PH: 842-2611
Price 50 Cents
52 pages, 3 sections
Vol . 107 No. 207
Tupelo, Mississippi, Weekend Edition, November 29-30, 1980
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S. Green St., East of Hospital
Hostage Transfer Plans ·Under Way By United Press lnternaUonal An Iranian official said Friday preparations for the transfer of the 52 American hostages from the custody of the militants to the Tehran government were under way but first they must find a secure spot to hold them in "absolute safety." The U.S. State Department said the transfer of the hostages to the custody of the Iranian government would be "a helpful step forward" but could not confirm if the move already has been made. Citing "conflicting reports" that the militants who seized the hostages 391 days ago relinquished control of the Americans, spokesman John Trattner said the State Department has made "inquiries through diplomatic channels.'' But he added, "We have no information on the whereabouts of the hostages or that the student militants have relinquished control of them . There are conflicting versions of this coming from Iran ... but we don't
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The traditional Christmas shopping season opened in Tupelo Friday as holiday bargain hunters filled malls, above and below , uptown stores and streets, below
right. Traffic on all business district streets was extremely congested and parking spaces were reportedly few and far between.
Big Crowds Open Yule
Gift Season By JULIE SNEED Staff Writer Shoppers filled local malls to capacity and crowded uptown stores Friday with the traditional opening day of the Christmas shopping season. Merchants predicted shoppers will be spending money more conservatively and concentrating on quality products of a practical nature. Local Christmas sales Friday seemed to show an increase over last year's sales, merchants said, adding that the day after Thanskgiving marks a day of record retail sales nationwide. Michael Earnest, manager of a local mall, said mall merchants had been cautiously optimistic about the Christmas season, heavily advertising preChrist mas sales and promotions. "When people first started coming in today, it looked like a lookers' day, but sales have really picked up now," Earnest said. Earnest said his mall was filled "very near capacity" Friday. He said many mall merchants are offering pre-Christmas di sco unts instead of the traditional after-Christmas sales. Because Thanksgiving
Quake
have any information to confirm those reports one way or the other.'' In London , Mohammad Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's deputy minister for agriculture and brother of the speaker of Iran's Parliament, said, "A decision was taken to take custody of the hostages from the students and preparations for this transfer can be noticed." Rafsanjani, touring Europe trying to win support for Iran in its war with Iraq, carefully avoided reference to the U.S. Embassy. The hostages were reportedly moved from that site after the abortive American rescue attempt in April and then reported returned to the compound after the outbreak of
the Iran-Iraq war. Rafsanjani, who spoke in his native Farsi, was pressed to specify the "preparations" for the transfer. He said, " The preparations mean that the government really must provide for a secure place for the hostages, where they may remain in absolute safety just as over the past year." His interpreter explained, " A suitable accommodation has to be found for these people so that, as from the very beginning they were kept in a safe and comfortable place, the same policy must continue. " Asked to pinpoint location of the hostages, Rafsanjani said , "Unfortunately I cannot disclose this to you because there is fear that America itself may cause problems for these hostages and blame it on the Iranians and create conditions for conspiracies." Trattner said the United States was "concerned ... but not anxious" about the current situation.
Death Toll May Pass 10,000
NAPLES, Italy (UPI) - Rain, snow and strong winds whipped southern Italy Friday, making a mess of relief efforts and forcing many of the 250,000 homeless
o·urses and a 4-month-old baby alive from the ruins 'of Sant' Angelo dei Lombardi. They had been trapped without food or water for 108 hours, officials in
survivors of the @arthquake to
the town said.
weather,
flee tent cities. One official predicted the death toll, still being counted days after the quake, would surpass 10,000. The official toll still stood at 3,100 dead and 8,000 injured but relief coordinators said the dead in dozens of towns were still buried beneath the rubble and yet to be counted. Almost with disbelief, rescuers who bad given up hope of finding more survivors pulled two young
The national radio reported two more survivors were found in other towns, including a pregnant worn an in Lioni. Relief efforts were stepped up with the help of U.S. Air Force helicopters that ferried in food, blankets and medicine to the mountainous 16,000-square·mile region affected by Sunday's q11ake. Army decontamination teams began spraying the rubble of
greater hardships to the survivors. After two days of thunderstorms, temperatures dropped and rain turned to snow in many areas. The winds also increased and forced several thousand refugees to evacuate some of the tent cities set up to house them. Dirt mountain roads turned into a
shattered villages with formaldehyde to prevent the spread of disease. But relief effor ts were hampered even further by the
which brought still
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Erosion Stealing Lee Farmlands By MIKE TAPSCOTT Staff Writer The sloping soybean field in north Lee County is scarred by a series of ugly gullies, each leading to a low area filled with fertile sediment that washes down the gully during rains.
