laboratory, which is located a few miles from Bull Shoals Lake, almost on and under the Arkansas-Missouri state line. The principal facility of the lab is a fine, large, wild cave called Tumbling Creek. For a fee, the Aleys make their cave available to professional biologists, geologists, crystallographers and paleontologists who have subterranean research interests; and also to environmental and student groups that have a serious interest in caves or that the couple think might be infected with such an interest.

Aboveground there are a bunkhouse for visitors, the Aleys' own home and a conventional office from which they conduct their business, which, as Tom Aley puts it, is being "consulting hydrologists and limnologists specializing in the groundwater dynamics of karst areas." Another way to put it is that they go about the United States identifying and solving problems having to do with how water runs into, through and out of karst areas (regions of irregular limestone or dolomite with sinks, underground streams and caverns).

I took Aley up on his invitation to visit him near Protem, and he and I commenced a tour of his Tumbling Creek Cave at a pace and in postures suitable for the senior member. By and by we came to a particularly fine breakdown room. (Large rooms and passages are generally formed by two processes.

Groundwater eats aWdY at soluble rock, enlarging interior crevices by slowly dissolving the rock, eventually undercutting other blocks of rock which remain in the walls and ceilings. As their supports are weakened these may come crashing down. If there is a cave stream then they in time are dissolved and flow out of the cave.)

Because they are protected from the agents that are constantly changing surface topography, caves are relatively stable phenomena, compared to mountain peaks, slopes or open river gorges. Nevertheless there are inevitably thoughts

about engineering and quality control when one IS III a big breakdown room. We were talking about this when Aley asked, "Did you ever think you were trapped?"

"I knew I was lost a time or two, but never trapped."

"I did once." Aley is a tall, lanky man with a full, gingery beard. As he talks, he has a habit of blinking like an owl that has come in out of the dark, and he did so with increasing rapidity as he spoke.

"In 1959 three of us were working a big, complicated cave on the north side of the Grand Canyon," he said. "There was a long crawlway entrance, then came a large passage oriented along a fault line. We had left that area and were about a half mile inside when we heard a great roar, as if jets were warming up in the next room. We could only imagine that the entrance must have collapsed. It never occurred to us that it might have been an earthquake. We felt no vibrations and saw nothing move, but we were terrified and we talked about what to do.

Finally we decided to go ahead, farther into the cave."

"Come off it."

"No. It's true. Actually it made sense, or at least caving sense. If the entrance had collapsed there was no way we could dig out from the inside and nobody was going to find us or get equipment up there to help us for a long time. We decided that there was nothing we could do about it either way and that if we went back we would end up wasting a whole day of caving."

When they did return they found the entrance open. Later they learned there had been a minor earthquake at the time they heard the noise. "We saw no movement of any kind, and yet the quake had been strong enough to knock things off shelves in shops in the area," said Aley. "What I remember is that it didn't really hit us until we started back. The closer we got the faster we went and the less we said. When we saw light we began babbling, punching and hugging each other. Everything-the sky, clouds, bushes, and especially the sun and space-looked so good. I wouldn't want to repeat the experience,. but it does demonstrate how stable caves really are."

As an undergraduate, Aley was a forestry student at the University of California in Berkeley. For recreation he began going about with rock climbers. After learning basic climbing techniques, he found out about caves.

During the next few years he became something of a maestro, discovering caves and making descents and climbs in the Sierra Nevada and other Western ranges which are still admired by cavers for the technical challenges they pose.

Aley settled in the Los Angeles area and took a job with a private engineering firm as chief hydrologist. (He had received a master's degree in forestry with an emphasis on hydrology.)

The pay was good, Aley says, but the work wasn't particularly stimulating.

Like many cavers, Aley had thought that it would be satisfying to have a cavern of his own, but unlike most he acted on the notion. "I was impressed with the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum [a justly famous collection of living animals and plants, displayed to give some insight into desert ecology]. I didn't have it clearly worked out, but I thought maybe I could do something similar with caves and associated phenomena, establish a research and educational center. I felt there was a need for this because underground systems are so important and so poorly understood."

While still employed as a hydrologist, Aley began looking for underground facilities. Eventually he came upon the Tumbling Creek Cave, which had long been known to local residents but hadn't greatly interested them. As any caver, sporting or scientific, would be, Aley was immediately enthrall-

ed. Tumbling Creek is a large system, with about 3,000 meters of passages open to humans. Within it are a sizable underground stream, several waterfalls and a lot of excellent, fancy cave formations. It is perhaps most remarkable for its biology, supporting more than 100 species of animals which, so far as anybody has determined, is more than live in any other single cavern west of the Mississippi River. Largely for this reason it has been designated by the Federal Government as a National Natural Landmark.

Though there are long-standing suspicions and myths that caves make fine habitats for weird monsters, the fact is that few large animals care to advance beyond the entrance light zone. Obligatory cave dwellers (troglobites, which have so adapted that they cannot now live in any environment except that of a cave) are invariably small to microscopic, including such creatures as snails, isopods, amphipods, millipedes, crickets, mites, tiny spiders and springtails. The largest permanent resident of the Tumbling Creek Cave is the 8-centimeterlong Ozark blind salamander. One of the smaller, and the rarest, is a pale, eyeless snail which is about the size of the head of a common pin. All known representatives of both the species and the genus of this snail (Antrobia culveri) live along 45 meters or so of the stream that flows.through Tumbling Creek Cave.

