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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (April 28, 1963)
g SUNDAY, APHIL 2. IM3 MEDFOHD MAIL TRIBUNE, MEPFORP. OREGON . . Conditions in Yemen Said Most Primitive in Middle East Area ' (Editor'! net: In Yemen. Mm currency it 10 heay that it ilk thtM man to carry 5500. But il's not much of a problam to tho natiTOf for this is ona ot iha poortit countriaa In iba world. Thii Is anotbar oi 1 b a profiles of countriaa written by United Preii In tarnation raportera living or working in them.) official figurues but it prob ably is no higher than 15 per cent, if that There is virtually no in dustry and the country's economy is based almost en tirely on agriculture. Despite a fine climate with a tem- PMMITIVE COUNTRY A land "being Middle East. Here, a rocket launcher is set dragged kicking and screaming into the up outside an ancient fort (top) as victorious ISth century" Is how British diplomat rebels hunt for pro-royaliat groups In March summed up Yemen a few years ago. Yemen's this year. The bottom picture ahows vege- hereditary rulers have kept the country at table gardens In sn old part of Sana'a. the most primitive level of any in the (UPI) By RAYMOND J. MOLONEY United Press International Sana'a, Yeman - 0JPD - A visit to Yemen Is a visit back in time. A British diplomat newly posted to the country a few years ago summed it up neatly when he wrote home that he found himself in a land "being dragged kicking and screaming into the 15th Century. This Is an agricultural country of 73,000 square miles in which some 4.5 million people - no one knows just how many because there's never been a census - live under the most primitive con ditions left in the Middle East. Its backwardness is no accident. The country was kept deliberately in Its prim itive state by its hereditary rulers, the Imamas who claimed to trace their ances try back directly to the Him yarite dynasty founded in the 2nd Century, B.C. Now simethlng new is be ing tried in Yemen. Last Sep tember a group of young army officers, fired by the winds of change blowing through Arabia from Abdel Gamal Nasser's Cairo, revolt ed and sent the Imam fleeing. Their battle is not yet won for the imam rallied loyal tribesmen as he fled and he still fights in the eastern hills. No Great Prise Yemen is no great prize ex cept perhaps in the battle of ideas. If your eye moved too quickly over the map you would miss this little country nestled just above the cen tral eastern coast of Africa and south of Saudi Arabia. This is a land with no uni versity and few schools ex cept for religious classes con ducted in the Moslem mos ques. Literacy can only be guessed at for there are no Summer Session Set at Ashland's Lincoln School Ashland - Southern Oregon college will again conduct a six week's summer session elementary school for students in southern Oregon June 24 to Aug. 2 at the Lincoln school in Ashland. Hours will be from 9 a.m. to noon Monday through Fri day. Children from kinder garten age through the sixth grade are eligible to attend. Some of the features of this summer's school program in clude a non-graded organiza tion based on the theory of continuous pupil progress rather than grade level achievement standards; some team teaching; youngsters will be placed in reading and mathematics achievement lev els according to their needs and abilities; social science will be organized around prob lem areas of challenge and Interest tn all youngsters re gardless of age and education al background; and a limited number of opportunities will be provided for youngsters with particular abilities to pursue advanced independent study projects in science and mathematics. Children enrolling in sum mer school are expected to attend regularly and accept ance for enrollment is based on the assumption that they will attend the entire six weeks. No transportation or insurance is provided by the school and the only expense involved Is a small fee charg ed for mid-morning snacks for the kindergarten group. Addi tional information may be ob tained from Southern Oregon college. j perate summer, cool winters and an adequate rainfall, it is a poor agriculture, depend ' ent mainly on two crops, cof j fee and qat. Qat is a bush i whose leaves and green shoots are chewed by virtually ev ery Yemeni male from the age of six upwards for the mildly narcotic effect. Even these crops arc fading. The country's income from all sources was estimated in 1960 (there are no later fig ures) about $4 million. Earns $20 Per Month A skilled Yemeni worker today earns between S15 and $20 a month. One of the first acts of the new republican regime