79-02-B7
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Miscellaneous 2
TranscriptTeresa Cardina of Buffalo, New York, handles the emergency - dial 911 - phone at police headquarters. Late one night she received a call, but the only sound she heard when she picked up the phone was heavy breathing and tapping sound. She gets a certain number of crank calls at the police complaint desk, but somehow felt this call was not one of those. It would have been easy just to hang up, but 26 year old Miss Cardina said, "If you need help, tap once for yes and twice for no". There came a single tap. Somewhere in the city a human being needed help - but where? Teresa told the caller she would recite the alphabet and to tap when she came to the first letter of the caller's street. Then of course she had to go through all the streets beginning with that letter and finally the street number. Soon she had an address - Melbourne Street on Buffalo's west side. A few minutes later a squad car and ambulance arrived at the home of a 75 year old woman who was having trouble breathing because of a throat operation that prevented her from speaking. Happy ending because of a young lady who went that extra step in doing her job. Teresa Cardina must be a nice person. Another happy ending story took place in Colorado this last December. A family-owned business, the Coors Brewing Company, has been undergoing a strike for almost two years. I don't know the cause of the strike, but I do know the Coors family, as an employer, has been generous and thoughtful to its employees. It was no surprise, therefore, when the great majority of workers refused to abide by the union's call to strike and kept right on reporting for work. The union responded with a hurtful, nationwide boycott of Coors products. Both the union and Coors asked the N.L.R.B. for an election. The results were announced last December 15th -- 71 percent of the company's employees voted against their own union. This next story is a good news - bad news item. Probably nothing is more visible as a mark of our continuing inflation than the changing prices of food items in our markets. Indeed the average housewife can be excused if her daily marketing leaves her with the impression that food for the table is where inflation is at. The truth is since 1960 the price of food as a percent of earnings has gone down 21 percent. The bad news is the cost of government as a percentage of earnings has gone up 20 percent. An item that helps explain government's increasing cost comes from the Los Angeles County welfare director. Just 18 years ago Los Angeles County, which has 40 percent of California's population, had 22,000 families getting assistance from the Aid for Dependent Children program. Today there are 170,000 families getting such aid and 37,000 of these are second generation - children who grew up on welfare, married and set up housekeeping as a new family unit eligible for public assistance. Another reason for government costs increasing has to do with Washington's "buddy system". Representative John Brademas, Chairman of the House, Education & Labor Committee, which has jurisdiction over the. National Endowment for the Humanities, found himself in a tough campaign last November. Joseph Duffey, head of the National Endowment, just happened by the Congressman's district with a $425,000 grant for two colleges prior to the election. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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