Generalizations on a Store

Sir:

Your Feb. 25 article, "The General's General Store," gave me a great deal of pleasure, as I used to know General Wood very well vhen he and I were working on the Panama Canal construction ... He was friendly and well liked ... by his employees ... I have known for a long time that General Wood is, in fact, Sears, Roebuck, and that Sears, Roebuck is General Wood, and as such he has done as much for the U.S.A. as any other Derson presently active in national affairs . . .

S. G. FORBES Silver Spring, Md.

Sir:

I feel you left out a very important item when you failed to let us know what the Sears catalogues cost to print and distribute.

WALTER LAFORET Philadelphia

P:Sears prints and distributes 14 million of the big catalogues a year, at a cost of about $21 million.--ED.

That marvelous drawing of General Wood on the cover sold one copy of TIME today, and I have just read your excellent story about this remarkable businessman . . . With the exception of the way you treated the America First Committee, on which I'd give you some argument, I congratulate you on the balance of the article. It's a very thorough and thoughtful piece, and those who know the General will see him in it, in each and every paragraph . . .

WILLIAM BENTON U.S. Senate Washington, B.C.

Sir:

On the basis of a long and otherwise delightful corresponding friendship with Sears, Roebuck & Co., I have only one criticism to make of your cover. Sears never in its 60-year history learned to wrap packages as compactly and neatly as pictured there. As proof, there is a trail of 25 pounds of grass seed between Boston and our front door.

May I suggest that General Wood would be smart to hire Artist Artzybasheff as colonel in charge of the packaging division ?

JEANNE S. WELLES Glastonbury, Conn.

Low Class Klan Sir:

I want to congratulate you on the stand you have taken in the Feb. 25 issue against the Ku Klux Klan. I think all decent people in the South resent the Klan and its activities. The class of people who make up this organization are generally of the lower class, and most of them are very illiterate and easily misled.

There is one suggestion I want to make. Please keep your reporters away from the trial, and try not to meddle in this case too much. Just as sure as Drew Pearson, TIME, LIFE and the N.A.A.C.P. start "sticking their nose" into this case, the people of North Carolina are going to resent it. And although their conscience would say that these fellows should be convicted, they will not do it. This is just a suggestion for what it is worth.

W. E. MINER Columbia, S.C.

A Thousand & One Saturday Nights

Sir:

TIME'S delightful and excellent Feb. 25 portrait of an emergency ward, "Saturday Night," is a perfect summary of what takes place each weekend in King's County Hospital, Bellevue or Morrisania.

Missing was the unmarried mother, fretfully pleading for assurance that "mother won't learn of this," or the woman who barely made the hospital before giving birth, who always says: "I misjudged my time and thought I had another month or more . . ."

CALVIN MURPHY Brooklyn, N.Y.

Sir:

"Saturday Night" was a vivid, accurate and familiar description of the typical emergency service in action . . .

One aspect of your snapshot was hidden behind the general impression that all emergency facilities are available to the community as are the fire and police services--with no direct charge for the service. The cost to nonprofit hospitals of maintaining the 24-hour emergency service is [high]. Payment for the service is only token, the income falling far below the minimum costs . . .

LYMAN C. WHITTAKER Wilmington, Del.

Footnote on South Wind

Sir:

As Mr. Norman Douglas' perhaps most intimate friend, and the executor of his will, I must ask you to correct the misstatements made in your obituary of Feb. 18. Mr. Douglas did not die "in penury"; he was a man of independent means; nor did he die in a "borrowed villa."He honored me by living permanently in my house on Capri, where we had dwelt together since the war until his recent death . . .

KENNETH MACPHERSON Capri, Italy

Sir:

. . . My father [Norman Douglas] did not sell South Wind for a piddling -L-75. He received an advance of -L-50 in 1917 from the publisher, and royalties every six months thereafter.

Apart from earnings from writing and royalties, he was in receipt of an annuity of $3,000 for the last 23 years. Three thousand a year goes a long way in Capri. If that be penury, I hope I may be comparably penurious when I retire. . . "

ROBIN DOUGLAS Chicago

P: TIME erred in saying that Norman Douglas died in penury, was misinformed on the price paid for South Wind and on Mr. Douglas' finances.--ED.

