Sirs: I have been watching with approval the idea of a life subscription grow into the idea of a perpetual subscription. I have also frequently read letters in your column not complimentary to TIME and threatening direful revenge. So before investing in a perpetual subscription I should like to know:
1. When you get mad at TIME and want to stop your subscription what do you do?
2. When you get over your mad and want to be reinstated what provision is there to make that easy and painless to your pride?
One who has never stopped his subscription.
H. S. BOQUIST, M. D. Minneapolis, Minn.
Impracticable is any special provision by TIME covering madness. Let Perpetual Subscribers who get mad, sell or give away their certificates. When the madness has passed, let them try to recover their certificates.--ED.
Not First
Sirs:
May I be TIME'S first perpetual subscriber? Or if not the very first, then at least a charter member of the Perpetual Subscriptions' Club? Herewith is my check for $60 in full payment for a perpetual subscription. . . .
TIME'S claim to be the first publication to offer perpetual subscriptions must be either withdrawn or considerably limited by qualifications. Since 1920 or earlier, the New England Historic Genealogical Society has offered a perpetual subscription to its quarterly magazine, The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, in connection with a perpetual membership in the Society, for $300. More recently, the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society has offered perpetual subscriptions to its quarterly magazine with or without perpetual membership in the Society.
CHARLES SHEPARD II Rochester, N. Y.
Sirs:
. . . In April, 1923, I sent to Wallace's Farmer, published by the Wallace Publishing Company, Des Moines, Iowa, the sum of $11.25 for a perpetual subscription. Just when the plan was announced I do not recall, but I did not respond at once because I had been subscribing on the multiple-year at-reduced-rates basis and did not send the fee for "perpetual" until my prior subscription had run out. The Wallace Publishing Company has sent the paper regularly since, and will continue to do so at my pleasure as long as they publish the paper, and the company in addition sent me as to all other "perpetuals" a certificate entitling me to the return of $10 upon return of the certificate with request to cancel the subscription. . . .
TIME'S plan is good, is attractive, but is not "without precedent" except in detail, and perhaps in class of publication. The rate is fair.
The sum is so large that it may be some years before I feel like coughing up. I would feel more like it if TIME could undertake to refund part of the money in case of need. . . .
S. W. MENDUM Takoma Park, D. C.
Subscriber Mendum is correct. Wallace's Farmer sold perpetual subscriptions from 1910 to 1927. Several thousand are still in effect. TIME will not include any refunding feature. To do so would destroy the kernel of perpetuity. --ED.
Look At Young !
Sirs:
"Time out!" Gentlemen! Life subscriptions, indeed! to make TIME smug and fat, complacent and self-satisfied. Already is there the trace of complaisance, of self-satisfaction, in its columns as indicated verily by this discussion.
Let TIME remain lean and hungry and ever under the necessity of striving to earn its daily bread. Only under such conditions are worth-while things accomplished. Let TIME ask Owen D. Young is he not hungry. Let TIME look at him. . . .
W. MCMILLAN PALMIERI Newark, N. J.
Park's Kudos
Sirs:
In the June 17 issue of TIME you give a list of people who have received honorary degrees at various institutions of learning at Commencement time this year. Among them is the name of Lou Henry Hoover who received a degree from Swarthmore. You have failed to state that the same institution, at the same time, conferred a degree on Marion Edwards Park! President of Bryn Mawr. I infer that it is not accounted "lese majeste" to mention the President of Bryn Mawr College in the same class with the wife of the President of the United States.
ALICE M. FIELD-NEWKIRK Radnor, Penn.
President Park, recipient of four honorary degrees prior to Swarthmore's. was omitted, with many another, to save space.--ED.
Sirs:
Suggest reporting among "Kudos" the awarding to Du Bose Heyward by the College of Charleston (S. C.) on May 14 the degree of LL.D. Mr. Heyward is a native of Charleston and the author of Porgy, Angel, Mamba's Daughters, etc. The College of Charleston was founded in 1785.
Congratulations on perpetual subscriptions. I expect to be for it financially in 1930, when my present subscription expires.
GEO. E. SHEETZ Lexington, S. C.
