October 1986

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Rembrandt Peale's portrait of his younger brother, Rubens Peale With a Geranium, became the world's most expensive American painting when it sold for $4,070,000 at an auction at Sotheby's in New York City a few months ago. The buyer was Kennedy Galleries, acting on behalf of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Interestingly, the president of Kennedy Galleries, Lawrence Fleischman, the official bidder, had

sold the same painting to Kennedy Galleries for less than $50,000 in 1958-as a private collector! In 1959 Kennedy Galleries sold it to Mrs. Norman Woolworth, the consignor to Sotheby's.

Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860) painted this portrait in 1801 when his brother was 17, and a fledgling horticulturist.

The previous record for an American work of art was $3.25 million for Samuel F.B. Morse's Gallery of the Louvre.

SPAN 2 The Plastic World

8 Plastics in Farming

by Steve McGill

10 For the Love of India

13 The Silent Genius of Celluloid"

17 Boosting School Science

by Constance Holden

21 Denver-Aiming

High

by Fred Ferretti

26 Focus On ...

28 Brave New Economy

by Monroe W. Karmin

30 The Home- Team Advantage

by Tom Peters

33 On the Lighter Side

34 Doctor in the Zoo

37 First Person

38 Innovate, Automate or Evaporate!

by Bruce Merrifield

40 ICRISAT-Fruits

of Cooperation

by Ratna Shekar

44 Making Friends

by Sandy Greenberg

48 Tough, Sweet and Stuffy A Review by Charles Newton

Publisher Editor

James A. McGinley Warren W. McCurdy

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editor

Nirmal Sharma

Art Director

Nand Katyal

Associate Art Director

Kanti Roy

Assistant Art Director

Bimanesh Roy Choudhury

Chief of Production

Awtar S. Marwaha

Circulation Manager

Y.P. Pandhi

Photographic Service

USIS Photographic Services Unit

Photographs: Front cover-Barry Fitzgerald. 2-3-Avinash Pasricha.

5-Brian R. Wolff. 8-Tom Sizemore. 11 bottom left-Gil Jain, courtesy World Literature Today. 13 top left-Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; right-Cinemabilia Inc.; center, bottomAmerican Film Institute. 15-MOMA. 17-20-Will McIntyre. 21 top-courtesy Snowmass Resort Association; bottom-Rod Hanna, courtesy The Denver Partnership Inc. 23-courtesy The Denver Partnership Inc. 24 top to bottom-Snowmass Resort Association; Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau; Bruce McAllister; center right-U.S. Department of Commerce. 25-Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau. 26Ieft-M. Ram Harith; center-Avinash Pasricha; top right-courtesy The Times of India. 28 bottom-Pete Souza, The White House. 34-36-courtesy Smithsonian News Service. 37Avinash Pasricha. 41-43-courtesy ICRISAT. 44-47-Barry Fitzgerald. 48-Avinash Pasricha. Inside back cover-#I, 6-Brian Montague; # 5-John Snell; # 1,2,3,5,6, 7-courtesy National Aquarium, Washington, D.C.; #4, 8-courtesy New England Aquarium. Back cover-John Snell, courtesy National Aquarium.

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 at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged. except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine. one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 25; single copy, Rs. 4. For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine. 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001.

See change of address form on page 48b.

Front cover: Yifat Whartman of Jerusalem gets into the rhythm of Indian music guided

by Roop Verma, an Indian musician in New York, at the summer camp of the International Youth Program. See also pages 44-47.

Back cover: The Geophagus Jurapari, one of the attractions at the National Aquarium, Washington, D.C. See also inside back cover.

Last month, Doordarshan screened a unique program that gave a national viewing audience a glimpse into the future of telecommunications while they watched a TV dialogue between heart specialists halfway around the world from each other.

In cooperation wi th the American College of Cardiology, the Cardiological Society of India and the United States Information Service in India, Doordarshan brought together, electronically, top physicians from both India and America to discuss advances in the diagnosis and management of acute coronary obstruction in their patients. The experimental program, with panels of physicians in New Delhi and Washington, D.C., able to con~rse with and see one another almost as if they were together in the same room, surely hastens the day when telephones are equipped with TV monitors, allowing con~rsations to be animated by facial expressipn as well as illustrated by whatever the speakers care to display.

During the Doordarshan program the Indian and American physicians discussed the technological de~lopments within the past 20 years that ha.ve led to a new aggressive medical management of the coronary victim (such as the application of internal pacemakers, valve surgery and bypass surgery). The doctors, speaking as much to the television audience as to their colleagues, pointed out that risk factors, such as smoking, high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and physical inactivity, ha~ been identified and can be reduced through effective educational canlpaigns. According to Dr. William Friendewald, almost certainly as a consequence of this awareness, and also of improved treatment of patients with coronary heart disease, "there has been a dramatic decline in the United States in the mortality rate from coronary heart disease. Between 1970 and 1982, there has been a steady decline in the rates of heart disease as well as stroke." In 1982, the rate was 30 percent lower than it had been in 1970 for heart disease and 42 percent lower for stroke. Later data through 1985 show that these downward trends are continuing.

Dr. C.C. Kar,..Cardiological Society president, and Dr. R.P. Sapru, of the Post Graduate Institute, Chandigarh, pointed out that in India there has been an apparent increase of coronary illness, probably owing to some extent 'to a greater awareness of the disease and better diagnostic facilities. The risk factors in_India, they said, are somewhat different from those in the West because of a general absence of cholesterol and smoking among women. Among men, however, smoking is a significant contributor to coronary disease, as is hypertension.

Dr. Sapru said that the situation indicates an urgent need to educate the public about these hazards.

The satellite television dialogue represents a new chapter in the long-term relationship that has existed between Indian and American cardiologists.

Previous programs have included exchanges of doctors, training projects and joint research projects.

In addition to the 11 distinguished Indian specialists gathered in Delhi for the program, three of the experts on the American panel were Indians working in the United States: Dr. Sheila Kar, a clinical research investigator at Cedar Sinai Medical Genter, Professor Kanu Chatterjee, from the University of california at San Francisco, and Dr. P.K. Shah, from the University of california at Los Angeles.

* * *

There were other Indian residents of America in the news last month as well.

In Anaheim, california, the fourth National Biennial Con~ntion of Asian Indians in America honored se~n Indian-Americans for their contributions in the fields of education, science, engineering, communications, medicine and community service.

India's new Ambassador to America, P.K. Kaul, told the 1,000 con~ntioneers, "The Indian community has a great goal to help improve relations .with the United States. The message you carry from India reaches out in all parts of the United States ••••Our relations are much better than in the past. We carry a great message of friendship for the United States." In much the same ~in, Ambassador John Gunther Dean, calling them "unusual and talented people," swmnoned the assenblage to sha"re his goal. "I am trying to be a bridge between the two co~ntries," he said. "Let us work together."

by J AME.S R. CHILES

No material bas bad sucb a profound impact OJ) our live~in sucb a sbort time as plastics. ,.

Tougb, strong; malleable; soft, resilient, versatile plastics , can now be given virtually any form and property, making' them ideal for everytbing' from computers,and aircraft t9 toys and kitcbenware.

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oryears now the stuff has been insidiously creeping into the nooks and crannies of our lives, firmly but unobtrusively shouldering aside the traditional materials of which our world is made. Cars are constructed of it, and boats and even airplanes, to say nothing of computer housings and camera bodies and fishing rods and watch cases and suitcases and cookware and roller skates and toothpaste tubes. It has replaced the glass in our spectacles, the paper in our grocery bags, the wood in our tennis rackets, the cotton in our clothing and,in an especially pernicious peanut-shaped form used for packing material, it has exploded from a million cardboard appliance cartons to lodge under our couches and drive us to intemperate language.

It can be brittle or brutishly strong, dirt cheap or astonishingly expensive, fragile or virtually indestructible. It can go any place from outer space to the depths of the sea, and once there it will do just about any job it is called upon to do. For decades, as a society we have denigrated it even as we have consumed more and more of it. If in our fanciful moments many of us imagine ourselves in a world free of it, in fact most of us would sorely miss its extraordinary versatility and usefulness. By now the stuff has-literallyfound its way into our hearts.

The stuff is, of course, plastic.

Plastic has long been with us. Indeed, the amber that once trapped prehistoric flies is a natural form of plastic. Celluloid, a nearly natural plastic, was developed by John Wesley Hyatt in 1868 as a substitute for ivory in billiard balls. Unfortunately, their high flammability added a little too much excitement to the game. One player in a Colorado saloon set off a ball when he approached it with his cigar, causing every man in the room to draw his gun. After the turn of the century, synthetic plastics overcame this and other problems and became well known in the 1930s and particularly in the 1940s as a conspicuously heralded substitute for other materials. Since then-with far less fanfare-it has steadily increased its influence over our lives. In 1976, plastic outstripped steel to become America's most widely used material. Today the United States makes and uses more plastic than it does steel, aluminum and copper combined. Last year the U.S.

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plastics industry, the world's largest, produced more than 21 million tons of the stuff worth more than $18,000 million.

This decade has seen the advent of what might be called superplasticssophisticated materials custom-tailored to possess an almost infinite variety of properties, from strength to lightness to conductivity to slipperiness to inertness.

Indeed, a plastic can be engineered to have almost any property you can name.

More than 10,000 varieties of synthetic plastics are already on our shelves andlike it or not-many more lie in our future.

In a locked room on the fifth floor of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., among the industrial curiosities known as the reference collection, is a man-high iron contraption that looks like a cross between a baker's dough mixer and a diving bell. It is Leo Baekeland's first production "still" and inside it, in 1907, synthetic plastic was born.

Baekeland was a businessman-chemist.

Born in Belgium in 1863, by age 21 he had his doctorate from the University of Ghent and soon after that a professorship. But after a trip to America, he resigned his post and immigrated there to try his skills in the marketplace.

He invented a quick-developing photographic paper, manufactured it briefly as Velox, then sold the rights to Eastman Kodak in 1899. At age 36 he was rich enough to retire. He bought an estate on the Hudson River and installed a laboratory in a barnlike building near his house.

There he started looking for something to replace shellac. Shellac was then needed for varnish and high-voltage electrical insulation, but the tiny lac insects of Asia which produced it could not keep up with the demand.

He jumped off from the knowledge that chemists of the previous century had often been annoyed by tough, insoluble resins left in their beakers after experiments. In his still, Baekeland blended phenol, formaldehyde and various catalysts under heat and pressure. The chemical reaction produced not shellac but something that would prove to have infinitely greater potential-an ambercolored material that was strong, fire resistant and chemically inert. He named the material Bakelite arid got it into full-scale production in 1910, just in time to use it in distributor caps for the

then fledgling automobile industry.

Baekeland did not understand precisely what he had wrought. Today we know that a plastic is a "polymer," meaning made of many parts. A polymer is composed of giant molecules, themselves made up of hundreds or thousands of once independent molecules linked in structures that are similar to, but also profoundly different from, what went into them. Chemists string smaller molecules together to form the giant polymers with heat, pressure and the addition of other chemicals. The elements making up these molecules are relatively fewusually carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, silicon, nitrogen, fluorine and chlorine-but they can be combined in an almost infinite variety of ways to produce such plastics as polyethylene, polystyrene, polypropylene, polyurethane, polyester and a host of other polysyllabic substances as well as such familiar materials as Teflon, nylon, vinyl and epoxy.

The basic raw materials for the manufacture of plastic are petroleum and natural gas, but plastic can also be made from coal or-if need be-even from wood. These hydrocarbon materials are processed into a waxy, moldable-hence "plastic" -stuff called resin. Americans associate steel with labor-intensive mills in Pennsylvania and Ohio; resin originates in computer-controlled plants that cluster along the central Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf Coast. Resin plants look less like steel mills than like oil refineries, because-like the latter-they manage continuous chemical reactions.

The most common resin is polyethylene, of which the United States produced about seven million tons last year.

Du Pont's polyethylene plant on the coastal plain near the Texas-Louisiana border is representative; it uses unearthly pres'sures rather than the white heat of a blast furnace. Up top, it has a spiky, Gothic look lent by a profusion of vent pipes and flare towers. But down below, huge green-painted compressors thunder in basso profunda, raising pressure a step at a time until "initiator" chemicals can start a reaction that transforms ethylene gas into the white plastic called low-density polyethylene.

Ethylene-flammable, colorless and odorless-is the most important single ingredient in making modern plastic. The Gulf Coast is webbed 'with pipelines transporting it from production plants,

tic handles." But as the economy changed gears after the war, plastic's popularity plunged. "Plastics," wrote a Chicago reporter in 1946, "the wartime material for clocks, compacts and junk jewelry, has virtually gone into the discard."

"The reason was that everybody was manufacturing items of low quality, like junk toys," said Albert Spaak, president of the Plastics Pioneers of America. "We had just a few materials to work with, and polystyrene was really brittle."

.::J!ly-madC ,,;nylgoods also

which make it from natural-gas liquids, to buyers. Besides polyethylene, the gas goes into vinyl (for pipes, records and car upholstery), synthetic fibers for clothes and polystyrene.

Polystyrene was an early synthetic used in many consumer .products. Introduced in the 1930s, it came at a time when plastics seemed the key to a new utopian era. Popular magazines forecast a world remade: plastic houses, plastic plane,s and plastic cars. The perfection of injectionmolding machinery brought the industry to a new high of mass production. Then plastics went to war and seemed more indispensable than ever. "When the Minuteman returns to his Plow-" one advertisement boasted, "it will have Plas-

caused a public-relations crisis after the war. John Keville of the National Plastics Museum, under construction in Leominster, Massachusetts, remembers women's handbags that stuck to painted or varnished surfaces. Some vinyl shower curtains were "not even fit to hang in a stable," said a manufacturer at a 1947 trade show. "They smell, they sweat, the print comes off and they get brittle." The problem, explained Keville, was a shortag~ of the proper raw materials. Plastics also took abuse for breeding sterile, anonymous design, often because of the economics of a molding process that demanded many thousands of identical items designed to offend the fewest people. And besides, after putting up with . long war years of synthetic substitutes for materials like metal and leather, people wanted the real thing back again.

The reputation of plastic as an inferior substitute "has never really disappeared," says Keville.

Freestyle rider Scott Freeman sits amid Quiteso. Consider polyester. A genuine a plastic world. The wheels of his bike are miracle fabric made of plastic fibers, it is glass reinforced nylon. The airplane fuselage, durable, easily washable, wrinkle resistant satellite ¡signal receiving dish and automobile and, in some current formulations, almost body panels are all plastic composites, indistinguishable from wool or silk. It is as are the tennis racket and fishing rod, The used in expensive dresses and designer suitcase and the casesfor the telephone, gowns, and yet it has never outlived its computer, radio/recorder and Scott's cassette reputation as bargain-basement garb for player are pure plastic; so are the sandals, the proletariat.

The kayak is a composite of plastic and Kevlar Back in 1967, when Dustin Hoffman laminated with fiberglass. The army played the role of young Ben in the film and construction helmets are fabricated .

The Graduate, a friend of his parents from a Kevlar-reinforced composite, the work gloves and the army flak jacket offered some avuncular advice at a party: are reinforced with Kevlar, "Ben, I want to sayone word to you, just one word ... Ben, are you listening?"

"Yessir," mumbles Ben. "Plastics!" the man declares.

Even if the scene was intended as

Aerospace companies used carbonfiber reinforcing first, but sporting-goods manufacturers weren't far behind. It goes into golf clubs, bicycles, ski poles and tennis rackets, often in combination with glass fibers.

Carbon-reinforced sports equipment, very expensive a decade ago, is still not cheap-a carbon-shafted golf club can cost $190, a tennis racket $100. David Lumley, a marketing director at Wilson Sporting Goods, guesses that carbonreinforced rackets now account for 80 percent of sales in the United States.

Wilson has stopped making wooden rackets entirely. It still makes aluminum rackets, though it has found that customers now prefer them painted high-tech black-an interesting example of a metal imitating a plastic to enhance appeal.

A West Coast company called FenwicklWoodstream was the first to adapt the technology to fishing. Carbon, engineering director Vic Cutter said, makes a "fly rod that will dampen vibrations much more quickly [than fiberglass] due to the stiffness and lightness of the fiber."

The advantage of a rod that is quick to dampen its own vibration is that it will shoot a line out farther and more accurately. Graphite rods now dominate the top of the market.

An army helmet introduced in 1982 combines a different reinforcing fiber with a plastic alloy called phenolicpolyvinyl-butyral. Troops sometimes call it "the Kevlar," in honor of the Du Pont fiber responsible for absorbing impact shock. The new model weighs the same as the M-1 steel pot it replaces, but it's about a third more effective at stopping shell fragments. Sixteen plies of Kevlar theoretically are not tough enough to stop bullets, but do on occasion.

M,nY pl"t;" acenotespe- "I'm pretty impressed with it," said Charles Lalone, a staff sergeant in the cially strong by themselves, but combined with reinforcing fibers made of U.S. Army-as well he might be. During "graphite," they become incredibly the action in Grenada his helmet took muscular. The fine black fibers "are really two glancing hits from a Russian-made rifle-but Lalone survived. not graphite," corrected Craig Robinson, Kevlar doesn't work for everything. Of research and development manager for Prince Manufacturing, a maker of tennis a prototype shark-resistant suit, one Du rackets. "They're carbon." Ounce for Pont salesman said: "The problem is that ounce, carbon fibers are much stiffer and a shark can gum you to death." But the stronger than steel, aluminum or tita- company is enthusiastic about Kevlar in work gloves, clothes for smokejumpers nium. Carbon-epoxy enables Voyager-a plastic airplane designed to go around the and civilian hardhats.

The first all-plastic-bodied car was a world without refueling-to carry 2.25 kilograms of fuel and cargo for every cream-colored Ford that went on display kilogram of plane weight. in August 1941. The phenolic in the

irony-fresh out of college, Ben was hardly dreaming of a career in, say, ticky tacky-he might have been well advised to pay attention. For as John Keville points out-and the most casual look around the American marketplace would tend to confirm him-the public image of plastic is changing. Part of that change has to do with materials known collectively as "engineering resins"-defined as those capable of replacing metals.

Take a heavy-duty electric drill, raise it head-high and drop it onto concrete so that the plastic patt of the case strikes first. Or shove a portable computer off a table. The reason that their housings don't dent or break is an engineering resin.

One such engineering plastic common in housings for electric tools, portable typewriters and video cameras is an alloy called ABS, which abbreviates "acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene."

If you wear a plastic-bodied watch, it's probably made of ABS. The body parts are injection-molded, which means that granulated ABS is melted and forced by a ram under high pressure into a cooled steel mold. The most common case color is black, but Armond Vallieres, an engineer for Timex Corporation, explained that raw ABS is amber in color and takes other colors easily. "People want black because it goes with a lot of clothing," he said. Matte black ABS also has an aura of high-tech chic-these days some ABS watches look as if they belong in the dashboard of a sports car or the cockpit of a jet fighter.

fenders was mixed with Southern pine, straw, hemp and a fiber called ramie that the Egyptians once used for mummy wrapping. Henry Ford impressed people by walloping the sides with a fire ax; the fenders bounced back. Ford promised to start producing plastic cars after the war.