There are eight species of bats (including the Indiana and the grey bat, both on the U.S. federal endangered species list) which are critically dependent on caves or equivalent habitats; 150,000 grey bats, the largest summer colony of this species west of the Mississippi River, breed, forage out of and spend the warm-weather months in Tumbling Creek Cave. They are of immense importance to everything else that lives there (as bats are to all caves) for reasons that are instructive in regard to the overall ecological systems that operate underground.

With the possible exception of extreme ocean depths, caves are the poorest of all environments so far as their energy supplies are concerned. Tumbling Creek Cave supports an exceptional number and diversity of animals because, by subterranean standards, it is so rich in the most common food-fuel-energy resource found in caves. That is bat guano.

Aley estimates that the bats that pour out of his cave every summer evening collectively capture and digest about 455 kilograms of insects from which they manufacture and deposit about 90 kilograms of guano a day. Being fascinated by all such matters, Aley has analyzed the manure, great mounds and ridges of which have built up in some of the cave passages, and found that a gram contains 3.5 calories or about the same as an equal amount of fast-food hamburger.

Because of the bats, Tumbling Creek is a kind of Saudi Arabia among caverns. However, all surface habitats accumulate, directly or indirectly from the sun, far larger energy resources than bats can deposit in this or any other cave.

Consequently, all permanent cave creatures have evolved to survive in conditions of chronic fuel shortage. Obligatory cave creatures are small because there isn't enough energy available to support big ones. They move slowly-a cave salamander crawls along in what for a surface salamander would be slow motion-grow slowly and aren't reproductively vigorous. Individually, they are long-lived. A cave crawfish, for example, may have a life-span of 50 years while a surface crawfish's may be less than a tenth of that. Cave creatures are all but helpless if the stability of their peculiar environment is shattered. A surface salamander living in a shallow pond can, if the pond is obliterated or degraded, move elsewhere and has considerable capacity, individually and as a species, to adjust its living

arrangements. An Ozark blind salamander deprived of its cave cannot survive elsewhere, and there is little reproductive response the species can make to such a disaster.

In somewhat the same way inanimate features of caves are also very fragile. Most of the delicate formations and the entire structure of many cave passages are often brittle and precarious.

Small, sudden intrusions of surface light, water, frost or plant roots can score, crack or collapse marvelous pieces of subterranean sculpture which have been millions of years in the making.

So too can humans, who as a practical matter are among the few large animals who go far enough into caves to be disruptive.

With a hammer or bare hands a malicious person can casually devastate a beautiful cave in a few hours. Benign but careless ones often create more disturbances than they know.

Not surprisingly, most serious cavers are fierce protectionists. "I don't think I'm an extremist," says Aley. "I don't believe that we need to lock up every cave and preserve it. My feeling about environmental protection in general is that we are part of the natural system. We have needs and desires. To satisfy them we will make changes, as do all species. In the process some things are lost and altered, new ones are created. But it is practical and ethical to look beyond immediate gratification, convenience and greed. This is particularly true with caves. We can make what may be mistakes on the surface-say, level a forest unnecessarily-but we have some capacity to correct them, stop doing what we have been doing and repair the damage. We have no capacity to make a cave or restore one after we have meddled with it. So it seems to me we have to be especially careful with them."

In 1966 Aley bought 50 hectares of oak woods and pasture that overlie Tumbling Creek Cave. (He has since increased his holdings to 115 hectares.) He then started hunting for a job in the Ozark region. To his surprise and good fortune, he found that the U.S. Forest Service regional office was looking for a hydrologist. As part of the growing interest in environmental matters, the Service had been given new mandates to manage water resources.

For the same reason that the Ozarks have lots of cavesextensive deposits of water-soluble rock-there are also a great many springs, seeps and sinkholes in the area. Much of Aley's work with the Forest Service had to do with these outlets and inlets to underground water systems-investigating the drainage areas and determining how water quality was affected by Luray Caverns in Virginia (left) are typical of the underground splendor that commercial caves offer visitors; cave specialist Tom Aley (below) measures water flow rates.

Ecologists and hydrologists both, Tom and Cathy Aley own 'the 115hectare Tumbling Creek Cave in the Ozarks, Missouri, a sort of scientists' garden, closed to casual passersby.

surface activities. "The popular opinion is that all springs are always pure," says Aley. "The reason for it is that springs are cold and look clear because they discharge water from underground, where the temperature is relatively constant and where algae and microscopic plants, which cloud surface water, cannot grow because of the lack of sunlight. However, this doesn't guarantee that they are safe for drinking and other human use. If the water that flows out of a spring has entered the ground in a diffuse recharge area [that is, seeps slowly down through substantial layers of soil and rock], then the filtering process usually purifies it. But in cave areas much of the water goes underground through discrete recharge zones such as sinks. Sinks are openings to natural pipelines. They discharge water directly into underground passages, and very little filtration and other natural cleansing take place. If a spring is part of a sink system the water will still be clear and cool but it may not be-in fact probably isn't-pure.

What comes out of it depends upon what went into it at the other end.

