Dollar Gin

Sirs: In reference to the article in your Feb. 10 issue under Prohibition "In God We Trust." At 6:30 last night I went to the "Cordials" and 'Beverages" shop at 201 East 44th Street and asked the clerk if he had anything alcoholic. He said he had and suggested brandy or rye. I explained that I had seen his "advertisement" in TIME, which had prompted me to drop in. He read your account with much interest and expressed the opinion that it might cause them some trouble. A man who had been sitting nearby suddenly took an interest, asked the name of the magazine, where it could be purchased, and went out to buy a copy. The clerk said this publicity was very unfortunate at the present time as one of their stores had just been smashed up and $5,000 worth of liquor destroyed.

I bought a quart of gin for $1.00 (using my commutation ticket as an identification), and left. The gin was palatable but weak. It was intoxicating.

I hope this shop will be permitted to continue operation, as I have to pay $2.00 for gin in the delicatessens in Bronxville and Tuckahoe, and $2.50 in the Wall St. district.

GEORGE B. THOMAS Bronxville, N. Y.

Indeed a newsworthy shop is 201 East 44th Street, whose fate TIME will report.--ED.

Mammyman

Sirs: TIME, Feb. 3, p. 18, col. 3, states: "When Al Jolson . . . now vacationing in Europe, was asked last week. . . ." On Jan. 25, Al Jolson appeared personally in a concert at Dallas, Tex. Could TIME be wrong?

A. RAGLAND, JR. Dallas, Tex. Yes. But there is reason to believe that Mammyman Jolson did refuse to sing in Vienna for less than his allegedly customary $5,000.--ED.

Sirs: Jan. 28, was officially proclaimed "Jolson Day" in Houston by Mayor Montieth, and Jolson appeared here on the night of the 28th, giving his reason for being here as "Sears-Roebuck and several other stocks."

C. W. THORNHILL Houston, Tex.

Sirs: While you were busy writing "Al Jolson now vacationing in Europe" Mr. Jolson was singing here in Tulsa--with a $6,500 guarantee. He then sang in Dallas.

I find I get a real kick out of finding you wrong.

PAULINE FANNING Tulsa, Okla.

Sirs: Your issue of Feb. 3 states that Al. Jolson is vacationing in Europe. I was one of seven persons who walked with Mr. Jolson from the Adolphus Hotel, Dallas, to the Baker Hotel, Dallas, to observe and hear him broadcast from Radio Station WFAA on the night of Friday, Jan. 24. I was one of 3,000 persons who heard him sing in the State Fair Auditorium, Dallas, on the night of Saturday, Jan. 25. I was one of 100,000 persons who read of his appearances in San Antonio and Houston, Tex., and New Orleans, La., during the week just past. I don't believe he could have been in Europe when your magazine went to press. I don't think he could have reached Europe by the time you receive this. From a conversation with him, I did not gather that he was even going to Europe.

CLAIRE BURGER ROSENFIELD Dallas, Texas.

Sirs: . . . Your reporter must be referring to two other people as "Mammy Singer" Jolson presented a commendable performance here on Jan. 30, 1930. Estimated attendance: 4,000. Average price of tickets: $2.00. Estimated receipts: $8,000. Obviously Vienna would have used poor judgment by refusing to meet "Mammy Singer" Jolson's price of $5,000.

SAM HEID New Orleans, La.

Sirs: . . . As a Jolson Fan I had the pleasure of seeing him in this city Feb. 27 last. He also occupied the Presidential Suite in the Gunter Hotel of this city.

J. B. ADAIR Fort Sam Houston, Tex.

Sirs: Would like to know if Mr. Jolson was being falsely impersonated in San Antonio, or if he has some uncanny way of jumping from continent to continent?

ROBERT J. SARBER New Braunfels, Tex.

Crassass

Sirs: A SOPHOMORON? Whatever else is hazy I'm Convinced the guy that flyspecks TIME With "smartchart," "slugnut," "cineman," And such emetic words is an Irrational, to give him credit, or Else a very woodenheaditor. This crassass botches English so, Yet spells "adviser" with an "o"!

CHARLTON ANDREWS New York, N. Y.

Ob'd't S'v't

Sirs: I am pained to observe that in your current issue (TIME, Feb. 10) you refer to the "Welsh Guards."

Permit me, on behalf of the accuracy for which TIME is notorious, to hand you this quotation from Robert Graves' Good Bye to All That.

"A defiant regimental peculiarity is the spelling of the word 'Welch' with a 'c.' I have seen a young officer sent off battalion parade because his buttons read Welsh instead of Welch.

" 'Welch' referred us somehow to the antique North Wales of Henry Tudor and Owen Glendower and Lord Herbert Cherbury, the founder of the regiment; it dissociated us from the modern North Wales of chapels, liberalism, the dairy and drapery business, Lloyd George, and the tourist trade."

I am, sir, etcetera, your ob'd't s'v't.

HOWARD VINCENT O'BRIEN St'd c'rr'ct'd.--ED.

