Right Intentions, Wrong Foot
Sirs:
I think you ought to know that you got off on the wrong foot on your Cleveland Eucharistic Congress story (TIME, Sept. 30). Whatever your good intentions were, from this editorial desk I have heard complaints about it from all over the U. S., and they seem to be growing in volume. Many readers of your paper, spontaneously and without any collusion, saw in the story many a sly dig against the Church and its personalities. You see, once it gets into people's minds that you have no respect for anything, they see in all of your airy remarks something sinister or at least unfriendly. Watch your adjectives!
WILFRID PARSONS, S. J.
Editor America New York City
Never were TIME'S intentions more sincere than in its effort to report thoroughly, seriously and fairly the preparations for Cleveland's Eucharistic Congress. Thoroughly astonished and disturbed was TIME, therefore, when it learned that its report had displeased many Catholic readers. If offense was given, TIME is more than sorry.--ED.
Horrible Scar
Sirs:
To many people the death picture of Gerald Thompson [TIME, Oct. 28] is more than "distasteful." It leaves a horrible scar. We don't expect to be so hopelessly exposed to that sort of thing in TIME.
The article might have been news, but the picture was inhumanly sensational, and too revolting for TIME to print.
LOLA McCoLLOCH
Janesville, Wis.
Sirs:
. . . You have outraged my sense of decency. . . .
IRENE E. WATERS
Atlanta, Ga.
Sirs:
Please add my protest to those which you are receiving. . . .
W. V. CARSON
Evanston, Ill. Sirs: . . . You will probably be deluged with letters from your readers deploring the publishing of the photograph illustrating the actual murder of Gerald Thompson by the State of Illinois. I wish to commend your action. Let TIME in every subsequent issue publish at least one photograph of an execution, until your readers with delicate stomachs do something about this nasty business of legalized State murder. . . . SAM G. WILDMAN Placerville, Calif.
TIME will print execution pictures only if and when they are news.--ED.
Epitaph
Sirs:
The violent death of Sidney Smith (TIME, Milestones, Oct. 28), caused me to recall a thrilling ride I once had with the originator of the Gumps.
Smith had a zest for driving and a skill for it, remarkable in a man over 50.
On record breaking trips such as the one attested to in the enclosed document, his car always carried the famed 348 plates created with his earlier character "Old Doc Yak."
I know that he too, would consider this certificate TiMEworthy. GEORGE T. EGGLESTON
Editor Life New York City
"Shame! Shame!"
Sirs:
I am sending today the following letter to President Walter Teagle of Standard Oil of New Jersey. . . .
"If the statement in col. 3, p. 10 of TIME, Oct. 28, is correct, you may count on me and as many of my friends as I can muster to boycott Standard products from now on. My sympathies are with Italy, but if you violate the Neutrality Bill you are as monstrous as a munitions maker; you will persuade many voters that Big Business is wicked and greedy. As a Republican and a firm supporter (until now) of Capitalism, I say 'Shame! Shame!'" PHILIP G. CORLISS M. D.
Somerton, Ariz.
Spank Sirs:
Now that you have been soundly spanked for "old adage," "consensus of opinion." and "hollow tube," I wonder if you care to be reminded of "cairn of stones," third column, p. 11," TIME, Oct. 28?
Please continue my subscription.
RAYMOND I. HASKELL
Head
Department of English Girard College Philadelphia, Pa.
Sirs:
Did Dutchman van Gogh produce paintings at some time other than "in his lifetime ?" (TIME, Oct. 28, p. 23). . . .
JOSEPH H. REASON
New York City
Sirs: In rebuking you for speaking of a "hollow tube" TIME, Oct. 28, a correspondent implies that the expression "the consensus of opinion" is similarly objectionable. For the sake of many of your readers who will be misled by his letter, will you kindly give publicity to the fact that according to the consensus of dictionary opinion the expression "consensus of opinion" is good English, "consensus" in this use meaning "general agreement." Skeptics are referred to the new Webster, the Standard, the Century, and the Oxford. This is only one of a number of good English usages condemned by the hypercritical but supported by the real authorities. Most people who hear them adversely criticized never take the trouble to investigate, but assume that the critic is correct and waste a good deal of energy in an effort to eliminate the offending expressions from their vocabularies -- energy which might be better spent in correcting their real errors. Worse than this, they acquire the idea that the prime requisite for using good English is to be unnatural.
C. A. LLOYD
Biltmore College Asheville, N. C.
Pride in the Past
Sirs: Please stand corrected upon one fact printed in the Sports section of TIME, Oct. 28. In reporting the Notre Dame football victory over Pittsburgh the story stated, "Pitt is the only team that has beaten Notre Dame three years in a row since 1900." A close check of the football records will reveal the following: 1931-- University of Southern California 16, Notre Dame 14. 1932 -- University of Southern California 13, Notre Dame 0. 1933--University of Southern California 19, Notre Dame . In view of the present Trojan campaign for which we certainly receive nothing for which to root, we do take extreme pride in the past victories of the S. C. football machines.
H. FREDERICK PHILLIPS
Los Angeles, Calif.
