Cantuar

Sirs:

Is it possible that you, who have followed the Abdication and the Coronation with such care, have missed the following quatrain? It was written, I have been told, by a young English poet, whose name I unfortunately do not know; and it was published, I believe, in a London newspaper. The Latin word for Canterbury is, as you are aware, cantuar; and the venerable Archbishop Lang must have had a twinge of conscience if his eyes fell upon these lines:

Milord Archbishop, what a scold you are!

And, when your man is down, how bold you are.

Of Christian charity how scant you are

Ah, Auld Lang Swyne, how full of cant-u-ar!

CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

New York City

Train Telephones

Sirs:

TIME, May 10, on p. 52 under Transport states that ". . . nowhere can train travelers telephone beyond the train when it is moving." A number of years ago the Deutsche Reichsbahn started installing regular telephone service from moving trains to outside points in the country.

This service was first established on some special trains on the Berlin-Hamburg run. Whether it is still being used I am unable to say, but it was by no means a stunt like the conversation between London, England and tram running from Montreal to Chicago which you mention in your article. The intention of the German Railroads was to establish a regular service.

An old bulletin of the German Railroads gives the following description of its operation: "While broadcasting does play an important function in the train telephone system, the method employed is really' a combination of ordinary and wireless telephony. There are three sending stations for the Berlin-Hamburg route, one at each end of the line, and another midway between the cities. Messages from ordinary telephones in homes, offices, or hotels, come to the nearest of these three stations by wire in the usual manner. At the stations they are taken up by a high frequency sending device and broadcast in an unusual manner. The waves do not leave the station via an aerial strung outside the transmitting building, but follow wires strung along the tracks, When they reach a point opposite the speeding train, the waves 'jump' to the aerial of the receiving set on the roof of the train."

PETER MOSNER

Caguas, P. R.

Sirs:

With reference to a statement in TIME May 10, that "nowhere can train travelers telephone beyond the train when it is moving," we are pleased to inform you that:

In January 1926 radio-telephone service was successfully installed by the German Railroads. Today, many express trains are equipped with radio-telephones; for instance, six expresses between Hamburg and Berlin.

From the moving train, travelers can make hotel or other reservations, converse with anyone they wish to reach, play the markets, etc., by merely stepping into the train radiotelephone booth and asking the operator to establish a radio-telephone connection with anyone anywhere in Germany. This train radio-telephone service is widely used and much appreciated by travelers. . .

H. PORTACK

German Railroads

New York City

Jalopy

Sirs: Where did you get the word "jalopy" for junked auto ? I cannot find it in any dictionary--Oxford, Merriam, slang, etc.

LAURANCE H. HART

Impersonator of George Washington

West Hartford, Conn.

"Jalopy," "jaloppi" --or "jollopy" (Weseen's Dictionary of American Slang}--has for years been the name used by U. S. second-hand car dealers and taxi drivers for an exhausted automobile. Possible derivation: jalap, a purgative root.-- ED.

Billy & Bobby

Sirs:

In regard to the cover picture on TIME, lay 3, it is obvious that Billy Mauch appears on the right.

Even the least fastidious movie goer would not mistake his identity. . . . I fear your most admirable movie critic has fallen to the depths of grammatical hyperbole. . . .

LLOYD AMBROSEN

School for Deaf

Faribault, Minn.

The Mauch to the reader's right (the Prince) in TIME'S cover picture was Bobby according to his mother, Billy according to Warner Brothers.-- ED.

Finest

Sirs :

Your story of the Hindenburg disaster, I believe, is the finest piece of work that has been done by your staff since the inception of the magazine. Will you please convey our congratulations to your staff members who did the rewrite on this horrible catastrophe.

J. B. HIPPLE

Business Manager

The Capital Journal

Pierre, S. D.

Loyal Bippo

Sirs :

Referring to one cat, Minnie, on the payrolls of the Standard Oil Company (TIME, April 12), I recently met on the island of Rhodes a bewhiskered and short-legged canine named Bippo who is not only the publicly-recognized assistant guardian of the local museum, but actually receives a pension from his government for 13 years of loyal ratsmanship.

ARTHUR TUCKERMAN

Gstaad, Switzerland

Logic & Politics

Sirs:

I. Hardee appears to be having trouble with his statistics, if his letter printed in the May 17 issue of TIME is an example of his calculating.

In a democratic government the majority rules. Would the Southern Senators and Representatives be fighting the anti-lynchlng bills with all the tricks they have up their sleeves if 99-975% of the population was against lynching? Both logic and practical politics say "no."

E. H. EATON Hagerstown, Ind.

Live Old Ladies

Sirs:

On p. 22 of your May 17 issue of TIME you refer to the Duke of Connaught as "Last surviving child of Queen Victoria," thus relegating to the realm of ghosts those two decidedly alive and grand old ladies, Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice, both surviving offspring of the union of Victoria and Albert.