Solid Ground

Sirs: Two recent statements in your columns lead me to write you. One is in your article on the resignation of Judge Taft "Outstanding decisions: one." In Taylor v. Railroad, in the 88th Federal, Judge Taft's opinion established the right of the taxpayers to resort to the courts for protection against tax discrimination; his decision in U. S. v. Addystone Pipe Co. is one of the most frequently cited opinions dealing with the rights of corporations under anti-trust laws; his decision in the Burlington railroad case established the right of the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate rates, both interstate and intrastate; his half dozen opinions on various phases of the prohibition law enforcement question are all basic and all outstanding. Wuchter v. Pazzutti on the limitations on certain rights of this state and of state courts is a recent example.

Judge Taft is one of our great lawyers. During the past years I have, in the discharge of professional duties, had occasion to study through some of his decisions back even to the old English cases he cited.

One who tests his opinions in that way is impressed with the sureness of Judge Taft's knowledge. Any lawyer will tell you that when he can quote in support of his contention an opinion of Judge Taft, he feels on pretty solid ground.

His statements of the law have the same lasting qualities that distinguish those of John Marshall. Doubtless other members of the bar will cite you other outstanding decisions. I have given you a few that will come readily to the recollection of any lawyer.

The other statement was in regard to the alleged distrust in which the late Wayne B. Wheeler held former Attorney General Daugherty when the latter was the head of the Department of Justice. I do not know Mr. Daugherty; never met him, but I did know Wayne Wheeler rather well. Mr. Daugherty and Mr. Wheeler knew each other very well in Ohio politics many years before each came to Washington. Mr. Wheeler once told me, in some detail, of the unwavering support that he and those who thought as he did had always had from Mr. Daugherty in Ohio. He regarded Mr. Daugherty as the staunch friend of the Drys and trusted him completely. Mr. Wheeler told me this sometime after Mr. Daugherty became Attorney General. That Mr. Wheeler's confidence in Mr. Daugherty, as a friend of the Drys, was justified is demonstrated by the fact that Mr. Daugherty placed at the head of Prohibition enforcement in his office Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, whose ability and attachment to the Dry cause are both unquestioned.

WILLIAM S. BENNET Evanston, Ill.

Skunk's Kick

Sirs: It seems from your insertion of Senator Blease's remarks in a recent issue (TIME, Jan. 20) that they have brought down condemnation upon your head. Blease's words were only a drop of rain compared to the entire book (DIVERSEY--MacKinlay Kantor--Coward McCann). The book is a thunderstorm.

Every page throbs with a brutal vitality and the rattle of a machinegun in action. It has the kick of a skunk to any pious reformer and will knock any prohibitionist for a loop plumb into a London pub.

Kantor makes the English language walk and talk with a breathless intensity--an episode of dramatic and thrilling power. It is worth 25 other books. Kantor has put on paper what every he-man thinks and does, and naturally it is not fit for the henpecked, weak-kneed, jellied flock of men strutting across the U. S. map today.

Imagine, SR. Co., the mail order house, is peddling the book today to the yokels in the rural regions for 63-c-.

WARREN WHEELER Midway, Ky.

South Carolina's Blease referred to Diversey in the Senate chamber as "the dirtiest thing I have ever read," quoted some of its more violent dialog. A novel of a Chicago newsgatherer, gangsters, women, it is priced by its publishers at $2, was being sold last week in Sears-Roebuck retail stores for 75-c-.--ED.

Box Business

Sirs: Under the caption "Box Troubles" in the "Business and Finance" section of TIME, issued Feb. 3, you printed an article in which a succession of circumstances, beginning with a gathering of members of the Paper Industry at the country home of Mr. George W. Gair, President of the Robert Gair Co., during July of last year and ending with the totally irrelevant acquirement of the Sefton Manufacturing Corp. by the Container Corp. of America, implied that these events indicated an eventual merger of the Robert Gair Co. with the Container Corp. of America. This forecast is the product of a willing imagination, which undeterred by facts, envisions a "U. S. Steel of paperboard companies" rising upon the foundation of this combine.

It is not the intention of the Robert Gair Co. to merge with the Container Corp. of America or to participate in the formation of a holding company with this or any other corporation. The bland hints as to the fatalistic attractions of this "splendid couple" are significant of absolutely nothing more than that the old "matchmakers" of Wall Street are again tickling public susceptibilities with romance.

Mr. George W. Gair and his guests, among whom was Secretary of Labor James John Davis, did not foregather at Greens Farms secretly, as implied, but by general invitation, to once more consider an agreement subscribed to by a majority of paper mill owners at Washington, providing for a five-day operating program to lessen overproduction. . . .

This was more than an expedient; it was necessary economically and it was humane socially. As in petroleum, more was being produced than was wanted or consumed. . . . That was all--mergers are believed by Mr. George W. Gair to be secondary to a correction of fundamentals and are not in themselves corrective when basic questions of production are allowed to continue. . . .

L. S. SANDERMAN Robert Gair Company New York City.

TIME's reason for calling the meeting at George W. Gair's home "secret": a nearby local paper had been warned not to mention it: the Robert Gair Co. itself refused to give information about an apparently similar meeting last fall; boxboard men in general would give information only upon receiving TIME's promise that their identities would not be disclosed. TIME mentioned a possible merger between the Robert Gair Co. and the Container Corp. of America because several important boxboard men believe it will eventually happen, some insist negotiations have been begun. The present denial is accepted in good faith.--ED.

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