It didn't happen. Among the reasons: plastic parts took more time to manufacture than steel ones and they were more difficult to fit to the chassis. In 1953, Chevrolet introduced the Corvette, made of plastic-bonded fiberglass. But the Corvette was and is an expensive, limitedproduction car whose body panels require extensive hand fitting to the frame. It was not until 1984 that the first high-volume, plastic-bodied car appeared, the Pontiac Fiero. The Fiero factory in Pontiac, Michigan, uses a computerized machine to solve the fitting problem by measuring each steel frame, shaping its mounting surfaces and drilling holes in the right spots.

The Fiero's frame is still metal, and the Fiero isn't much lighter than a comparable all-steel version (calculations showed weight savings of zero to 14 kilograms) but it has some significant pluses. Lou Wassel, marketing manager of sporty cars for General Motors (GM), said he's suspended a bowling ball from a chain and swung it through a 70centimeter arc against a Fiero panel.

"I've seen people stand on a panel and I've seen people kick them: none of those things left a dent." Scratched panels can be patched and painted, but when heavily damaged, GM recommends replacement.

For consumers, plastic's biggest advantages over steel are probably its greater resistance to corrosion and dents. Said Louis Collier, an automotive products manager for Du Pont, "Right now, the [metal] body ages the car. Plastics will change that: it will last essentially forever. " Painting the Fiero requires pla.stics that can tolerate paint-drying ovens. This high-temperature technology has spilled into the kitchen. Most of the new plastic ovenware is a glass-reinforced polyester similar to that on the Fiero and Corvette.

Polyester is competing with ceramic and glass dishes for space in microwave ovens, where metal cannot be used. It's even crowding aluminum and steel in conventional ovens, because these polyester pans are rated a little more than 200 degrees Celsius.

Threatening glass from another direc- highly corrosive environments or election is the plastic bottle made of PET, tromagnetic-testing facilities. One of Apshort for polyethylene terephthalate. ple Computer's test labs is a building made After just eight years on the market, totally of plastic, down to the nuts and 6,000 million bottles are produced world- bolts. wide each year.

The impact of the plastic revolution on Last year PET had a smaller piece of industry has, of course, been enormous. the U.S. soda market than either glass or Owens-Illinois, the United States' largest aluminum, but it was growing while glass producer of glass containers, has recently was dropping and aluminum holding closed four of its glass plants. But it has steady. And the market isn't limited to also adopted the philosophy that if you fizzydrinks. Heinz has found that plastic can't fight 'em, join 'em-it is now makbottles for its ketchup weigh only a tenth ing plastic soda bottles-and other indusas much as glass bottles. Bartenders like tries are following suit. Reynolds AlumiPET whiskey bottles because they don't num now sells plastic wrap for the kitchbreak on the floor and drinks come out en. Glassmaker PPG also spins fiberglass faster from squeezable containers. A for plastic reinforcement. The Budd jumbo jet can save $25,000 in fuel costs Company, a subsidiary of a West German every year if it flies with single-serving steel company, makes plastic panels for liquor in PET rather than glass, because the Pontiac Fiero, and U.S. Steel produceach PET bottle is about 10 grams lighter. es plastics through its U.S.S. Chemicals Another breakthrough in packaging division. results from a process called "barrier coextrusion," in which plastics with different properties are layered into a single sheet. One layer provides overall strength, another prevents punctures, plasticshave another protects flavor, still another EnViconmentallY, a good deal to recommend them. Plasblocks the passage of small molecules. tic requires only one-tenth of the enerThe most common item in American homes using barrier coextrusion is the gy required to produce aluminum, and toothpaste tube, which may contain as in spite of the enormous volume inmany as nine different layers of plastic. volved, plastic accounts for only five Nowadays plastics have moved into percent of the U.S. petroleum consumpevery room in the house in the form of tion. But plastics also present some specountertops, plumbing, paints and vinyl cial problems. Although the basic resinfloors, and have covered the outside as manufacturing process presents a much well with vinyl siding. But what about the cleaner face than a steel mill (there ts house itself? We were promised plastic little smoke and soot), it is also true that houses more than 40 years ago, but many of the ingredients are dangerous. conventional materials proved very tough Benzene, for example, which goes into the manufacture of styrene, epoxy, to beat. Monsanto Chemical Company and a group of cosponsors built a plastic polyester and nylon, is a carcinhouse at Disneyland in 1957, near the ogen. Common types of plastic produce entrance to "Tomorrowland". The waJ!s, toxic gases in fires, including hydrogen roof, floors, rugs and furniture of the cyanide and hydrogen chloride. The plas"House of the Future" were all plastic. tics industry counterargues that natural Crews demolished it ten years later (with materials such as wood also produce toxic some difficulty, a Disney spokesman said, gases when burned, and that nonplastics because wrecking balls just bounced off) may be more prone to catching fire or to make room for a souvenir stand. starting fires (as in the case of metal Nearly 30 years later, that design, or any electrical housings). Carbon-reinforced other plastic house for that matter, has plastics create a particular problemwhen burned, they release clouds of tiny yet to find a place in American suburbs.

Even if a plastic house were practical, few fibers that can get into electrical equippeople would want to incur the wrath of ment and cause short circuits. their neighbors by erecting one on One concern of environmentalists is the street. that many plastics-such as PET botPlastic is used in some nonresidential tles-are neither biodegradable nor easistructures where metal won't do, such as ly recyclable, and that the material is

increasing our already staggering solidwaste and litter problem. Recycling plastic bottles does not have the economic incentive that recycling aluminum cans or even glass does, but manufacturers are working to make it more practical.

For all that, there is little question that there will be more and more plastic in our future. In 1963, consultant Gerald Shook predicted the role of plastics in the year 2000 but "most of my projections came to pass in about six years."

A plastic automobile engine is already a reality. The Polimotor, 90 kilograms lighter than its metal counterparts and plastic right down to its block and connecting rods, started running on the racing circuit last year, and such an engine could power luxury cars in the near future. Mass-produced plastic automobile frames are a gleam in the eye of Du Pont, which is also working on a material called Bexloy C that it hopes will replace exterior sheet metal on most cars after 1995. It would, Du Pont claims, cut the cost of producing exterior parts by 20 percent. Volkswagen is working on a plastic fuel tank, and plastic drive shafts are already a reality. Cars are just the beginning.

Under development are "aseptic" polymer packages that can hold milk or other perishable products for 18 months or more without refrigeration. As medical scientists gain more control over the interaction between plastics and living tissues, we can expect to see tiny synthetic blood vessels and a variety of bodily organs. The Jarvik 7 artificial heart is mostly plastic, and the University of Utah is already at work on a plastic pancreas. Recent development of electrically conductive plastics raises the prospect of flexible sheets of photovoltaic cells and transparent speakers that you can hang over your television screen.

In spite of past experience, visionary plastics enthusiasts like John Keville of the Plastics Museum argue that plastic houses will be commonplace 20 to 30 years from now, and, if costs drop, even plastic bridges and domes to cover whole towns could follow.

And so, regardless of how we feel about it, we might as well prepare ourselves. Leo Baekeland's genie has been out of the bottle for almost 80 years now; no one is going to put it back in.

0 About the Author: James R. Chiles is a Missouri-based free-lance writer.

Plasdes in FariDing

lasticmaterials and a variety of plastic products are playing an important and ever-expanding role in modern agriculture.

One reason is the relatively low cost of many plastics. Another is that plastics are often the best materials for certain uses, regardless of cost. And, in a growing number of cases, plastics are doing farm jobs that simply can't be done by other materials.

One of the biggest and fastest growing agricultural uses of plastics is for mulching (spreading a protective covering such as compost on the ground to prevent evaporation from the soil) to speed maturity of high-value crops.

"Figures from the National Agricultural Plastics Association show that u.s. growers alone use more than 50,000 tons of

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Supported by a framework of wooden stakes and hoops, plastic tunnels protect vegetable crops from inclement weather at an American farm.

plastic mulch a year," says David Carnell, president of a Canadian firm which sells plastic sheeting for mulching.

By using the sheeting to protect their crops from low temperatures, growers are able to plant and market earlier. For example, the Rasmussen family in Granger, Washington, grows ten hectares of cucumbers and six hectares of peppers under plastic tunnels. They. can reach the local market three weeks earlier with tunnel-grown vegetables. In addition to getting higher prices, they harvest higher yields.

"Our plastic tunnels are made on a framework of wooden stakes and wire hoops," says :RichRasmussen. "We lay two sheets of plastic side by side over the frame. The machine that lays the plastic also buries the outside edge of each sheet under soil.

During cold weather we close the tunnels at the top by holding the inside edges of the sheets together with clothespins."

Carnell predicts further growth in plastic-mulch usage among American and Canadian farmers, partly because of new developments. One recent advance is plastic sheeting that selfdestructs after 60 to 90 days in sunlight. Carnell says the plastic will shred and disappear before harvest, so it doesn't have to be removed by hand. Plastic sheeting would clog mechanical vegetable harvesters if it remained in the field.

Another development is the so-called floating mulch, which is made from woven plastic fabrics. Edges can be anchored with soil but should be laid loosely right on top of the crop to eliminate the need for a tunnel framework. Delbert Hemphill, an Oregon State University researcher, is evaluating floating mulches at the North Willamette Experiment Station in Aurora, Oregon. He says these plastics allow plants to breathe, while protecting crops from low temperatures.

Other developments include an opaque mulch with 2.5-centimeter-wide shiny stripes that provide a degree of aphid control without insecticide. There is also a herbicide-coated clear plastic. Carnell says the herbicide eliminates many common weeds, but doesn't harm important crops.

Plastics are also becoming more popular for storing farm commodities. Farmers can now buy plastic bags that are 30 meters long and three meters in diameter. They are used for making and storing silage (fodder converted into feed for livestock through fermentation). Special machines are needed to fill the bags. Each bag holds roughly 80 tons of silage.

According to Mike Hutjens, a University of Illinois dairy specialist, it is possible to make top-quality silage in the bags if they are filled properly and protected from puncture.

Another farm use for plastic involves a tough fabric originally designed as underlayment for oiled roads. It is being put to a number of farm uses. One brand is Supac plastic fabric from Phillips Petroleum Company. Tim Fairbrother, superintendent of the University of Missouri's Forage Systems Research Center, unrolled 4.5-meter-wide strips of Supac material and covered it with 5- to 7.5-centimeter-diameter rocks to make a cattle yard surface that doesn't turn to mud in wet weather.

"We do have more maintenance with the rock and fabric than with a concrete slab," Fairbrother says. "But the difference in the original cost more than pays for dressing up the rock and fabric when we clean out the pens."

Farmers also place the fabric under riprap, a foundation of stones, along streambanks and under driveways, according to Fred Perkirrs, manager of Lafayette Farm and Industry in Cuba City, Wisconsin. His firm distributes a brand called Agri-fabric throughout the United States. The tough material keeps gravel from disappearing into mud when the soil is wet. It also can keep newly seeded grass waterways from washing out during a hard rain.

A much thinner plastic fabric, with much tighter weave, is the raw material used to make a new kind of protective clothing. It is designed for wear when 'spraying dangerous agricultural chemicals. Du Pont's Tyvek spun bonded olefin plastic fabric breathes, resists penetration by sprays and is described as more comfortable to wear than rubber.

A plastic product that is already common on U.S. farms is corrugated fiberglass sheeting, made by reinforcing plastic with glass fibers. Clear fiberglass sheeting is now replacing glass in

greenhouses and is a popular material for building solar collectors. Clear fiberglass became practical when engineers found a way to coat it with Tedlar, a plastic which screens out harmful solar radiation that would otherwise turn the sheets opaque.

Dwayne Curry in Alpha, Illinois, used clear fiberglass to build a solar collector on the south wall and roof of his new hog house. The collector supplies heat for his farrowing unit, as well as supplemental heat for drying grain in the fall. In addition, Curry has built a methane generator that converts hog manure into fuel. Plastic pipelines deliver manure from his hog barns to the generator.

Other stockmen use corrugated plastic tubing ten or more centimeters in diameter, buried a few meters below the soil. surface, to construct earth-cooling systems for livestockconfinement housing. Several hundred meters of the pipe can produce enough air at 12.8 degrees Celsius to cool an average hog house.

There is even a plastic white rail fence, made by Nebraska Plastics, Inc., in Cozad, Nebraska, that looks as if it were built out of wooden boards and posts. The polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic isn't likely to splinter, crack, or break into jagged pieces, and never needs painting.

Plastic is also gaining a greater share of the market for irrigation pipelines, sprinkler heads, nozzles and many other items used in irrigation systems. In fact, most new pipelines are now made of plastic. R.G. Evans, a Washington State University irrigation specialist, says plastic costs less than metal for buried pipe and isn't affected much by acid or alkaline soils.

The drip-irrigation boom is essentially based on plastic, Evans adds. From one-centimeter tubing to main lines measuring 25 centimeters across, most of the material in drip systems is some sort of plastic. Plastic tubing is now so economical that some American growers are using drip irrigation for row crops such as cotton. For example, at Paloma Ranch in Gila Bend, Arizona, workers unroll drip tubing six rows at a time after they plant cotton, then reel it in after they defoliate the crop.

Plastics are showing up more in some types of farm equipment, too. For example, most manufacturers have switched to plastic materials for the roofs and interiors of tractor and combine cabs. According to Paul Kusy, who monitors plastics technology for the John Deere Company, plastics are better than metals in these applications. They offer superior sound deadening and insulation against temperature change and can be molded into complex contours and shapes.

New kinds of plastics are replacing metal and fiberglass for holding corrosive farming materials. Larry Snyder of Snyder Industries in Lincoln, Nebraska, uses polyolefin plastic to make tanks suitable for storing flammable liquids. According to Snyder, who employs a process called rotational molding, plastic tanks are less susceptible than fiberglass to cracking, crazing and wicking. A number of American manufacturers are using them on planters, sprayers and other implements.

Plastics engineers have just developed ways to make plastic alloys that offer improved wearability and lower costs. According to the experts, one can expect to see even more and better plastics on farms in the future.

0 About the Author: Steve McGill is a regional editor with The Furrow, a farming magazine published in Moline, Illinois.

For the Love of India Many eminent scholars of comparative literature in American universities have devoted their careers to study and popularize the works of Indian writers in vernacular languages.

I have come across several American scholar-humanists who have made it their life's mission to build bridges of understanding and appreciation between the United States and India, especially in the areas of literature and culture. Their contribution to this mutual understanding is immense, though their work has not received as much public attention in India as it deserves. The community of these scholars is spread over diverse areas and varied disciplines, such as Indian literature, music, dance, Sanskrit, history and civilization. It is a broad spectrum and one may begin with introducing briefly the contribution of a few scholarhumanists, editors of journals, who have done commendable work in promoting the spirit of awareness of Indian art and literature in the United States.

Carlo Coppola (b. 1938), a professor of modern languages at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, is a remarkable person. In the time since we first met in 1970, he has become a trend-setter in creating and developing a deep interest in Indian literature in America. As a graduate student in Chicago in 1963, he learned Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Sanskrit and completed his PhD under C.M. Nairn on the "Progressive Movement in Urdu Literature." With a working capital of $35 and much good will, Coppola and Nairn launched a journal, Mahfil, which was renamed The Journal of South Asian Literature (JSAL) after it received a grant

from Oakland University in 1972. Carlo Coppola visited India in 1967-68 and studied Urdu at Aligarh Muslim University under Professor Suroor. Much later, in May of this year, I met Professor Suroor in Srinagar and he was very appreciative of Coppola's contribution.

My visit to Oakland was memorable.

Spring was in the air and on the way to Rochester in Michigan the landscape was a tender tapestry of greenery. Maples and elms sprouted with fresh leaves were a delight to the eye. Oakland University, built in sylvan surroundings, is known for its distinctive features and innovative courses in "non-Western" civilizations, especially Indian civilization.

At Oakland University I was to lecture on E.M. Forster, and to meet faculty members who were interested in Indian studies. John Cutts, chairman at Oakland, was my colleague earlier at Wayne State University, Detroit, where I was a visiting professor in 1970. I was privileged to meet Carlo Coppola at Oakland. He impressed me as a very enthusiastic scholar, deeply committed to the cause of Indian literature and civilization. I still remember entering his class and making some impromptu comments on Indian fiction and on Train to Pakistan (I was then writing my book on Khushwant Singh for the Twayne series). By the time my wife and I returned to Belcrest Hotel in Detroit, my head was crammed with delightful flashes of a fascinating visit. I had more occasions to meet Coppola later and to share his passion for Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, his enthusiasm for Indian literature and his missionary spirit in enabling Americans to appreciate the values of the ancient cultures of the Third World. I also met Steven Paalos, a sensitive member of the India Study Group at Oakland. He told me that the response to a course in Bharatanatyam at Oakland was overwhelming. It is 16 years

since I met Carlo Coppola and, ever since, I have been a keen follower of his extraordinary career in research, interpretation, translation and popularization of a varied spectrum of Indian literature and studies in America.

Even a cursory glance at the issues and special numbers of Mahfil and the Journal of South Asian Literature will demonstrate the wide range Coppola has covered in his editorial efforts. His literary adventure, commencing in 1963 with Mahfil, has covered extensive areas of Indian literature with special numbers on Hindi literature, English writing from India, S.H. Vatsyayan, Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali poetry since 1941, Tamil literature, Amrita Pritam, Ghalib, Sanskrit literature, G. Sankara Kurup and English poetry from India. He has also published proceedings of the symposium on "Teaching Asian Literature in America." Coppola told me that he deliberately used the singular, rather than the plural (literatures), to underscore the idea of the unity of Asian literatures.

JSAL began with a special number on Umashankar Joshi, followed by another on Mohan Rakesh (1973). From 1972 to 1986, JSAL published special numbers on Modern Bengali Poetry, Indian Theater, Nissim Ezekiel, Poetry of Sri Lanka, Jaya Sankar Prasad, Malayalam Literature, East-West Literary Relations, Marathi Literature, Goan Literature, Intizar Husain, the Lyric in India, Sadat Hasan Manto and the Mahabharata, and devoted an issue to the "Feminine Sensibility in South Asian Literatures." Even this brief listing will show what a vast and varied field this has been for literary appreciation and evaluation. Coppola tells me that among the forthcoming issues, special numbers on South Asian Humor, the Bhagavad Gita, Oriya Literature, Qurratulain Hyder, Modern Urdu Poetry, and South Asian Women

Writers Immigrant Experience are scheduled.

I asked Coppola about the most memorable (or most painful) experiences in his editorial effort.

