August 12, 1959: One man is killed and six are injured in the collapse of a bridge being built over the Pacific Electric tracks on Charlotte Street north of the San Bernardino Freeway near Soto Street.
Confidential File
Heer Iz Hwot Wee Cheefli Need, No?
Yesterday, I got the inside story on a weapon which could win a major battle in the cold war for us.
It wasn’t devulged to me by an atom scientist or a rocket engineer.
I got it, instead, from a retired schoolteacher.
And — unorthodox and overly simple as it sounds — I’m convinced that our government ought to squander a few bucks on investigating its possibilities.
The former schoolteacher, whose name is Helen Bowyer, readily admitted to me that her idea wasn’t an original one.
| It’s been kicking around since the days of the Revolution. Abe Lincoln dug it up again in Civil War times, and small groups have been advocating its use ever since.
It is, basically, to scrap the nonsensical, burdensome system of spelling which has been foisted on American children for all our generations.
“Today,” Miss Bowyer told me, “the American child is paying two years out of his school life because of our fantastically confused spelling. We have by far the She showed me the results of a spelling-efficiency study made by Ralph D. Owen, Ph.D. professor of education, Temple University. It revealed: Italian and Turkish use 27 letters for 27 sounds. German uses 38 symbols for 36 sounds. Russian uses 36 symbols for 34 sounds. English uses 250 symbols (letters or combinations of letters) for 44 sounds. The spelling efficiency of Russian is 90%; English, 20%. “After three months of learning to read and write,” Miss Bowyer told me, “Russian first-graders can move on to short, prepared passages and stories from famous Russian novels.” Little Muscovites, she added, get rapid and mind-satisfying sight-sound relations which make learning to read and write a pleasant adventure. There are none of Miss Bowyer’s phonetic system for the English language, based on the Simpler Spelling Assn.’s system consists of 40 basic spelling units. The following passage, which she used to illustrate an article that she had published in the June, 1959, Phi Delta Kappan magazine, employs them all: “A loef ov bred,” the Waulrus sed, Even without knowing the few rules of her system, the passage is relatively simple to follow. In her article Miss Bower points out that Russian school children have been attuned to the basic requirements of the scientific attitude so badly sought today by the predictability and orderliness of their reading, writing and spelling exercises.
Koetz Iz Klarvoyunt “It is a curriculum,” she states, “so much more intensive and faster-paced Personally, I think it’s too bad we didn’t streamline our spelling 50 or 100 years |
— And to replace it with an organized logical phonetic system.
She asks: “Can we doubt that with every year of this intimate process their developing young minds become better and better instruments for the thinking required by the algebra, geometry, trigonometry, biology, physics and chemistry
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