Daily Citizen from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin • 5

Saturday-Sunday, September 14-15, 1996 Daily Citizen Page 5 BOMBAY 12-year-old Indian trainee sumo wrestler Nibrah is being lifted by the 305-kg World open amateur sumo champion, Yabro Emmanuel of the United States in Bombay, Friday. The World champion was invited to promote the newly founded Sumo Federation of India, who are trying to introduce sumo wrestling to the Indian masses. Associated Press Photo rW I it l'ti i i a 'V i i tmi -1! f-, A j'tt-v jj v. if Jf A I I ll Mil Demo derbies remain as popular as ever R1VERHEAD, N.Y. Call it sport, spectacle or travesty, but demolition derby has indisputably claimed an ear-splitting, bargain-basement cranny of the American imagination since the first one crashed into existence at a Long Island track almost 40 years ago.

The agenda was and is breathtakingly basic: a mess of very big, very old cars slam into one another until just one. the winner, is still running. "Boys must wreck cars," suminari.ed Tommy Walkowiak, 24, a boiler repairman who brought a pachydermatous Ford, a 1976 Country Squire station wagon, to Riverhead Raceway here Saturday night, after working a month on the relic in front of his Queens County apartment. Little matter that he had difficulty breathing because of tw broken ribs from his previous derby. This, after all, was the World Championship a not unknown designation for events at the nation's other 5,000 demolition derbies.

Paul Conte, 39, a car mechanic from West Babylon, N.Y., provided more evidence of the derby's importance, global or whatever: he paced about complaining to anyone who would listen about the heart attack two weeks ago that was keeping him from trying to better his second-place finish in 1995. "It's driving me completely crazy," he said, perhaps unnecessarily. "I'm going nuts." But no loonier than others. "Give me a few beers and I could do something real crazy for you." said Johnny Hopkins, a reincarnated James Dean ho let it drop that he once leapt from the bed of one pickup to another on a narrow bridge at 60 miles an hour. "I wanted to get in the other truck," he explained.

On Saturday night, he would be driving an '82 Olds festooned with his logo, "Johnny Dangerously." His goal is to live on the edge. "A car can explode while you're in it, and you just want more," he said. "It's a high like you can't explain." So it has been since 1958, when Larry Mendelsohn, a 28-year-old stock car driver, grasped the highly unflattering truth that most race fans and more than a few drivers, perfunctory denials aside, love the crashes. Why not give them an event with nothing else? Not surprisingly, demolition derbies swept from their birthplace, Islip Speedway, to Culver Stadium on the outskirts of Los Angeles and virtually every dirt track and county fair between. At first, the sport's lurch to working-class America's heart had elements of glory at least one early event was held at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, and ABC's "Wide World of Sports" showed "demos." as derbies are known, almost weekly.

But that stopped in the mid-1970s, as sports shows went upscale. In later years, it has become harder and harder to find the tanklike old clunkers the sport requires. Many tracks, including Islip's. have become shopping malls. Most recently, demo tans have resented drivers' colluding to attack others in order to split prize money.

"It's in pretty sad shape, the sport is." said Leonard Pease, president of the National Demolition Derby Association, a 12-man organization based in Tower Hill, which was founded to bring standards to a sport with exactly none. "In 10 or 12 years, it could be a thing of the past." Fat chance, even Pease immediately concedes. The sport is the surest moneymaker lor county fairs and has managed, at least in the iew ol participants, to remain a cut above events to which it might be compared: tractor pulls, animal dressing contests, pig racing. "The popularity of demolition derbies will never ever end." declared Jim Cromarty, owner of the Riverhead track. "People just love to watch the smashing of cars." Man building mountain in backyard "The VanBarriger Mountain in Big Rock, is not just a hill, or an eyesore, or an unlawful placement in wasteland.

It is a representation of what America was built on, and it represents freedom, expression of thought and expression of art." --John VanBarriger an unlawful placement in wasteland," he wrote. "It is a representation of what America was built on, and it represents freedom, expression of thought and expression of art." It is the peace and beauty of the Rocky Mountains, along with its symbol of independence, that has always captivated VanBarriger. But as much as he loves the West, his business and his family ties have kept him in Illinois. For more than 40 years, he said, he has worked perhaps 80 hours a week to forge a better life. He has spent more than $10,000 on his mountain.