"Oh," he answered immediately, "the series of interviews I conducted with several writers in India in 1968. I met Qurratulain Hyder in Bombay and when I switched to Urdu from English in our conversation, she was delighted and spoke for six long hours, but only after I switched off the tape recorder! I also interviewed Amrita Pritam and Ismat Chughtai in India. The most memorable interview I have had was with the famous Urdu writer Krishan Chandar at his bedside along with two other remarkable writers, Rajinder Singh Bedi and Sahir Ludhiyanavi. " "Did you have any out-of-the-ordinary experiences?" I asked Coppola.

"Yes. I wanted to meet the poet Akhtar-ul-Iman. I called his home and spoke to his wife asking for an appointment. I spoke in Urdu and said,! was an American researching in Urdu poetry.

When I reached their home, they said they could never believe what I had said and thought I was part of an elaborate prank planned by their friends, simply

"Ivar Ivask has put the University of Oklahoma on the

international literary map by sponsoring the Neustadt Prize for literature., ,

because Urdu-speaking American students didn't exist!" Coppola of course was delighted that his Urdu was good enough to fool the native speakers!

"Another memorable experience," said Coppola, "was a meeting with Umashankar Joshi in Delhi." Umashankar Joshi, the gifted writer in Gujarati, not merely visited Coppola at his hotel in Delhi, but invited him to his home in Ahmedabad. Coppola was given a fond farewell in Delhi by Prabhakar Machwe, Sahitya Akademi's secretary.

"My most painful editorial experience is to look at a new issue of the journal and find typographical errors! How I hate them. You know that the staff of the journal is extremely small-myself and a typist. I am also pained that I must do all the editing, correspondence, filing, etc., myself. This takes a great deal of time."

I asked what his future plans were.

"I have always felt that the benefits of our publication have not been broadly accessible to scholars and readers in India. I tried to explore the possibilities of having an Indian edition of JSAL, but so far this has not been possible for many reasons. I also tried to get Indian publishers interested in publishing anthologies of short stories published in JSAL, but again I have not succeeded so far.

JSAL is a labor of love. I have not been able to pay any remuneration to our valued contributors."

On August 5, 1985, I was on my way to New York from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to meet Anne Paolucci, professor of comparative literature at St. John's University. I had corresponded with her extensively on her project of the special India number of the Review of National Literatures (RNL), but this was to be our first meeting. The weather was fine, and Paolucci was in excellent spirits. As executive director of the Council on National Literatures and editor of RNL, she has made a substantial contribution to widening the literary horizons of Americans. I found Anne Paolucci and her philosopher-husband Henry deeply committed to the cause of comparative literature and international understanding achieved through growing awareness of national literatures of other countries.

Anne has published RNL special numbers on many diverse topics, such as national literatures of Australia, Armenia, Turkey and France.

, 'Carlo Coppola impressed me as a very enthusiastic scholar deeply committed to the cause of Indian literature and civilization. , ,

Anne and Henry impressed me as an ideal intellectual couple-an American variety of Beatrice and Sidney Webbwith deep interest in Indian civilization and Sanskrit studies, and having a rich European philosophical background.

A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University, Anne Paolucci has received many honors and awards. Her areas of specialization have been both classical and modern-Dante, Machiavelli, Hegel, Shakespeare, Pirandello, Albee, Beckett, and the theater of the absurd. She is deeply involved in studies of non-American civilizations, and has directed a popular drama program, "Shakespeare and the World" in New York. She is also a poet, playwright and short-story writer. Her enthusiasm in exploring national literatures of other countries, especially India, is infectious.

Both Anne and Henry Paolucci made elaborate preparations for the RNL India special number. Together they wrote a very thought-provoking essay on the growth and future prospects of the major languages of India in a comparative

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, , William Riggon has explored the writings of the Third World and is associate editor of the journal World Literature Today." context. In "Dante and the 'Quest for Eloquence' in India's Vernacular Language," the Paoluccis have raised a basic question: Does modern India have a national author whose work has given it a national expression? Does India have a national language? Dante's eloquent plea for Italian, they say, has similarities with Mahatma Gandhi's advocacy of Indian vernacular languages and Hindi. They draw elaborate parallels between the linguistic situation in Dante's Italy and that in modern India. In this probing presentation, Mahatma Gandhi's ideas seem to be a close parallel to Dante's concepts in De Vulgari Eloquentia. Anne Paolucci has thus offered a very comprehensive and analytical interpretation of modern India's language problem.

Someone has said that art is preeminently provincial, that it emerges from a certain age and a certain locale.

King Lear and Hamlet could never have been written anywhere but in Elizabethan England. It is true that much of the world's literature has been nurtured in the cradle called "the region." And the Earth itself is a kind of "region" in an expanding cosmos. This view underscores the need for people to develop an international attitude that is indeed the ideal

cherished by Americans. Americans, in their approaches, are regional and universal at the same time. "Home, as we say in New England," says Charles Miller, "is the place that must take you in when you have to go there; your region, then, is the place that must receive your homing spirit when it needs a home."

"Yes, indeed," safd ¡Paolucci, "this is the essence of national literatures." For the literary creator in modern America, a region can be an emotional home as well as a most soul-satisfying laboratory to test home-bred truths. Many famous regions in the literature of the world are one-man regions such as Hardy's Dorset, Mark Twain's Mississippi, whereas a rich region like New England may boast of many creative voices-Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson and, most recently, Frost.

To move from St. John's in New York to Norman in Oklahoma is to discover another fascinating field of American cultural adventure of purposeful bridgebuilding and exploration of international cultural awareness. Ivar Ivask and William Riggon, professors in modern languages at the University of Oklahoma, have demonstrated the American genius of building cultural bridges. Ivask edited a cosmopolitan quarterly, Books Abroad (founded in 1927), which subsequently was renamed World Literature Today (WLT). About this journal, Ivask said, "It has a stable of 800 reviewers in the United States and abroad and reviews books in 72 languages including books from India. It was designed to' promote international understanding by disseminating information." WLT is a journal in its own class, and has helped Americans to look beyond the boundaries of their country to Europe, Asia, Africa and farther afield. It offers a 176-page fare every quarter, which gives American readers a fair glimpse of the literary expression the world over.

Ivar Ivask (b. 1927) is a highly accomplished person. He is a professor of German, as well as a comparatist, poet, painter, critic, linguist and art historian.

William Riggon (b. 1946) is also a scholarly comparatist at the University of Oklahoma and the enthusiastic associate editor of WLT. He has explored the writings of Third World countries and authors a fascinating column, "Last Page," for WLT, besides editing numerous reviews. Ivask has put the University

of Oklahoma on the international literary map by sponsoring the Neustadt International Prize for literature. Founded by the Neustadt Foundation, it is awarded in recognition of outstanding achievement in poetry, fiction or drama to any living author in any language. This $25,000 award is conferred every two years. A replica of the eagle feather cast in silver is also given along with the prize.

I asked Ivask if he was interested in exploring Indian cultures and literature.

"Yes, I am. I have invited writers from India to act as jurors for the Neustadt award. A.K. Ramanujam, Kamala Markandaya, R.K. Narayan have been some of our invitees."

The Books Abroad special number on India featured articles on Kathak, Gujarati poetry, Kamala Markandaya, P.S. Rege, Tamil poetry, the Telugu novel, Punjabi fiction, Urdu poet Firaq and a fair number of English translations of poems originally written in Indian languages. The August 1969 issue entitled "Letters of India in Transition" was produced in honor of the birth centenary of Mahatma Gandhi. "Our journal now enters its 60th year of publication. The Neustadt Prize has been described by the press as the 'American Nobel' or the 'Small Nobel.' " Ivar Ivask and William Riggon are both dynamic scholar-editors working with dedication and faith toward the ideal of cultivating international understanding through the exploration of non-American literatures and cultures and thus building bridges of international cooperation between the United States and other countries, including India. They project the concept of "One World" in the realm of literature and the arts.

These four scholar-editors in their mission of international bridge-building demonstrate the true spirit of American civilization so aptly expressed by Walt Whitman: "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem .... " William Blake aspired to see the world in a grain of sand; these humanists desire to see the world in a bunch of journals, and transmit the images of India and the world through their innovative and distinguished efforts.

0 About the Author: Vasant A. Shahane is Professor Emeritus at Osmania University, Hyderabad. He is at present visiting professor at the University of New Hampshire.

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Erich von Stroheim at work (fadeft) and "ene, from hi> f film epic, Greed. Left: Trina .~ (Zazu Pitts) and McTeague (Gibson Gowland) at their wedding feast. Below: In his dental parlor, McTeague steals a kiss from a drugged Trina. Bottom: McTeague is held at gunpoint for killing Trina and fleeing with her gold to Death Valley.

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The ~ Silent Genius of Celluloid

by C.!. BHASKAR

America recently celebrated the centenary of the birth of Erich von Stroheim with a fresh look at his old films.

Best known for making the world's longest movie in 1923, he was Hollywood's first realist filmmaker.

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y filmmaker who produces a nine-hour silent film and expects his audience to sit through it must either be mad or have an incredibly strong conviction about his creative ability. Erich von Stroheim, who made the world's longest film, Greed, in 1923 (a record that has not been surpassed), was "guilty" on both counts-he was often described as an insane genius.

The American film, in its evolution from mere optical gimmickry to a revolutionary and universal art form, had many stalwarts. D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, names that need no introduction to movie-buffs, are considered to be among the pioneers of American cinema. Yet tucked away in cans of silent film lies the work of Erich von Stroheim (1885-1957) whose contribution to American film is only now being recognized. A retrospective of his films, held in Los Angeles last year during the Stroheim birth centenary, aroused considerable interest. Generally regarded as tqe first realist among American film directors, Stroheim's contributions were giscussed in an article in the International Herald Tribune (October 4, 1985): "As a paragraph by a great writer can disclose his style, so these remarkable films reveal a distinctive creator. His methods warrant examination."

Stroheim, best remembered for Blind Husbands (a memorable directorial debut), Greed (based on Frank Norris's novel McTeague) and The Merry Widow, became involved with celluloid accidentally.

Born in Vienna, Austria, on September 22, 1885, Stroheim was educated in a military academy and was a lieutenant in the imperial Prussian army before immigrating to the United States in 1909. The aristocratic "von" seems to have been grafted onto his name while crossing the Atlantic, but it was part of the Stroheim image that was to hypnotize Hollywood later. Initially he worked as a journalist for a German daily, managing to obtain a commission in the National Guard. Later, he wended his way to the West Coast by singing ballads in beer halls, working as a boatman and a railroad man and selling flypaper.

His checkered career also included a brief stint as a lifeguard in a hotel before he arrived in Los Angeles in 1914-now as a riding master with a carload of horses. Stroheim drifted into a variety of jobs as do most immigrants in America, but his widespectrum apprenticeship was to stand him in good stead in the years ahead.

The year 1914 saw the outbreak of World War I, and Hollywood, which had already become the focal point for American cinema, was obsessed with war films. Stroheim arrived in Hollywood and joined the "extras pool," hanging around for work in a milieu that was becoming increasingly difficult for anybody with a Teutonic background. However, he got his first bryak in Griffith's Birth of a Nation in a bit role that_ nonetheless won him minor assignments as an assistant /;nd part-time actor. Success and recognition in Hollywood have always been governed by chance and individual grit, and Stroheim's case was no different. With the war raging and the United States having joined ranks with the Allies, the immigrant Austrian became the ubiquitous Hun on celluloid.

Stroheim's military bearing, his sinister scowl and Prussian arrogance were orchestrated in film after film. He worked in Griffith's Intolerance and Hearts of the World, Fairbanks's In Again-Out Again and Ince's For France and The Unbeliever. Stroheim was advertised as the "Man You Love to

Hate" and was described as the villain who seduced Red Cross nurses, threw babies out of windows and ordered firing squads to execute hapless Belgian peasants. Sinister Stroheim had arrived in Hollywood.

But success in Hollywood, as he was to learn, was a fickle goddess. The war was over and the Prussian act had become passe. Even though Stroheim was out of work again, the new adversity only whetted his confidence. The former cavalry officer decided to become a director. He wrote a screenplay and decided to sell it to one of the bigger studios. His Prussian aim was unerring; he targeted Carl Laemmle, president of Universal Pictures Corporation. As The New York Times was to report later (December 14, 1924): "So in a new suit of clothes he [Stroheim] went to see Mr. Laemmle. He was told that Mr. Laemmle was out, at which he took a' seat and declared he would wait.

He recognized Mr. Laemmle when that man appeared and with military precision he saluted the wealthy producer. In his office Mr. Laemmle asked who the man waiting outside [was], and when he was informed that it was Mr. von Stroheim he told his secretary to say that he was too busy to see him. For two weeks Mr. von " morning Stroheim turned up every to see Mr. Laemmle until the latter decided to end the Austrian's visits by seeing him. When

he was c10setted with Mr. Laemmle, Mr. von Stroheim said that he had written a great scenario, which would make the finest picture ever made. He amplified this by asserting that his literary effort was a supreme one and whetted Mr. Laemmle's interest by adding that it would cost only $25,000 to produce. Mr. von Stroheim further stated that, besides directing the picture, he would play the heavy role himself, which would save money. This figure, the man's persistence and the enthusiasm he had for the story made a deep impression on Mr. Laemmle, who finally decided to see what the man could do."

Blind Husbands (1919), as the film was called, was a runaway hit. It struck gold for the producer and marked Stroheim as a director to be reckoned with. The plot of the film was familiar-rich American doctor incapable of appreciating the qualities of his beautiful wife juxtaposed with a continental Austrian in the idyllic Alps. But Stroheim's treatment was refreshingly different and as Lewis Jacobs points out in The Rise of the American Film: "All von Stroheim's films were melodramas of lust-lust for money (Greed, The Wedding March) or for youth, love or debauchery (The Devil's Pass Key, Blind If,usbands, Foolish Wives, The Merry Widow, Merry-GoRound). Executed with a hard unrelenting honesty, they were by turns sordid, scathing, mocking, ironic. His characterizations and viewpoint brought to the screen an individuality, a maturity, and a meaning not to be found in the pictures of the De Milles, the Inces, or the George Fitzmaurices. He was a compendium of varied talents in an industry in which only specialists were given an ear: he was the writer and the player, as well as the director, of many of his films."

Yet, despite his maverick success at the box office, Stroheim became notorious for his extravagance, in terms of both time and money. Blind Husbands, which was budgeted at $25,000 and three months, cost $85,000 and took six months. From an estimated $75,000, The Devil's Pass Key overshot to $185,000 and nine months, while Foolish Wives, which was not to exceed $250,000, broke the $1 million mark and was advertised as such.

In the credits, the S in Stroheim's name was signed as $. But in Hollywood, budgeting is the name of the game and while conceding Stroheim's creative talent and searing realistic treatment, the studios became wary of him. Fortunately for

Stroheim, Metro-Goldwyn was trying to gain a foothold in the movie business and engaged him to direct a film. The result was Greed-the biggest box-office disaster of its time but, again according to Lewis Jacobs, "one of the shining achievements in American film history."

The film depicts the degeneration of a common man, a lower middle-class dentist and his avaricious wife. Filmed with frightening realism, Stroheim's fidelity to Frank Norris's novel remains unparalleled (the novel, MeTeague, was earlier filmed in 1915 as Life's Whirlpool, but faded into obscurity). It is a measure of Stroheim's obsession with realism that he filmed Greed page by page from Me Teague. Shot on location in San Francisco and Death Valley (Stroheim scoffed at the idea of using studios), Greed took nine months to complete and cost $ 470,000- an astronomical sum in those days. As Kevin Starr, formerly assistant professor of American literature at Harvard, opines, "The extravagance of Greed was also the tribute of one artist to another; for the Austrian-born director correctly sensed the affinity between Norris's naturalism and the epic cinema von Stroheim dreamed of creating."

Se,enesfrom three movies directed bY'Erich von Stroheim: Blind Husbands (above), Foolish Wives (right) and The Wedding March (below). Stroheim's role was usually as a noble seducer.

McTeague, the phony dentist, becomes aware of his latent sexuality with the arrival of Trina in his life and "mysterious instruments as ungovernable as the winds of heaven were at work Jmitting their lives together." Trina's chance winning of $5,000 in a lottery sows the seeds of their destruction. Her hoarding of the money reveals her latent lust and greed, further compounded by the unmasking of McTeague as a phony medical practitioner. Penury heightens Trina's miserliness and reduces McTeague to an animal level, culminating in his brutal murder of Trina. McTeague flees to Death Valley with the gold, only to be apprehended by the law. Despite the work's classification as naturalistic tragedy in American literature (Norris is considered to have inspired writers like Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser) there is an element of Aristotelian catharsis in McTeague's fall.

One is forced to ponder the insignificance of man in the context of the larger natural forces. This feeling of awe and the dwarfing of the human spirit is further heightened by Stroheim in the last sequence of the film. Greed amazingly achieves this effect by cutting from a close-up of the handcuffed McTeague to a long shot of the two characters, dwarfed by the immensity of the desert. Stroheim's vision evokes the naturalistic tragedy of a man destroyed by his inner compulsions, yet a vision that reverberates with certain irrevocable classical, tragic rhythms.

Whether or not Stroheim was inadvertently orchestrating his own doom vis-a.-vis Hollywood, is a moot point.

Greed remains a very significant landmark in the history of world cinema, particularly for the portrayal of realism, and is part of compulsory viewing for any student of film. (The Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, for instance, has it in its syllabus for the Film Appreciation course.) The film was too long and a commercial failure at the ticket booth. In its totality it took nine-and-a-half hours to screen. Hollywood ridiculed Stroheim's masterpiece. But the eccentric director was convinced that audiences would love to see it and even tried to persuade distributors that it could be seen over two days! In an attempt to salvage Greed, the film was slashed to ten reels from 45. It still failed commercially though it retained its majesty.

Commenting in the Motion Picture Magazine (April 1924),.

Harry Carr said: " ... I saw a wonderful picture the other day-that no one else will ever see. It was the unslaughtered version of Erich von Stroheim's Greed. It was a magnificent piece of work, but it was 45 reels long. We went into the projecting-room at 10:30 in the morning; we staggered out at 8:00 that night. I can't imagine what they are going to do with it. It is like Les Miserables. Episodes come along that you think have no bearing on the story, then 12 or 14 reels later, it hits you with a crash.

For stark, terrible realism and marvelous artistry, it is the

greatest picture I have ever seen.

But I don't know what it will be like when it shrinks from 45 to eight reels. Von Stroheim is imploring the Goldwyn people to make two installments of it and run it on two different nights.

Could any other director in the world have gotten away with this?

One of the best love scenes in the picture is played with the lovers sitting on an outfall sewer pipe down which the body of a dead cat has just drifted. And I give you my word, it is a tender, beautiful and romantic love scene .... "

Greed ruined Stroheim's reputation as an economically viable and dependable director. He had to retrieve lost ground for Metro-Goldwyn and made The Merry Widow. America flocked to see the film, and Life magazine (October 1, 1925) concluded that "the extravagant, inconsistent, unreliable genius

whose mime in Hollywood is mud has at last triumphed over his oppressors ... at every point he sparkles with brilliance; and at times he bursts into flames ... a sentimental glow which reduces the hard critical faculty to a quivering pulp." Despite its box-office success (it is reported to have cleared $4 million) Stroheim was censured for squandering time and money.