"There is another thing that is hard for people to understand. The direction of underground drainage may not correspond to that of surface drainage. There is a sink area on the laboratory property. We traced the underground flow by putting dye in a sinking stream that entered the ground near the sinks. The marked water reappeared in the cave stream, which was on the other side of the surface valley, passing directly under a surface stream. People who would never think of polluting a surface system-much less a spring-might dump waste water in sinks or other discrete recharge zones. It seems a commonsense thing to do because water disappears rapidly and it appears to be going into the ground where it won't hurt anybody, but what they are putting in a sink may come up miles away in a different direction and contaminate a spring or weJl." While he was employed by the Forest Service, Aley was frequently sent to other administrative regions to ply his unique trade. In 1973 it was decided that he should be transferred permanently to Illinois to deal with hydrological problems associated with strip mines in the coalfields. Aley didn't want to relocate in Illinois, had no great enthusiasm for the new assignment and quit the Forest Service. It was at about this time that his first marriage broke up.

For some months Aley had a rough time of it. "I was lonely and I was broke," he says. "I thought there was an economic and environmentai need-tor a consultant with my background, but I sent out scores of letters and proposals and there was only minimal response for a good many months. The difficulty was not so much selling myself-I knew a lot of people and I think had a good reputation because of my work in California and with the Forest Service. It was selling the idea of what amounted to a new profession. There was nobody doing what I wanted to do-and, as a matter of fact, there is still nobody else doing it on a full-time basis."

While potential clients were mulling over their need for a consulting karst-hydrologist, Aley supported himself as a free-lance carpenter and as guitarist in coffeehouses.

Among the early student parties that came to Tumbling Creek was one from Wichita State University. In the group was a young woman, Cathy Keith, who was then completing work on her master's degree at that institution. Aley had previously been acquainted with the presiding professor. A few months later when he was in Wichita doing a concert Aley asked him if he had a student who might like to work as an associate at the

cave. Aley said any such person should have an academic interest in water and underground phenomena, would have to work for very little money and should be female.

"To repeat, I was lonely," says Aley.

"I was an. arranged bride," says Cathy Keith Aley.

In 1975 Cathy and Tom Aley became full partners professionally and matrimonially. The two children from his previous marriage frequently visit them.

Among other things, the Aleys are apparently the only pair of professional cave consultants in existence. They have made their expertise available to public land agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management. National Park Service, and Forest Service, and to owners of private, commercial caves, to explore and assess the recreational potential and environmental importance of caverns. Also they train both public and private guides.

The more substantive part of their practice now involves natural underground water systems. Currently, for example, the couple is engaged in a hydrological survey for the community of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a resort famous for its fine water. A few years ago local residents became concerned that some of the springs were not as fine as they had been. The suspicion was that they were vulnerable to contamination from the city sewage system. The Aleys are now testing these springs and their sources, collecting aquatic organisms and making recommendations about what should be done with sewer lines to protect the quality of the waters.

Though they charge modest fees for its use, both Aleys tend to bristle at any suggestion that Tumbling Creek Cave is commercial and are quick to point out that income from the cave itself barely covers the expense of maintaining it for the use of others and doesn't begin to pay them, at their customary rates, for the time they spend displaying it.

Tumbling Creek isn't open to casual passersby. Small student and environmental groups must make advance arrangements to visit, and when they do either Tom or Cathy spends most of a day with them providing what amounts to a short course in cave ecology.

"Many of the people who come here are already enthusiastic environmentalists," says Tom, "but I try to make the point that hard-core protectionism is not the best or even a practical solution to many problems having to do with caves or the environment in general.

"We try to determine what will be the consequences of various courses of action and make them known to the people who live there and are concerned. I believe that if people have good information they will almost always act in reasonable and responsible ways. In surface-underground relationships, a big problem has been that a lot of people haven't had good information and aren't really -aware that there are such relationships. That comes back to why we think this cave is educationally valuable.

"If we 'mismanage our land, water and natural resources out of ignorance or greed we weaken and degrade our country in fundamental and lasting ways," says Tom. "To the extent we can find and practice environmental harmony, we improve the quality of life and decrease the costs of living. I think that is a profoundly patriotic act."

0

About the Author: Bil Gilbert is a free-lance writer, author and dedicated outdoorsman. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

ON

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"You'd think I'd get some credit for the thousands of heads I haven't lopped off!"

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ixty-two years ago pianist Thomas A. Dorsey. wa.s tr~veling the blues circuit under the name of Georgia Tom. An idea struck him that was to shake the world.

"1 had been playing and writing blues for quite a while," 83-year-old Dorsey recalls, "but I always thought that someday I would bring my music back into the church, where I started. One day I got the idea that if I could get into church

S

music, the moans and feeling and pathos of blues, then I'd have something." That was in 1921. Dorsey continued playing blues for another decade. But he was also writing a new kind of religious song, filing the music away for the time he thought the world would be ready.

Liturgical music of black churches in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States was dominated by spirituals-in the Swing Low, Sweet Chariot style. Dorsey

thought church services had become arid and needed something to more fully involve the congregation. His new music was a lively effort t6 fuse traditional Baptist lyrics to the style and soul of the blues. The result was, very simply, a new art form: gospel music. Besides using blues rhythms, Thomas Dorsey's songs emphasized personal singing style. Those songs became the bones that singers fleshed out in their deliveries.

Barely a decade after Dorsey's invention, gospel music had replaced spirituals as the main liturgical music of black churches in America.

Though many writers were, by then, creating and publishing similar music, gospel in general was commonly referred to as"Dorseys."

Soul music arrived on the scene in the 1950s, and the musical circle was complete.

