Short takes

"Without, or With, Offence to Friends or Foes, I Sketch Your WorldExactly As It Goes."

BEN Franklin once said three can keep a secret if two of them aredead. Well, Franklin never met Bill Bissett of Huntington, or any ofhis fellow F-86 pilots who flew missions over the Soviet Union andRed China in the 1950s.

For 42 years, Bissett kept his mouth shut about his spy missionsfor the Air Force. The photographs of the airfields and othermilitary installations in those communist countries gave the freeworld the leg up it needed to persevere in the Cold War.

From 50,000 feet - nine miles high - Bissett and his fellow pilotsgathered information that later would be gathered by U-2 pilots andeventually by satellite. He did not tell his wife or even his fellowpilots about his missions.

"Guys would take off and I wouldn't know where they'd go," Bissettsaid.

A veteran of World War II, Bissett was among the first F-86 pilotswho began their mission 50 years ago. It was not until 1996 that hismissions were declassified - five years after the fall of the SovietUnion. Until then, mum was the word.

And what did Bissett do after he left active duty? He joined theNational Guard and went to work for Inco Alloys International,retiring as its president in 1987.

Whoever coined the phrase the Greatest Generation was not kidding.They certainly did not let loose lips sink their ships, which is onereason why the free world won the Cold War.

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The last picture show in Welch was 20 years ago. Since thePocahontas Theater burned down in 1984, McDowell County seat hasfaced floods, the largest bank failure in the nation, a statetakeover of its schools and more flooding.

But give Marquee Cinemas of Beckley some credit. The company plansto open a modern, 10,000-square-foot theater with digital sound andstadium seating in Welch sometime in May or June.

"The people have asked for it since the Pocahontas Theaterburned," Welch Mayor Martha Moore said. "They have wanted it sincethen. However, there were more pressing issues the city had to tendto - mainly wastewater treatment - before we could address this typeof project."

Good for Marquee Cinema and good for Welch.

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All legislative session long, the public heard from lawmakers andthe governor how tight the budget was. Though the budget itself grew,lawmakers and the governor said they cut it by $120 million.

But it turns out lawmakers were not busy trying to trim thebudget. In fact, many of them were re-loading for election-year porkbarreling. Budget Digest requests - requests for directed spending -topped $100 million from the 34 state senators alone.

That is nearly triple the amount in this year's bloated BudgetDigest.

That is ridiculous.

No other state does this. West Virginia should stop this practice,especially in light of the fact that it faces $10 billion in unfundedliabilities in workers' comp and its various pension funds.