last fall was to raise the pay of army privates from S5 to $15 a month. The incomes of farmers struggling with their poor crops, raised by methods little changed in centuries, is even lower. The currency of Yemen is another of its anachronisms. It is still the old Maria Ther esa thaler (worthy roughly B0 cents U.S.) dating back to the time of the Austro-Hun- garian empire at the close of the 18th Century. The coins, with their orig inal 1780 date, are still mint ed in Europe especially for the Yemeni market. They make banking something to see. The only bank in Yemen still is - of necessity - a Saudi Arabian one. It became established under the imams and continues to operate even though the new Yemen re gime is bitterly involved with Saudi Arabia which it accuses I of backing supporters of the imam in the continuing civil j war. Has Two Capitals Yemen has two capitals -Sana'a and Taiz - but few telephones, one weak radio station, no railways and only four real roads. One of the roads, built with a loan from Red China, is a tarred surface one running 200 miles from the port of Ho deida to Sana'a. The port it self, on the Red Sea, is the work of Soviet engineers. In a fine demonstration of posi tive neutrality, two other of Yemen's roads are the work of U.S. engineers under an j outright American foreign aid gift. These run 313 miles from the port of Mocha to Taiz, and then on up to Sana'a. The fourth road joins Taiz and Aden. The American engineers made the Yemenis most un happy when they insisted the roads they were building would have a gravel surface. The Yeminis wanted a tar surface matching the Chinese made road that was completed two years ago. But now the Chinese road already is be coming daily more scarred with pot-holes and the Yem- I ems are Beginning lu ininK i the Americans may have been right after all. I WILL TRADE! Klamath Falls Home for Horn in the Medford Area PHONE TU 2-4062 3638 ALVA ST. KLAMATH FALLS NOTICE H TIC-TOP CHRIS E f TIME SHOP " THE TAILOR H f 34 No. iertlett 36 No. Bartlett H SUMMER HOURS N 1 8:30 to 5:30 Pacific Daylight Time K ; TUESDAY THRU SATURDAY H ClOSED MONDAYS Bj Anti-Semitism Question Considered By WERNER ZWICK United Press International Frankfurt, Germany - (11B The young American business man, a third generation de scendant of German fore bears, had been traveling In West Germany for a month, "sizing up the situation." "I've been offered a splen did job here with exciting fu ture prospects," he said. "But I am engaged to a Jewish girl from California and she is timid about us making our home in Germany. She need ed convincing that anti-semi-tlsm no longer exists. I came over here to prove It to my self, too." The American smiled wry ly, sighed a little, and gave his verdict: "I'm not taking the Job. I won't bring her here." Why? The American had no firm answer. "I can't put It into words for you. Be Uncemforiable "I just knew she'd be un comfortable, and so would I. for her sake. It's not any thing you really can put your finger on. Nobody here German or otherwise has said to me he doesn't like Jews or has anything against them. In fact everyone pro tests just the opposite. How had he gone about "sizing up the situation That was a little hard to ex plain, too. "But one thing 1 did was sometimes, in stores and places like that, I'd give a very Jewish sounding name. I'd get that look, some times. You know. Nothing said. No real change in the manner. Just something. Any way. I know 1 don't want to bring her here. Too bad. It would have been a good chance for us." German Embarrassed The American was embar rassed, talking about It. As embarrassed, possibly, as Ger mans themselves when the subject comes up. German embarrassment often comes to the surface. In a noisy Frankfurt beer stube one recent evening there was suddenly heard, above the oom pah pah of the band, an angry voice say ing, "You damn Jew!" Man Arrested on Josephine Warrant Medford city police Thurs day arrested David L e r o y Wlnans, 48, In a downtown hotel on a felony warrant from the Josephine county sheriffs office Wlnans, who was lodged in Jackson county jail, is charg ed with obtaining money un der false pretenses. Immediately all conversa tion dropped oft. At every table the customers, gay and lively a moment before, sat quietly looking uneasily at one another. In the silence even the band seemed muted the offender, slight ly drunk, called for his check and, avoiding stares, marched swiftly out. In a few minutes things were back to normal. From Berlin to Brcmerha- ven the reaction is much the same when the national clos et is opened and the skeleton of anti-Semitism in Germany la exposed. Not Many