STORIES FROM THE PAST

50 years ago

The Casa De Amistad Board of Managers split 7-5 last night in tabling a motion to support the boycott of Cesar Chavez and the Delano grape pickers. The Rev. Harold F. DeVries abstained.

Until the issue comes to a vote and is settled one way or the other, Casa director Albin Kovar and the staff at the center will support the boycott, Kovar told the board last night.

Kovar maintained that the issue is moral, not political, and that to ignore it would say to Mexican-Americans, “We hear you talking Brown Power but we can’t quite reach you.”

“Most of the residents of this community (Brawley’s ‘eastside’) are Mexican-American field workers, and they support the boycott. We cannot be insensitive to their feelings.”

He denied that the agency does or will ever make a “significant” contribution to the community unless the board “puts its ear to the ground and listens to the rumbling.”

Kovar and the supporters of the boycott issue (the Mexican-Americans on the board) agreed with the non-supporters that the issue will split the community.

Most non-supporters, the Anglo board members, declared that they are in favor of a higher wage scale, rising aspirations of the workers and better living conditions for the eastside.

However, supporting Cesar Chavez and the Delano strikers is not the way to do it, they argued.

40 years ago

Imperial Valley College president Daniel Angel has accused the Department of Health, Education and Welfare of “improprieties and collusion” regarding the rejection of an IVC grant application to continue its Title III funding for the fifth year.

The $496,685 grant would continue operation of IVC’s external college as well as provide continued research into bilingual needs of students and fund a computerized management system.

Angel made his charges Aug. 30 in a letter to Dr. Ernest Boyer, U.S. commissioner of education. The letter was released this week by the college along with other material regarding the grant controversy.

After review of a grant reader’s evaluation rejecting the college’s application, “I emphatically submit that all written comments are grossly discriminatory with no regard or relevance to actual facts contained in the application,” Angel wrote.

IVC’s application for continued funding was bitterly rejected by a HEW evaluator who, among other things, accused IVC of “empire building” and mismanagement of funds. College officials feel HEW’s rejection, which is being appealed, was a planned attempt to eliminate the college from the program. IVC is not the only school that has levied such charges.

30 years ago

The Board of Supervisors Tuesday unanimously agreed to take over the administration of the Area Agency on Aging program and its $875,000 annual budget.

And if things go as they should, the 400 to 500 senior citizens eating daily lunches at nutrition centers, the scores riding on buses to the lunches and to and from the Salton Sea and the 700 to 800 seeking information and referral services each month won’t notice a thing.

Dennis Jackson, the states’ interim director of the Area Agency on Aging since the programs were take away from the now-defunct Economic Opportunity Commission in June, said today, “The state’s main intent is to minimize the interruption of services.”