Gospel, born ofthe blues, had sired its own secular progeny: rhythm and blues, and soul music. Today, virtually every soul singer of note started in the gospel choir.

Greats like Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder went directly from gospel to popular music. One of Elvis Presley's early millionselling hits was Dorsey's Peace in the Valley, which had previously sold a million copies for Red Foley.

Today gospel is both art and industry.

Albums by gospel singers like James Cleveland and Andrae Crouch routinely sell a million copies'; Billboard magazine lists gospel recordings right along with bestselling classical, pop and rock.

The man who started it all lives much as he has for the last half century. Thomas Dorsey and his beautiful second wife of 41 years, Katherine, live in the same South Chicago house they moved into in 1940. The Professor, as almost everyone calls him, sits at his kitchen table sipping a glass of cream sherry. How does he like being called the father of gospel music?

"1 like it," he laughs, "but at my age

they ought to be saying the gram/father of gospel music." Though the app~,llation is right on target, Dorsey refuses to retire.

He still attends to his music publishing company and directs the Pilgrim Baptist Church Choir, as he has done for 50 years. The major difference in his life is that widespread recognition has come to Thomas Dorsey. You may well find a music historian or a television camera crew sitting at his kitchen table these days.

Awards come in legions. Dorsey was recently elected to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame and is the only black man ever elected to the Nashville-based Gospel Music Association.

He was recently invited to the White House by President Reagan. A musician at Harvard is writing his doctoral thesis on Dorsey's contribution to American music, and three American universities (Howard, Tulane and the University of Michigan) have established Thomas A. Dorsey archives in their music-department collections.

Dorsey began his musical life in Villa Rica, Georgia, a tiny town 48 kilometers tram Atlanta. His father was an itinerant, revival-running preacher, his moth@.t:. played organ for the town's church.

Learning to play that organ quickly and well, young Dorsey was recognized as a musical prodigy. When his fa'mily moved to Atlanta in 1910, the ll-year-old boy heard jazz and the music of the wider world for the first time.

"When I was just a little fella 1 got a job selling pop at the old 91 Theatre in Atlanta, because that was where some of the greatest musicians of the time played, including Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Eddie Hayward.

"Even at that. young age I knew I wanted to be playing that music someday, so 1 began asking the performers to teach me whatever they could. I'd let them buy pop on credit and then have them teach me something in return."

Barely a teenager, Dorsey was already playing the wine-room and house-party circuit.

But turn-of-thecentury Atlanta was a most inhospitable place for a black man to live. Hearing about steel-working jobs near Chicago, he headed for that city in 1916 at age 17.

Chicago was a hotbed of musical activity.

A new black musical genre called the "blues" was just beginning to develop and Dorsey quickly picked up on the music. Under the nickname Georgia Tom, Dorsey soon became famous in the blues world. He could write and read music, skills few blues musicians of that era possessed. Those abilities landed him a job with Paramount Records writing lead sheets for recording artists.

For five years, from 1922 to 1927, he traveled with Ma Rainey, the great blues singer, writing and arranging songs and Elaying backup piano_. He then teamed WIth Tampa Reef, and was responsible for molding the career of that legendary blues singer. They recorded a number that Dorsey wrote, a bit of doubleentendre entitled It's Tight Like That, which sold well on both the white and black record markets, and propelled the duo to fame.

But something was missing. In 1931, after writing more than 200 blues songs

Before establishing himself as a composer of gospel music, Thomas Dorsey (right) in 1923 was a member of the Rabbits Foot Minstrels, a jazz band that accompanied the great blues singer Gertrude "Ma" Rainey on tent shows and vaudeville performances throughout the South and Midwest.

that sold more than a half million records, he dropped out of the blues world forever. Dorsey explains what happened: "My father was a Baptist preacher, and even with all the time I put in on the blues circuit, I had the church in my blood.

"I wandered down to the old armory where they were having a big national Baptist convention. Some fellow got up and sang a beautiful song called I Do, Don't You? a'nd he blew the audience away with that song, including me. I said to myself, 'That's where I ought to be,' and ever since then it never got off my mind. Through all the years of traveling with Ma Rainey and Tampa, I was writing gospel songs and putting them away for the time I would use them." In 1926, after {l serious illness, Dorsey began to actively redirect his musical career. He wrote and published If You See My Savior, his first gospel hit.

"At that time," he says, "if you wanted to write religious music you had to give it away. This was no good for me.

I had a family to support, so I published If You See My Savior by myself. I took $5, which was a lot of money then, and sent the piece out to 250 churches around the country, but I didn't get even one response." Most black ministers rejected Dorsey's gospel music as being unsuitable for use in the church. But the Professor persisted. He opened his own publishing house so that he could publish, and profit from, song sheets of his own music. He teamed with legendary gospel singer Sally Martin, whom he hired to demonstrate

his music, and to- telegram. It said 'Your wife died. Hurry gether went to any home.' One of the ministers there was audience that was nice enough to drive back to Chicago ready to listen. with me. I was broken-hearted and all Often, the street worked up, as you can imagine.

"We arrived back in Chicago and I see corner became their stage. Audi- . my wife's body. She died in childbirth, ences loved gospel. but at least the baby was O.K., a fine bouncing baby. But that night the baby And controversy began to stir in the died too. Can you imagine that? Double Chicago black reli- trouble. For one of the first times in my life I felt as if God had forgotten me and gious community.

