WHITBY FREE PRESSEDNESDAY,3ULT2O; 198u PAGE7'> PAGE SEVEN STIIL COMPLAINING AFTER ALL THIS TIME A'column doesnt have to bespectacular every day - just memorable - memorable enough to make your reader forget the garbage you wrote yesterday. from the comic strip "Shoe" This is column number one, hundred. At roughly 1,000 words each, that's a fair sized book - how much of it you've read is probably. another story, but for someone whose prior journalistic experience consisted of afew lengthy letters to the Editor, I think Ive done passably well. As publisher, I get enquiries from people who think they too would like to write a column - people like the idea of other people reading their ideas. I usually suggest that they write letters to the editor but they rarely do - it just doesn't have the same punch as your own byline. Writing a column lias its rewards for sure but it certainly isn't the instant respect and influence that some people expect. A good columnist can attain a large and faithfull following but it takes years. Some people will buy the Toronto Sun to read a single column but that kind of loyalty was not won overnight. It was six months before I got a single comment, good or bad, apart from friends who made the appropriately polite blandishments. In recent months, though, I have had a number of total strangers tell me that they read my column (and like what they read) every week. I must be doing something right. Perhaps it's the theme which runs throughout most of my columns: bureaucracy, red tape, and incompetence - which are usually all the same thing. Not just in government either - it's rife in our largest private corporations as well. (Especially Ma Bell! - I found out a few weeks ago that I'd been paying for a service they discontinued a year ago - but since Bell doesn't itemize their bills, how was I to know?) Even my columns on heritage are about the blindness and incompetence of a system, both public and private which plans roads and parking lots wherever significant buildings are 'found. (In iWhat has to be the ultimate insult to human intelligence, the parking lot that replaced the Perry House on Byron .St. behind the new medical building charges 35 cents per half hour while directly across the street, the Town's parking lot charges only a quarter for two hours. Needless to say, the medical parking lot is usually three-quarters empty -ï-u but they needed the parking.) Have you ever noticed how politicians attack bureaucracy too - and then create more of it? I rail against scientists who hide the facts in their ivory towers and lobbyists who choose to ignore them. I .object. to things like the free trade agreement not because I'ni an expert and understand it fully but because the guys that wrote it don't either and I don't have a lot of faith in the folks from tainted tuna land to negotiate something as important as free trade. We have a legal system which throws innocent people into jail for years on crimes they didn't commit but lets dangerous WMTBY PSYCIATRIC HOSPITAL BECREATION HALL UNDER offenders out on the street where they commit murder again. CONSTRUCTION, 1917 We operate government funded schools for crime but call The recreation hall for the hospital was built for the entertainment of soldiers who were them jails. We are so concerned about civil liberties that the occupying the facility during the First World War. The upper floor contains a stage and criminals go free yet peaceful demonstrations are monitored assembl hall the lower floor consists of a canteen and bowling ley, l in use tday. for so-called subversives.Wityctzninte12sad13satnedncsitthpyhircptetsn And I hammer away at the money we waste on the inef-thshlad ayenetimngrusfoTrnepromeontstg.Fom17 ficiency and indecision of the bureaucratic bumblers around t 99tehsia a prtdb h ode' i omsinadbcm sciti us. We pay for the high postage and poor service, the sub-fcityn190WhbyAhiepoo standard goods at high prices, the bank charges for the 1 ER G bank's own mistakes, the unemployment insurance system fo h ensaJl 9 98eiino h which hounds the unemployable but pays others to holidayWHTYFE PRS down south. Reinlouclhsdeaebyoevtaprpsitstdthfiacaimlainsf We pay judges to make assinine decisions and then otheretndgswrseBooin judges te set things right again (maybe). And when the TecaaiyothCobtCrkswgetatntpntilbeduedhsyer government is really confused, they employ yet another judge*ThCo unyGaesriefrsirciinsada0prcntnraeinletsnte te lead a Royal Commission and when the commission îs he ots reports in a year or two, they appoint a committee to study*AaxcucloCoiMciesproinafuthegnlcuciororWibada the report. ...etc., etc.> ad naiuseum. rdcini h ubro saacucloso einlCucl So te all those people who think it would be real neat to write a column, you will notice that nothing much has 2 ER G changed since I started this one. The press is only asfrmtehusaul18193etinote powerful as its ability to rally the indignation of a usually WIB EKYNW apathetic pulc nOtroGvmetsre asWib ed 0fml etIbue n ih ie I recall a phone call last fall from a lady who wanted me for senior citizens'apartments. to write about the illegal parking on Centre St. beside the e Jack Nixon and Mel Femia have been naned Justices of the Peace for Ontario County. new medical building (to say nothing about the cars that e Arthur Mel Alward ofWhitby and Jesse Easter Moore cf Toronte were married on a ferris were coming out of that parking lot and going the wrong way wheel in Centennial Park today. on a one-way street.) She was concerned about the children * A building permit will be issued for construction of a Masonic Temple on Cochrane Street. from the nursery school across the street and I had to agree that the situation was an accident waiting to happen. She 100 YEARS AGO was most insistent that the newspaper should do something about it - she would not understand that only she and her WHITBY CHRONICLE fellow concerned parents could do anything about it - by complaining long and loud and often to the powers that be until something finally got done. No copy of this issue appears te have survived. So next week I start on another hundred thousand words - m aybe by then....ndM elFemiahavebeennamedJusticesof_ the_ Peace_ for O ntario County.