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*IRANIAN PRESIDENT Bani-Sadr took a tour of the battlefront at Abadan on a motorcycle in the midst of an artillery duel with Iraqi forces Friday. Page 10.
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"Would you believe 100 tons of soil to an acre are coming off this field a year?" asked Lee County Soil Conservationist Wallace Henry, measuring the depth of a
knee-deep gully. Henry, employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, points to this field as one of the more severe examples of erosion that threatens to destroy the productivity of an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 acres of bean fields in Lee County. Such acreage represents roughly onefourth of the county's bean fields . Erosion, which has steadily robbed America 's farmlands of their most fertile soil since the
Europeans first settled here, has become a more serious problem for local farmers in the last four or five years as more and more rolling pastureland is plowed up and planted in beans. Unlike pastures, which have a protective grass cover, bean fields expose the soil to rain, which washes dirt from the field and carves gullies into the land. The first soil to disappear is the Continued on Page 18
Corneal Transplnnt Restores 22-Year-Old's Sight By PHYLLIS HARPER Feature Editor Related story on Page 8 Alan Nunnelee calls the restoration of his sight through a corneal transplant a miracle. And to doubters he replies in words similar to those of the man whose eyes Jesus treated · with mud and sent to the Pool of Siloam to wash : "All I know is that I was blind a nd now I see." The 22-year-old son of Mr. and
Mrs. P at Nunnelee of Tupelo with his boyish good looks, ready smile and articulate manner seems to have everything going his way. He graduates later this month from Mississippi State University with a degree in marketing. "We've had a lot to be thankful for this year," he avowed after driving his own car from MSU campus to Tupelo for the holiday. A year ago, he was fighting despair after losing his sight to
briefI cabinet difficulties President-e l ec t Ronald Reagan said Friday former Treasury Secretary William Simon definitely does not want to be considered for a Cabinet post and George Shultz probably does not want a job either. Page
weekend feature keratoconus, a condition whose onset was discovered about four years earlier and led to the prediction of blindness. Nunnelee had not known that he had problems until he was 17 or 18. His grandfather, after they had spent some of the summer on the golf course, "called my
city action backed
school taxes surveyed
The Lee County Biracial Committee unanimously adopted a resolution this week endorsing the decision of Tupelo aldermen to appoint all city department heads and supporting the work of the city charter commission. Page 4.
In a statistical survey released by the State Department of Education , Nettleton Line Consolidated school district ranks at the bottom of the state's 152 school districts in the percentage of its support which comes from local taxes and at the top of the list for rec eiving th e most state support. Page 3.
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records bill planned
deficit rises Led by increases in both the volume and price of oil imports, the nation's trade deficit rose moderately in October for the second month in a row, the government said Friday. Page 27.
Ronald Reagan
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parents and told the m he didn't . think I could see the ball." " We'd had his eyes checked as a child and nothing was wrong," said the elder Nunnelee. The condition had developed slowly and no one realized it. Initial treatment in Tupelo was the fitting of contact lens in an
Rep . Dennis Dollar, DGulfport, said Friday he plans to introduce an open records law bill in the 1981 Legislature, which would designate a custodian of public record for every public body in the state. Page 9.
effort to to improve vision and slow the deterioration. On his first day of wearing contacts, "I saw all the way to the end of the street. I saw leaves on trees that I'd forgotten about," he said. "I went into the kitchen at my grandparents' and saw black specks in the kitchen tile and tried lo clean up the spill." Despite treatment, the keratoconus developed more rapidly than doctor s had
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index
quake hits coast A strong earthquake, measuring between 4.75 and 5.1 on the Richter scale, rocked the high Sierra Friday with a rolling motion felt from Reno, Nev. , to the Pacific Coast. Page 2
anticipated. They'd warned Nunnelee be might be blind by age 40. In the ensuing three years Nunnelee's sight failed to the point that the Mississippi Federation for the Blind furnished him with talking textbooks and other equipment and " I had to be led around on.
weather Fair. High 50s; low 20s. Sunrise 6:47; s un set 4: 49. Details on page 18.
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