TIME gladly restores to Southern California its cherished football memory.-- ED. Damned Irritating
Sirs:
TIME may be (which I doubt) at a loss to understand the undoubted bad taste of its "constant references to a certain Englishman" who cannot hit back which offended Subscriber McFarlan (TIME, Oct. 28)--but it's pretty clear to me he meant the Prince of Wales. Assure me, please, that TIME'S subtle mud-slinging at the British Royal Family in recent issues isn't caused by the fact that TIME was censored in England. Meantime I continue to take your magazine because it's so damned irritating. . . . MRS. GILBERT MANT
Ottawa, Canada
Let irritated Subscriber Mant be assured that censorship in England or anywhere else has not the slightest effect on TIME'S content.--ED. Sirs:
. . . With reference to your comment frankly, if I thought you were really as damned dumb as this indicates, I would confine my reading to the advertisements. . . .
The reference was, as you damned well know, to the constant reporting of items regarding H. R. H. the Prince of Wales. It still seems to me to be in rotten taste to be constantly reporting items of no consequence, but written up with your well-known derogatory slant, regarding a man who will probably, at some time, rule the only nation which has pulled up its socks, faced the music, and endeavored to overcome its difficulties without resorting to either dictatorship or demagoguery with a Harvard accent. . . .
A. H. McFARLAN
Phoenix, Ariz.
Chamois Beard
Sirs:
For your information the Austrian chamois has a beard of soft hair almost uniformly black, while hair used in the Gamsbart is stiff, bristly and varicolored (TIME, Oct. 28). TIME, Abercrombie & Fitch and the Austrian National Tourist Office have probably never hunted like I have.
ALEXANDER KING
New York City
TIME owes an apology to Subscriber Angier Biddle Duke, who said that the chamois Gamsbart was composed of spine hair, and whom TIME contradicted. To the Austrian National Tourist Office and Abercrombie & Fitch, reproof for giving out misinformation.--ED.
Oldtime Bailer-Out
Sirs:
Under Transport, TIME, Oct. 21, re physiological reactions of Parachute Jumper Captain Armstrong excerpted from the American Medical Association Journal, your reporter erred in saying "since it was his first jump," a conclusion not unwarrantedly drawn from the original article.
As a matter of fact during the fall of 1929 Captain Armstrong, then a First Lieutenant in the Medical Reserve Corps and a student in the School of Aviation Medicine at Brooks Field, Tex., of which institution I was then Commandant, "bailed out" as one of a covey authorized to make a parachute jump. As one of many witnesses, it has remained a conviction with me that the "physiological reactions" experienced by that splendid officer on that occasion were not those which could be unscrambled and recorded with the precision and scientific value that attach to his more recent leap. My good friend Captain Armstrong will doubtless bear me out. FRANCIS H. POOLE, M. D., F. A. C. S.,
Major, U. S. Army, Retired
Santa Cruz, Calif.
The report in the A. M. A. Journal dealt with Captain Armstrong's one & only jump, which Major Poole witnessed in 1929. Since then, said Captain Armstrong last week, "I have obeyed kindly, frightened Major Poole and wife's six-year-old admonition to stop that nonsense.''--ED.
Greatest Dailies
Sirs:
No list of nation's great newspapers [TIME, Nov. 4] complete which omits Richmond's News Leader.
R. P. CECCHINI
Cleveland, Ohio
Sirs:
How about the Newark Evening News?
A. J. FLANAGAN
Washington, D. C.
Sirs: The St. Louis Globe-Democrat outranks the St. Louis Post-Dispatclt--or has the Globe reached its 30? VIOLET G. OWENS
St. Louis, Mo.
Sirs:
. . . May I cast my vote for the Christian Science Monitor? . . .
LILLIAN E. EDLUND
Baker Insurance Agency Fargo, N. Dak.
Sirs:
And the self-tooted Des Moines Register & Tribune which offers so much to advertisers was among the missing in TIME'S list. . . .
What will the Register & Tribune say to that?
WILLIAM M. SLAYDEN
Field Representative
Tennessee Emergency Relief Administration Chattanooga, Tenn.
Nothing to date.--ED.
Sirs: Inclusion of the Los Angeles Times in your list of great newspapers will be greeted with a whoop and a holler from intelligent residents of Southern California. . . . Front page "news" in the Times: columns on Aimee's home life; headlines on storm and flood in the East whenever an Ohio hen house blows over or the Piscataquis creek overflows in Maine, but a singular reticence when our own rooftree tumbles about our head. . . . Hi SIBLEY
Pasadena, Calif.
Handsome Daughter-in-Law
THE HANDSOME REDHEAD SIPPING SOMETHING THROUGH A STRAW WITH
WALTER P. CHRYSLER ON P. 63 [TIME. Nov. 11] IS THE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW OF THE K. T. KELLERS. SHE IS MRS. ROBERT KELLER. LOVE & KISSES.
JACK L. OLIVER
THE DETROIT TIMES Detroit, Mich.
TIME stands rebuked for mislabeling the daughter-in-law of Chrysler President Keller.--ED.
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