Debriefing

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. – I grew up in another country - a place with its own heroes, songs and customs, even its own unlikely vegetation. Whether in scrub pine country or the middle of the Western plains, the Army posts where I lived were always the same lush green. The same shade trees protected well-watered lawns that were always trimmed to the height specified in the Post Rules and Regulations. The flag was lowered in the same "retreat" ceremony at the same time every evening./P

Very Expensive Education

George White is superintendent of Northwest Arctic School District headquartered in Kotzebue, Alaska, serving 1,550 students in grades K-12 with 130 teachers and 227 aides, cooks, custodians, principals and administrators in 11 small villages scattered across 36,000 square miles of roadless Alaskan wilderness. It is an unusual operation. It spends over $6,000 annually per student, three times the national average of $1,800. It pays first year teachers $20,033 for a nine-month contract, half again the U.S. average for all teachers (but less than some rural Alaskan districts). In Shungnak Alaska, a village of 200, it built a $2.7 million school for 75 students. Similar schools are under construction or complete in almost all eleven villages. Northwest Arctic attracts state and federal grants for many purposes, especially those grants targeted for Native Americans, in which the district abounds. Yet with all these resources, the district loses 30 to 40 percent of its teachers every year. And this year, one-third of the Shungnak High School students left their new school (with their parents' blessings) to go to Mt. Edgecumbe boarding school 1,000 miles away near Sitka, Alaska.

Things Fall Apart

SAN FRANCISCO — The Colorado River rises high in the Rockies, near Long's Peak in the state that bears its name, and begins its 1500-mile, 12,000 foot descent to the Gulf of California. Its waters are sweet. The Colorado's volume swells quickly from snowmelt, and before long it is a roaring churning violently through red canyons down the long West Slope of the Rockies. Not far from the great Utah desert, near the town of Palisade, the rapids die into riffles and the tempestuous Colorado becomes, for the relatively short length of forty miles, calm and sedate. It has entered the Grand Valley, a small but productive agricultural basin full of orchards and grazing cows looking utterly out of place in a landscape where it appears to have rained once, about half a million years ago. Agriculture in the Grand Valley depends on the river, so a good deal of its water takes an excursion there to irrigate the fields. As the water leaves the river, its measured salinity content is about 200 parts per million. As it returns to the river, the salinity content is about 6500 parts per million.

End or Begin?

CAIRO – Hassan AI-Tuhami is one of those men who, at first sight, conveys to you a special presence, and even something more. I had asked for an interview because he is known as Anwar Sadat's eminence grise, and apart from Sadat himself is considered the principal inspiration behind Egypt's peace overture to Israel. He invited me to see him late one afternoon in his apartment in Zamalek, the most bourgeois of the quarters of Cairo. I arrived only with the knowledge that he was regarded as a man of mystery, and nothing more.

LOS ANGELES – Fifty years ago Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, a.k.a. Stepin Fetchit, reigned as the first and only black movie star. He had made his motion picture debut in the silent film "In Old Kentucky" (1927) playing opposite Carolynne Snowden; it was a groundbreaking role in which for the first time in a Hollywood film "a clear love affair -a sexual relationship" was depicted between blacks (Slow Fade to Black, Thomas Cripps, Oxford Press, 1977). His real success, however, began in one of the early talkies, "Hearts in Dixie" (1929), where he introduced the dawdling, slow talking, illiterate character that had been created years ago by others on the vaudeville circuit, but would become his trademark.