Busy week, the one that ended on September 22 in 1985.
Starting with Mexico City, where a violent earthquake struck central Mexico yesterday, killing at least 250 people, destroying or heavily damaging dozens of buildings and trapping an untold number of the dead and injured beneath mountains of shattered concrete. Unofficial estimates of the death toll ranged from 250 to several thousand. At least 1,000 were reported injured in Mexico City alone. But with only sketchy reports from the capital and many areas the country cut off, the actual number of dead and injured was unknown. By midafternoon, the Red Cross said it could confirm only 10 dead and 265 injured, but it was evident from the amount of destruction throughout the city that the toll would be far greater.
President Miguel de la Madrid declared a national state of emergency and placed the armed forces under maximum alert. Police and soldiers patrolled stricken areas, where fires still smoldered, to prevent looting. Hospitals were jammed with victims, and rescue workers dug for people trapped and buried in the debris. The quake at 7:18 a.m. (9:18 a.m.EDT) registered 7.8 on the Richter scale, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and was centered on Mexico’s Pacific coast, about 200 miles southwest of the capital and northwest of Acapulco. It shook much of Mexico and was felt as far away as Houston.
Meanwhile; for 10 days, Shiite Moslem extremists holding five Americans hostage in Lebanon debated which hostage would do the best job if released – of communicating their demands to the Reagan administration. The Rev. Benjamin Weir, who learned 1½ hours before was freed Saturday night that had he been chosen, said that came as a surprise. He and the other hostages thought the kidnappers would pick Terry Anderson, 37, formerly of Batavia, N.Y., Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press. “We g all had expected it would be Terry,’ said Mr.Weir. “He was deeply disappointed when he found out he would not go free. “We tried to console him and (the Rev.) Martin Jenco went over and put his arm around Terry and that seemed to comfort him. I don’t know what they said but I got the sense it wasn’t much.” The hostages were allowed to read some Lebanese newspapers and occasionally a news magazine, Mr. Weir said, and they noted with special interest the efforts by the hostages’ families to gain freedom for their relatives.
He said that when Anderson noted a news story about his sister, Peggy Say of Batavia, going to the State Department to demand action on behalf of the hostages, “He said, ‘That’s just like my sister – real up front.'” He said Anderson had begun to learn Arabic.
And finally, Two rock stars sarcastically assailed two of the capitol’s most prominent Washington Wives Thursday over their proposal to protect children from raunchy rock lyrics, precipitating angry exchanges with senators and demands that the recording industry clean up its act. At a packed Senate committee hearing, Sen. Slade Gorton, R- angrily attacked rock star Frank Zappa for “boorish” remarks about Tipper Gore, wife of Sen. Albert Gore, D- Tenn., and Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III.
Zappa, onetime leader of the Mothers of Invention whose song lyrics sometimes border on the salacious, mocked Mrs. Baker’s Southern accent during his testimony, declaring: “While the wife of the secretary of the Treasury recites, ‘Gonna drive my love inside you .’ and Sen. Gore’s wife talks about ‘bondage!’ and ‘oral sex at gunpoint’ on the ‘CBS Evening News,’ people in high places work on at tax that is so ridiculous the only way to sneak it through is to keep the public’s mind on something else: ‘Porn Rock.” Gorton responded, “I find your statement to be boorish, incredible and insensitively insulting. That you could manage to give the First Amendment a bad name shows you don’t have the slightest understanding of it.” Zappa said a parents group started by Gore and Baker proposes “the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation.” Gore and Baker, mothers of preteen children, recently founded the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) to protest rock lyrics they say dwell on sex, drugs, violence and sadomasochism. They have urged the record industry to put warning labels on albums about content, make lyrics available to consumers before purchase and establish an industry panel to set up guidelines for labeling records. Most major record labels last month agreed to place a sticker saying “Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics” on certain albums. But the industry rejected requests that a committee write guidelines on what is objectionable. The industry wants individual record companies to decide.
And that’s just a little of what happened for this week of September 22, 1985 as presented by ABC Radio’s World News This Week.
