Slice of Life
From the South China Morning Post this week in: 1979
Hong Kong's second airport could be built across the border on the mainland, Hilton Cheong-Leen proposed in the Legislative Council.
'Since relations with China are expected to improve in the long term, perhaps the alternative of building a second airport across the Shumchun border, with the co-operation of China, could be considered.' Such an airport, he said, would be less expensive to build than at the site under consideration at Chek Lap Kok. 'It would also serve ... the two million Hong Kong residents who will be living in the New Territories by the end of the 1980s,' he said in the resumed debate on the financial secretary's budget proposals.
Tributes to well-liked disc jockey Bob Williams were contrasted sharply by G. Stream in the correspondence columns.
After a preamble about the sad news of 'Uncle Bob's' death and how much he meant to his listeners, the correspondent went on: 'I find it surprising, therefore, that Mr Ted Thomas in his programme on Saturday morning dismissed Bob's death in a few seconds, while Aileen Bridgewater, on what is after all the rival station, saw fit to devote at least 10 minutes to pay tribute to an 'old friend'.
'Can it be, I wonder, that Commercial Radio has more heart than Radio Hong Kong?'
On a happier note, the two stations made history when their phone-in programmes made a simultaneous broadcast for the first time.
Steve Alyward, of RTHK, and Bridgewater, of CR, thanked listeners for supporting the Helping Hand charity by sponsoring underprivileged children to see the film The Slipper and the Rose.
The overall median household income in Hong Kong more than doubled from HK$708 in 1971 to HK$1,425 in 1976, with the real income of households increasing by an average of 5.4 per cent a year.
The average number of working members per household was two, with each supporting 1.2 non-workers, according to the official analysis of the Hong Kong By-Census 1976.
A Hong Kong woman was slightly injured when a poker machine exploded at the Lisboa Casino in Macau. The blast shattered the glass in four windows.
The casino's managing director, Stanley Ho, ruled out the possibility of blackmail as the reason for the blast, but commented that it was 'a very bad joke'.
A European woman's inability to stop crying in court led to a 14-day incarceration at the Castle Peak Hospital. Dorothy Louise Jehan McMahon Kwok cried when charged with three offences at Western Court. The magistrate ordered the hospital stay so a psychiatrist could interview her. The woman denied trying to avoid paying a bill at a restaurant on The Peak, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Two Thai women who fell out with local boyfriends chose deportation to remaining in Hong Kong.
The two arrived in the territory on visitors' visas, which expired in early March. While here they met and lived with two construction workers.
When the relationships went sour they asked a Western Court magistrate to deport them to Thailand for having breached their conditions of stay.
Two former soldiers of the Japanese army returned to their homeland for the first time after the end of the second world war. The two went to Indo-China in the 1940s, stayed in Vietnam after the war and fought against the French.
They decided to leave Vietnam when the authorities confiscated their land after unification.