Jews Left There aren't many Jews in Germany and more. From 700,000 before Hitler, there are today some 25,000 to 30, 000 left. Most of them are old er generation, roughly two thirds over age ot 45. Scarcely 4,000 are under 21. A low birth rate and emigration con tinue to shrink the figures. A German Jewish leader, Rabbi Hans Grunewald, has said Hitler's plan for a Jew less Germany may be fulfilled in another 20 years. Practically all observers agree that, excepting only the rare fanatic or crackpot, there is no active anti-semitlsm In Germany. When Hitler's l, 000-year Reich crumbled 12 years after Its birth, most Germans were genuinely shocked by the full revela tions of the murderous pro grams and the extermination camp horrors. The iiHtional revulsion led West Germany when it regained self-govern ment In 1949 to make it a crime even to utter an anti Jewish remark. It has been said It Is safe to attack any thing in West Germany to day except a Jew. Go To Prisons Two young Germans wrnl to prison when they smeared swastikas on a Cologne syna gogue on Christmas eve 1959. Arnold Strunk, 25, and Paul Schoenen, .12, also went to prison for painting swastikas on a synagogue. Elementary school teacher Ludwig Zind fled to Cairo after an arrest warrant was Issued for him for publicly calling a man "a Jewish pig." A pathetic incident .involv ing a Jewish woman patient at West Berlin's Behring hos pital stirred the country un happily Her supper came with a knife and fork bearing swastika emblems and under the shock oi seeing the dread symbols she suffered a heart attack. An investigation showed that 62 of the hos pital's 5,500 sets of silver ware still bore markings o( the Third Reich. The admin istrator was tired The few extremist right wing groups in West Germa ny have either been banned or stripped of influence at the ballot boxes. The West Ger man government in a special report last year said antl semltism was practically non existent. In a recent state ment Interior Minister Her mann Hoecherl told the coun try that "ultra-natlonnll dead" and "undercover exist ence of anti-semltism Is meaningless." Jewish leaders agree that overt anti-semitlsm, allowing always for the occasional twisted individual, is gone. Dr. Henrlk George Van Dam, the Jewish community's sec retary general, reported this year that anti-semltism and neo-Nazlsrn are no longer problems In Germany. Why then, the continuing self - questioning? Why the fears of one American about bringing a Jewish wife to live here? It is not the sort of thing that can be accurately polled. Surveys can at best come up with answers in generalities. One leading West German editor, asked to state his view, said helplessly: "Who knows if anti-semitlsm is dead in Germany? Who knows if it is dead anywhere?" KNOCK DANDELIONS OUTof your lawn! INSC UAfGE 5 Dandelions and other broad-leaved weeds can be eliminated from your lawn. With GOLF BRAND TRIPLE TONICyou not only kill these lawn pests . . . you feed your lawn the nutrients it needs for greener growth at the same time. And now GOLF BRAND TRIPLE TONIC con tains iron to prevent unsightly iron chlorosis! Easy-to-apply GOLF BRAND TRIPLE TONIC also kills the bugs that infest your lawn, but not helpful earthworms. Get a bag and start three-way lawn improve ment this week! BRUCE BAUER LUMBER COMPANY 765 South Riverside Medford, Oregon PLEASE - Be Careful! MAY IS AMERICAN BIKE MONTH Sliissssal mmm t-HM i V mm Quickie Quiz For Safe Cycling Safety il l eatery doci. and before reaching tht doing itage, KNOWINS HOW ii molt important. Ai today'i 55 million cyclilti gear up (or Spring nd Summer tilt fun. a quick quit to felt their lafsty procedurei knowledge might pay handiome dividend!. Hera then are 10 true or falie queitioni de aignad to rait your bilts IQ- Publiihed in Cooperation Witt) Crater Lake Poit l33. Veterena of Foreign Wan to Adonca Hio fine Work of Thte Orgeniaation in the F,eW ot licycht Salary Medford. Tribune A bike ihould be ridden on the left ude of the road, facing traffic. "Jumping" a curb will not damage a properly inflated tire. The hand lignali for atopping or turning a hike an the ume ji for cars. Riding two oa a bike it all right for an tiperienced rider. When palling a alow-moving car, paei on the right. 4. The cyeliit hai the right of way over pedeitriana. 7. Riding "ne handa" ia lafe on a imooth, ttraight road. .'.T' .hjaalin, dovice. deiigned for ths autont da not apply to the cyeliit. A level, atrarght highway ia a good place for a bike race. A cyeliit ihould itop. look and liiten at ALL Isl Ilssl Anrweri: The eycl.it who .n,., it,,,, , , ,h, ,., hti better nay home unt.1 he learm the nilei of the road.