Juvenile court judges were generally regarded as “low men on the judicial totem pole, if on it at all,” according to the president of the National Council of Juvenile Court Judges.
Judge Orman Ketchum of Juvenile Court of Washington, D.C., addressed a dinner meeting of the Florida Juvenile Court Judges Institute at Beauclerc Country Club and obviously did not mince words.
He said he hoped that, in time, efforts to improve the public image and stature of juvenile court judges, plus increasing recognition of performance and devotion of men and women in the field of juvenile relations, would improve.
“It is vital that we do not become inured to prison-like training schools and that we refuse to continue holding children in jail because the state has failed to provide detention facilities,” Ketchum said.
“Let us demand them, not as charity, but as the due of our nation’s children,” he added.
Circuit Judge Roger Waybright of Jacksonville said prisons and youth juries were not solutions to the age-old problem of juvenile delinquency.
“In fact, they cause more harm than good,” he said.
Waybright was credited with writing Florida’s juvenile court law when he was chair of The Florida Bar’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1950-51.
“Juvenile court judges are the most important workers in Florida’s judicial vineyard. You seek to rehabilitate, not punish,” he said. “But I can’t save them. All I do is send them to prison where there is no rehabilitation worth the name. I sit there and I fail.”
Waybright said there wasn’t a prison or jail in the U.S. that wasn’t a “stinking pesthole” and described corrections facilities as “cages for animals.”
He described a prison term as a “graduate course in crime.”
“They learn to make pistols out of pipe and shivs out of table knives. They learn to cross wires to steal cars and how not to leave fingerprints,” Waybright said. “They come out schooled and polished criminals. We bring back outlaws from prison to live with us in the community.”
He warned his colleagues they would always be criticized and there were those in the community who would offer alternatives to incarceration that were no more effective.
“Some man in every community will come along and propose some new idea. He’ll sit there and call for a juvenile jury or he’ll call for a father spanking his son in public. It’s all old hat and it’s never worked before. All the man will do is make an ass of himself,” Waybright said.
• Two men were wounded, one seriously, when a third man pulled out a handgun and fired it once in a store on Davis Street.
The bullet passed through one man’s hand and hit the second man in the abdomen.
The man shot in the stomach was admitted to Duval Medical Center, where he was listed in serious condition. The other was treated and released.
The gunman also suffered minor injuries to one hand when several unidentified customers in the store grappled with him for possession of the gun.
Julius Hardy, 52, of 671 W. Ashley St., was taken to the city jail and booked on a charge of assault to murder after he was treated at the hospital.
Homicide Sgt. J.L. Jordan said the victims had been drinking when they went into the Flowers food store at 618 Davis St.
Inside the store, Hardy produced the weapon and fired for no apparent reason.
The bullet struck the first victim, went through his hand and then went through a door before it struck the second victim, Jordan said.
• The state Board of Health at its headquarters in Jacksonville voted to issue certificates to ambulance drivers and attendants who completed first aid courses as required by law and also adopted minimum requirements for ambulance equipment.
“We don’t know how many people are dying because of some inexperienced ambulance driver. Florida is attempting to improve the situation, but it isn’t easy,” said James Shelton, who led the board’s accident prevention program.
(Note: In 1966, ambulance service in Duval County was provided by funeral home operators.)
• The Jacksonville Area Chamber of Commerce’s annual spring membership drive began at a breakfast in the Robert Meyer Hotel.
“Jacksonville business growth is directly related to the activity of our chamber of commerce,” said Irby Exley, chamber membership chair. “We have more than 100 fine men assembled to make personal calls on new businesses and non-member firms to tell the chamber story and invite them to participate in the chamber program.”
Assisting Exley as vice chairs of the campaign were Tom Stang of Stang Associates, Harold Starling of the Atlantic National Bank and Lloyd Henderson of the Barnett First National Bank.
• A botanical painting of a species of philodendron by Jacksonville artist Lee Adams was accepted for the American Watercolor Society’s 98th annual exhibition in New York City.
The painting was one of 150 works accepted from hundreds of entries. It would be on display through April 21 at the National Academy Gallery.
Adams also was asked to submit five botanical paintings for showing at the opening of a new multimillion-dollar garden center in Cleveland.
• Bob Harris of Jacksonville, a candidate for state treasurer, asked radio stations around Florida for free equal time if they had broadcast since Feb. 15 public service announcements featuring his opponent, incumbent Treasurer Broward Williams.
Dan Crisp, public relations director for the Harris campaign, said his client sent the request via letter to more than 200 radio stations.
Most had replied, but only three said they used Williams’ announcements since Feb. 15 when he qualified for election and they offered equal time to Harris if he would send to them taped messages, Crisp said.
In the letter, Harris wrote that while the Williams tapes were supposed to be public service announcements explaining Medicare and promoting highway safety, they were in fact political under terms of federal regulations governing radio stations.
• A government structure responsive to the needs of the area’s more than 500,000 residents was the goal of the Local Government Study Commission of Duval County.
Commission Chair J.J. Daniel said a responsive government, a government that efficiently used tax dollars and a government attuned to the 20th-century needs of the community were the three main goals of the study.
The commission was created by the Legislature in 1965. The 50-member group had been meeting since January.
Speaking to the Meninak Club of Jacksonville, Daniel said there was no prejudgment as to what recommendations the commission would make to the community and the Legislature in March 1967.
Task forces set up by the commission hoped to complete the data-gathering phase by July 1 and begin examination and correlation of the data by the end of September.
Daniel said there was a “tax imbalance and a political imbalance” in the structure of government in Duval County.
He cited in particular that city taxpayers paid for government services provided by both the city and the county.