New England's
Crate Escape
t may not constitute a ma-
jor crime wave, but to the
A New England dairy indus-
try it's the moral equivalent of
highway robbery. The crime:
theft of milk crates. The chief
culprits: college students who
use the crates to store books
and records. Calling for a
crackdown on crate snatchers,
dairy lobbyists got a bill intro-
duced in the Maine Legislature
to stiffen the punishment for
milk-crate theft from a $250
fine to $1,000 plus a year in
jail. But the lawmakers voted
down the bill last spring, rea-
soning with state Sen. John
Balducci: "It's tough enough
to graduate without having to
do time for a milk crate."
Dairy owners aren't giving
up. Bill Bennett, vice president
7 of Oakhurst Dairy in Port-
land, Maine, says stolen crates
(at $2 apiece) cost his business
$60,000 last year. The industry
claims to have lost $75 million
nationwide because of crate
snatching. Some dairymen
are retaliating by taking mat-
ters into their own hands.
Oakhurst ran ads in the stu-
dent newspaper at the Uni-
versity of Maine in Orono ask-
ing students to return their
crates. When that tactic failed,
the dairy dispatched milkmen
to "retrieve" the crates from
students carrying goods from
their dorms after graduation.
In Bennington, Vt., Fair-
dale Farms Dairy got even
tougher, obtaining a search
warrant and raiding a dorm at
Johnson State College during
Christmas break last year, seiz-
ing 428 milk crates. The move
was roundly criticized as "over-
kill." Maybe the dairy indus-
try should simply start opening
milk-crate concessions on
campuses, instead.
KA TE ROBINS in Boston
Shy Does Not
Equal Lonely
When Tulsa psychology
professor Warren
Jones began studying
loneliness 12 years ago, he did
something researchers rarely
do: he peeked at the names of
students who had completed a
survey. "I was testing my as-
sumptions about who was
lonely," Jones explains. "I
thought the loneliest
would be students I didn't
Iz Vyb : d i w Le
Realizing a lofty ambition: Student in the New Hampshire sky
know." Wrong. The male and
female students who ranked
as most lonely on his scale were
bright, outspoken people who
seemed to be popular.
Shyness, according to
Jones, is a single personality
trait. Loneliness, by contrast,
is a syndrome involving feel-
ings of low self-worth and
negativism about life in gen-
eral. "All lonely people are
shy," Jones says, "but not all
shy people are lonely." Forty
percent of all young adults, he
says, consider themselves in-
herently shy. Shy students
are usually identified as shy
by the people they meet, but
they also may seem at first to be
unfriendly. In the long run,
however, "shy people may be
better liked by their friends,"
AGE Jones says. "They're loy-
al, better listeners and
less competitive." In
Jones's studies of 136
students, 78.6 percent
experienced shyness
when meeting strangers
or approaching author-
ity figures.
Lonely people, in his
view, are harder to spot.
They may be liked by
others but seldom like
themselves. Jones
urges sufferers to recog-
nize that "virtually ev-
eryone" feels lonely at
times, whether their
schools are big or small.
Interior decorating or petty
larceny? Student with
low-budget bookshelf at
the University of Maine
Flyin High at
Hawt orne
nmany small college
towns, it seems as if students
are always underfoot. But
in Antrim, N.H., the students
at Hawthorne College are
usually overhead-probably
doing barrel rolls at 16,000
feet. At this unusual liberal-
arts school, more than half of
the student body of about 350
major in aviation. Hawthorne
authorities say they select their
flying majors with an eye to
lofty dedication. Says aviation
instructor Jeffrey Brown:
"We're looking for kids who
eat, sleep and breathe flying."
Former chancellor William
Shea, an avid pilot, launched
the program in 1962. "Every-
one else was saying, 'Let's start
a French class'," Shea recalls.
"So I said, 'Let's teach flying!' "
Today aviation majors re-
quire more than a wing and a
prayer: a year's expenses total
$15,000 for aviation majors,
compared to $6,700 for other
students. The college main-
tains its own airport and a
fleet of 17 smiall planes and two
helicopters. By graduation,
the aviation majors not only
will have taken a standard
course load leading to a B.S. de-
gree but will have logged
about 500 hours of flight time-
which gives them one-third of
the hours they need to qualify
for an entry-level commercial
pilot's job.
NEWSWEEK ON CAMPUS 23