ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, July 19, 1996 TAG: 9607190022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
IN THE mid-1960s, Paul Moyer caught some children breaking into a store in his Northwest Roanoke neighborhood.
He didn't run them off.
He didn't alert police, then shrug it off as their problem.
He didn't demand that the kids be treated like hardened adult criminals.
He didn't ask politicians to ``do something.''
He didn't call for a task-force study.
He didn't apply for a federal grant.
He didn't wait for a government solution.
Instead, Moyer talked to the kids, asking them why they had broken into the store. They told him: ``Because we don't have anything else better to do.''
They also told him they wanted to play football and basketball, but there were no programs in their neighborhoods.
So Moyer and other parents formed the Inner-City Athletic Association, to give lower-income kids more chance to participate in sports and recreational activities.
It's anybody's guess how many Roanoke youngsters have not broken into stores or otherwise run afoul of the law because of this voluntary, nonprofit endeavor. The numbers of victories and honors won by ICAA participants on the fields, courts and tracks of athletic competition are easier to gauge.
Just last weekend, for instance, the ICAA ``team,'' boys and girls, collected a bunch of medals in track-and-field competition at the statewide Commonwealth Games in the Roanoke Valley. Not all of those youngsters are bound for future Olympics, of course. Few will go on to professional sports careers as did, for example, the National Basketball Association's George Lynch - a well-known ICAA alumnus.
But they all have been given something to do better than becoming juvenile-crime, teen-pregnancy, drug-abuse or school-dropout statistics.
All the Commonwealth Games' winners and participants deserve congratulations. But the shiniest medals should go to people, like Moyer, who care enough to get personally involved with the children in their communities.
LENGTH: Short : 45 linesby CNB