''Udder Nonsense"
Sirs: In these days of much ado about Farm Relief, you may be interested in what the Guernsey breeders have to say about it. In their picnic at River Falls, Wis., on June 4 as you will note on the attached sheet, they sang to the good old tune "I've been working on the railroad" the lines on the enclosure. May I suggest as a headline, "Udder Nonsense."
P. S. WILLIAMS Minneapolis, Minn.
The lines:
Today old friends can get together, at River Falls right now. We're here to boost the golden Guernsey The world's best dairy cow. No farm relief we need be asking, at night or early in the morn, Because we milk the golden Guernsey Till Gabriel blows his horn.
Chew on Decapitation
Sirs: In your June 3 number appeared a letter from Mr. John M. Vorys, Columbus, Ohio, giving a description of official decapitation by the sword in China.
Possibly an account given me by Mr. Ng Poon Chew, Chinese Editor of San Francisco, who was born and raised in Canton, China, may be interesting. When a boy he witnessed the execution of 42 pirates on the beach near that city. The culprits were placed in a kneeling position, an assistant seized the queue of the first, and the executioner decapitated him with a single quick slash of a long, straight, single-edged sword held by the right hand on the handle, the left grasping the back of the sword near the right hand. The stroke was delivered downward at an angle of 45 degrees away from the breast of the executioner. When decapitating public officials or others of high rank it was obligatory to leave a strip of skin at the throat imsevered, demanding a severe penalty upon the executioner for his lack of skill when the head was completely separated from the body. . . . DR. W. A. DUXTON Los Angeles, Calif.
Use for Queues
Sirs:
May I offer an addendum to correspondent Vorys' note on the technique of decapitation a la chinois? While in the Navy, I had a chance to examine certain snapshots of Chinese executions which had been taken with more or less success by a bluejacket who had spent some months on a gunboat up one of the Chinese rivers in the days before composographs were common. The most interesting (and clearest) was one of a decapitation carried out in the presence of a mandarin and an appreciative crowd of villagers. The utility of the queue was noteworthy. The decapitee was kneeling. One of the executioners held him by the shoulders. A second, vis-a-vis, strained at the end of the pigtail. The neck was thus brought into the most favorable position. I forget whether the third executioner, the swordsman, used one or two hands. The mandarin, fan in hand, had the air of a connoisseur. . . .
JAMES A. BRADLEY Newark, N. J.
Vandenberg's Eloquence
Sirs:
TIME is ordinarily accurate as well as concise. I prefer it to any other news symposium because it presents current subjects in compact form and with many revealing sidelights which I find nowhere else. But I am mystified by TIME'S high-spot analysis of Michigan's Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg in the issue of June 10. It was not accurate. . .
You say that Senator Vandenberg writes with more force than he speaks. How come? He is generally accepted in this state as Michigan's most outstanding orator, and has received national recognition as well for his forensic abilities as for the forcefulness of his pen. He was Michigan's orator upon the presentation of the Zach Chandler statue which fills the second of this state's places in national Statuary Hall at Washington. His war-time orations from the Indiana line to the Straits of Mackinac were a tremendous factor in putting over the Liberty Loan drives in Michigan.
As you say, he is a forceful writer, and also "bookish." That he should have tackled the reapportionment issue immediately after taking the Senate oath was characteristic. . . .
Vandenberg has a knack for putting losers out on top. When he was a reporter for the Grand Rapids Herald, Collier's Weekly hired him as editorial writer at $75 a week, a princely income at the turn of the century. But he quit Collier's and came back to The Herald at $18 a week on a hunch. Soon after that The Herald, in new hands, was shy an editor. Vandenberg hung up his hat in the editor's office, brushed his cigar ashes in the editor's tray and announced himself as the new boss. The owner let him stay as a penalty for his impertinence; but in about three jerks of a lamb's tail he had the weakling Herald on a money-making basis.
He doesn't play golf, fish, or engage in other outdoor sports. He does play a fair game of bridge and better than average billiards, but he prefers a book, usually one with a historical turn. He is scholarly, keen, well-grounded.
May I urge that you keep your eye on Vandenberg. Back here in his home town, we count him a "comer."
EARL H. DICKEY Grand Rapids, Mich.
TIME will continue to eye Michigan's Vandenberg; will report when his oratorical reputation reaches in Washington the height it has achieved in Michigan.--ED.