From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for August 10, 1974:

• A young Lawrence man, having stolen a walkie-talkie radio from the Lawrence Police Department on a recent Friday night, used it to turn himself in about three hours later. The radio, valued at $800, had been recovered and Robert Mendoza, 18, was being held in the county jail for investigation of grand theft. Mendoza told officers he had walked into the police station, then located at 745 Vermont Street, at about 11 p.m. to talk to a detective but instead had picked up the radio from the front counter and had exited the building without being noticed. At about 2 a.m., Mendoza had used the radio to talk to a police officer, asking the officer to come to an area near Sixth and New Hampshire, where he subsequently surrendered himself (and the radio) without incident.
• Dutch Elm disease was affecting a slightly higher number of American elms in Lawrence this summer due to the extremely dry conditions, according to George Osborne, superintendent of parks and forestry. Usually, the department removed between 325 and 375 trees a year, with about 95 percent of those being American elms with Dutch Elm disease, which “pops up when it gets dry,” Osborne said. Various types of trees were being replanted in the Lawrence area in an attempt to avoid planting too many trees of one kind. This former practice had resulted in a full-scale wipeout of the kind that had destroyed most of the area’s American elms.