"We began to treated me wrong. A few weeks later I get real popular was still feeling very blue. I went to this musician's practice room with Theodore with the people, but the churches Frye, the great gospel singer and my didn't want us. The friend, trying somehow to get over my folks started ac- grief. I began browsing along the cepting us and flocking to see us, but keyboard of the piano, and something the preachers didn't like it at all," Dorsey went off inside of me. I began playing a says. "They were afraid they were going tune and singing words. I didn't write to get outweighed by the music and they them, they just came to me. That week wanted the people to be shouting about we taught the song [Precious Lord] to the preaching and not the music. A lot of Frye's choir over at Ebenezer Baptist them got angry at me: 'You can't sing no Church and they sang it at the Sunday gospel here,' they'd say, 'you can only morning service. That was the first time it was performed and it tore up the preach the gospel.'

"I'd say 'To me gospel means good church." Translated into more than 35 news and it don't matter if you preach it languages, Dorsey's masterpiece is a or sing it, as long as it's for God.' Still, in modern classic. Leontyne Price sang it at those years I got kicked out of some of Lyndon Johnwn's funeral, and some of the last words Martin Luther King spoke the best churches in town."

The appeal was unstoppable. Sally before his death were a Tequest to hear Martin began traveling with her bag of the song.

Thomas Dorsey says God's grace gave Dorsey song sheets, teaching the music to church choirs across the nation. By the him the talent to accomplish what he's mid-1930s, Dorsey's music began to have done, and the long life to see some of his a major impact on black churches in successes. He has lived to see his work America. In 1939, when Dorsey hired an permeate white congregations, too, and unknown singer named Mahalia Jackson affect the entire fabric of American and to demonstrate his songs, his song sheets world popular music. Although he rehad a place next to the Bible in most cently broke his hip, the Professor still visits his flock. With the help of gospelblack religious households. music historian Dr. Clayton Hannan, Dorsey and Sally Martin organized the National Convention of Gospel Dorsey travels to churches nationwide, Choirs and Choruses, which celebrated where he directs their choirs, tells them its 50th anniversary in Chicago this Au- what it was like in the old days, and sings gust. The same year that Dorsey orga- his songs.

Why, at 83 years old, doesn't he slow nized the National Convention, he was down?

"I'm always flying here, there, or struck by the tragedy that resulted in his writing Take My Hand, Precious Lord, somewhere," he says, "so people will hear my music. I wrote my music for all his most famous gospel song.

Dorsey tells the story: "It was August people, not just black, brown, red, or of 1932. I was living in South Chicago green people, and I want everyone to with my wife and we were expecting our hear it and hear the Word of God. So I first child. I had been invited to bring my keep moving around, and will as long as music to a revival meeting in Saint Louis, people want me and God lets me live. It and I left early in the morning, leaving keeps me alive. It keeps me among the my wife asleep. We arrived in Sajnt Louis people. When it gets so you can't be then you're dead, and there was a big crowd there. I figured among people, 0 this was a good chance to introduce them brother, you're dead." to gospel music, and the first night was wonderful, a big success. Second night, About the Author: Steven Kaplan is a though, a porter comes to me with a Minneapolis-based writer.

Who Formulates U. S. International Economic Policy?

In recent years, the formulation of American international economic policy has become increasingly complex as a result of the enormous growth in the country's foreign trade.

Thirty-five years ago, when America's capacity to mold events to its liking seemed to be unlimited, identifying the institutions responsible for formulating u.s. international economic policy seemed easy. Who else but the State and Treasury Departments? Between these two institutions, the major challenges facing the United States in a post-World War II era were ably addressed: defense of the dollar abroad, the negotiation of trade agreements and, more broadly, the imaginative conduct of America's economic diplomacy.

State and Treasury, more than any other part of the U.S. Government, were also responsible for building domestic support for America's participation in organizations that even today dominate the operation of the global economy: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Bank. But since then, the situation has changed.

In the 1980s, few questions evoke more frustrated responses than this one: Who formulates America's international economic policy? Not even the people specifically vested with responsibility for carrying out those policies can provide a precise answer. For in reality, the formulation of America's diverse commercial, monetary and trade programs is a game that everyone in the government, plus Congress, now plays.

What has happened? "The issues are no longer clear-cut the way they once were," wistfully answered a midlevel official in the Department of Commerce's division of International Trade Administration. "Take the international debt problem," she continued. "It used to be that these matters fell within the exclusive purview of Treasury. No longer. If Mexico,. for example, continues to experience difficulty in repaying its loans to the international banks, the ramifications for any number of other U.S. departments will be severe. Trade, investment, immigration and diplomatic issues are now attached to Mexico's debt dilemma."

Moreover, where the domestic U.S. economy was largely unaffected by international events 35 years ago, the situation is dramatically different today. U.S. merchandise trade as a percentage of U.S. gross national product (GNP) has grown from 7 percent in 1965 to nearly 18 percent in 1980. Where this trade came to a mere $19,000 million in 1950, it had reached $459,000 million 30 years later. C.F. Bergsten, former Assistant Secretary for International Affairs in the Treasury, places these developments in appropriate historical perspective: "One of every six U.S. manufacturing jobs depends on markets abroad.

