Sports: Durant headed to Golden State See B1
THE IOLA REGISTER Locally owned since 1867
www.iolaregister.com
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
June tax receipts $34M below projections
Ray Vader gets behind the wheel Saturday of a customized “rocket car” built by Elsmore native Earl Miner back in the 1970s. The car has since been reacquired by Miner’s children, and was featured during a family reunion over the weekend. REGISTER/RICHARD
LUKEN
Family recoups father’s ‘rocket car’ By RICHARD LUKEN The Iola Register
LAHARPE — It’s not the most fun to drive. With a touchy throttle, extended nose and limited visibility, most would hesitate to try the custom-made “rocket car.” But for Suzanne and Ray Vader, driving the car takes Suzanne back to her childhood and once again appreciate her father’s genius.
The rocket car, built from scratch in the early 1970s by Elsmore native Earl Miner, was a focal point of the Boler-Miner family reunion over the weekend in LaHarpe, Elsmore and Hepler. At first glance, most passersby thought it was an airplane. “But it doesn’t fly,” Ray Vader says with a chuckle. THE ROCKET car was one of Miner’s many inventions.
As a mechanic in the Air Force and a confessed tinkerer, “Dad was always working on something,” Suzanne Vader said. “He liked to build things, and he really liked rockets.” So in 1973, Miner began construction of his rocket car. He started with a handmade aluminum frame, equipped with a 1967 Chevy 327-cubic-inch V-8 engine, and a two-speed power glide
Helping others boosts Kappa Alpha By RICHARD LUKEN The Iola Register
Gwen Tefft figured operating a concession stand this summer would be a fun and productive way for Kappa Alpha sorority to serve the community. And it has. “But I think it’s been just as rewarding for us members,” Tefft said. Kappa Alpha, a local branch of the national Phi Tau Omega philanthropic sorority, has used the proceeds from its summer ball concession stand at Riverside Park to assist a number of local charitable endeavors. The sorority makes monthly donations to Hope Unlimited, the Pregnancy Resource Center and the Allen County Animal Rescue Facility, and when school resumes, the St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church “Backpack Kids” project, which sends needy students home for the weekend with enough food to see them through. In addition, Kappa Alpha assists a number of local cancer patients with money for gas or other needs when they must travel out of town for cancer treatments. “There’s a lot insurance doesn’t cover,” Tefft said. “We want to help in any way we can.” WITH AT least 16 members who attend the monthly meetings, Tefft, et al, had several willing to man the
transmission. With the assistance of Air Force pal Gary Shelton, Miner took about nine months to complete the project. All of it was built by hand, aside from the engine and rear axle, which came from a 1969 Dodge. “The front-wheel mechanism, he designed and built,” Suzanne Vader said. “There was some trial and error, but See ROCKET | Page A3
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas tax revenues in June came in $34.5 million below estimates, boosting the year’s total shortfall to $76.2 million and forcing officials to scramble to balance the ending fiscal 2016 budget. The Kansas Department of Revenue on Friday announced it was withholding roughly $260 million from school districts’ June payment until July 7, but marking it as a June 30 payment. Officials also were pulling $23.6 million from the state’s highway fund, the Kansas Department of Corrections and unspent money in the Children’s Initiatives Fund. The moves will leave the state with a positive ending balance for the fiscal year that ended Thursday, as required by the state constitution. Corporate income tax receipts in June came in $20.3 million, or 25.1 percent, below estimates and individual See SHORTFALL | Page A3
Renowned Holocaust survivor, Wiesel, dies By MARY ROURKE and VALERIE J. NELSON Los Angeles Times (TNS)
Kappa Alpha sorority member Susan Hoffmeier scoops up a bag of popcorn Thursday at the concession stand in Riverside Park. Kappa Alpha is manning the stand as a fundraiser. REGISTER/RICHARD LUKEN
concession stand during the hot summer evenings, while baseball and softball games were ongoing nearby. “We tried to rotate everybody, so nobody had to do all the work,” Tefft said. “It’s
Quote of the day Vol. 118, No. 175
been great. We’ve teamed up members who normally wouldn’t get to spend much time together. And we’re not so busy that we can’t sit See SORORITY | Page A3
Elie Wiesel, the Nazi concentration camp survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author whose seminal work “Night” is regarded as one of the most powerful achievements in Holocaust literature, has died, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial said. He was 87. Based on his experiences and those of other Holocaust survivors, Wiesel wrote dozens of semi-autobiographical books, memoirs and plays. His message “of peace, atonement and human dignity” earned him the Nobel prize in 1986. For a decade, he was silent about the horrors he witnessed after being transported by train to Auschwitz with his parents and three sisters when he was 15. After a year, he was liberated at the end of World War II with other prisoners from the German camp Buchenwald — and soon learned that his mother and younger sister had been killed in the gas chambers. He already had seen his captive father die a brutal death. First penned in Yiddish, the harrowing yet unsentimental account based on Wiesel’s year in the death camps was published in French in 1958
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” — Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and novelist 75 Cents
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust chronicler, talks to students at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., in a March 2011 file image. LOS ANGELES TIMES/ LIZ O. BAYLEN/TNS
and eventually printed in more than 30 languages. President Barack Obama issued a statement Saturday, calling Wiesel a “dear friend” and recounting their visit together in 2009 to Buchenwald, where more than 50,000 people were killed during the Nazi regime. “Elie Wiesel was one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world,” Obama said. “Elie was not See WIESEL | Page A6
Hi: 93 Lo: 74 Iola, KS