Page 6-Sunday, December 4, 1977-The Michigan Daily
The Michigan Daily-Sonday, C
Top cop
Walter
Krasny
P OWER COMES IN many forms.
Sometimes it can be quiet and
graceful; a corporate executive, for
instance, can sit in his paneled office
and give an order over the telephone
that instantly puts a thousand people
out of work.
But there are other, less refined,
ways to influence people and events:
the crack of a billy club over someone's
head, a bullet in the leg, a year or two in
jail. And Walter Krasny-as Ann Ar-
bor's chief of police-deals with that
kind of power every waking day of his
life, whether he likes it or not.
"When you get right down to it," he
says with a calm smile, "we're in the
business of repression."
Krasny heads a compact police
department. This year it employed
some 181 people (150 of them sworn law
enforcement officers) and operated on
a budget allocation of $4.5 million. For
all intents and purposes, it is his private
See KRASNY, Page 8
FtOOK S
Westward Ho!
No, Eastward
...
Ho!,.?Wron
again *Ha!1
EASTWARD HA!'
By S. J. Perelman
Simon and Schuster B
126 pp. $7.95"
I FIRST discovered S.J. Perelmart
during the 1972 inaugural week- me guffawing loudly betw
end when - languishing under a of penicillin, and whoopingt
deathly combination of strep and throatful of Xylocaine, a
mono, evicted from my dorm, and reader risks being convert
ousted from a Daily junket to abject devotee for life.
Washington, D.C. - I read Westward I plunged onward through
Ha!, which included such chapter classics: Crazy Like a Fox (
grumblings as "Please Don't Give "You Should Live So, 'W
Me Nothing To Remember You By" Pond"), Vinegar Puss (thet
and "It's Not the Heat, It's the affectionate nickname best(
Cupidity". on the author) and The Mo
Brother, believe me: if, under Perelman.
those circumstances, the author had I also learned that there i
y Cynthia Hill
Krasny: "We're in the business of
Daily Photo by ANDY FREEBERG
repression."
s :
Don Canham and his sports biz
een doses
through a
healthy
ted to an
his other
including
Walden
title is an
towed up-
st of S.J.
s a small
n buffs in
ak a copy
Yorker
Poli Sci
lecture, or perhaps chuckle quietly
over a tale or two at 3 a.m., when
they realize that their bank account
won't cover the rent and the phone
bill.
And many, of course, are inadvert-
ent Perelman fans, not realizing he is
the author of much of the Marx
Brothers material from the 30's.
It's too bad. For while his Marx
Brothers scripts, and New Yorker
pieces are often excellent, they can't
hold a candle to his own disgruntled
memoirs, such as the following
description of an encounter with rats
on the island of Rhodes (an excerpt
from Eastward Ha!, this season's
belated se
Ha!:
... I sure
bearing a%
their shoal
another oc
the size of
the vine no
marble-tol
ing his win
with an ai
deliberate]
flash of1
rodents' c
-.planted, I
found that
only on the
cellophane
the conten
packet, the
See P
I N ANN ARBOR, athletics is Big
Business indeed. In fact, on fall
weekends, it's the biggest business
there is.
A single Wolverine home game, for
instance, can easily bring the city's
merchants a neat million or two in
sales during the height of the football
season. That's not even considering
the $600,000 or so raked in by the
University in admission prices, or
the wages of the 600-odd workers
employed in game operations -
money which sooner or later makes
its way into Ann Arbor's economy.
The man responsible for making
all of this happen - the man who
molded intercollegiate athletics into
the profitable, efficient and some-
times heartless enterprise it is today
- is University Athletic Director
Donald Canham.
Since 1968, whenhe took over from
retiring director Fritz Crisler, Can-
ham has radically changed the face
of varsity athletics. He has taken the
heart of sport from the locker room
and into the marketplace, and built a
$5 million-a-year empire on the sweat
and muscle of University athletes.
Canham, 59, was born in Oak Park,
Ill., and was an NCAA high jump
champion during his student days
here. In 1946, he became assistant
track coach, and was promoted to
head coach two years later. In 1954,
he founded Don Canham Enter-
prises, a sports equipment/training
conglomerate which has brought him
millions. When he took the post as
University athletic director in 1968,
he divested himself of his interest in
the company. The University made
the exchange as painless as it could.
Critics say Canham doesn't give a
damn for the beauty of sport when
confronted with the beauty of a.
dollar; and charge him .with regular-
ly ignoring the needs of recreational,
intramural and women's athletics in
favor of more profitable varsity
sports. For every Canham critic,
however, a supporter can be found.
His methods have been imitated
from coast to coast, and he has put
the University's name on thousands
of unlikely lips.
But friends and enemies agree that
Canham is a skilled intriguer who
wheels and deals in the highest
circles, an autocratic administrator
who guards his power jealously.
"There's only one way to run a
successful athletic department," he
says, "and that's to run it like a
corporation. I have my nose in
everything, and I'm surrounded by
people I've hand-picked myself. I
know it can be dangerous to have one
strong personality running things,
but I never saw anything run well by
a committee. The best committee is
one guy working like hell."
Cynthia Hill, a former Daily
editor, contributes frequently
to the Sunday Magazine.
but select group of Perelma
the area. They furtively sne,
of Perelman's latest New
short story to their boring
FILM/~lchrlistopher potter
Daily Photo by BRAD BENJAMIN
Canham: "... one guy
working like hell. "
Power is
academ I for
Harry Howard
FEW MEN HOLD great power as gracefully as
Harry Howard.