But Stroheim himself was disillusioned with Hollywood's lure for lucre. In an interview after making the box-office bonanza, Stroheim said: "When I saw how the censors mutilated my picture Greed, which I did really with my entire heart, I abandoned all my ideals to create real art pictures and made pictures to order from now on. My film The Merry Widow proved that this kind of picture is liked by the public, but I am far from being

proud of it and I do not want to be identified at all with the so-called box-office attractions.

So I have to quit realism e¡ntirely .... When you ask me why do I do such pictures I am not ashamed to tell you the true reason: only because I do not want my family to starve."

Bloodied, but with head unbowed, Stroheim left MetroGoldwyn and joined Paramount where he made yet another memorable film, The Wedding March, which predictably went over budget. Hollywood was terrified by Stroheim's extravagance. World Film News (September 1929) referred to him as "a man who spends money on films without regard for profits"-the kiss of death for any director. The Wedding March was the last of Stroheim's directorial ventures to be seen by the public. He was commissioned to do two other films (Queen Kelly and Walking Down Broadway) but they were shelved before completion.

Relegated to oblivion, Stroheim was faced with the ignominy of acting under lesser directors. His performance in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937) as a German prison camp commander brought him back into the limelight, and his last role was that of a former star's valet in Sunset Boulevard.

Stroheim died in 1957, relatively unknown to filmgoers of that period. Yet for a brief but important period, he strode through Hollywood's studios like a colossus. In the end he finally fell victim to his own fidelity to realism. But his influence on world. cinema has been evident in the decades that followed his work. One may conjecture that in his naturalistic treatment of the lives of ordinary people (Greed), and the use of actual locales, his work foreshadowed the Italian neo-Realists of the 1940s who ironically were reacting against the Hollywood idiom. Within America, according to Lewis Jacobs, the work of later directors, such as King Vidor, William Howard, Josef von Sternberg and Karl Brown, "bear the stamp of von Stroheim's influence. " Last year's retrospective mayor may not resurrect von Stroheim, but it is worth recalling that for Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian filmmaker who consciously molded the artistic potential of the medium, von Stroheim was the director. A generation later, Rene Clair, the French avant-garde filmmaker, echoed a similar tribute: "An artist of genius is one who creates without imitating and who draws out of the depths of his own being the least predictable part of his work. How many in the history of cinema fit this definition? Whatever be their number, Erich von Stroheim is at their head."

0

About the Author: C./. Bhaskar is a Delhi-based free-lance journalist and the art critic of The Financial Express.

Boosting School¡Science

There is a tidal wave of interest by industry in the schools of America. Corporations are pouring in millions of dollars to provide young scientists with the best laboratories. airfax County in Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., will soon boast a fancy new high school for science and technology, a public school designed primarily to attract new high-tech companies to the area.

The school is being created with extensive aid and participation from local corporations. A foundation set up to solicit corporate donations has so far received more than $856,000 in money and scientific equipment.

Twelve hundred students will be selected through competitive examinations to take part in the new program.

They will be subjected to a rigorous

F

college-directed curriculum and enjoy the use of 13 labs, some of them the envy of any college. In addition to three basic science labs there will be applications labs, costing $200,000 each, in such fields as communications (with a dish antenna), energy and health. Two computer rooms, containing 50 terminals, will be available for homework and recreation.

New state or local "magnet" schools, most of them for science, are springing up around the United States, many with substantial corporate backing. Most take the form of centers within existing schools. Some others are being developed along the lines of the pathbreak-

ing North Carolina School for Science and Mathematics in Durham, a two-year public boarding school that opened in 1980. Louisiana opened a School of Science, Math and the Performing Arts on the campus of Northwestern State University of Louisiana in Natchitoches in 1983. In Batavia, Illinois, Fermilab Director Leon Lederman has initiated a proposal for a three-year Illinois Science Academy that would cover the sophomore year in high school through freshman year in college. "It gets rid of senior slump," says Lederman.

Contributions for these new high schools are actually only a small part of

.

Left: Lloyd Flanagan, one of the 400 gifted students at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, studies in his room (suitably arranged to accommodate his collection of plants).

The school is the first boardingschoolfor 11th and 12th grade students highly motivated and gifted in the study of science and math.

Below: An instructor at the North Carolina School shows chemistry students the properties of various liquids. Below right: At the North Carolina School students'walk in front of the old Watts Hospital building that has been converted into an administration block for the school.

what is becoming a "tidal wave-of interest by industry in the schools of America," according to Michael Roberts of IBM in Armonk, New York. Corporate involvement in science education has in the past been largely confined to higher education and projects for minorities. But the picture has altered dramatically in the two years since the "Apple bill"-designed to give tax breaks for donations of computers and other equipment to public schools-died in the U.S. Congress.

California, in the lead, as usual, has passed its own Apple bill. Companies everywhere have been involved in donations of money and equipment to schools, training, competitions and summer jobs.

Coalitions, commissions and networks are springing up to foster cooperation between business, science and education.

An extensive phenomenon has been the proliferation of company-school partnerships, sometimes called "adopt-aschool." In Houston, Texas, for example, there was only one such arrangement in 1979. Now there are 200 in Texas alone.

The nationwide total, including partnerships with banks, newspapers and other nontechnic'ally based enterprises, is about 35,000.

"The time is right," says one executive. Companies finally "woke up" to the problem, says Emory Rogers of HewlettPackard in Palo Alto, California. "We recognized we couldn't sit back and wait for universities to produce people."

The entry of technology into the schools is offering science-based companies unprecedented opportunities to share both their products and their expertise. Says Roberts of IBM, "For the first time, IBM is manufacturing a piece of equipment (the personal computer) that

is really meaningful for precollege."

In a larger context, many corporate officials feel that new technology is helping precipitate radical change in education. It is "now on the cusp of a-revolution," says L. Scott Miller of the Exxon Educational Foundation-one leading to a far more flexible system that is more finely geared to the needs of both individuals and of society.

The movement is being led' by large national companies such as HewlettPackard. The company has a strong tradition of philanthropy but only got into high schools in 1982. It has been conducting a pilot program in 64 California high schools, where it has placed $3.2 million worth of computers and software, accompanied by computer training. Employees also get release time to do tutoring in schools. Typical of the various unorthodox arrangements throughout industry is one whereby an employee can make a grant of company equipment to a scho<;>lif he can come up with one-fourth of the sales price.

Most corporate-sponsored programs are focused in their geographical areas.

In Houston, for example, more than 100 companies are contributing about 1,000 employees to teach in city high schools.

Science education in Texas as a whole is benefiting from the efforts of computer magnate Ross Perot, who sank $1 million into a study of public education sponsored by the governor. Perot is trying to get educators to shift some attention from sports to basics and to introduce more academic substance into requirements for teacher certification.

One plan, national in scope, is being developed by Lockheed Corporation in Sunnyvale, CaliforQia. Efforts are being made to form a consortium of national

companies that will offer high school students and teachers salaried technical jobs during the summer. A pilot program in the San Francisco Bay (California) area began in 1985. The experience. says Robert Haught of Lockheed, will give students "a first-hand feel for career paths. Kids know what doctors and lawyers do. But they don't know what a mathematician does every day." Ultimately, says Haught, they hope to locate 100,000 positions across the United States.

Lockheed has a. particular interest in cultivating future talent-because of its defense contracting work, many jobs are open only to American citizens. But many university engineering departments are dominated by foreigners.

Although reform of college education is not now a major corporate goal, some companies, like IBM, have decided to focus their precollege efforts on teacher training. Roberts says that while the company donates equipment and training to schools (including $225,000 to the North Carolina school), its biggest precollege commitment-$12 million in 1985-is to a summer teacher-training program. The course includes programming, the history and ethics of computing, the use of computers in teaching and the instructional potentials of word Students at the North Carolina School work on one of the 20 personal computers provided for their use by corporations.

processing and allied technology.

Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts, one of the first companies to get involved in precollege education, is subsidizing a graduate program at the University of Massachusetts for math and science teachers. On completion of the 14-month program, teachers have to agree to stay in the school system for at least three years.

Digital has another unusual program that involves parents as well as teachers in designing changes in science curricula.

Another approach is being tried by the Exxon Educational Foundation, which has programs in Houston and New York for giving "minigrants" to individual teachers so they can tryout innovative classroom ideas.

Although school boards are generally thrilled at getting help from private enterprise, most teachers are initially resistant to computers, says Anthony Napolitan of Hewlett-Packard. They fear encroachment on their functions and are "intimidated because the students know more about computers than they do." But they almost always become enamored of the new medium.

It may be some time before any drawbacks to these various initiatives become apparent. New relationships with industry, as well as higher salaries there, could help speed th~ drain of teachers into the private sector. And John Fowler of the National Science Teachers Association suggests that "adopt-a-school"

partnerships could lead to "company schools." But for the most part, optimism prevails. "I am so enthusiastic about what we are doing that it's hard for me to see any downside," says Rogers of HewlettPackard.

The movement is basically pushing forward on two fronts-raising the overall level of scientific literacy and creating a scientific elite. The elitist thrust, in the form of the new magnet schools, is generating some concern that they will be skimming the cream from the rest of the student population, as well as creating an additional drain on public resources.

But school officials indicate that schools are attracting new funds, both public and private. They say that they will be getting such a tiny percentage of students (Lederman says they are aiming for the top 0.1 percent in Illinois) that it will not affect the quality of the rest of the school population. And that 0.1 percent represents an enormous waste in terms of talented adolescents who feel bored and isolated in ordinary high schools.

A new magazine, Pro Education, has recently been launched to track the "renaissance" of public-private cooperation in education. The phenomenon "is snowballing," says Editor John Bayliss. "It just goes on and on and on." As Bayliss points out, the style of corporate giving has radically changed, from check-writing altruism to participatory self-interest.

Professional associations are now taking action to join in. The American Association of Engineering Societies is starting a coalition to pressure local school systems and legislatures to do something about raising teacher competence. The National Science Teachers Association has formed a "triangle coalition" of business, science and education to start a data base, connect existing networks and give grants to science teachers.

Mark Leuchtenberger of the North Carolina school says, "People in high school edupation are working fast because they're afraid the tide of fashion is going to shift somewhere else." But according to Miller of Exxon, the feeling of most corporate people is, "This is not a fad. The 19th-century factory called school shows signs of being radically transformed in our lifetime."

0 About the Author: Constance Holden writes regularly for Science magazine.

or the people who live there-many of them migrants from the midwestern United States, California and Canada-Denver, Colorado, is the city of the 1980s.

Most residents in this city, which sits 1.6 kilometers above sea level in the foothills of the Rockies, are young; indeed, the average Denverite is 29 years old. Many are recently out of college or engineering school. Some are latter-day urban wildcatters, drawn to Denver by its emergence as an energy hub, as a place where oil, natural gas, coal and shale are brokered, bought and sold, and where energy's profits are banked and administered. Later arrivals are the silicon specialists, masters of the microdot and the microcomputer. Today the municipality of Denver boasts 550,000 residents (and the greater Denver area's population has hit 1.6 million), all seemingly bent on making the city what Atlanta, Georgia, was in the 1960s, what Houston, Texas, was in the 1970s.

Yet even as Denver seeks to become one of America's more happily bumptious cities, its people are demanding more than growth from their city-they are concerned with the quality of their lives. Perhaps it's the influence of the rough-hewn beauty of Denver's surrounding hills and valleys, still largely untouched.

Perhaps it's because the residents wake up each morning and see the purple Rockies from their house and apartment windows. Perhaps it's that the skiing resorts of Vail and Aspen are a few hours away. Or maybe it is simply that Denver's newest citizens involve themselves with their city's past even as they enjoy its present.

Denver, Colorado's largest city and its capital, is where a young, energetic mayor, Federico Pena, can be found mornings jogging around Sloans Lake and where Colorado Governor Richard Lamm does his running along Logan Street behind the State Capitol. But it is also a place where former cow-town bawdy houses are preserved as historical museums even as skyscrapers rise to flank them. It is a city that names its newest development-a combination hotel, office complex, shopping mall that incorporates a copy of the San Marco campanile in Venice-for Horace Tabor, not only one of Denver's more flamboyant and successful gold seekers, but also a roue of some note.

This new Denver cares about skiing at Vail, but also about the city's annual National Western Stock Show and Rodeo, a horse- and cattle-breeder tradition since 1906. The new Denverites care about lunching at fancy restaurants, but on Saturday nights they eat steaks.

Denverites love their professional football team, the Broncos, and show the rest of the country that they want a major league baseball team, too, by cramming themselves into Mile High Stadium for exhibition baseball. During the week they wear suits; on weekends they don jeans and drive their cars and trucks up mountain roads.

An effort to balance the city's developing newness with respect for its historic past is perhaps what preoccupies Denver

F

Overleaf: Hanging languorously over the winter ski resort of Snow Mass Village, Colorado, a hot-air balloon with its Unicorn design seems in keeping with the fairytale landscape.

Sports are an important pastime among Denver residents and they particularly love their football team, the Denver Broncos. Tickets to home games are about as scarce as hen's teeth.

most, and the focus of this effort is a 70-block square patch called the "Mall District," the core of which is the 16th Street Mall, Denver's urban centerpiece. The four-year-old mall, whose impeccable design should serve as a model for other cities, includes a wide lane of geometrically inlaid gray-andpink polished granite designed by the renowned American architect I.M. Pei. In a city that has forged ahead with seemingly rampant, uncharted high-rise development, there has emerged a philosophy of development, buttressed by government support, that the key to Denver's future lies in a combination of new urban design of quality, preservation of the city's architectural past and housing that is an integral component of the central city rather than suburban.

Look, for example, at the empty shell of Denver's centuryold Masonic Building, the chiseled red stone structure that sits along one midtown block of the 16th Street Mall. In 1984 the building was gutted by fire. What remained was its rough, elegant face, a reminder of Denver's history as a town of gold strikes and cowboys.

Some Denverites wanted the remnant torn down to make room for yet another skyscraper. Others, alarmed because so much of old Denver has been leveled to make way for commercial development, pressed to have this bit of their municipal past retained along with such other reminders and evocations of 19th-century Denver as the Brown Palace Hotel (erected in 1892), the reconstructed Larimer Square, the rehabilitated turreted Tivoli brewery and rows of ornate Victorian houses. The preservationists won and so the interior of the Masonic Building, its face carefully preserved, has been rebuilt.

In the last decade the face of Denver has changed remarkably. Once the focus of Colorado's gold rush and a shipping center for cattle, the city has been favored with several subsequent booms. I.?uring and immediately after World War II, Denver saw its first spurt of growth when the U.S. Government chose to place a number of military installations in and around the city, including the United States Mint at Colfax and Cherokee streets, the nation's second largest depository of gold bullion after Fort Knox in Kentucky. The Denver Mint turns out more than 5,000 million coins a year, most of them 25-cent pieces. The latest government installation in the area is the U.S. Air Force Academy in nearby Colorado Springs.

Growth hastened again in the early 1970s when energy entrepreneurs moved into the city, and yet again a little more than five years ago when a spate of 17 commercial skyscrapers sprouted on the Denver plain.

For all of its varied history, Denver is rather young as cities go. Actually it was born as a by-product of gold fever: In 1806 Zebulon Pike, heading west in search of the Red River, discovered the mountain peak that bears his name among the American Indian tribe called the Colorados. Until the mid1800s Colorado was home to American Indians, buffalo and mountain men. Then, in 1858, gold was found where the South Platte River meets Cherry Creek, a location within what is today's city, and the slogan "Pike's Peak or Bust" helped to lure more than 150,000 gold seekers over the next decade. In 1859, a huge lode of gold was found at Central City near the small settlement named for Territorial Governor James Denver.

For a while, Denver was abandoned, but eventually it came back to life as a trading and shipping point down from the

mountains. In its early days, Denver survived a citywide fire, a vast flood, and an American Indian war; the railroads came in and a series of silver strikes about 100 years ago in nearby Leadville once again transformed the city into a boom town.

Further gold strikes at Cripple Creek at the beginning of this century brought permanence to Denver along with ornate Victorian homes, parks and gardens, wide boulevards, hotels, commercial development and the social and cultural activities that accompany such urban growth.

Oil and shale have since replaced gold and silver and growth in Denver these days is being more carefully planned. Mayor Pefia has positioned himself in the forefront of what is no less than environmental zoning on a massive scale. "Some say that this concern with making Denver a great city is a pipe dream. I say that cities, like the people who inhabit them, either grow or they stagnate and fall prey to an inevitable process of deterioration," he said in his .first State of the City message in 1984. And Denver would not be allowed to deteriorate!

His most powerful partner is Denver's business community, which operates under an umbrella organization called the Denver Partnership. A nonprofit, civic-business venture, the Partnership actually manages the central city through its two corporations: Downtown Denver, Inc., and Denver Civic Ventures, Inc. Both of these, explains Partnership President Richard C.D. Fleming, "have one mission-urban design and city planning, making the center city viable." Downtown Denver, he says, is "devoted to advocacy and management," while Denver Civic Ventures focuses on "design and publicpurpose development."

The Partnership deals with such aspects of central city life as traffic patterns and vehicular access. It has inventoried the city's parking lots, created bicycle lanes and developed ride-sharing criteria; operated a series of music, food and cultural festivals; and begun planning to enhance the mall with 26 kiosks and sidewalk cafes to make the downtown area into what Fleming calls "a place that is alive and in use 24 hours a day."

Downtown Denver functions as a management firm for the Mall District. It programs events on the mall and in other downtown areas, and it is responsible for policing and cleaning the 16th Street Mall. All merchants and property owners within the district are billed for an additional tax surcharge each year and this money is turned over to Downtown Denver. In addition, dues are collected from member corporations and firms. In a recent year these combined monies amounted to an impressive $2 million.

How Downtown Denver does its job should be a model for other cities. Associations of retail merchants and restaurant owners have been organized. Free bus service is offered from 6 a.m. until midnight along the length of the mall, with buses stopping at each corner about every 70 seconds. Projected to carry 12,000 shoppers a day, these electrically powered buses currently accommodate nearly three times that number. The tree-lined mall contains fountains, benches and modern lightposts, all maintained by a full-time cleaning staff that washes down the granite mosaic walkway three times a day.

Denver Civic Ventures, as the planning arm of the Denver Partnership, has created an internal civic design team to work with the city government over the next two years to "do a plan

about what we w~nt to be, what we want to look like, what our options are here in Denver," says Fleming.

A new convention center has been designed and there are plans for a $30-million program to turn the Denver Center for the Performing Arts into a sort of cultural mall. Civic Ventures has succeeded in getting Mayor Pefia involved in its planning and got the Denver Post to run a series of articles by readers on the theme "If I Could Change Things." "We ask the questions: Should there be more open space? Should there be more housing? Should there be more business activity? What if? How much?" says Fleming. Interesting questions for the town where legendary Westerner Colonel William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody (see SPAN June 1986) once tested the dedication of temperance advocates.