One of every three hectares of U. S. farmland produces for export. Almost one of every three dollars of U. S. corporate profit derives from international aCtivities-investment as well as exports-of American firms." Small wonder, then, that most government agencies, and Congress, are now in the act. . Not surprisingly, formulation of American international economic policy also has become increasingly complex. "Everybody wants a piece of the action," as one insider puts it. In

practice, everyone, from the President of the United States to a first-term congressperson, has a 'piece. But Congress and the executive branch, with a powerful assist from the private sector, have nonetheless attempted to streamline the operation of this burgeoning bureaucracy. Two recent undertakings merit special attention in this regard: Trade Reorganization. Until the mid-1970s, the United States ran surpluses in its trade account. As world oil prices exploded, and as import competition in the U.S. market grew, however, the terms of trade began to shift against the United States in the last part of the decade. Charging that the United States was losing its ability to compete, many members of Congress began to argue that the United States needed a centralized approach to the conduct of its export and foreign commercial activities. The solution: a new department.

In 1979, the Carter Administration responded with a compromise. The administration agreed there was a need for more coherence and direction in the conduct of U.S. trade and commercial policy. But the White House was opposed to the cr.eation of a new department. The administration convinced Congress that setting¡ up a new division of labor between Commerce and the Office of the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations (USTR) was the best alternative.

Under the Trade Reorganization Plan, which went into effect in January 1980, these two agencies have been given main responsibility for the implementation (Commerce) and formulation (USTR) of U.S. trade and commercial policy. The big losers from the reorganization were State and Treasury which, respectively, lost (a) the Foreign Commercial Service and (b) enforcement of the nation's antidumping and countervailing duty laws-both to Commerce.

In practice, Commerce and USTR do not exercise complete control, between them, of the nation's trade and commercial activities. Even now, Treasury remains the dominant influence in determining U.S. monetary policy that has a major impact on trade patterns. Moreover, the quasijudicial International Trade Commission (ITC) has the sole authority to determine whether American firms have been "injured" from violations of the antidumping and countervailing duty laws. Nevertheless these reorganization efforts at least represent an official recognition that U.S. international economic policy formulation needs to become more streamlined and coherent in the future.

Reagan Administration Initiatives. Two mechanisms have been established by the Reagan Administration, both of which reflect further efforts to simplify the formulation of U.S. international economic policy: â&#x20AC;˘ The Cabinet Council on Commerce and Trade (CCCT) is one of a number of Cabinet Councils established by the White House to formalize control over matters that have political ramifications for the President. The CCCT is chaired by Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige. Its membership consists of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Agriculture, Labor and Transportation and the Attorney General; the head of the USTR, who has the title of ambassador; and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers .

The CCCT works closely with the Trade Policy Committee (TPC) of the Office of the Special Trade Representati~e, of . (Continued on page 48)

Gym Gems Inventing

New Food Gateway to America

The coal town of Fairmont, West Virginia, has a heroine.

She is 15-year-old gymnast Mary Lou Retton, the town's first Olympic hopeful.

Another American athlete trying to strike gymnastics gold at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles is 16-year-old Tracee Talavera (below) of Santa Clara, California. They are currently America's top female gymnasts.

And it's not difficult to see why.

Both move with the grace and assurance of accomplished ballet dancers. They are hard working, talented and totally dedicated to their goal. As Talavera says: "My number one priority is gymnastics." And Retton says: "I

t would seem impossible have always dreamed of the that plant breeders could Olympics." cross corn and soybeans, Bela Karolyi, who coached wheat with barley, carrots and Romanian Nadia Comaneci to a tobacco, or peas and wheat. gold medal at the 1976 Olympics But, technically speaking, before defecting to the United they already have done that.

States two years ago, is confident The idea is to create genetic an American girl will win an building blocks for intriguing individual medal at the 1984 new kinds of farm crops and Olympics. other plant life. Conceivably, Since families of athletes can't scientists say, "somatic cell bear the financial burden of fusion" and other new training and since American breeding techniques might gymnasts receive no funds from someday make it possible to either the Olympic Committee or transfer the better the United States Gymnastics nitrogen-fixing ability of Federation, the American public soybeans to corn, or to is getting behind top gymnasts. incorporate the greater For example, the citizens of Fair. survival power of thistles into mont have raised $10,000 in a crop such as soybeans. donations to help Retton train Scientists already have with Karolyi and participate in produced hybrid cells from national and international commany different interspecies petitions. And coach Dick Mulcrosses. Kansas State vihill has' collected han'dsome University researchers funds from the private sector for recently crossed potatoes and Talavera's training. In fact, Dick , tomatoes through cell fusion. and Linda Mulvihill themselves The two are actually founded the nonprofit National plant-world relatives. What's Academy of Artistic Gymnastics unusual is that the scientists in Eugene, Oregon, in 1973 to have also induced some of the provide a place where promising resulting hybrid cells to athletes can live and train year develop into what the round. researchers describe as "a There are some 2,500 gymnasrespectable-looking plant." tics clubs in the United States There is a plant called today. Ten years ago, there were triticale, a cross between only a few hundred. Girls active wheat and rye. Scientists in gymnastics outnumber boys by point out that having the 10 to I-largely because there genetic material from both are so many more sports options crops to work with offers for boys. The U.S. Gymnastics many advantages for.

