Shreveport's Shreve

Sirs:

I enclose a photograph of the central mural, one of five, which adorns the walls of Shreveport's newest skyscraper. This particular panel depicts Captain Henry Shreve, breaking up the great raft on Red River at a point where the city of Shreveport now stands. This, I believe, gives the lie to the caption "Shreveport forgot him," which appears below a likeness of Henry Shreve . . . in your Oct. 27 issue.

The Shreve Memorial Library, named after our "benefactor," has in its files considerable data on Shreve and his work. . . . Captain Henry Shreve is one Yankee whom this part of the South does not choose to forget.

J. G. O'BRIEN

Vice President and Trust Officer Commercial National Bank in Shreveport Shreveport, La.

Smart Dames & Smooth Gents

Sirs:

Compliments and thanks for "Fever Chart" and "Appointment in Samara" in TIME, Oct. 27. They are the tops. Written as though from a mountaintop where we get in one view significance of the past, pathos and confusion of the present, doom in the future unless we wake up with a bang.

Here in the Carolinas we are having, this week of crisis, a convention of tourist agents. Two hundred of them from all parts of the country loll on terraces of inns and country clubs, sipping mint juleps which obsequious landlords provide. Smart dames and smooth gents talk languidly in low tones, with those little glances of confidence, eloquent of the present moment only. . . .

On an afternoon I watched some of them sitting where the whole panorama of the mountains stretched sleepily before them. Black boys in white coats slid constantly among them with trays of tall glasses wrapped in white paper napkins. . . . Not a cloud in the sky. All were dreaming and talking of next year's harvest of tourists to Vermont, Yosemite, Miami, Williamsburg. Suddenly the sound of airplanes came from high above us. Hardly a soul looked up. I searched but could see nothing till two small clouds of glistening white like snowflakes showed where a tremendous flock of swans or geese had been split into confusion by three Airacobras. The birds formed again, melted out of sight. The planes vanished in the blue void. The Lords and Ladies of Tours talked on.

The whole thing was as unreal as a printed poster, while the voice of TIME dinned in my ears: . . . It was now plain that the U.S. could count on no other country to do her fighting for her. Henceforth the U.S. would have to decide and act for herself.

RALPH ERSKINE

Tryon, N.C.

Sirs:

When reading the article "The Crisis" in your last issue, I had the sensation of a sharp, lightning pain, as from the sudden touching of a sore tooth, for which we had swallowed pills instead of facing the dentist.

I can't help but wonder, where does all that opium, which so successfully dulls our pains and paralyzes our will power, where does that same drug which has doped so many other peoples into slavery come from?

ANTHONY STEVEN FELSOVANYI, M.D.

Baltimore, Md.

Horticulture

Sirs:

. . . You sit smugly on your interventionist porch and look down on your neighbor's lush America First garden, which, you exultingly perceive, is filled with all manner of obnoxious weeds. Surely you know enough about horticulture to realize that weeds grow rankest where the soil is most fertile. Every good gardener, and your neighbor is one, eventually gets rid of his weeds, often to the chagrin of his early-season critics.

Why don't you do a little hoeing in your own garden? You may not know it, but since last June your patch has become so infested with Red skunk cabbage that it is beginning to be a nuisance to the neighborhood.

A. A. HOFFMAN

Tenafly, N.J.

Devil's Due

Sirs:

I notice some folks don't like to "give the devil his due." Had California been taken from us 20 years ago, we most certainly would get it back and we wouldn't go to Munich and ask John Bull's permission either. And if he threw out his mighty chest in defiance because he thought he ruled the earth as well as the seas, we'd likewise teach him to mind his own business, wouldn't we ? I can't appreciate a big bully who, after getting his ears pinned back for butting in, comes crying to Uncle Sam for help because he started something he couldn't finish. Neither do I approve of war. . . . Since Britain seems to have gobbled up her share of the earth why should she jump on Berlin's paperhanger because he wanted to round up his German people and create a new order in central Europe. . . .

MRS. E. NEWQUIST Los Angeles, Calif.

Two Tutes

Sirs:

Please correct publicly a glaring error that has appeared under the heading Mexico in TIME, Oct. 6.

Sir Richard Clifford Tute has never been in Mexico in his life. Nor has he ever been entrusted with any mission to that country. He has not been in England since 1938. As a matter of fact he has lived in Ottawa for the last three months and before that resided in Washington.

Please let me know how this extraordinary mistake came to be made. . .

SIR RICHARD CLIFFORD TUTE KB.