The people involved in Denver's downtown planning like to quote former Mayor Robert W.Speer who in 1919 told the Civic and Commercial Association: "One of the most neglected ways that people can make themselves bigger and better is by helping to make their city more attractive."

Denver already has more parks than anybody can count. It has a Greek theater in its civic center, a strikingly modern art museum that resembles a piece of abstract sculpture, a historical society that displays a reverence for Denver's past, an assortment of galleries and museums, and a collection of well-kept public squares. Just outside the city limits rise Lookout Mountain and Pike's Peak, and towns such as Estes Park, Cripple Creek and Leadville. It even has Jack Kaufman, a resident celebrity cab driver/trumpet player/philosopher, who will tell you why he left New York State in 1952 to settle in Denver.

"It's a young town," says Kaufman. "It reminds me of home when I was a kid. There are very few natives. Everybody is from somewhere else. It's new, fresh. But it's more than that.

It's an attitude."

The busy 16th Street Mall, in the heart of downtown Denver, was designed by 1.M. Pei for the comfort and enjoyment of pedestrians.

/

"Denver has more parks than anyone can count, a Greek theater, a modern art museum that resembles a piece of abstract sculpture, a historical society that reveres the city's past."

Right: Downtown Denver at night. Left, top: Skiing at Snow Mass. Above left and above: Two views of the 16th Street Mall.

Left: The outdoor life is unlimited in Colorado.

FOCUS

What do the Taj Mahal in India and the Washington Monument in the United States have in common? For one, both edifices commemorate a person. The Taj in Agra is a majestic tomb built by Shah Jehan more than 300 years ago as a monument to his wife Mumtaz Mahal. The Washington Monument is a 166-meter obelisk erected more than a century ago in the American capital in memory of George Washington, the country's first President.

Their other commonality is that both are built of marble and have undergone a change of color.

Now the two monuments have yet another common factor in Norman Herz. Director for the Center of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Georgia, Herz is a world authority on marble. He has visited quarries allover the world and collected an enormous variety of marble pieces, chips and fragments that make up his marble data base, perhaps the only one of its kind in the world. He has analyzed every piece to determine its distinctive characteristics.

H~rz's expert advice is often sought by governments and organizations, anxious to preserve their ancient marble monuments, discolored and degraded over the centuries by erosion and pollution. Recently, he was invited by the Archaeological Survey of India to recommend measures to protect the Taj and other monuments in India.

There's not much one can do to stop discoloration of monuments because of weathering, Herz says. Short of putting the Taj or the Washington Monument in a glass cage with a pure atmosphere of nitrogen, nothing can halt their aging. However, the pollution, one of the worst enemies of monuments, can be controlled. It is in this area that Herz is all praise for the Indian authorities. The TaL he says, is very well preserved for its age, because they have shifted polluting factories away from the vicinity of the Taj.

Recently two Indian scientists were honored in America for their contributions in their respective fields.

Dr. Sohan Singh Prihar, professor of soil physics and head of the Department of Soils at the Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana, has been made a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy for his contribution to Indian agriculture. He is the first Indian scientist to receive this honor.

Prihar's pioneering work in soil and water management has led to new farm practices that have greatly economized the use of scarce water and fertilizers without loss in crop yields in Punjab and adjoining areas. He has also designed an improved dry land technology that holds the promise of doubling food production in the foothill regions of several northern Indian states. Again, his controlled experiments on the role of tillage-induced soil mulch in reducing evaporation losses from the soil and the movement of solutes with water have greatly added to man's knowledge of these processes.

Prihar, who received his.

PhD from Ohio State University in 1966, is the recipient of the Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Memorial Prize given by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. The American Society of Agronomy will formally present the award to Prihar at its annual banquet in New Orleans in December.

The other Indian scientist to be honored is Dr. R. Sarin, head of the Basic Research and Training Division of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute in Nagpur. He has been awarded the prestigious

Eisenhower Fellowship for 1987 for his outstanding work in the field of water-quality monitoring. Sarin is a member of the Standard Methods Committee, a joint body of the American Public Health Association, American Water Works Association and the Water Pollution Federation of the United States. The committee reviews and approves standard methods of purifying water and waste water.

Instituted in honor of the late President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the fellowship promotes international understanding by providing professional opportunities to scientists and scholars to attend individualized programs of study at American institutions.

Participants interact with their U.S. counterparts while observing American so~iety firsthand through visits to U.S. cities. Since its inception 31 years ago, more than 700 scholars from 91 countries, including 16 from India, have received the fellowship.

During his 12-week U.S. tour beginning next March, Sarin will attend workshops and conferences in the field of water-quality monitoring, and will meet with scientists and officials at the U.S. Environmental Agency.

A New Political Force Fossilized Flyer A team of Texas Tech University paleontologists, led by Sankar Chatterjee, recently discovered remains of the world's oldest known bird. Among the fossils found near the small town of Post in west Texas are hollow bones, a wishbone, a breastbone with a keel, a skull with avian features such as wide eye sockets, and a large brain case. Although no feather impressions were found with the fossils, a forearm and hand show a series of nodes to which feathers were attached.

The creature's bones, shown in this photograph with a 25-cent coin for scale, belong to a 225-million-year-old crow-sized bird with teeth and long, bony tails. The drawing at right shows recovered fossil bones (in black) of the bird that Chatterjee has named genus Protoavis-ancesfral bird.

"The Protoavis bones are at least 75 million years older and more birdlike than Archaeopteryx, and will shed new light on the early origin and diversity of birds," says Chatterjee, whose work is supported by the National Geographic Society. (Archaeopteryx was discovered in a limestone quarry in Bavaria in 1861, and has been considered the earliest forerunner of today's birds. Its skeleton, embedded in a stone slab, shows a partly feathered creature with characteristics of both bird and reptile.)

Protoavis, like Archaeopteryx, showed other prominent reptilian features, says Chatterjee. It had clawed fingers, a tail and teeth. Modern birds are toothless. But, he contends, "There's a big difference between the two early birds. Protoavis displays more birdlike bones and already has lost the teeth in the back part of its jaw, indicating that it was more advanced than Archaeopteryx. This will lend support to those who feel that Archaeopteryx was already on a side branch of avian evolution in the Upper Jurassic period some 75 million years later."

According to Chatterjee, Protoavis's pelvis and hind legs resembled those of a small dinosaur. The strong hind legs enabled the creature to run as well as fly. Protoavis strengthens the evolutionary relationship of dinosaurs and birds, he says.

Most scientists trace the ancestry of birds to a small, meateating, fast-running dinosaur.

The 43-year-old Chatterjee, born in Calcutta, received his doctoral degree in geology from the University of Calcutta after completing a year as a predoctoral fellow at London University.

He studied vertebrate fossils at various museums in Europe, and in 1976, taught paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, as a visiting professor. Later he taught geology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and George Mason University in suburban Virginia. Subsequently, he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution and was awarded the Henry-March Fund by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Chatterjee, whose projects have taken him all over the world, including Antarctica (three times), has discovered a variety of fossils from the Triassic period of some 225 million years ago; Chatterjee lives in Lubbock, Texas, with his wife, Sibani, a geographer, and their two sons, Samu and Shuvo.

Americans go to the polls November 4 to elect one-third of the 100-member Senate and all of the 435-member House of Representatives.

There is already frenetic political activity throughout the country as candidates tour their constituencies, make speeches, shake hands and woo various ethnic groups that are increasingly becoming more vocal and demand attention as their awareness is heightened.

One group being courted more than ever before, by both the Republican and Democratic parties, is the Indian-Americans.

Although one of the newest and smallest ethnic groups, IndianAmericans have already carved a niche for themselves in American society through their contributions in business, medicine, teaching, science and technology and a myriad of other fields. They are now making their collective voice heard in politics too by actively working on election campaigns and contributing money to candidates bidding for elective office.

One proof of this came last month when almost two dozen senators and representatives, both Republican and Democrat, attended a lun-

cheon meeting of the IndianAmerican Political Education Forum (IAPEF) on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Among the senators present were Paul Sarbanes, Strom Thurmond, Dennis DeConcini, John Warner, Chic Hecht, Christopher Dodd, Paul Simon, Alan Simpson and Robert Dole, the Senate Majority Leader and a possible Republican contender for the presidency in 1988. Representatives included Norman Mineta, Lindy Boggs, Dale Kildee, Newt Gingrich, Peter Kostmayer and Harris Fawell.

The luncheon was also attended by P.K. Kaul, India's new ambassador to the United States; Peter Galbraith, a staff assistant with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Department of State officials and a representative from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

The IAPEF, a nonpartisan educational organization with chapters in various states, is actively involved in the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. Government. Founded in 1982 by Indian-Americans, its primary aim is to raise the political consciousness of American citizens of AsianIndian origin on local, national and international issues.

Our artist Bimanesh Roy Choudhury's (left) and Democratic Party symbols.

depiction

of the Republican

Reprinted from U.S. News & World Report, March 31,1986, published at Washington, D.C.

Brave Ie.

Bconomy

Top: American agriculture, like other segments of the U.S. economy, is also thriving. An American farmer today produces enough to feed himself and 78 others, as symbolized in this photo. It shows the owner of a farm,

his wife and their three children in the foreground, and 78 other people.

Above: President Reagan at Wall Street in New York. As a result of a booming economy, the stock exchange bustles with frenetic activity and exudes confidence.

After years of a dizzying roller-coaster ride, the United States is enjoying a sounder and more buoyant economy. Inflation and interest rates are down and business is up.

American economy fundamentally different from the one that sapped the nation of its industrial strength and sense of confidence in the 1970s is springing to life today.

Now heading below three percent, inflation is down to the lowest level since 1965, and is expected to stay down.

Interest rates have fallen to their lowest levels since 1978 and could be moving even lower. The value of the dollar relative to other currencies has declined by 30 percent from its peak in February 1985, and is expected to keep falling. The oil-price spiral has been broken. U.S. companies are adjusting to a more competitive environment.

The happy result is that, after years of a dizzying roller-coaster ride, the United States is enjoying a sounder economy and could have a rising standard of living for years to come. Consumers will have more of their earnings available to spend for goods, business executives will be able to plan with more certainty, industry will be better able to compete against foreign producers and everybody will be able to borrow more cheaply.

Declares David Wyss, chief financial economist for Data Resources, Inc., a Lexington, Massachusetts, consulting firm: "The good times are back." Adds Paul McCracken, a professor at the University of Michigan who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under President Nixon: "We may be on the threshold of a sustained expansion that could last through the rest of the decade of the 1980s."

The more muscular economy is the result of some good luck on oil prices, some government actions that have strengthened industry's ability to compete and, most important, the success of Chairman Paul Volcker's Federal Reserve Board in breaking inflation.

By no means do experts believe that all the nation's economic problems are solved. Massive budget and trade deficits continue to be worrisome.

The heavy debt burdens of consumers, business and the Third World are another cause of concern. Farm and oil regions of the United States are still mired in a minirecession. The 40-month-old recovery from the 1981-82recession will inevitably succumb to the business cyclepeacetime recoveries have averaged 34

I

'With Richard Aim, Carey W. English, Edward Mervosh, Patricia M. Scherschel, Kenneth R. Sheets, Clemens P. Work and Robert F. Black.

months since the end of World War.II. have been. Under the new conditions, Conversely, an economy that roars too lenders presumably will accept a smaller fast could re-ignite inflation and send return and the Federal Reserve Board will be able to keep a steadier hand on interest rates up again.

Even so, there's a consensus among the money supply. The benchmark economists that, in terms of the long haul, prime rate charged by money-center America's economy has undergone fun- banks on loans to their best customers, damental, structural changes. As manu- which touched 21.5 percent in 1980, was facturing jobs have declined and in- reduced to 7.5 percent in August 1986. dustries suffered, the survivors have Says Walter Heller, the University of emerged fitter, more cost -effective and Minnesota professor who led President more productive than ever. The expand- Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisers: "We're on the road to both lower ing services sector is offering more-and better-jobs than most analysts ever inflation and lower interest rates." Falling expected. Despite the misery and pain of interest rates, should fatten profits and foreclosures, farmers are producing make it less expen'sive in the years ahead bumper crops. In field after field, U.S. for companies to finance new capital companies are discovering niches in which investments, thus shoring up a soft spot in they can compete successfully against the economy.

As the remodeled economy moves foreign competitors.

More than anything else, the decline in forward, unemployment should decline.

In the years ahead, the job picture should inflation is responsible for America's emerging new economy. In the 1970s, the also benefit from the slowing of the United States lost its status as a country number of new entrants into the work where wild inflation would never take force because of the sharp decline in the hold, as the cost of living climbed steadily birth rate that began in 1964 and conuntil it hit double digits. "Between 1965 tinued through the 1970s. Milton Hudson, chief economist for Morgan Guaranand 1980, we had three great inflationary shocks to fight [the two oil-price escala- ty in New York, sees the possibility that tions and the Vietnam war]," explains "the unemployment rate could come Charles Schultze, a former economic down quite dramatically" to below six adviser to President Carter. "That percent in the next few years from February's 7.3 percent. weakened our economy."

A shrinking dollar should help U.S. Only the sharp recession of 1981-82, manufacturers and farm exporters comwhich resulted primarily from the Federal Reserv~ Board's tight-money policies, pete more effectively with foreigners, and was the worst since the Great De- making American products less costly abroad and increasing the price of impression, was enough to shrink demand ports in America. Before its recent defor goods and credit and break inflation's cline, the stronger dollar opened the back. The rise in living costs has returned to the levels of the mid-1960s, far below domestic market to a flood of imports. the double digits of 1979-81 and the col- The U.S. merchandise-trade account, lapse of oil prices this past winter makes which was roughly in balance at the start it unlikely that inflation will come roar- of the 1970s, swelled to a record $148,500 ing back. The view spreading in finanHOW THE ECONOMY HAS CHANGED cial markets is that inflation no longer will continuously ratchet upward. Schultze : ~1 I agrees: "I can't see that we'll be fighting "_~ 9.22% double-digit inflation again in the fore- .... ..1 seeable future."

The taming of infla\ ... r 4.35% tion convinces many I ~ I analysts that interest 1.0% I I I rates in the future will Interest rate Inflation rate be neither as high nor (c?ns~mer-~ricegain,S,yea~to/ear )- (yields on ~ig~.grade b?nds) 1960 '62 '64 '66 '68 '70 '72 '74 '76 '78 '80 '82 '84 Latest as volatile as they

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million deficit in the year 1985.

At the same time, sky-high interest rates lured to the United States a tide of foreign capital. Total foreign assets in the United States are now more than nine times the total 15 years ago. "It's truly a -global ball game now," says Paul Boltz, chief financial economist for T. Rowe Price Associates. But, unlike at the end of World War II, "when we were a giant astride the planet," he adds, "today we are just a player in the game."

With threats from foreign and domestic competitors on the rise, American firms probably will hack away at costs even harder than before. Already, companies are laying off employees, forcing unions to give back wage gains, closing marginal plants, shifting more production overseas and investing in new technology. The airline industry, for example, has trimmed its operating cost by an average of two percent a year over the past four years. Firms are investing in computers and computer-controlled machinery to improve output at lower cost. Says Murray Weidenbaum, a former chief economic adviser to Reagan, "Everywhere, we are learning to compete again."

The keener competition also is contributing to the flurry of mergers. "The

idea behind the movement tow,ard giant, global corporations," says Jerry Jasinowski of the National Association of Manufacturers, "is to cut costs to compete in world markets."

New competitive forces also are being unleashed by deregulation of the transportation, financial, services and telecommunication industries. The American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation is being challenged by a host of new longdistance telephone companies, which advertise lower charges. With the removal of federal barriers, banks, insurers, brokerage firms and even retailers are engaged in a furious competition for the consumer's investment dollar. The airline industry is changing constantly. Since deregulation in 1978, new entrants have almost tripled the number of airlines to 100 at the end of last year, setting off major fare wars. Now, many carriers are merging to strengthen themselves.

One major effect of the cost-cutting drive, coupled with the deep recession of 1981-82, has been to weaken the bargaining power of labor unions. "They know they can't ask for what they asked for just a few years ago," says Alan Blinder, an economics professor at Princeton Uni. versity. That restraint is having the effect of

The Home-Team Ad,antage American companies love to complain about the edge foreign competitors enjoy from cheaper labor and government subsidies. But U.S. firms can prosper in the new economy if they don't ignore the advantages they have in their own backyards. By being closer to their customers, domestic companies should be better at sensing their customers' needs and responding more quickly to a constantly changing marketplace.

To accomplish this, American business must cut product development and delivery-cycle times and develop new forms of cooperation with traditional customers.

One company to meet this challenge has been textile manufacturer Milliken & Company of Spartanburg, South Carolina. A $ 2,000-million-a-year maker of everything from denim to carpets, Milli.ken has long been a research-anddevelopment and manufacturing-technology leader in its industry. But even with these traditional strengths, the company found itself under heavy competitive pressure in recent years.

Milliken chief executive Roger Milliken responded with an all-out quality-improvement program in 1981. A "total customer responsiveness" effort was added in 1984 to cut development and delivery times by as much as 90 percerihn all the firm;s 40 business units. Typical is Milliken's carpet unit, where a six-week delivery cycle was cut to just five days.

helping to keep inflation down.

Organized labor also will suffer as the service sector of the economy becomes even more prominent. Nine out of ten new jobs created in the next decade are expected to be in services, where the entrepreneurial spirit is thriving. Because the service sector is fragmented, unions find it difficult to gain the bargaining power they still hold in manufacturing.

For individuals and firms, opportunities and problems in the new economy vary widely. Here's a sector-by-sector look at how this new economy is reshaping the American industrial landscape.

Manufacturing More than any other sector, manufacturing has taken it on the chin. The steel industry, for example, which had nearly 400,000 production workers as recently as 1979, employs just 200,000 today. Over all, imports represented 21 percent of total U.S. sales of manufactured products last year, more than twice their penetration in 1970. Outwardly, manufacturing would appear to have the earmarks of an economic basket case.

Yet for all its problems, Smokestack America retains a surprising degree of strength. "U.S. manufacturing is much

by TOM PETERS

Milliken's first step was to establish more than 1,000 customer action teams (CATs) to unearth new market opportunities in partnership with an existing customer. To launch a CAT, the customer joins with representatives of the Milliken factory, sales, finance and marketing staff to seek creative ways to serve current or new markets. Well over a hundred such projects were implemented last year, adding many millions of dollars to Milliken's bottom line.

For instance, a year-long "partners for profit" program with apparel maker Levi Strauss has revolutionized the way the two organizations do business together. Close cooperatio~ enabled Milliken to produce fabric to Levi's exacting color standards and in sizes that enable Levi's to exploit every square centimeter of material. Milliken's quality and reliable delivery record convinced Levi's to omit its inspection of Millikensupplied goods. That allows Milliken to ship directly to Levi's factory, making it unnecessary for Levi's to warehouse the material.