Federation, the sport's governing developing a superior new body in the United States, curcrop. rently includes 315,248 girls and According to one U.S. 28,436 boys, and it conducts a scientist, "The deeper we vigorous training program, called probe in this business, the the Junior Olympics, in which more we find that nature has gymnasts as young as seven comdeveloped an incredibly pete on the local, state, regional intricate genetic framework and national levels. Says Bill we have to follow. When we Roetzheim, the coach at the Unistray too far from that, we versity of Illinois, "All the top run into problems. But names today came through the occasionally we get lucky and Junior Olympics. If you want to find a little loophole to get make champions of them, you through and move ahead. This must begin when they're seven or can be quite worthwhile for eight." agriculture - and man. "

IT

Dear Editor: In SPAN, July 1983, the inside front cover mentions that softball came to India in the 1950s. No, sir.¡ The game was introduced in India as early as 1942. As a student of S1, Xaviers High School in Patna then, I remember the American Jesuit priests teaching the sport to us, and we would play almost every day at the end of school. The war was then on, and American soldiers stationed in Gaya frequently visited our school. On such occasions, we would form mixed teams-made up of the teaching staff, the visiting servicemen and the students, and play friendly matches. The standard of pitching, batting, catching and fielding was of quite high a standard even then-40 years ago.

GAUTAM BIR Calcutta

If you are thinking ~f visiting the United States as student, business executive or tourist, you will find a wealth of helpful information in Gateway to America by Arun C. Vakil, Secretary-General of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce. He has managed to pack a truly astounding amount of facts, statistics, cautionary notes (your drinks will be served ice-cold, unless you insist on no ice) into 172 pages. He guides the reader through the labyrinth of customs regulations, immigration procedures and visa requirements. He includes exhaustive lists of employment agencies in major U.S. cities; Indian religious, professional and social organizations by state. If the visitor becomes hungry for the solace of a good curry, Vakil has listed dozens of Indian restaurants. He even includes such other necessities for survival as an Indian-American glossary (want biscuits? order cookies). He reveals the "mystifying variety of euphemisms" that Americans employ to conceal their "public conveniences. " There seem to be few aspects of American life and folkways that Vakil has not touched on in his volume. He guides the potential visitor from the moment of first preparation through arrival and even settling in the Umted States. For the student, he provides details on where to get help in preparations in India (U.S. Educational Foundation in India); the necessary academic credentials; application fees; costs; scholarships-even American dating customs.

Gateway to America is published by Vakil Murarka Inc. in Bombay for 74 rupees. Don't leave home without it!

Mohammed Khaki was born in Cairo, Egypt. He is only six weeks old and he is blind. Mo~ammed was born with white corneas in both eyes, that is, the part of his eyes that acts as a' watch crystal was clouded, impervious to light. In addition, reports Patrick A. McGuire in The Baltimore Sun, because neither of his eyes had an iris-the blue or brown-colored tissue that controls the flow of light- the lenses of Mohammed's eyes adhered to the clouded corneas and developed as opaque cataracts. Two eyes, three defects each.

But the baby has every chance of seeing the world-thanks to eye surgeon Dr. Walter Stark (above). Stark is the internationally known director of corneal services at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and one of America's principal researchers in studies aimed at preventing rejection after corneal transplants.

He has performed thousands of corneal transplants before-sometimes six in one day. A few years ago, he flew to Moscow with a team of eye surgeons from the Johns Hopkins Hospital to operate on the eyes of a key official of the Soviet Union.

Dr. Stark transplanted a cornea into Mohammed's right eye and removed a cataract recently, and soon he will do the same to the left eye. Stark believes the infant sees through the right eye already, and will eventually see normally with the help of contact lenses.

While there have probably been babies born with similar triple defects, said Dr. Stark, only recently, with advances in surgical technique and the development of eye banks, has it been possible to attempt such an operation.

Although many nations move toward protectionism when unemployment is on the rise, far more jobs and business opportunities are created by trade than are lost from it.

and Latin America. Developing countries purchased about 38 percent of total U.S. exports in 1980, a share greater than that sold to the European Community, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China combined. But American firms have only recently begun to enter these markets in large numbers. Trade and investment seminars have been jointly organized by the which Baldrige is also a member. In practice, the staff work Commerce and State Departments to acquaint business groups demanding the joint attentions of the TPC and the CCCT is with the opportunities available to them in emerging countries. handled by Commerce Undersecretary Lionel Olmer and De• Export trading companies to facilitate formation of export puty USTR David Macdonald. ventures between marketing firms, banks and small- to • The Senior Interdepartmental Group on International Eco- medium-size businesses. The Export Trading Company Act of particinomic Policy (SIGIEP) was created at the request of William October 1982 allows financial institutions-banks-to Clark, President Reagan's National Security Adviser. Estab- pate in these new foreign marketing enterprises. According to lished in July 1982, SIGIEP's function is to "pull individual Department of Commerce analysts, formation of these new economic issues into a broader political-strategic context" in the entities will create 350,000 new jobs, and $11,000 million in words of a National Security Council staffer. The Senior overseas sales.

Interdepartmental Group is chaired by Treasury Secretary • Export financing to assist American firms in their effort to Donald Regari, with Secretary of State George Shultz serving as compete for overseas sales. A recent study on Export-Import vice-chairman. Its regular membership includes the heads of the (Eximbank) financing by the USTR concludes .that its program Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the of direct credits and financial guarantees is one necessary Office of Management and Budget, USTR, Agriculture and component of overall U.S. trade policy. The United States has Commerce. Additionally, the chairperson can, at his or her tried to prevent the outbreak of export credit wars with the discretion, invite other government heads to participate in the Europeans and Japanese. Until final agreement is obtained in this politically sensitive arena, however, the report notes that SIGIEP on a meeting-by-meeting basis. Previous administrations have also had similar groups. But SIGIEP's agenda of adequately financed Eximbank programs "enable us to neutral.controversial issues has been an especially crowded one since it ize distortions engendered by foreign export credit subsidies."