Three surviving children of Queen Victoria, if you please sirs, Arthur, Louise and Beatrice.

Princess Louise, widow of the Duke of Argyll married that Scottish peer when he was Marquis of Lome, accompanied him to Canada when he was made Governor-General of this Dominion, and presided graciously over Rideau Hall at Ottawa for some years.

Princess Beatrice is the widow of Prince Henry of Battenberg, is the mother of former Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain and resides, unless I have been misinformed, in Kensington Palace, London and Carisbrooke Castle, her official residence as Governor of the Isle of Wight. She is the youngest child of Victoria, and with her sister was among those included in the present King's Coronation honours list.

In all chivalry I suggest you acknowledge the existence of these two thoroughly alive old ladies, the Princesses Louise and Beatrice.

F. H. STEVENS

Winnipeg Free Press Co. Ltd.

Winnipeg, Man.

Swing It

Sirs:

TIME, May 17, p. 22 under Great Britain, "Poorer sections made decorations from previous celebrations do."

Swing it, boys!

HOWARD H. LESTER

Rockport, Tex.

Longest Program

Sirs:

Referring to the last three lines centre column p. 39, TIME, May 24: you say the Coronation program was "the longest continuous program in radio history." We question this in view of the fact that on March 24, 1934, General Petroleum Corp. of California through its advertising agency Smith & Drum, Inc. introduced Mobilgas to the Pacific Coast with a radio program over all stations of the [then] Columbia Don Lee network which ran from 7:30 a.m. until midnight. The first 9 1/2 hours and the last 3 1/2 hours of this broadcast were continuous. Occasional interruptions between 5:00 and 8:30 p.m. were due to precedence of previously contracted transcontinental commercial programs. All this still left a clear uninterrupted continuous 9 1/2 hr. program. For details see p. 74, April, 1934 issue of Tide.

W. B. M. CURTIS

General Petroleum Corp. of California

Los Angeles, Calif.

Redcoats

Sirs: Again on the subject of military dress--TIME, May 3, p. 18, column i: ''Filty thousand Britons ... to gaze at the Royal Horse Guards in glistening breast plates and scarlet tunics. . . ." Because of their distinctive costume and the title of their colonel, the Royal Horse Guards were known as the Oxford Blues soon after their formation in 1661. Today the supplementary official title of the regiment and the one by which it is commonly known is The Blues.

All this because it wears a blue tunic instead of the scarlet of the other regiments of the Household Brigade.

W. J. WHITESIDE

Lieutenant, U. S. N.

U.S.S. Raleigh

Villefranche, France

There are two regiments of household cavalry. The redcoats TIME saw were Life Guards, not Horse Guards. ED.

Down on Fundy

Sirs:

We live down here in a small town on the Bay of Fundy. Educational facilities being poor, we depend on magazines and the radio for our development along this line, and in a town of this size one is apt to subscribe to any and all magazines in the hope of enlightenment.

Many papers and magazines differ so greatly in their views that we had come to the stage where we read all and believed none.

TIME came along and now we have accurate and unbiased accounts of current events. We have come to believe in TIME Your description of the Coronation in the May 24 issue cannot be equaled. It is truthfully and dramatically written and I, as a British subject, will have to hand it to America for the briefest, yet most concise and exciting account of the Coronation. God save our TIME.

HARRY LEON BURKE

Joggins, Nova Scotia

Unhardened Wildwood

Sirs:

It would be interesting, I am sure, to most of the winter residents as well as to the 350,000 summer residents of Wildwood, to know what prompted you to describe Wildwood as "a hardened little resort town and fishing port between Atlantic City and Cape May," in your article of May 17 on our "Extraordinary Mayor." Just what constitutes "a hardened town?" 1 will gladly admit there is nothing Puritanical about Wildwood, and it is quite frankly a resort city. But that does not mean we are hardened. The resort attracts a very good class of people from all sections of the country. All of our many churches are crowded throughout . the summer and none is vacant in winter.

Yes, we do have a fishing port here. It is not so very small, however. Our commercial fisheries rank second among the commercial fisheries of the Atlantic seaboard. And we have any number of deep-sea fishing boats for sport. . . .

We are also quite proud of our bathing beach. We have more than seven miles of the best beach in the country--a clean, gently sloping beach superior to any other on the entire coastal line.

Your article was evidently written by someone who never saw Wildwood. I suggest he come here this summer. The fact that we will not punch his face or kick him in the pants, as he most justly deserves, will be evidence of our lack of hardness.

(REV.) WILLIAM CHARLES HEILMAX

Episcopal Church of St. Simeon-by-the-Sea

Wildwood, N. J.

All power to Wildwood, hard or soft; to her boardwalk, her auction shops', her dance halls, her shooting galleries and Bingo games. A seaside colony of 15,000, this summer Wildwood, according to her Chamber of Commerce, expects 175,000 residents, 15% more than last year.--ED.

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