Next, state-of-the-art data and telecommunications linkups save Levi's sorting and storing steps at the _plant. Milliken reverse-loads material into its trucks, making them meticulously stocked warehouses on -wheels. The trucks are unloaded in the. exact order that computers, interacting between the two

more resilient than is generally understood," says economist Michael Bryan of the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland.

He calculates that manufacturing still accounts for just under 24 percent of America's gross national product, about the sector's share over the past 35 years.

Within the manufacturing sector, however, a major shift is taking place.

While basic metals and metal fabrication have retrenched, other industries such as electrical machinery and printing have prospered. Many companies are producing more, or at least as much, with less.

Productivity growth within manufacturing has been more rapid than gains in the rest of the economy. Says Donald Ratajczak, director of economic forecasting at Georgia State University: "Manufacturing as a goods producer isn't dyingmanufacturing as an employer is."

Services The fast track of the new American economy will be service-from janitors and bank clerks to computer repairers and programmers to lawyers and doctors.

Seventy percent of all employees now work in jobs that provide services, and more will in the future. "Service has

become a powerful economic engine in its own right," say Karl Albrecht and Ron Zemke in their new book, Service America!

What kind of an economic engine the service sector will turn out to be is the subject of intense debate. Some academics claim the bulk of service jobs pay so little that the middle class is endangered. But Robert Lawrence of the Brookings Institution predicts that the number of middle-income service workers will actually swell in the years ahead.

One clue: The fastest job growth is coming in such fields as financial services, medicine and computer-electronics, which pay more for higher skills.

Even lower-paying service jobs are "an opportunity for upward mobility" says Gerald Faulhaber of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. But to get the good jobs, applicants will need continuing education and training-a major prbblem that could worsen.

Many of today's better service jobs go begging because employers can't find skilled workers. "You've got to retrain workers displaced from manufacturing," notes Ronald Shelp, author of the book Beyond Industrialization, and, he points out, "you've got to deal with people who

firms, determine the fabric that will be needed at Levi's factory.

With exact, time-coded order information, the truck brings exactly what Levi's needs to the piant, and the fabric is carried directly to the machine where the garment is cut and sewn.

In another complex cooperative maneuver, Levi's makes tags at a remote location for each bolt of fabric to be manufactured. Via another electronic hookup; the appropriate tags arrive at the Levi's finishing plant just as the Milliken truck pulls up and are attached as the truck is unloaded. The result is a monumental savings of cost and delivery time for Levi Strauss plus previously unheard-of flexibility in responding to. today's lightning-fast fashion trends. Milliken shares the financial benefit. More important, it keeps an order onshore that might otherwise be lost to Hong Kong.

Another landmark Milliken program involves the mundane "shop towel" business, where cloths are made for industrial purposes. Milliken products are sold to industrial launderers, who, much like consumer diaper services, rent towels to customers such as carwashes, garages, cafeterias and factories.

Milliken not only provides cloth to the industrial launderers, it also conducts extensive training for the launderers' sales force, manages their convention exhibits and promotions and sends Milliken salespersons out with the launderers' representatives on joint sales calls 80 percent of the time.

This partnership enables Milliken to serve its fragmented customer base better, charge a 40 percent premium for an otherwise commodity product and gain more than a 50 percent

don't even have the very basic skills."

Another threat to service jobs in America is coming from abroad. Just as millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost to low-wage foreign workers, the same is true of service jobs. Already, airlines are .processing tickets in the Caribbean. "If Citibank can move its credit-card operations to South Dakota," says Shelp, "the next step is overseas."

Finance No-holds-barred competition will mean a continued-and sometimes scaryshakeout of banks and other financial institutions. Mergers and outright failures will kill off one-fifth of the nation's 18,000 banks and savings and loans by the early 1990s, predicts Stuart Greenbaum, a banking professor at Northwestern University.

The erosion of barriers against interstate banking will fuel rapid consolidation. Last year, 236 bank mergers worth $7,100 million took place. More ominous is the pace of bank failures. In 1985 alone, 118 commercial banks closed their doors-a sure post-Depression record.

Although lower interest rates will be a godsend to shaky institutions, at least as many banks are expected to collapse this

return on its investment in the business efficiently.

Milliken is not the only company to capitalize on its domestic competitive edge. Campbell Soup is launching a dramatic reorganization of its national marketing, sales and distribution forces to increase local responsiveness to its grocer customers. Marketing, sales and distribution will be split into 22 regional offices. Milliken-like programs will radically reduce delivery time and inventory. Regionalization of promotion and advertising will be stepped up to better tailor campaigns to local consumer tastes.

A similar attitude exists at Pepsi-Cola, where John Costello, the senior vice-president of marketing and sales, recently said: "We see a growing interdependence, a blurring of classic supplier-buyer relationships .... We are becoming closer partners with our bottlers, who, in turn, are forging even closer ties with retailers." .

Foreign competition and increasing consumer demands bring an urgency to programs such as Milliken's, Campbell's and Pepsi's. But technology is revolutionizing what companies can do to streamline the production process and develop cooperative efforts with customers. To survive, U.S. firms must seize these opportunities. Companies that fail to do so will leave themselves dangerously at risk in the emerging American 0 economy.

About the Author: Tom Peters is co-author of the bestseller A Passion for Excellence.

year as did last year. Meanwhile, the battle will get hotter among banks, brokerages, insurance firms and even supermarkets for the right to manage people's money. A sign of what may be ahead is the array of services at Sears.

There, customers can buy stocks, deposit a paycheck, obtain car insurance and hire a real-estate agent.

Automakers are jumping into the fray.

General Motors ranks as the United States' second-largest mortgage lender.

Ford Motor Company recently acquired First Nationwide, a California-based savings and loan association.

More banking, securities trading and other financial transactions will be done by mail, phone or home computer as the industry tries to meet consumers' wants and strengthen its own financial future.

Energy The price of oil, the fuel that powers the new economy, has plummeted to a new low. Philip Verleger, a consultant based in Washington, D.C., says oil prices could yo-yo between $10 and $15 a barrel for ten years or so, barring a major supply disruption. Most experts agree, predicting inexpensive and plentiful oil for years to come.

But the price collapse will be tough on the American oil industry. John Lichtblau, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, estimates gross revenues of oil companies will drop $50,000 million this year if oil prices drop by an average of $10 a barrel and natural gas prices decline by a smaller amount. Exploration almost certainly will drop.

Producers of other forms of energy also will be hit. Natural gas prices already are eroding, forcing many producers to shut down wells. Pipelines and distributors are cutting prices to high-volume users in an effort to keep plants from switching to oil. Coal may retain a price advantage, but if oil prices remain low for years, some electric utilities may keep their oil-fired generating units longer rather than switch to coal.

By the mid-1990s, these changescombined with greater consumptioncould well make the United States dependent again on the Middle East, which has half the world's known oil reserves, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). But even if that happens, it's not necessarily a scenario for disaster. Bruce C. Netschert, who is vice-

president of the National Economic Research Associates in Washington, D.C., argues that although OPEC will regain control of oil prices, "the control will be exercised rationally, not recklessly as in the 1970s. Persian Gulf producers will need a market for their oil in the 21st century."

Farming Emerging from today's agricultural crisis-the worst since the Depression in the 1930s-may be a stronger, more profitable American farm economy that will be less dependent on government subsidies for survival.

Characteristics of the new farm economy already are appearing. Bankruptcies and foreclosures are driving out overextended farmers, leaving less competition for the survivors. Land¡ prices, after tumbling more than 50 percent in parts of the country, are bottoming out. Debt is shrinking as farmers sell off land and equipment to repay loans and improve their balance sheets. Lower costs of interest, fuel, fertilizer and other outlays are cutting production expenses. And a cheaper dollar may boost exports. "The farmers that survive will be able to make a profit growing maize that sells for $8 a quintal and cotton at $1 a kilogram, prices far less than today's," predicts farm consultant John Schnittker.

However, the cost in jobs will be high.

Luther Tweeten, agricultural economist at Oklahoma State University, expects that only two million farmers will remain when the next farm census is taken in 1987, down from 2.3 JPillion at the start of the 1980s. Nearly 75 percent of those who remain will be part-timers who earn most of their income at jobs in nearby cities. The rest will operate larger farms, with much land rented from absentee landlords.

Despite the loss of family farms, agribusiness won't dominate. Says Tweeten: "Forty percent of all farmers have no debt, and many others are in good financial shape. They will help their sons and daughters get established."

Global Trade News about the U.S. trade performance has been all bad in recent years.

The record $148,500 million trade deficit in 1985 is a global scoreboard of competitive weakness. But now many experts are cautiously optimistic that the United

States is in position to start coming back in world markets. "We are turning the corner away from the deteriorating, disastrous trade route we were on," says C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics.

A hopeful sign is that U.S. industry appears to have stopped losing ground and is even beginning to recapture some lost market shares. Manufacturers, for instance, have recently won back the biggest piece of the electronic-typewriter market according to Dataquest,industry consultants. Unqer pressure from the falling dollar, Japanese automakers are jacking up prices. Adds¡ JasinQwski of the National Association of Manufacturers: "Our members say the outlook for foreign. orders is .brightening as the dollar falls." .

The comeback road, however, won't be smooth. From 1980 to 1985, U.S. unit labor costs zoomed by about 27 percent, compared with just 11 percent in Japan and West Germany. In that time, the U.S. share of world markets for manufactured goods withered an additional full percentage point to 11.8 percent.

Just as the race goes to the swiftest, markets go to the most productive. From 1980 to 1985, productivity in the United States rose six percent; in Japan, it surged 16 percent and in West Germany ten percent. But big investment by U.S. business is expected to energize productivity.

A weaker dollar and slow-growing wages are big pluses, too. The trade deficit could drop to a $125,000 million annual rate in the fourth quarter and fall to $50,000 million by the end of 1987, seers say. At the decade's end, the United States might even score a surplus and look like a winner again.

How long the brave new economy will last is yet to be seen. Some analysts fear that the U.S. Congress and the White House won't be able to cap federal deficits, a failure that would give fl lift to inflation and interest rates. Others cite heavy consumer and business indebtedness, overbuilding in some cities and the oil and farm weaknesses as potential dangers to economic growth.

But for now, with interest rates, inflation and the dollar sliding, "the story line is perfect," says Leif Olsen, a New York economic consultant-so perfect that he warns against "excessive euphoria."

D

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"... or, if you prefer, you may elect to skip coffee breaks altogether and retire three years early."

Reprinted with permission from The Saturday Evening Post Society, a division of BI'L and MS, Inc. Š 1985.

Doctor in the Zoo

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It is much tougher to diagnose and treat sick animals as they "don't come and talk about their problems."

Left: Infectious diseases, like tuberculosis, are constantly guarded against by zoo vets. Because of a suspicious TB test result from Nancy, an African elephant, National Zoo doctors decided to culture a tissue from her windpipe.

The results of this study were fortunately negative; Left below: Dr. Mitchell Bush, the zoo's head veterinarian, looks at the internal organs of a bull snake with the aid of a laparoscope. Laparoscopy, a common diagnostic method in zoos, allows vets to determine the sex of some animals, to remove foreign bodies or tissues for biopsy and to repair damaged tissues or organs.

his morning rounds, Dr. Mitchell Bush relaxes with a cup of tea and explains to a visitor that he did "nothing ~ really striking today-just the routine things that everybody else does." On this particular morning, the "routine" included checking a gorilla's swollen eye: removing an abscess from a lizard's foot and bandaging the wound where a South African antelope broke off its horn.

Bush, of course, is a veterinarian. But even among colleagues, he is somewhat unusual. As a specialist in exotic animal medicine, Bush is charged with the health care of approximately 2,600 wild animals at the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., and at its Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Virginia.

Most large zoos in the United States have veterinarians to care for their animal collections, says Bush, and about 50 veterinarians work full-time in zoos nationwide. These professionals work closely with other exotic animal experts.

Together, they have made today's zoos not only resources for public education, but important learning centers for better understanding of the basic biology and health-care needs of exotic animals, especially many of the world's critically endangered species.

At the National Zoo, Bush is assisted by an associate veterinarian, a veterinary intern, a nurse and a changing crew of veterinary school students. The zoo also has a full-time staff nutritionist, a pathologist and, a reproductive physiologist to help maintain the health and well-being of the animals.

Infectious diseases, parasites, injuries, nutritional and other problems of captive animals are, to some extent, predictable and thus preventable. And, whenever an animal is anesthetized to treat a specific ailment the veterinary team checks its general health to remedy any previously unknown problems.

Diagnosing illness is perhaps the biggest difficulty in caring for wild animals, Bush explains. "Through evolutionary changes," he says, "the animals learn to mask illness in order to protect themselves from predators, but they may be very sick." This phenomenon also affects drug treatment. Veterinarians may have trouble in selecting the correct drug and monitoring its effectiveness.

Interestingly, Duman pediatricians can provide help, according to Dr. Lynd-

say Phillips, the National Zoo's associ- Washington and the National Zoo. No ate veterinarian. "Their diagnostic chal- vaccine existed for the exotic animals.

By 1983, the epidemic arrived; 14 lenges are similar because their p~tients with rabiesdon't come in and talk about their prob- dead raccoons-infected lems either." When Ling-Ling, the zoo:s were found on the zoo grounds. But the famed female giant panda was ill with a exotic animals had protection. Montali kidney infection recently, a Washington and the rest of the health-care team had studied the vaccine problem and inocupediatric kidney specialist was consulted.

For almost any procedure-even tak- lated threatened animals with a killeding blood samples-the animal must be virus preparation.

Montali and his staff also conduct anesthetized, says Bush. This protects the health-care team from aggressive be- autopsies on zoo animals as a preventive havior by large animals and reduces stress -medicine measure. "Autopsies tell us a lot that we can put into the management on the animal from handling.

Vaccines help keep some infectious of the animals," he says. "They allow us diseases a minor problem in zoos. Two to see what's going on in a particular major types of infectious diseases must group of animals."

Montali recalls a recent situation with be guarded against-species-specific diseases and diseases that infect a broad several species of wild and captive ducks that live in' several ponds at the zoo. range of animals, such as distemper, rabies and tuberculosis.

Mandatory During a weekend, 50 ducks in one of the quarantine of new animals also prevents ponds became ill and died. The bacterium that causes botulism-which somethe spread of disease.

Unfortunately, few commercially pro- times decimates wild waterfowl populations-was suspected, so Montali beduced vaccines and little information about their effectiveness exist for exotic gan an investigation.

Autopsies first ruled out other probanimals, according to the National Zoo's veterinary pathologist, Dr. Richard Mon- lems, while a test for the lethal bacterium tali. Vaccines used to protect domestic indicated its presence. But Montali and animals-such as those for rabies or his staff had to determine how the pond distemper-cannot always be used for became contaminated. Talks with other exotics because the live-virus prepara- zoo employees, plus inspection of the tions may actually transmit the disease. pond area, led to the remains of a dead Properly modified or killed vaccines are wild duck. Rainfall a few days before the deaths had carried maggots-which, by used instead.

Like any pathologist, Montali studies then, harbored botulism bacteria-from the decomposing duck into the pond. the nature and effects of diseases-and possible remedies. This includes being on Regular inspection of pond areas for the lookout for epidemics. In 1980, for carcasses and routine draining and disinstance, Montali and others at the zoo infection has prevented further outidentified a rabies epidemic that showed breaks.

Animal hospitals at the National Zoo up in wild raccoons living on the grounds of the Front Royal center. They pre- and the Front Royal center aid in these dicted that it was headed toward nearby preventive and other medical care efforts. The zoo's hospital, Bush says, is not unlike animal clinics where people Dr. Lyndsay Phillips, the National take their dogs, cats and other pets for Zoo's associate veterinarian, attends to the treatment.

The facilities include an operdamaged hoof of a zebra. Such animals ating room, an examination and treatcan have hoof problems caused by embedded ment room for X-rays, small surgery and pebbles or minor infections. dental work, a pharmacy, and clinical laboratories. Pet clinics, however, don't often have lions on their operating tables.

Each morning the veterinary team completes "rounds" at the hospital and also checks on animals in the park. Twice a week they visit the Front Royal facility.

Whenever possible the team makes "house calls" and treats the animals in their enclosures to prevent the stress they suffer in being moved.

Surgery is performed in the zoo hospital's operating room two or three times a week, Bush says. "But some weeks we may be in there ten times," he adds. In addition to minor operations for repairing lacerations the most common surgical procedure is laparoscQpy. In this procedure, the veterinarians insert a viewing instrument through a small incision to look at the animal's internal organs, usually for diagnostic purposes. Sometimes-as with birds-the laparoscopy not only allows the veterinarians to determine the animal's sex, but also to examine organs and tissues.

Zoo veterinarians must be familiar with and able to 'treat almost any condition an animal can develop-even dental problems. Recently, for example, an African elephant at the National Zoo was fitted braces to repair a broken tusk.

"We're generalists," Bush says. "We do everything with a range of species. " The majority of the problems the veterinarians can handle alone. But sometimes they do consult with specialists on human diseases who lend insights on neurology (the nervous system), orthopedics (muscular/skeletal systems), soft tissue surgery and nephrology (the kidneys). Orthopedic work-putting delicate wings or legs back together-is often the most difficult.

Bush and other members of the zoo's veterinary team always seek to improve their understanding of exotic animal's health through research and careful recording and analysis of information they collect in working with the animals. As do other doctors, they search for better drugs, techniques and equipment with which to treat their patients.

In the near future, the National Zoo hopes to improve and expand it9 facilities with a new animal hospital. The Front Royal center recently built such a hospital, designed specifically for the care of exotic animals.

Such facilities and health-care practices certainly improve a captive animal's health. Captive animals, though, are vulnerable to the same health threats as wild animals, according to the associate veterinarian Lyndsay Phillips. "But in the wild, animals may not recover from many diseases and injuries. Here, the captive animals live longer because we can treat 0 and prevent their problems."

About the Author: William G. Schulz is a writer with the Smithsonian News Service.

First Person THE AUTHOR FOUND HE WAS IN OVER HIS HEAD WHEN HE TOOK ON THIS OLDTIMER.

I once competed in 'a 200-meter freestyle race against one of the greatest American swimmers of the century. At the time-the early 1950s-I was a junior high student at Punahou School in Hawaii and a member of the Outrigger Canoe Club on Waikiki Beach. During summer vacations I often arrived there at 7:30 in the morning. The club was usually deserted at that hour, and, for that matter, so was Waikiki, except for a dozen beach boys getting ready for a day of taking tourists surfing and canoeing.

There was one other club member who'd turn up early on summer mornings, though. He was a tall, handsome, silver-haired Hawiian, and I could tell that he didn't spend a lot of time at the beach because his face was a darker brown than his body. Occasionally I saw him swimming with a slow, graceful stroke that carried him effortlessly along at an impressive pace to the beach wall and back again.