As superintendent of the Ann Arbor Public School
District, Howard administers a $40 million-a-year
operation and supervises the cultivation of 18,000 little
minds. "Harry Howard," says City Councilman Jamie
Kenworthy (D-4th Ward), "runs the school system the
way Sy Murray runs the city."
It's true. In his private domain, Howard is as hefty
a customer as you'd care to meet. But he's also a care-
ful man with a reputation for being a "hell of a sur-
vivor"-despite his influence, he takes great pains to
go along with his elected bosses on the Board of Educa-
tion. If bombs fall while Howard is in office, they aren't
going to fall on him.
Still, the superintendent is a tough administrator
with a master's grasp of finance-and while many of
his underlings complain that he keeps them in a con-
stant state of terror, they readily admit he pushes
himself with the same demonic energy he lavishes on
them.
Howard was born in 1924 in Harlan County, Ken-
tucky, and received his BS from Eastern Kentucky
University in 1949, and his MS in 1953. His career in
educational administration began in 1951, when he
took a job as a high school principal. From 1957 to
1973, he served as superintendent for Michigan's
Wayne-Westland Community School District.
When Howard took charge of the Ann Arbor school
district in 1973, the city's educational establishment
was beset with funding and unmet labor problems.
But Howard moved in with ruthless precision-rerout-
ing dollars, re-examining goals, and laying off em-
ployes to create funds for school programs. Within a
year, the school system was back on its feet and
Howard was getting the credit.
He still is. With one or two exceptions, the Board
members are enchanted with their superintendent's
energy and dedication. Howard has received regular
and generous-pay increases since his hiring. His
annual salary, as of last December, is $44,000.
See HOWARD, Page 8
RE'S THE final part of a.
list stating mfy candidates-
for the most underrated and over-
rated films of the '70s. This week,
it's the last of the underrated.
2. Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) - As
a rule, film versions of famous novels
almost invariably fall short of their
original. Slaughterhouse-Five is a
notable reversal of that trend, per-
haps partially because Kurt Vonne-
gut's fantasy-allegory about Billy
Pilgrim's time travels was so over-
rated to begin with. Still, the book's
deficiencies in no way downgrade a
film which stands tall and brilliant,
largely on its own merits.
George Roy Hill is normally one of
the most slick-mechanical directors.
anywhere (The Sting, etc.), but on
this one memorable occasion he
matched his technical expertise with
a gui compassion to craft one of the
most entertaining and least phony
anti-war films I've ever seen. As Hill
follows Billy's ever fluctuating jour-
neys between present, World War II
past and Tralfamadorian future, he
brings to his work the scope and
dignity that Vonnegut's indulgent,
self-conscious novel so painfully
lacked (thank God, not a single "so
it goes" is uttered the entire length of
the film).
Hill misfires only once, inserting a
slapstick car chase that seems
totally out of place. Otherwise, the
director's instincts are unflaggingly
right - whatever scene cut from the
book seemed superfluous in the first
place; any sequence added brings
new depth to both story and theme.
This remarkable film is helped no
end by a series of near-perfect
characterizations by a group of
actors rarely seen elsewhere and
thus readily adaptable to one's own
notion of what the book's people
should be like. Their cumulative
efforts more than do Vonnegut
justice. And that's more than he did
for them to begin with.
3. Rage (1972) - Sometimes I seri-
ously wonder if I'm the only person
anywhere who's ever seen Rage.
Whenever I make a reference to this
thematically militant work, I draw
unanimously blank stares from both
film groupies and radical politicos
alike. If only they knew what they
had missed.
T WO YEARS before George C.
Scott permanently undermined
his directorial career with the brain-
less The Savage is Loose, he concoct-
ed this terrifying gem of a cinematic
nightmare which can justly claim the
honor of being the first unabashed
conspiracy film to be produced in
America. (I discount Haskell Wex-
ler's Medium Cool, whose muddled
semi-documentary style merely
skirted the edges of the political
cesspool it purported to expose).
Rage's plot is simple and horrify-
ing. A small-time rancher (Scott)
and his son are out camping over-
night on the range somewhere in the
Southwest. Suddenly their union is
shattered by technology run amok.
Wbile sleeping. the two are acciden-
tally sprayed with poisonous gas
dropped from a military plane as
part of a chemical warfare study.
When the rancher awakes, his son is
dying.
A local hospital can do nothing to
counteract the effects of the gas. The
boy dies and his father, who received
a lesser dose, learns that he is also
fatally ill. For much of the remainder
of the film, he engages in a desperate
search to simply find out what was
done to him and his son. He meets
with a stone wall of lies and silence
fronr government officials deter-
mined to prevent any outside discov-
ery of the incident. It is the first
cover-up, long before the term was to
become a part of our popular lexicon.
Only by literally holding a gun to the
head of the official in charge of the
operation (no leering villain, just a
cherub-faced little man entrenched
in an evolving deviousness) is the
rancher finally able to learn the truth
of his malady.
In a maniacal fury - spurred less
over the accident than at the institu-
tionalized lying about it - the dying
rancher blows up a chemical warfare
testing station, then is ultimately
tracked down in a grisly midnight
The underrated cont.)
scene. We
from his rn
the ground
lights slow
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Doily Photo by CHRISTINA SCHNEIDER
Howard:". . . the su-
perintendent-has to have a
lot of latitude."