Honkballer from Holland

Sir:

An article appeared in the Feb. 25 Sport section about the arrival in this country of Hannie Urbanus, the first European baseball player ever to come to this country to be trained here . . . We, who have organized this idea [inviting Hannie to the U.S. for a month's training with the New York Giants], which we know will snowball as time goes on, are particularly impressed with the right tone of the article. In my 20 years' career as a newspaperman I have seldom seen a better job of telling an interesting sports story . . .

The people of The Netherlands--where baseball is the showcase of Western Europe --are grateful to TIME.

If perhaps 20 years from now, there will be a real World Series instead of the one between The Bronx and The Bronx (as was the case last year), TIME will have been one of the first to see it coming.

ALBERT BALINK Editor The Knickerbocker New York City

Forward Toward the Dinosaur

Sir:

Re your Feb. 25 Miscellany squib about the disgruntled Reno meat packer who found it more profitable to work for OPS than for himself: do I detect here the first faint whisperings of the Great American Economic Revolution, when all merchants will work for OPS, all farmers for PMA, all vets for VA, ad infinitum, leaving only the decontrolled rattlesnake-meat canners and dinosaur-bone collectors to shift for themselves?

If so, please forward as soon as possible a list of approved schools having courses in rattlesnake cookery and dinosaur appreciation. The course I'm now taking in advertising looks like yesterday's gardenias.

DAVE PORTER Columbia, Mo.

Ike & Luke

Sir:

In your Feb. 25 issue, you quote Ike Eisenhower's favorite Bible passage, Luke 11:21, "When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace." Is Ike unaware that Christ's words here refer to Satan? The following verse says, Luke 11:22, "But when a stronger than he shall come upon him and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils."

This was the picture Christ had of His times. The strong man fully armed was Satan; guarding his own court, his goods were in peace. But when the stronger than he comes, he dispossesses the strong man. That was our Lord's claim for Himself--that He was stronger than Satan. Ike's idea is valid. But I'll bet he could find a verse with a better connotation.

LEROY F. ANDERSEN Trinity Lutheran Seminary Blair, Neb.

The Problem of German Rearmament

Sir:

In my opinion you have mislabeled the story in your Feb. 25 issue titled "In Fear & Hatred." I am sure that it was not out of fear or out of hatred [of the Germans] that Deputy Georges Heuillard spoke. He spoke with the voice of the conscience of the world. He expressed the feelings of millions who agree with him that the re-creation of armed German power is treason to those ideals on which the U.N. was created . . .

It is obvious that the present conflict is essentially moral. Humanitarian democracy is challenged by Communist tyranny. Do you expect that the cause of democracy can be helped by the morally discredited German military? People in Russia and elsewhere certainly hope that they will be liberated from their Communist oppressors--provided that it will not be by their slaughterers of yesterday.

HENRY BECK Bloomington, Ind.

Sir:

One might get the impression that Germany is doing the rest of the world a big favor by agreeing to participate in NATO, but the stubborn, wicked, sentimental French just do not want to give in to a few minor demands.

NATO is just as important to Germany as to France. Germany, therefore, has no moral right whatsoever to make her participation a trading object. How much more wheedling and cooing will it take until those who are mainly responsible for the mess Europe is in will allow the American taxpayer to arm them? . . .

PAUL GRIMINGER Champaign, Ill.

What, No Prairie Dogs?

Sir:

Your Feb. 25 Science story says that Ornithologist Lewis Wayne Walker tries to formulate an explanation for "an old legend about prairie dogs, burrowing owls and rattlesnakes . . ." He stumbled on one explanation, but that doesn't solve the enigma of this strange association.

We have no prairie dogs here, but the burrowing owl and the rattlesnake, though both extremely rare, do occur here. Neither of the two occurs on either of the other islands of the Lesser Antilles. Is there or is there not a tie? Coincidence? There is no coincidence. Not in Nature.

E. BARTELS Oranjestad, Aruba, N.A.

Democracy in Southwood (Cont'd)

Sir:

Re your Feb. 25 story concerning Mr. Sing Sheng and family trying to buy a home in San Francisco's Southwood subdivision: as a former San Franciscoan, who thought San Francisco was one of the best cities until 1941, barring Harry Bridges' longshoremen's strike in the early '30s, this came as no surprise to me. It seems that everybody now is out for the almighty dollar, which isn't worth a wooden half-dollar today . . .

ROBERT S. STURGEON U.S. Army Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

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