One morning when I'd arrived at the club earlier than usual and was on the beach loading a two-man canoe for a day of spearing fish, he walked past me on his way to the water, then stopped. "Where do you spear?" he asked.

"Usually by the old sunken barge, out past Baby Surf."

"Do you surf, too?"

"Sure!"

"How about swimming?"

"I'm a pretty good swimmer."

"You probably go to Punahou, right?"

"Right."

"You going to tryout for their team?"

"I play football and basketball and run track," I said. "You're pretty fast. I'll bet you were on a team."

"I was once, a long time ago. How wourd you like to swim against me?

Just for fun, I mean."

"Now? Against you?"

"Sure. Just for fun. Down to the beach wall and back." He pointed in that direction. "It's just about 200 meters." He was smiling at me.

This article is reprinted courtesy of Sports Illustrated from the September 3. 1984. issue. Copyright Š 1984 Time Inc.

"O.K.," I said.

We waded into the warm water, out through the gentle swells to a depth of a meter or so. He smiled again, then said, "Let's go," and started swimming.

Adolescent boys are often fanatically competitive and I was no exception. Though I was confident of winning, I started out as fast as I could go, thinking I'd build a substantial lead in the first 50 metersbut after those 50 meters we were even. "He won't be able to hold this pace for long," I told myself.

When we reached the beach wall, we were still dead even. I was already about three-quarters exhausted-my legs heavy, my shoulders starting to burn. As we turned to head back, he smiled at me. "What's going on here?" I thought. "He doesn't look tired at all. He must be faking it.

He's got to be worse off than me."

I was able to hold my pace for another 40 or 45 meters, at which point we were still swimming side by side. By now, though, I was taking two strokes to my opponent's one.

My legs were in knots. My arms and shoulders were numb and my head was spinning. I wanted very badly to quit and walk the rest of the way, but I struggled and made it, fighting the water, which felt like warm molasses.

"Just about even," he said when we finally stopped in front of the club.

I was panting for breath. "Guess so," I said, trying not to show it.

"Thanks for the swim."

"Sure."

"You're pretty good all right. But you might as well stay with football, basketball and track."

"Well. .. sure," I said.

"See you later."

He walked out of the water and up the beach. I stayed where I was,

recovering from the ordeal.

Ten minutes later my friend, a Hawaiian named Sammy Kauua, arrived, and I told him some of what had happened. "See that old guy standing up by the canoe?" I said.

"He's a pretty good swimmer. I swam down to the beach wall and back with him. Who is he, anyway?"

Sammy laughed. "You kidding?

Where you been all your life? Wake up and die right. That's Duke Kahanamoku. He won gold medals at the Olympics. I guess he's pretty good for sure!"

That night I looked it up in an almanac. Duke Kahanamoku had won a gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle and a silver in the 4 x 200 freestyle relay in 1912 and two golds in the 100 free and 4 x 200 free relay in 1920. He also won a silver in the 100 free in 1924. He was past 60 when I "raced" against him.

Several days later when I saw Kahanamoku on the beach I talked to him about his swimming career.

What I really wondered was how an athlete could become good enough to win in the Olympics.

"How hard did you have to train?"

I asked him. "I mean, how many kilometers a day did you have to swim?"

"Oh, I trained," he said. "But not hard, really. I did most of my swimming at the beach. I swam after my surfboard when a wave washed it in.

I swam because I liked it. It was always fun, and I was pretty good at it. We trained all right, but mostly we just swam. It was natural. I always enjoyed doing it."

I was disappointed at the time because there was no easy answer there, no secret formula for athletic success. Thinking back on it now, though, I find the answer he gave me very appealing.

0

Innovate, Automate or Bruce Merrifield is the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce forProductivity, Technology and Innovation. He was recently in Bombay to attend the first meeting of the binational, blue-ribbon board of directors of the Program for Advancement of Commercial Technology, under which Indian and American companies will collaborate to develop new products and processes. This article is an adaptation of Merrifield's speech in Bombay.

Never has man made so much progress as in the past 30 years. Almost 90 percent of everything we know in the sciences has been generated in this 30-year period and 90 percent of all scientists and engineers who have ever lived are living now.

This is an event in history, and it presents an unprecedented opportunity to raise the quality of life of every person on Earth.

According to the theory of economics, the critical factors of production are labor, raw materials and capital. There is now a fourth factor that is overriding the other three. It is technology and it has become the most critical factor. All nations now see technology as the engine that drives 'their economies. It is a global phenomenon.

A decade ago, the United States, with only five percent of the world's population, was creating about 75 percent of the world's technology. Now its share is down to about 55 percent.

In another decade it will be only 33 percent, not because America will be generating less technology-in fact, it will be producing a lot more-but because the other 95 percent of the world is becoming an active participant in the development of new technology.

Basically, what we are seeing is an accelerating process of technological innovation. Its message is: Innovate, automate or evaporate.

No country can survive in a global economy with obsolescent facilities. Literally, 70 percent of everything we produce in the United States is in direct global competition.

This will be an increasing fact of life. The global village is really just that; there are no longer boundaries of any significance.

Any nation that clings to obsolete technology does so at its own peril.

In the United States, we have the biggest collection of obsolescent facilities that the world has ever known. There are, for example, about 1,400 machine-tool companies in the country. Almost 1,300 of these will probably not survive the next five or ten years; they are operating inefficient, obsolescent plants and equipment; they have not modernized adequately to be competitive.

As a result, America is now writing down the biggest inventory of obsolete facilities in history. However, instead of being in the throes of a depression as this scenario would

suggest, the GNP (gross national product) is going up. One principal reason for this is the ingenuity that has built a vast pool of innovative, underutilized technology, which is already fueling the next phase of industrial development-in electronics, communications, engineering plastics, specialty chemicals, biogenetics, aerospace and pharmaceuticals.

Greatly aiding this process of technological development has been the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1982, which offers a number of incentives-investment tax credits, rapid depreciation allowances, reduction of capital gains from 50 percent to 20 percent-that have stimulated some $25,000 million in new venture capital and $35,000 million in initial public stock offerings for start-up companies at a relatively low risk. Even in higher risk areas, where we haven't had incentive funding, we have been encouraging companies to pool their resources to bridge that gap, pick up very advance technology and accelerate the development into commercial areas.

A record number of new, small companies has mushroomed all over the country in recent years-600,000 in 1983,640,000 in 1984 and 674,000 in 1985. And the process continues. This year, we expect to add another 700,000 new businesses. Although only about 25 percent of the U.S. capital is in these new industries, it is already more than offsetting the 75 percent of capital still in the inefficient, declining, obsolescent factories.

This phenomenal business expansion has created an unprecedented number of new jobs-IS million, 90 percent of them in the new, small-business sector. The job force has grown from 99 million to 110 million. Then there are an additional four million jobs that are going begging-waiting for qualified people.

Something similar is happening in U.S. agriculture, which until recently has been a major American export industry.

However, exports are now down from $44,000 million in 1981 to less than $ 27 ,000 million this year. This has badly hurt our farming community and the fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide industries.

But our response to this is diversification, not dejection.

We have put together a major consortium of companies to diversify the country's agricultural base out of food and into specialty industrial products, using genetic engineering to manipulate the crops and make them far more productive. Again, technology is turning a bad situation into an opportunity.

The world is at present witnessing tremendous forces of technological change. They are so powerful that they are going to change our lifestyles in the next¡15 to 20 years in ways we cannot even imagine. The scenario for the near future is a manufacturing plant that will make 500, maybe 1,000, different products for a variety of companies and industries, and be continuously programmable to turn out new products or modify old ones-an evergreen plant that will never be obsolete. It will have sister plants all over the world that can be satelliteprogrammed to make the same or new products at any time

Evaporate! in different countries. This is the wave of the future.

These forces will continuously restructure the world economies. The management win be management of continuous change. Any organization that fails to manage change will not survive very long the incredibly rapid changes in the competitive world market.

Life cycles in products and processes have collapsed enormously in recent times-three to five years in electronics, about 18 months in software, rarely more than five to ten years in most other areas. As a result, any set of skills we possess today will also be obsolete in the marketplace in five to ten years. We have to continue to re-educate and re-train ourselves all our lives. This must be one of our top priorities-the lifelong, continuous reskilling of our work forces.

We have at hand an incredible opportunity to do this. New technology has provided us with tools to bring education to every part of the world. For the first time in history, we have the capability, the delivery systems to make point -to-point contact anywhere on Earth. With satellites beaming educational programs to communities, we can turn around generations of entrenched poverty and ignorance. China is already doing this very successfully. Just last year, as many as 100,000 students graduated from their television schools.

International Business Machines (IBM) recently conducted a study of 200 American schools using computerized and other modern teaching aids. The study, involving 22,000 children in kindergarten and first grade, demonstrated that the students' rate of learning increased phenomenally-lOO to 500 percentand their retention was up to 75 percent as against 15 percent in normal classrooms. Thus, we can revolutionize education, putting it at the leading edge of what we know are incredibly positive, reinforcing, almost seductive, ways that excite children to learn, and change the elasticity of education from limited mastery in a rigid timeframe to basically total mastery in a flexible, accelerated timeframe. It's an extraordinary, positive situation, because for the first time in history we have generated the capability to do this.

Let me talk a little more about the actual process of innovation.

Innovation, simplistically, is a three-step process. The first stage is the invention-that's where government laboratories and universities do basic research and expand the pool of knowledge.

The next stage is the translation of that knowledge into creating processes and products that are useful to society.

About 90 percent of the cost, time and risk goes into this process. Universities are no~ capable of effecting the conversion; industries must do that. However, there can be a powerful synergistic relation between the two if we structure that relationship properly. The third step is to go from the prototype stage to commercially viable products.

It is important to understand this process because there are different skills and disciplines that are required at each stage.

There is a naive feeling, particularly in the academic community, that once you invent a product, it is just a matter of detail to put it into commercialization. That is just not true; in fact, that's where the real work begins-90 percent of the cost and risk are here. For example, when you develop a transistor, not only do you substitute it for the vacuum tube, you also create hundreds or thousands of other applications fvr it that were not conceived before. That is what basic research does, but it is because of the application of technology to the multitude of opportunities that new businesses and jobs are created.

Management of innovation is a very sophisticated process.

There is an incredible wealth of basic knowledge and advanced but underutilized technology all around the world, and the opportunities and the imperatives of the fast-changing technology make it an unparalleled opportunity-and a necessity-for nations to pool these to mutual advantage. With India, we recently signed an agreement to do just that. Called the Program for Advance of Commercial Technology, or PACT, it will bring together American and Indian research institutions and companies to jointly initiate translation of basic knowledge into socially useful products and processes.

The United States has spent more than $13,000 million on basic research, the results of most of which are available to anyone in the world. It also has a great industrial, technical infrastructure with the know-how to translate this early knowledge into commercial products. That is what we will bring together in our joint Indo-U.S. PACT ventures. The entrepreneurial culture, which we have created more or less accidentally, turns out to be a critical factor; that culture is responsible for the enormous explosion of new industries in the United States.

Over the years, India has also built a vast pool of scientific and technological talent. I was greatly impressed to discover the ingenious and very creative ways in which the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) has been developing the same kind of innovative process in India as we have been doing in America.

Together, India and the United States can effect this process in ingenious ways and build the indigenous capability that can be self-energizing and self-sufficient as well. Of course, in the process, we multiply the market potential too, because when you have two large markets, like the American and Indian, for the same investment, that's a win, win situation. Everything that PACT develops has got to be a win-win'proposition. Under bilateral R&D arrangements, there is no such thing as win-lose.

It is either win, win, or lose, lose.

The creativity is there. All we have to do is furnish the climate, and PACT will bring forth new products and processes in ingenious ways both in India and the United States. 0

ICRI SAT .FRUITS The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics at Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh, is an excellent example of how internationally pooled talent can help solve the world's food problems.

Fifteen years ago, few people even in Andhra Pradesh knew of the existence of Patancheru, a small, sleepy town located about 30 kilometers from Hyderabad on the Bombay highway. Yet today, it is world famous. Patancheru is home to the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).

Established in 1972 over an area of more than 1,400 hectares, ICRISAT is the world leader in research in sorghum, millet, pigeon pea, chick-pea and groundnut-the five crops basic to the lives of farmers in the semiarid tropics.

In the first few years ICRISA T's four scientists and staff functioned from four different offices in Hyderabad.

Only the field-oriented staff involved with conducting the experiments on the site from day one visited Patancheru every morning. "Those were the pioneer days," recalls Dr. Francis R. Bidinger, the institute's principal plant physiologist.

"We used to work from the barracks outside here," adds Dr. Surinder Virmani, looking out of his office window.

He is ICRISA T's principal agroclimatologist. "At that time we didn't even know what exactly the semiarid tropics were," Virmani continues.

"We had to define that area first. We had many top scientists, but we didn't know what dry land agriculture was, which is in itself a concept of the 1970s. Till then people didn't think it was worthwhile to research these areas. We had a mandate to improve the life of the people in the semiarid tropics. But where to begin?"

Today, 14 years later the research directions are clearer. ICRISA T scientists have not only defined the semiarid tropics but have also identified the prob-

lems that affect the crops there, and in some cases have come up with solutions.

"The institute has evolved, and we have grown with the institute," muses Dr. Kedar Nath Rai, a pearl millet breeder who took his doctorate from the University of California.

From its meager staff in 1972, the institute has grown to nearly 180 scientists, from 19 developing countries including India, and a support staff of 1,200.

Today they work from well-equipped laboratories and administrative offices on the site. Of the 1,400-hectare land that comprises ICRISAT, nearly 800 hectares are under cultivation in various stages of experimentation.

Visitors to ICRISAT, who number about 12,000 a year, include national and international scientists, college students and 3,000 to 4,000 farmers, who mostly come through state extension programs organized by the institute.

The organization is one of the 13 international centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) that are engaged in exotic research devoted to improving food quality and production in the developing countries. Since the late 1960s there has been worldwide concern for the low productivity and instability of food crops in the nonirrigated, rain-fed and sea.sonally dry uplands of the tropics, especially in Asia. It was this concern that led the Ford and Rockefeller foundations to initiate in 1970 a series of discussions on the problem of crop production in semiarid tropics at Bellagio. in Italy. These discussions formed the basis of a report called, "Discussion Paper for an Uplands Crops Program," presented by Dr. Clarence Gray III of the Rockefeller Foundation.

The report included the proposal for an uplands crop institute on the lines of the J nternational Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico.

The CGIAR, which came into existence in 1971 along with its technical. advisory

committee at a meeting in Rome suggested that a feasibility report be prepared on the subject. A three-member team comprising Dr. R.W. Cummings, Dr. Hugh Doggett and L. Sauger toured potential sites in India, Africa and Latin America and recommended that the new research institute be set up in Pat ancheru. "When the team visited India, we had no difficulty in convincing its members about the desirability of having the institute here in India," says Dr. Jaswant S. Kanwar, now the deputy director general of ICRISA T, but at the time of the. committee's visit to India the director general of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

Among the reasons that convinced the committee, according to Kanwar, were: • Of the 700 to 800 million people in the semiarid tropics who were to be the beneficiaries of ICRISAT research, 400 million were in India. "Fifty percent are right here in one country. Your captive audience is right here," Dr. Kanwar had told the committee members.

• The emphasis of the institute wasto be on rain-fed crops. The major producer of sorghum and millet in the world was India. And 75 percent of the world's chick-pea and 95 percent of its pigeon pea production were in India. More important, the per capita availability of these cereals and legumes had come down drastically in India over the past decade.

• Technical manpower was available in India.

• India was in the vanguard of the Green Revolution then and was committed to dry land farming.

The Ford Foundation signed the agreement with the Government of India in 1972 on behalf of the CGIAR, establishing the institute in Patancheru.

The The two photographs at right symbolize successin transforming barren lands into lush green fields. The picture at top shows the land as it was when it was allotted to the institute in 1972 and the photo at bottom shows the same land as it looks today. feRfSA T's research efforts-and

OF COOPERATION .

Indian Government provided the land and the Ford Foundation provided the administrative and financial support during the first crucial years. Dr. Ralph Cummings, an American soil scientist, was appointed the first director of the institute. He was the former representative in India of the Rockefeller Foundation and, later, the agricultural adviser in Asia and the Pacific of the Ford Foundation. He retired in 1977, and a scientist from New Zealand, Dr. Leslie D. Swindale, succeeded him as the director.

Financial support to ICRISAT comes from donors through the CGIAR. Among them are numerous national governments, including India and America, and international and private organizations such as the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program. Total funding to ICRISAT last year was $24.8 million. The U.S. Government gave about one-fifth of that. The Ford Foundation, which is no longer directly involved in the funding of the institute, supports ICRISA T's activities through special projects.

The institute participates in the U.S.funded International Research Support Program on Sorghum and Millet (INTSORMIL), aimed at improving world sorghum and millet prodilction and utilization. The institute also conducts research in association with a number of Indian universities and eight land-grant universities in the United States.

ICRISA T does not work directly for the U.S.-aided Peanut CRISP (Cooperative Research Support Program), but collaborates in the research by exchanging scientists.

ICRISA T's five mandate crops were chosen because of their importance in the semiarid tropics, especially to the subsistence farmers who live there. The semiarid tropics produce more than 55 percent of the world's sorghum, 95 percent of pearl millet, 90 percent of chick-pea, 96 percent of pigeon pea and 69 percent of groundnut.

Given the nature of ICRISA T's crops, and of the conditions of the farmers who live in these regions, scientists at the institute are acutely aware that their achievements cannot be as dramatic as those of the Green Revolution in rice and wheat.

"The crops we work in are basically subsistence crops of small farmers who

Right: Dr. V. Mahalakshmi (left) explains her studies on pearl millet at Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh, to visiting dignitaries. Also seen is Dr. Jaswant S. Kanwar (foreground), deputy director general of feRfSA T. Far right: Dr. Stanley B. King, an American plant pathologist, shows some diseased millet heads to visitors.

are growing them iri conditions where there is little water and no fertilizer," says Dr. Stanley B. King, an American plant pathologist at ICRISAT. However, according to Director Swindale, improvements in sorghum production in India over the past decade have been as good as those in wheat and better than those in rice. "That," he says, "is a tremendous achievement considering rice and wheat are grown in irrigated areas, and sorghum in dry lands with much fewer inputs."

Though there may be no revolution in sight yet, he says, ICRISATis committed to help farmers in the semiarid tropics produce legumes and cereals more efficiently and with less financial strain.

Agricultural research is a long-drawn process and it can take years before breakthroughs are achieved. For example, Dr. V. Mahalakshmi, a plant physiologist who joined ICRISA T for her postdoctoral work after a doctorate from the University of Nebraska, has been focusing on the problem of drought resistance in millet for the past seven years.

Yet, she is far from finding a solution.

"It's frustrating. But that's the way research is," she says. "Sometimes, research yields results in a remarkably short time, but often one has to be patient."