AT BOTTOM he explained, the struggle is about power. When a rich man commissions an expensive sculpture for the garden of his estate, he said, it is called elegant fine art. Growing up in poverty with 10 brothers and sisters. VanBarrigcr said, he has long known the sting of being considered declasse. trash." they called us," he said, still bristling and voicing indignation that even today people use such slurs, which, he noted, "reach the ears of poor children." His father was a carpenter who worked furiously as an inventor.

But the man never made a cent on any of his inv entions. "I have struggled all of my life." VanBarriger said. "But it has made me strong. My father used to say. 'Keep your mouth shut unless you can back it up ith brains or He was quiet for a moment, then he chuckled and said.

"I've been in a hell of a lot of fishts." BIG ROCK, III. (NYT) A poor boy with grand dreams, John VanBarrigcr was 1 5 years old when he tried to run away from flat Illinois to the mountains of the American West. The authorities caught him just 20 miles down the road, and he ended up going to Boys Town instead. Now, at 62, he is still searching for mountains. And the authorities are still standing in his way "I am not going to give up," said VanBarrigcr, a barrel-chested man with a white mustache, fairly trembling with emotion.

sit in jail, if it comes to that." VanBarriger, who never was able to move out West, is building a mountain here. He has trucked about 40 tractor-trailer loads of rock, sand and gravel onto his 32-acre property here in rural Kane Count) about 40 miles southwest of Chicago. Now about 15 feet tall, the mountain will eventually rise 50 feel, VanBarrigcr said, topped by a cactus made of steel that stretches an additional 25 feet into the sky. The mountain covers about the si.e of a baseball diamond. "This is for all the people who never had enough money to travel out West," said VanBarriger, a painting contractor.

"Just because they can't afford it doesn't mean they shouldn't get to appreciate the beauty." COUNTY OFFICIALS do not seem to appreciate it, and they have ordered him to tear it down. Phillip Bus. the executive director ol the Kane County Development Department, said the huge rock pile, which stands near Welch Creek in the countryside a few miles outside the gone-in-a-blink town of Big Rock, could dangerously disrupt the flow of water downstream. "Me needs to move his mountain out of the flood plain," Bus said. Illinois law.

Bus added, clearly states that no one can fill in a flood plain, "not with rusted car bodies, not with horse manure and not with works of art." A COMPLAINT has been filed with the county prosecutor. But Jose Vela, the assistant stale's attorney who is handling the case, said he certainly hoped that a compromise could be reached before a full blown trial. VanBarriger is not about to make molehills of his mountain. "This is about America," said VanBarrigcr, who printed up some T-shirts for the cause, depicting a multi-ethnic, multi-racial liveryman, under the slogan "Stand ree." Most of VanBarriger's neighbors out here in corn-and-soybean country say they do not give a hoot about the mountain, one way or the other. But one Big Rock man has taken up for his fellow townsman, posting papers in store windows that declare, "Defend the Mountain." The mountain sits well behind a car repair shop on Highway 30, alongside tracks for the Santa Fe Railroad, near Welch Creek.

People here say the landscape was not much to look at before VanBarriger arrived 10 years ago, turning it into a meadow and arbor, thick with blue spruce, willow, ash and crab apples. Inside his rambling, wooden, A-frame house, there are artifacts everywhere that point to the West, from American Indian artwork to the Western landscapes on the walls. Even the hair dryer looks like a silver-plated Colt 45. "I don't keep real guns inside," he said. "They scare me." AS FOR, POLITICS VanBarriger described himself as "more of a liberal," a man ho believes that government has an important role to play in imposing certain controls.

"Like on automatic weapons." he said. "But not on art." He has composed and recorded a song on cassette ta'pe, "Stand Free." and has written an essay on the struggle. "The VanBarriger Mountain in Big Rock, 111., is not just a hill, or an eyesore, or Arizona school campaign kicking Joe Camel's ash North Korean crops failing, US Senate told "We expect the Ash Kicker to make its presence felt in every Arizona county. We've sent it on a statewide hunting expedition for Joe Camel" Dr. Joe Dillenberg Arizona Health Direcort the factory in North Korea started, but Hall said the money probably will have to be funneled through the international aid group UN1CEF to keep North Korea from rejecting the help.

