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OPINIONS
Voice of the people
MU baseball team deserves home field
While watching the Conference USA baseball tournament on TV at our home in Texas, I was shocked to hear the announcers discussing the embarrassing lack of baseball facilities at Marshall.
I could not believe our team had to travel to Charleston to play C-USA home games and played other games on area high school fields. Also, the team could not have been happy when reference was made to them being a vagabond team. I thought, Marshall, where is your pride?
Having played baseball at Marshall during the 1959-60-61 seasons, we were lucky to have played my first two seasons at the Inco field. It was a good field, but other facilities were not really up to college standards. After the Inco field was torn down, the 1961 team was without a home. What has Marshall done to improve baseball facilities in the past 47 years? Evidently not much.
Marshall, you now have a competitive team and a good coach, as demonstrated by their showing during the C-USA tournament. The MU administration and athletic department should now take the lead in building first-class practice facilities and a baseball stadium in Huntington. The alumni association, former baseball lettermen and Herd fans everywhere must support those efforts. If it doesn't happen, shame on all of us.
Carl Little
Arlington, Texas
State must do more to stamp out smoking
The debate is over: Smoking is a filthy, anti-social, unacceptable habit. It is positively toxic for the smokers, dangerously unhealthy for unwilling bystanders, a serious imposition on those with breathing or other cardio-pulmonary health problems and also a poisonous source of urban litter.
The state needs to put more funding into prevention programs to keep youth from ever starting to use tobacco and to help those who continue to be manipulated and addicted to tobacco to quit.
It is time for all West Virginia health departments to adopt stringent measures that keep secondhand smoke from being involuntarily inflicted on the rest of us, whether we're in office buildings, doorways, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, gaming centers or city parks.
We all should be supportive of any public health efforts that encourage smokers to give up a habit that is damaging to their own health and to that of anyone unlucky enough to be living with them or simply eating, drinking, working or playing right beside them.
Bruce W. Adkins
Nitro, W.Va.