These efforts to increase America's competitiveness reprewas created in 1982-including American disputes with Western Europe over agricultural and steel exports and an assess- sent promising departures from older attitudes which downment of the. impact of the administration's now-suspended oil played the need for the nation's industries to search aggressivepipeline embargo. ly for sales overseas. But what's ultimately needed is an upturn in the worId economy. And here, the portents are hardly At the end of World War II, Time magazine's publisher, Henry R. Luce, boldly predicted that the next 50 years would encouraging. Trade-the engine of economic growth for many stagnated, and prosbe the "American Century." Luce was right about the next 10 nations in the Sixties and Seventies-has pects for expanded trade at least in the near future seem years. But since then, the United States has increasingly shared its century with a growing number of countries. And nowhere is questionable.

Moreover, many nations are moving toward protectionism. that sharing process more pronounced than in the arena of With unemployment on the rise, governments feel vulnerable international economic policy.

"Competitiveness," the need for the United States to ex- . advocating "free trade," which in many instances results in pand its exports of goods and services, has been one of the further job losses. Nevertheless, the leaders of the Western world should exercise extreme care before they succumb to implicit code words driving proponents of a more rationalized American approach to international economic policy issues. outright economic nationalism. Far more jobs and business opportunities are created by trade than are lost from it.

For good reason. Since the mid-1970s, U.S. trade performance The United States is frequently criticized for its alleged has weakened, as the United States finds itself in competition "scatter gun" approach to the formulation of U.S. international with other countries-not only for control of overseas markets, economic policy. In the past, these charges had merit. There but for possession of the American market. The result: U.S. trade deficits to the tune of $25,000-$33,000 million since 1976. was too much "laissez-faire" in the government bureaucracy To be sure, competitiveness also includes America's exports when it came to focusing high-level attention on commercial, of services and foreign investment earnings. These items, plus monetary or trade matters. But recent administrations .have trade in goods, constitute the "current account," which through begun to redress this problem. Witness the Trade Reorganiza1981 registered modest surpluses for the United States. Never- tion Plan and newer initiatives-the CCCT and the SIGIEP. theless, when the deficit from the trade account is subtracted More important, the United States is beginning to view the . from the modest surpluses in the current account, the United issue of policy formulation as one aspect of overall American States comes out being a foreign exchange loser. As foreign diplomacy. Certainly that's the major outcome of Secretary of exchange earnings become an increasingly vital source of State Shultz's 12-day trip to Europe some months ago, where he capital for the American economy, however, the United States exhorted the allies to work with the United States in finding will be required to improve upon its international economic ways to bring about an expansion of the world economy. The performance. issues now facing the United States in the international econThe campaign to bolster America's ability to compete is omy are indeed complex. But the nation's policymakers seem designed to accomplish that. Some examples of governmentintent upon mastering them.

D sponsored efforts to improve U.S. competitiveness include: • Foreign market assistance to provide U.S. firms with timely About the Author: John M. Starrels is a professor at School of market information on business opportunities in Asia, Africa International Service, The American University in Washington, D. C.

Women Playwrights It's been a good start to the new decade for women playwrights-Beth Henley won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1981 and Marsha Norman this year. And these two are just at the crest of a new wave of young women playwrights in the United States.

Power From the

Peopie-

Between the time a bill is introduced in the U. S. Congress and the time it reaches the President for his approval, it passes through various stages to determine its form and content-and also, whether it will, in fact, reach tHe President. The most crucial of these sta/?es occur in the Congressional committees where compromlses are made and laws get final shape.

Primary Nurses Offer 24-Hour Care Study groups from Europe and Asia are coming to Beth Israel Hospital in Boston to observe a new breed of medical professionals who are bringing back the "one-an-one care" in the United States. A primary nurse provides 24-hour personal care for the patient.

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New Life for Old Buildings

If the past decade has produced a single cultural bench mark of note in cities and towns across the United States, it has been the remarkable change in Americans' estimation of their architectural legacy. Instead of tearing down old buildings and neighborhoods, city planners are preserving them. More than 500

cities now have ordinances aimed specifically at saving old structures, and several state and local governments offer financial incentives for the adaptation of disused buildings.

The emphasis, however, is not just on reverential restoration, but on modernizing and reusing buildings without distorting their original character. Cincinnati's Union railway station (left), built in the 1930s, is undergoing extensive interior revisions to accommodate more than 100 new shops and restaurants. However, the station will retain its original structure and decor. Chicago's elegant 86-year-old public library (see back cover) is being refurbished to again serve its original purpose.

Even new buildings 'are being designed to blend with the old. For example, Philadelphia's New Market (above) stands in the center of a historic site with 17th- and 18thcentury structures.

Apart from making good economic sense-it costs less to restore an old structure than to build a new one-and satisfying the nostalgia for an earlier age, preservation of old architecture, as one sociologist notes, "helps us to find ourselves.

When you appreciate where you've been, you have a better chance of deciding where it is you want to go."