NEWS & VIEWS
NEWS& VIEWS Boys Town Front cover and eight and one-half pages of text and pictures - that's what the current Columbia Journalism Review devotes to Paul N. Williams' account of the journalistic...
...But the article seems as preoccupied as was the expose itself "not to convey any tone of anti-Catholicism or implication that anybody was misappropriating funds...
...Odds and Ends - Variations on a theme from H.M.S...
...That reform is "slower and and less fundamental" than Williams would prefer to see...
...The Columbia Journalism Review piece is even titled "Boys Town: an expose without bad guys...
...Certainly you knew it would disrupt morale at Boys Town, would cause some people to lose their jobs, and thousands to lose faith in a respected institution...
...Neither is likely to be financed out of old Boys Town funds, however, because of the threat of lawsuits charging misuse of funds-earlier donors having intended their money for an orphanage program...
...Government prosecutor Lieut...
...and Palo Alto, Calif...
...Does Hupp decry any effects of the Sun's reportage...
...Does he feel vindicated...
...Will they be rocked from their apathy...
...1 to take it up...
...Nicholas Wegner, Father Flanagan's successor at Boys Town, over the papers' look into the operation...
...And what of Twin Circle...
...Its residents, meanwhile, were being given what has been labeled "restricted horizons"-vocational training, for instance, as bakers, metalworkers, or barbers...
...Work is beginning on $10.1 million worth of buildings for a Boys Town Institute for Communication Disorders in Children, and construction may start this year or next on a Center for the Study of Youth Development, with facilities in Omaha, Washington, D.C...
...Martin, classic irony...
...And it specifies the unwillingness of Archbishop Daniel Sheehan of Omaha to fill gaps or volunteer information...
...What, meanwhile, of Boys Town's finances...
...And wouldn't you know that the board of the National Association of Laity would meet in Syracuse on Feb...
...The article is largely city-room talk...
...Well, yes, says Williams...
...Good reporting aids public understanding," he writes, "which I believe has produced tempered but implacable pressures for reform...
...What might students be provoked into doing now that they have to read Silas Mar-ner, Moby Dick and 300 other books-made-easy...
...Classic Finish Washington Poster Judith Martin had fun with the demise of Twin Circle's Classic Comics enterprise...
...JOHN DEEDY...
...It seems to have diminished 'the dedication some of the staff had.' Also, the boys are less careful about breakage and waste...
...Then, in some closing paragraphs, Williams gets to the query of critics: "Did you stop to think about whether to break the story that way...
...The Williams article provides no new revelations to go on top of the mountain of disclosures that won for the Sun Newspapers a Pulitzer Prize, one of the few ever given a weekly for reporting...
...People say we have more money than we know what to do with," Hupp is quoted...
...Is there no grant to save Dos-toevsky, Jack London and Shakespeare comic-books...
...Yes, we thought about it carefully," Williams answers...
...NEWS& VIEWS Boys Town Front cover and eight and one-half pages of text and pictures - that's what the current Columbia Journalism Review devotes to Paul N. Williams' account of the journalistic investigation that led to the Boys Town expose in March, 1972...
...In our view of where a newspaper's duty lies, there was only one answer: publish...
...Boys Town is now under a new executive director, Father Robert P. Hupp...
...Boys Town's net worth was discovered to be about $209 million by the end of 1971, and was rising at about $17 million a year, or more, after all expenses...
...Edward W. Remsburg argued that coffee is "part of the tradition of the Navy . . . Without it, morale would be affected...
...The charge: refusing to make coffee for Navy officers...
...Likewise, he fails to understand why Boys Town's directors have moved to resume the fund-raising appeals...
...Obviously...
...It is reduced to offering "an attractive permanent binder, covered in beautiful brown simulated leather and richly embossed in gold" to hold your collectors' copies in your library...
...If there were morale problems, they were Boys Town's...
...And what about the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities...
...Williams, who teaches investigative reporting at Ohio State University, was managing editor of the Sun Newspapers of Omaha, the chain of small weeklies that revealed Boy Town's endowment to be about three times Notre Dame's (for a child population of about 665), with a net worth that would have ranked Boys Town 230th on Fortune's list of "Top 500" industrial firms, were its figures of public record...
...It is, says Ms...
...We weighed these against what we saw as the public's right to know about use of its charitable resources...
...Says Williams: "Hupp, 59, has cut Boys Town's population to fewer than 500 boys and has done away with such quaint practices as reading their incoming mail, regulating their schedules by bells, feeding hem in a giant mess hall, and denying them telephones (they may now use pay phones in their cottages...
...I know what to do with it...
...It does confirm the upset of Msgr...
...1 for Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan-Howard, 16th Duke of Norfolk, and England's ranking Catholic peer: ". .. he would not have disowned the appellation of being a 'garden of the soul Catholic' brought up upon and all his life using that prayer-book which for 200 years nourished the piety of English Catholics since Bishop Challoner compiled it for them...
...He is using Boys Town funds to help those who want to go to college or take other post-high-school training...
...But he is satisfied that Boys Town has been rocked out of an "institutional inertia...
...The use of girls to serve Mass has to be the great Catholic non-issue of 1975...
...Gifts from the public dropped sharply during the two years that mailing appeals were suspended: from some $15 million in 1971 to $3.6 million in 1972 and $6 million in 1973...
...He is pressing his expanded administrative staff to develop a formal budget for the first time in the institution's 57 years...
...He has begun ("with some reservations") to change the counseling system, working towards teams of four counselors in each cottage of 12 boys...
...It need hardly be added that he did not welcome the liturgical changes which followed Second Vatican Council...
...From the London Times' two-and-one-half column obituary of Feb...
...Boys Town's net worth continued to expand, however, to $226.7 million (unaudited) at the end of 1973-thanks in part to interest and dividends at the rate of $8 million annually, or more, from investments...
...Pinafore: The Navy has court-martialed enlisted man Garrett W. Gosnell in Norfolk...
Vol. 101 • February 1975 • No. 15