One scientist at the institute who has been more fortunate in his research work is Dr. Yeshwant L. Nene, principal pathologist and acting program director (legumes). For 50 years researchers did not understand what the "wilt complex," which destroyed 75 percent of the chickpea crop, was. Dr. Nene and his colleagues traced the problem to a dozen causes and zeroed in on finding a solution. They have now come up with 128 lines of wilt-resistant chick-pea.

Crop improvement is a time-consuming process. It involves five to seven years of basic breeding research from selection of germplasm or other breeding material to segregating lines through crossing, formation of varieties or hybrids to preliminary and advanced-yield testing. In India it takes five to six years of national testing before the seed is approved for release to farmers by the All-India Coordinated Crop Improvement Programmes.

Though the small farmer is the principal beneficiary of ICRISA T research, the institute does not deal with him directly.

Its target audience is the national scientist who in turn reaches the farmer.

ICRISAT has close working relations with scientists of all major countries in the semiarid tropics. In India, it has cooperative research stations on the campuses of five widely separated agricultural universities-at Hissar, Gwalior, Anantapur, Dharwar and Bhavanisagar-to test research under varying climatic conditions. The institute also works closely with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and various other national agricultural programs of the Government of India.

In the past few years, ICRISAT has released several new varieties of sorghum, millet, pigeon pea and chick-pea that are not only giving higher yields but are also producing more stable crops. In pre-release and national trials, ICRISAT varieties have yielded more than the local or standard varieties. A pearl millet released three years ago is being cultivated extensively in India; not only is its yield higher but it also has shown a high degree of resistance to downy mildew, a disease that destroys popular hybrids.

,

For this, ICRISAT recently received a most handsome tribute from the secretary of agriculture, Government of India.

"He said that ICRISAT had saved India last year. That was an exaggeration, of course," says Director Swindale. "What he meant was that when India's main stock hybrid became susceptible to serious disease, an ICRISAT-developed pearl millet variety was available which saved the situation. This was no small achievement; it saved India millions of rupees, probably more than what it costs to run ICRISAT each year."

Dr. Kanwar foresees self-sufficiency in sorghum and millet in India in the near future. But he says cautiously, "We won't take all the credit for that. ICRISAT has been the catalyst. A lot still depends on the cooperative efforts of the national programs."

However, it will take a longer time to achieve self-sufficiency in legumes. But evenhere, ICRISAT strains have yielded better results than the existing varieties.

In India where chick-peas are tested by geographical zones, an ICRISAT entry was the best in the northwest plains. An earlymaturing pigeon pea line with large seed and wide adaptability is being multiplied in Maharashtra. In agronomic tests at ICRISAT to maximize the yield of this multiple harvest line, two harvests produced 3.8 tons per hectare of land. An ICRISAT groundnut selection was recentlyrecommended for release in India.

Thisvariety outyielded the local standard variety; it gave 43 percent higher yields on average.

As part of its crop improvement efforts,ICRISAT collects, conserves and distributes materials from its germplasm bank whose accessions run over 80,000

and constitute the world repository for the five crops. Not only are seeds supplied on request but comprehensive data including plant origin and characteristics are also stored on computer and can be retrieved on request.

Stability and higher yields are not the only two factors ICRISAT scientists look for when they breed for a new variety. A groundnut variety was rejected when the breeder realized the seed would be purple, a color that would not be acceptable to the farmer. The biochemistry laboratory analyzes the nutritional values of new varieties. Dr. R. lambunathan, principal biochemist, who worked at the Purdue University before joining ICRISAT, says, "One of our most important jobs is to ensure that in breeding, protein content and nutritional values in a variety are not lost. We also maintain a panel of tasters to ensure that the taste of sorghum or millet is not lost when it is cooked."

There's no better lab to test this than the scientist's home.

Plant breeder Dr. Rai often takes ICRISAT-developed millet home to his wife to make chapattis from it. "Some people thought that the ICRISATdeveloped millet, which is drought and heat resistant, would make dark-colored chapattis. Not only were they not dark colored, but they tasted so good that I didn't like wheat chapattis after that," he says.

ICRISAT works not only on crop improvement programs but is involved in developing improved, viable farming systems that raise the production of the farmer through best use of natural resources. The institute's main contribution in this area has been in a new approach to land and water management. ICRISATs scientists have developed a package of practices that enables farmers to crop on certain black soils both during the rainy season and after, encouraging them to gro~ two crops where they were growing only one earlier. The results have been dramatic.

A main component of the improved technology is watershed management, whose thrust is to improve utilization of rain when it falls, to conserve most of it in the soil profile, and to store the excess water from the rainy season for irrigation during dry periods. It has helped farmers to reduce soil erosion and increase production. "ICRISAT has given impetus to dry land farming in the country. When we

proposed watersheds five years ago no one would listen to us. Today the Government of India has committed land for it," says Dr. Kanwar.

To keep in touch with farmers, and study their lifestyles, agricultural conditions and the social and economic constraints that hamper their agricultural production, a ten-year study was conducted in six Indian villages. The results are reflected in policy changes and program redefinitions at ICRISAT. Nutritional studies showed that what was lacking in the villagers' diet was not, as had been generally believed, protein, but calo.ries. "The study helped us to de-emphasize high protein lines in sorghum breeding. We then switched over to more energy, more calories," says Dr. Thomas S. Walker, an American economist working with ICRISAT. Results from village-level studies conducted by ICRISAT economists have also been reaffirmed in recent policy announcements by the Government of India that more emphasis would be given to pulses, oilseeds and dry land farming in general.

Training continues to be a crucial aspect of ICRISAT's work. "Over the years more than 1,100 fieldworkers, students and research scholars representing 72 countries have participated in our training programs," says Dr. Dallas L. Oswalt, who heads the training division at ICRISA T. Postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, midcareer scientists and technicians arrive at ICRISAT every year, either to do research or to participate in workshops and seminars that are conducted regularly.

Though India's problems will continue to occupy ICRISA T's attention, future focus is likely to be more on droughtprone Africa. Already 35 ICRISAT scientists are working in nine African countries in cooperation with the national scientists there. An additional base for ICRISA T's future work will be at the new Sahelian center near Niamey, Niger.

"What excites me today is that we have achieved sufficient maturity to be able to reach out to other countries in Asia and Africa. These countries need our help today more than India," says Dr. Swindale.

0 About the Author: Ratna Shekar is a Hyderabad-based free-lance writer. She scudied journalism at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, on a Rotary Foundation scholarship.

Top: Nguyen Vu Nguyen, a VietnameseAmerican living in Atlanta, Georgia, and Eleanor McLain of Kensington, Maryland, carry a crate of tomatoes that they have harvested. Above: Sang Hwand, a South Korean student at Blacksburg, Virginia, and a camp counselor, helps to serve dinner; meals are always vegetarian and

partly prepared from produce grown in the camp's own gardens. Left: Teacher Wendy Spoor of Orange, California, helps three campers on a shopping trip to the camp store; from left to right: Akiko Shimada of Japan, Johnny Chen of Taiwan and Sam Chiu, also of Taiwan, now a New Yorker.

here are classes and chores, games, laughter and late night discussions. But the paths at the summer camp, nestled in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, lead far beyond just the local swimming hole and the usual arts and crafts. Rather, they are directed at the future-at communications and cooperation, at cultural awarenessand international good will, at leadership development and personal growth. Called "an adventure in global understanding," the Legacy International Youth Program's unique camp is really a global village.

For six weeks each summer, some 125 young people, aged 9 to 18, and about 60 staff members, together representing more than 25 countries and cultures, join in a community program of learning, working, having fun and simply living with one another.

Now into its second¡ decade, Legacy International is sponsored by the Institute for Practical Idealism, a nongovernmental organization affiliated with the United Nations.

According to its founder, educator and author J.E. Rash, Legacy's goal is "to provide an atmosphere where the optimum potential of individuals can come forth."

Participants are chosen for what they have to contribute nowand for what they might be able to give the world as they grow. They in turn receive the opportunity to share their cultural heritages, and to learn problem solving and practical living skills, all with the goals of fostering understanding, promoting peace and developing a broader world perspective.

While student campers and staff engage in activities commonto most camps, many of their projects and pursuits at Legacyare specifically geared toward helping the young people prepare for the world they are inheriting.

To build skills that will be needed in the future there are such hands-on projects in modern technology as computer programming, video production and amateur radio networking.

T

~Ing rlen s The Legacy International Youth Program brings about 125 youngsters from all over the world together for a summer camp in Virginia every year.

To encourage creativity and confidence, professional instructors and counselors from around the world teach classes in such traditional fine arts and crafts as weaving, ceramics, painting, drama and music.

To stimulate thinking toward a global perspective, camp activities focus on the food, crafts, customs, games and festivals of various nations. Each weekend a different culture is highlighted, with children eating the food, wearing the clothes, hearing the folktales and learning the games, music, crafts of the focal country. Emphasis is on the similarities between cultures, rather than just on the differences.

Through service projects, discussions and up-to-date methods of conflict resolution, youngsters have a chance to develop leadership qualities and better communication skills.

An "accelerated learning" method is used to teach foreign languages, and English as a second language is offered to those campers needing it. Through a camp council, patterned after the United Nations, Legacy participants govern their community cooperatively. They also help cultivate and harvest organic gardens and manage a camp general store.

The new perspectives gained by Legacyyouth during their summer-camp experiences are enhanced by other activities during the rest of the year, such as travel programs, service project days, reunions (both in the United States and elsewhere), photo projects and a newsletter.

Nutrition and diet are also a part of the Legacy program.

The camp features a natural food vegetarian diet, and often uses food grown by the campers in the camp's own gardens.

According to Legacy, "The absence of meat and fish is not presented as a philosophy, but rather as an opportunity for participants to explore their own flexibility, and for individuals from various religious traditions to feel comfortable with the food."

Legacy's skilled staff works to establish a close family atmosphere at the camp, one that will encourage openness and trust, and will bridge language and cultural differences.

Year-round personnel are joined by professional artists-inresidence, university students, environmentalists, teachers and craftspeople. Futurists, experts in various disciplines and globally minded diplomats also offer special presentations and opportunities for stimulating discussion.

Campers stay in wooden cabins housing ten to 14 young people and two or three staffers. Dorms or private lodging are provided for additional staff and special guests. And with the wide range of ages, from young children of staffers to special guests who may be in their 60s or 70s, enduring friendships often blossom across generational lines. Numerous staffers and campers return year after year.

The Legacy experience seems to be a lasting one. Says one alumnus, "I made friends from many, many countries. Now I have brothers and sisters from all over the world." Another former camper notes, "Legacy has helped me discover who I am, what goals I should be striving for. I have learned that I can make a difference." According to founder Rash, "Legacy plants seeds for future growth .... What the young people have achieved is an ability to think and care in a way that they otherwise might never have managed on their own."

About the Author: Sandy Greenberg is a SPAN correspondent in Washington, D.C.

I

Making Friends While some campers in a crafts class construct a ceramic tile table top in the shape of a world map, others, learning communication skills, videotape them.

A group works on the camp's weekly newdetter The Worid Reflection.

The publishing program includes a yearbook for fellow campers.

Under the direction of Charles Williams of New York's Metropolitan Opera, youngsters rehearse in The Bubble, an inflatable dome at the camp, for a dramatic musical performance for local citizens.

Legacy staffer Roop Verma, an Indian musician now living in Monroe, New York, conducts a music class with students from some American towns, Nigeria and Jerusalem.

Participants come from far and near. A signpost put up by them at the campsite in rural Bedford, Virginia, shows the places-and distances-they come from.

Sharingan umbrella on a rainy summer dayat the camp are (from left) Akiko Shimadaof Chiba, Japan; M uhanned Farrahfrom East Jerusalem andMariko Kawazoe, also of Chiba.

Chi Phan, a Vietnamese-American from Falls Church, Virginia, is lifted by her companions during an exercise designed to foster trust and cooperation in one another.

Eddie VanNess of Fairbanks, Alaska, leads a meeting of the Legacy International Camp Community Council, which is patterned after the United Nations. The camp participants govern the community cooperatively through the council.

Tough, Sweet and Stuffy

by Walker Gibson, Prentice-Hall of India, New Delhi, 1985, 179 pp., Rs. 25.

As the home of people originating in virtually every country, the United States is indeed a microcosm of the world. In this century, the tide of immigrants has possibly been greater than in the preceding three centuries combined. Thus, the Tower of Babel and the gift of tongues, as described in the Bible, are as nothing when compared with the number of languages spoken in America-and the variety of accents in English alone.

This has contributed to the richness of American prose, which is vigorous, colorful and distinct from English usage in other parts of the world.

Since speech is governed by what we hear and read, it reflects the user's academic and cultural background, as well as the environment he was nurtured in. According to Walker' Gibson, "All writing is an adjustment of compromise among three ex-

Charles Newton has been on the editorial staff of The Statesman, The Illustrated Weekly of India and the British Information Services, New Delhi. He is a prolific contributor to several magazines and newspapers and has written three books.

treme but familiar styles of modern American prose.

There is the 'tough' style of writers like Hemingway, the 'sweet talk' of advertising copy and the 'stuffiness' of official rhetoric and the jargon of academic specialization."

Gibson, who is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, is also the author of books on composition. In analyzing modern American prose styles, he conducts an autopsy, for which his equipment seems to include a microscope and a scalpel. "The purpose of this essay," he says, "is to begin asking how in our time, character is created by rhetoric."

Dialect is an important component of modern prose, principally in works of fiction, but Gibson concentrates on "extreme but famil.iar styles." He dismisses written language itself as "merely a 'dialect,' of the spoken language, and an overrated one at that."

"Tough" talk, the author says, is characterized by short sentences, simplified diction, relatively low modification, frequent use of the definite article. In newspaper and magazine reporting, however, Gibson says, there is an additional characteristic -omniscience.

"When you invest a voice that asserts deep and violent feeling, and close intimacy with the reader, and omniscience, you have a public address system of formidable power. And when you apply that voice to the 'reporting' of the news, you have committed an act of intellectual dishonesty."

"Sweet Talk" and "Advertising Rhetoric of Madison

Avenue" ~eem to be almost synonymous. Strangely, Gibson relaxes his objectivity when he says, "More than one observer has remarked that the freshest writing going on nowadays comes from the ad agencies on Madison A venue." In sharp contrast, however, E.B. White, in An Approach to Style (SPAN, July 1986), is more incisive when he says, "Today, the language of advertising enjoys an enormous circulation. With its deliberate infractions of grammatical rules and its crossbreeding of the parts of

speech, it profoundly influences the tongues and pens of children and' adults. ... You will also ... want to try writing that way .... You do so at your peril, for it is the language of mutilation."

Gibson, however, is clearly starry-eyed over ad copy: "The language of modern fiction and the language of modern advertising, while obviously different, and certainly paid at different rates, share at least this in common: both are produced with more care and energy and talent than any other prose in our time."

"Stuffy talk" is organizational talk-it is the lan-

guage of officialdom and public bodies. "A key characteristic of Stuffy rhetoric is just this refusal to aSsume personal responsibility."

Hence the proclivity for circumlocution, aided by sentences in the passive voice.

Gibson says, "A little Tough Talk goes a long way, sometimes, as an antidote to Stuffy Talk .... Whereas a little toughness can be wholesome, a little sweetness can. be sickening." He concludes, "All three of our styles are dangers in modern prose, in ascending order of peril."

All writers-professional ones, in ~articular-will find Tough, Sweet and Stuffy a stimulating, ingenious dissection QL the language we speak and write. The Style Machine, for instance, is a meticulous, almost mathematical table of the categQries of words us.ed in pros~.

There is also a list of criteria for measuring style. "Stuffiness is the easiest style to define and isolate."

Gibson's Style Sampler covers fragments from the prose of 25 authors, ranging from the American Declaration of Independence to the contemporary crop.

Only a professor could have produced such a work.

Academics themselves seem to have a distinctive style, in which footnotes are indispensable. A skilled writer should be able to weave all 1 his statements-references et ai-into a smooth fabric undisturbed by footnotes and other pedagogical distractions.

It would bejnteresting to conjecture how Walker Gibson would classify this piece of prose--':-tough, sweet, or stuffy?

0 I

T,he Human Imperative There can be no halt to space exploration, asserts historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Boorstin,. because man must explore. "People's humanity lies in discovering the boundlessness of our powers, which we can never define .... To fail to do all we can do is to fail to be human."

Tillking with Saurabh When the Mohans discovered that their two-year-old son Saurabh was deaf, their world was shattered-until they learned of the John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles. Guided by the clinic's free correspondence course for parents of deaf and deaf-blind children, they have helped their son lead a normal life.

Comedy as Comment "Make 'em Laugh," the theme of the latest USIS film festival of American comedies, carries in it a message. For filmmakers from Chaplin (Modern Times, 1936) to De Palma (Wise Guys, 1986) have used satire to comment on the contemporary American scene.

Rhyme and Reason Everybody's talking about Vikram Seth and The Golden Gate, his novel in verse. This 33-year-old Calcutta-born student Of Stanford University in California has long been confounding convention by allowing his passions, not other people's expectations, to guide him.

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Fish-n-Fins Whether it's a goldfish bowl at home or a huge public aquarium, watching the underwater world is a fascinating experience. The oldest public aquarium in the United States is the National Aquarium in Washington, D.C. Founded over a century ago, it has more than 600 marine and freshwater inhabitants, six of which are shown here: pictures 1- 3 and 5- 7. Pictures 4 and 8 show specimens from the New England Aquarium's Giant Ocean Tank, a tank containing a Caribb~an coral reef, 708,000 liters of saltwater and 1,000 animals.

Each fish has its physical specialties peculiar to its species. The Thread-Fin Butterfly Fish (1) is a wide-ranging tropical Indo-Pacific species. It has a distinctive white-ringed black spot at the rear of its body. A black band, narrowly edged with yellow, runs through its eye, presumably to' conceal the eye from predators; an eye-spot near the tail further confuses possible attackers. The Moorish Idol, also known as Toby (2), .is a shallow-water reef species.

When young, these fish have a knifelike

spine behind each corner of the mouth; the spines drop off when the fish is between eight and ten centimeters long. With age, a pair of hornlike protuberances grow in front of the eyes and gradually increase in size.

The Dwarf Lionfish (3) is a beautiful but dangerous inhabitant of the Indo-Pacific region. Their dorsal fin spines are venom laden and wounds from them are intensely painful. Green Moray Eels (4) inhabit caves and crevices. '.'Morris," shown here, is almost two meters long and is the largest Moray Eel at the .New England Aquarium.

The Fairy Basslet (5) is a popular aquarium fish owing to its spectacular coloring: violet and yellow, with two gold streaks on the head. The Yellow Surgeon Fish (6) too is brightly colored, with its shining canary coat. It is found over a wide area of the Indian and Pacific oceans but is most common in the coastal areas of Hawaii. The Anemone Fish (7) is a coral reef specimen.

The Atlantic Ridley Turtles (8) are the smallest of all sea turtles. They can hold their breath for hours at a time, surfacing every few hours to replenish their supply of fresh air.