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 No one di course, for governmer move to o the inciden man. D OES A worth matic glan 1972, the ti Rage was d frightening of good rev of bad one from sight, across the "fashionab Vietnam v "honorable Nixon was Watergate attached to Americans about. Not film to adv our gover always tel fact, be lyii Later on, theory bec with such as The Doi Days of th paranoia I made grol Se Doily Photo by CHRISTINA SCHNEIDER Howard:". . . the su- perintendent-has to have a lot of latitude."