Thursday's committee meeting was designed to offer an oversight of the situation in North Korea. After Hall spoke, a variety of international and diplomatic experts agreed that the U.S. must prod its European allies into donating food to the cause of feeding this country before winter sets in. Although Hall told the group that the soldiers he saw hadn't been fed any better than civilians, many remain wary of the country's military ability. "I don't think it's intelligent to find out what a desperate North Korea will do," said Stanley Roth, director of research at the United States Institute for Peace.

your head. It was at my waist." Experts have predicted that North Korea will lose 10 percent of its normal harvest this year, but Hall thinks the country is going to lose much more. He said relief workers he met while in the country told him people have lost an average of about 30 pounds since last January. BUT AS the country appears to be sliding toward famine, the issue of how to help is made prickly by political and diplomatic concerns. North Korea remains a Stalinist nation that has refused friendly negotiations over anything, including until recently the monitoring of nuclear weaponry.

Hall has insisted that food not be used as a tool of diplomacy, but even the deal to reopen the glucose factory will have to skirt the tensions between North and South Korea. South Korea has agreed to donate $350,000 to get WASHINGTON (COX)-While Ohio Congressman Tony Hall was telling a senate panel Thursday that North Korea is in dire agricultural shape, his office was announcing that South Korea has agreed to help rebuild a factory that makes nutrition packs for children. A series of floods over the last two years has left the southern region of North Korea, the flattest and most crop-friendly part of the country, with little chance of providing enough food to feed the population. Hall, a leading congressional advocate to eradicate world hunger, visited the country last month after the North Korean government invited him to view the abysmal conditions first-hand. "I'm from corn country, Ohio," Hall, D-Ohio.

told the Senate subcommittee on AsiaPacific Affairs, "and by this time corn should be up over PHOENIX Now it's the "Ash Kicker" vs. Joe Camel. The state health department took its teenage anti-smoking message on the road Thursday with the Ash Kicker, a trailer vv hose interior looks like a diseased smoker's mouth complete ith exhibits of blackened lungs and a tobacco-spitting mannequin. With a gangplank that looks like a tongue and an interior of rotting teeth and throbbing tumors, the all-black Ash Kicker looks like C. Everett Koop's version of Disneyland.

"It was cool." said Kurtis Johnson. 13. who was especially impressed with the lungs. "It was gross, of course, but it was cool." The Ash Kicker was unveiled at Osborn Middle ScluxI in Phoenix, where students clamored to get in it and afterward raced to get anti-smoking packets as if they were seeking rock stars' autographs. State health officials hope to beat Joe Camel's cool with the Ash Kicker, whose humor is as black as the shiny trailer, which looks like a souped-up hearse.

One poster showing a foot ith gangrene carries the rhyme: "Bhxxl didn't get to his toes because he was puffin' through his nose." Aaron Hammon. 14. "I thought it was really effective." he said. "It was much better than the commercials, because it showed what could actually happen to you." was kind. i nasty with all that stuff." said Jose Hernandez.

14. who doesn't plan to smoke and ishes his dad would slop pulling "He's going to end up using one of those things (oxygen tanks Jose said, pointing to a mannequin of a young girl whose face rotated to show the face of an old woman with an oxygen mask. To help smokers kick the habit, the state has established the Arizona Smokers' Helpline. By calling an S00 number, people can reach a counselor who will help them identify why they smoke and set up a date." State counselors then call people the day before the quit date, the day after, a week after and two times after that. A similar program in California last year had a success rate of 27 percent, said Scott Moldenhauer, coordinator of the hotline.

"If people try to quit and they only have a booklet, the success rate is 2.5 percent." he said. "We are selling an attitude to stop a deadly addiction." said Dr. Jack Dillenberg. state health director. "We expect the Ash Kicker to make its presence felt in every Arizona county We've sent it on a statewide hunting expedition for Joe Camel." The Ash Kicker will be at schools, country and state fairs, rodeos, parades and other public events throughout the state.

It" cost about $100,000 to build the exhibit and an additional $40 to lease the black Humvee that pulls the trailer. The Ash Kicker is part of a $5 million advertising campaign that is funded by a tobacco-tax program approved by voters in W4. The trailer cot rave reviews from.