THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 1, 1996 TAG: 9606290005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
LENGTH: 93 lines
Novelist William Styron was in his hometown of Newport News this month with a documentary-film crew that he guided to Smithfield and to Southampton County, where Nat Turner led the South's best-known slave rebellion. Styron won a Pulitizer Prize for his novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner.
In Smithfield, the 71-year-old writer feasted on Smithfield ham and fried chicken, which is as Virginia a meal as there ever was and sky-high in fat and cholesterol. He told a reporter: ``If you pay too much attention to your health, you'll live to be a hundred but you'll be an ill-tempered old man.''
Styron and his wife of 42 years, Rose, make their home in Connecticut and summer on Martha's Vineyard. They have lived abroad and traveled widely. They have dined in many splendid restaurants.
But Styron's appetite for Smithfield ham is unabated. He has the old town's hams shipped to him - further proving, as did his most recently published book of fiction, Tidewater Morning, that although the boy took himself out of the South, the South never took itself out of him. Get these sponsors
O.J. Simpson sponsored a fund-raising event last week to help organizations that combat violence, gang and domestic. He no longer knocks Nicole Brown Simpson around; his late wife, as even habitues of the deepest jungles perhaps know, was murdered, along with a friend who happened to have stopped by her house.
A Los Angeles jury found Simpson innocent of the charge of murdering her, but the court of public opinion clings to a contrary judgment.
So the Simpson fund-raiser prompted some people to conjecture that the former football star, ``actor'' and TV pitchman is trying to regain the public's respect.
Simpson's event brought in some bucks for abused women, which could suggest a whole new line of celebrity-linked fund raisers. How about a Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial mock-cannibal feast to generate dollars for boys' clubs, a Charles Manson festival to underwrite drug-treatment programs for hop heads and a Mike Tyson boxing benefit for rape crisis centers? A Top Ten business location
Both Hampton Roads and Richmond have been designated as top ten towns in which to locate a business.
The study by Regional Financial Associates was reported in a recent Business Week and concerns the relative cost of doing business. It takes into account tax rates, office rents and energy costs. But the factor given the greatest weight is labor costs.
Both Hampton Roads and Richmond scored well and ought to have an advantage in attracting employers. However, cheap isn't everything.
If low labor cost means less skilled workers and low taxes translates into a lack of infrastructure, employers may rethink the tradeoff. At the moment, Virginia appears to be in the happy position of offering both adequate amenities and relatively skilled workers at a reasonable cost. But to keep attracting good jobs, the state must keep its roads, ports and schools competitive. Doing so without making taxes a deal breaker is the challenge. Bad aim
Lenin once prophesied the capitalists would sell the communists the rope with which to hang them. It didn't quite work out that way, but in the aftermath of the Cold War we are at risk of shooting ourselves in the foot with our arms sales.
An advisory panel appointed by the president has reported that a global arms trade approaching $22 billion (U.S. share, 52 percent) poses a threat to U.S. security. Our enthusiasm for selling sophisticated arms abroad, the panel found, could backfire. Many conventional weapons pack a huge wallop these days and our indiscriminate sales could put them into the hands of foes, not friends. When unstable regimes topple, for instance.
The report was especially critical of a tendency to authorize arms sales not because they make strategic sense but in order to keep the arms makers in business. That's bad economics and bad geopolitics. It could easily result in taxpayers footing the bill for weapons that wind up pointed at their sons and daughters in uniform. The president and Congress should heed this warning. Aging brothers
Everyone who has watched the popoular Shriner's parade in Virginia Beach each autumn has suspected that the age of the average Shriner was increasing while the overall number of Shriners was decreasing.
Now the Philadelphia Inquirer confirms the bad news in a story about membership in fraternal organizations. Membership is down. Way down.
The Inquirer reports that since the late 1970s the Lions clubs have had a 15 percent drop in membership, the Elks are off by 23 percent, the Moose by 8 percent and the Masons and Shriners are showing a 30 percent decrease in members.
But cutbacks in government social programs could be good news for lodges which have traditionally performed community service.
``Just look at society,'' said Moose director general Frank Sarnecki. ``Look at its sadly growing numbers of dispossessed children. Look at its increasing numbers of elderly facing an insecure retirement. And look at its communities, where overburdened local government just can't cover all the needs anymore.
``Then look at the Moose.'' by CNB