Ottawa, Canada

> The British official who arrived in Mexico was not Sir Richard Clifford Tute, veteran of the Indian Civil Service, onetime Governor of the Bahamas, but his brother, Brigadier Clifford S. Tute, veteran of Britain's Army in India, now attached to the Indian Purchasing Commission. The names were confused in a press agency dispatch from Vera Cruz.--ED.

TIME & Religion

Sirs:

... It so often happens that the secular magazine puts a sports reporter on religious meetings and we get about what might be expected. I have watched TIME's treatment of religious news in general, and I feel that it is exceptionally well done.

This is especially true in the case of news from the Methodist Church which has been, so far as I can remember, without important error in any particular. This is unusual, and deeply appreciated. . . .

ROY L. SMITH

Chicago, Ill.

Sirs:

I should like to make the observation that your article "No-Priest-Land" in TIME, Oct. 20, marks the first really intelligent reporting on your part on things Catholic which I have ever been privileged to read in the pages of your powerful organ. Let us hope that this marks a complete departure from your former utter lack of comprehension of the Catholic element on the American scene.

May I express my thanks for a down to earth, soberly conceived report of the N.C.R.L. Conference.

(REV.) JOHN BUCHANAN

Minneapolis, Minn.

Lean, Tall, Sad Men

Sirs:

The story that Abraham Lincoln is the illegitimate son of John C. Calhoun (TIME, Oct. 27) is a legend that has existed in the Carolinas for 100 years, and in spite of all sorts of proofs that it cannot be true it continues on. It makes the Calhouns very angry and it also angers the Hanks family, many of whom still live here. Once years ago my father and Mr. Rhett Turnipseed asked Mr. John Edward Calhoun if it were true that Calhoun were Lincoln's father--John Edward Calhoun was sitting on the front piazza of the Calhoun mansion and he picked up a straight chair and said furiously to my father and Mr. Turnipseed, "Young gentlemen, you have been misinformed."

Once about two years ago I asked my Uncle Wade O'Dell at Liberty, S.C., if he had ever heard the Hanks story. He began to tell me what he had heard and as he was talking my Aunt Bettie came into the room. She said with indignation, "I'm not going to hear that story another time," and she went off to prayer meeting. . . .

The legend probably started in this section from hate. It probably too was helped along by the leanness and tallness and sadness of appearance which both Lincoln and Calhoun . . . possessed. . . .

BEN ROBERTSON

Clemson, S.C.

Giveaway

Sirs:

TIME put out a clever quiz

Its readers' minds to frisk.

Now wasn't TIME a foolish mag

Its Little * ?

(Note: See TIME, Oct. 27, questions 27 & 29.)

JEANNE T. MILLIKAN Woodbridge, Conn.

> TIME did indeed print asterisks in front of the correct answers to those two questions in some copies -- a dead giveaway. When the quiz is first made up, asterisks are carried on the correct answers to avoid mistakes in the answer column, but these marks are, of course, supposed to be removed when TIME goes to press. This TIME the printers failed to sweep all the star dust under the rug. -- ED.

Thanks

Sirs:

We have been most satisfied subscribers to TIME for more than five years, so last spring ... we sent TIME to [a mission in] India. We are sure you will be interested in the enclosed "Thanks."

R. E. MAXWELL

Rochester, N.Y.

> The "Thanks" forwarded by Reader Maxwell were printed in a missionary circular. Excerpts follow. -- ED.

"The other day we received TIME. It has come regularly. There is no letter indicating whom to thank. But my point is that it is an exhilarating experience to suddenly see AMERICA through the medium of modern streamlined advertising. We like the style of TIME. It is a good tonic for a certain 'missionary mentality' we hope to avoid. You know what I mean.

"It is an awakening experience to read of the American scene, international affairs, science, art, the theater, movies, music and religion through TIME. But the ads. They are terrific. The new sleek cars ... air conditioning . . . music on a beam of light . . . super air liners . . . Heinz Soup . . . romance in a lump of coal . . . Listerine . . . washing machines.

Say, you should come to India. Old "T" model Fords going strong . . . hot winds blowing through a 'khus-khus' tatty/- ... a wedding party hammering the stillness of the night with goatskin drums . . . travel on an oxcart . . . native women patting cow dung into fuel cakes from dawn to dark . . . the dhobi beating your best shirt thin on a rock ... a sour lime trying to do the work of Coca-Cola. Thank you, someone, for sending TIME. We feel like Columbus in our rediscovery of America. . . ."

/- Tatty: mat or screen of fibers in a door or window, kept wet to cool the air. Khus-khus: sweet-scented root of an India grass.

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