Man of the Year

Sir: George M. Humphrey, our able Secretary of the Treasury, is my nomination . . . because I believe that a solvent U.S. is the world's best hope for peace.

ELIZABETH L. ROCKWELL Saginaw, Mich.

Sir: . . . There can be but one choice: Joseph McCarthy--to my intense dismay and revulsion.

CHRISTOPHER E. KNOPF Culver City, Calif.

Sir: The Prisoner of War, multiplied by hundreds, is a strong contender.

NATHANIEL RUTHERFORD San' Antonio.

The Big Game Sir: What a fine football issue TIME [Nov. 9] put out. And if people were seen drooling at newsstands, it was no doubt because of that wonderful Lattner cover . . . Surely there's a lot to argue about concerning commercialized athletics in our schools. But most of us can safely agree that if amateur sports must be a big business, then by all means let's have it a la Notre Dame . . .

GIRARDE GAGNON Montreal

Sir: I can come to no other conclusion than that you deliberately made your Notre Dame football hero cover picture your corniest in years, filled the story with a collection to end all collections of the humdrum idiocies of professional sports, spicing it with the phony baloney, barstool oratory, synthetic manliness, and parroting of "statistics" and "history" by the sports fan . . .

HARRY WILLIAMS Westchester, Ill.

Sir: ... A very candid and warm story, thank goodness it was not glamorized as so many stories are today . . .

FRANK E. MCBRIDE JR. Dayton, Ohio

Sir: Your story . . . is excellent, primarily because it captures some of the spirit that permeates the campus and student body. Notre Dame has top-drawer material, but so do many other schools; this is one of the few times I have seen it acknowledged in a publication of general circulation that Notre Dame's winning ways are at least partly attributable to an "intangible spirit that seems to make super-players out of ordinary mortals like Johnny Lattner."

JOHN P. DEFANT University of Notre Dame Indiana

Sir: . . . The greatest thing wrong with Notre Dame's winning ways is that Notre Dame does not "play" football, but instead each game is a religious crusade . . .

W. S. Cox JR. New Orleans

Sir: Undoubtedly, Lattner is great but how could you overlook Alan ("The Horse") Ameche, one of the truly great, if not the greatest, fullbacks of our time . . .

JAMES E. LEIN Madison, Wis.

Sir: . . . Minnesota's [Paul] Giel is greater.

ROBERT P. JANES Minneapolis

Sir: Who wrote the Notre Dame article about Johnny Lattner & Co.? An alumnus?

ED SMITH Shakopee, Minn.

P: No, an alumnus of Brown University ('41).--ED.

Presidents at Play

Sir: Your entertaining and enlightening footnote on the sporting interests of our Presidents [Nov. 9] could do with a little amplification in the field of halieutics. George Washington's Diary records his frequent dealings with the perch and catfish of the Potomac River. Thomas Jefferson, accompanied by his Secretary of State and successor, James Madison, traveled 300 miles by coach to fish for trout in ... Lake George. Chester Arthur knew his way to the salmon pools of New Brunswick. Grover Cleveland, an authority on black bass, wrote one of the most delightful of angling books [Fishing and Hunting Sketches], and perfectly phrased the ultimate test of a true sportsman, "He draweth not his flask in secret."

As for T.R.'s version of swimming in the river ... as Jules Jusserand used to tell it, the story of his two-piece bathing suit--consisting of a pair of kid gloves--was more informing. The swimming party was a quartette composed of "The Tennis Cabinet,"

T.R., Jusserand, at that time French ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British ambassador, and George Von L. Meyer, Secretary of War ... As the agenda for the day was to include rock climbing, which in the past had done damage to his sensitive scholar's hands, Jusserand had decided to wear gloves. When the quartette was nuded . . . he couldn't get them off. They were stuck on by his blood. He was proud to recall that when the President himself shouted through his teeth, "Mr. Ambassador, why your gloves?" he was inspired to reply, "I thought we might meet ladies."

FERRIS GREENSLET Boston

Searle's Old Girls

Sir: Re "Poison-Ivied Walls" [Nov. 2]: so St. Trinian's is closed! I, for one, will miss the frantic antics of the little monsters. The "somewhere in England" address of St. Trinian's was Cambridge, and the "model" was the Cambridge and County High School for Girls.

Cartoonist Searle studied at the Technical School, whose windows overlooked the County School tennis courts. As these also served as a playground and basketball courts, there was very little time during the day that these courts were vacant ... so Mr. Searle had ample opportunity to look for ghoulish girls. As a contemporary of Mr. Searle's and an "old girl" of the high school, that knock-kneed, spotty-faced gargoyle wearing glasses, in the chem lab of St. Trinian's [see cut] could quite possibly be me.

JOAN E. CLARKE Toronto

What Wright Likes

Sir: Being an old admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, I was thrilled to read about the great retrospective show of his work in TIME [Nov. 9]. Until now I knew the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, or the famous "Fallingwater" only from postcard-size photos and illustrations . . . Wouldn't it be a good idea to give South America a chance to see this show of Wright's work too?

WERNER RUBENS Santiago, Chile

Sir: You have a most interesting piece on Frank Lloyd Wright, the "world's greatest living architect." Naturally I've known of Mr. Wright's abilities for years, but went anyway to my library to see again the photographs of his work. I agree he has everything--everything but taste.

JEROME ZERBE New York City

P: Photographer Zerbe is probably aware that Architect Wright also has something to say on that subject: ". . . What is taste? What conscience is in morals, taste is, no doubt, in the realm of esthetics. It is a mysterious authority, neither learned nor reasoned but there, regardless . . . In simplest terms taste is indeed what we like . . . In the modern world, however, taste is not homogeneous . . ."--ED.

Pictures in a Minute

Sir: All of us in the photographic industry were delighted that TIME saw fit to devote a cover story [Nov. 2] to photography . . . However, I felt that a needless oversight was made in not mentioning anywhere in the article the fact that a camera exists which delivers a finished picture right on the spot, without the necessity of making that trip to the drugstore which your article mentions. I realize that the story was intended to deal primarily with photography as an art form but . . . I'll guarantee you that you will find the Polaroid Land process high on almost anybody's list of outstanding achievements in the field of photography . . .

R. C. CASSELMAN

Polaroid Corp. Cambridge, Mass.

Counter-Polemics

Sir: The whole of the Rev. Paul Austin Wolfe's argument in his article for Presbyterians titled You Are a Catholic [TIME, Nov. 2] is an elaborate and unworthy pun. It is, moreover, a pun on a single letter, for while the Presbyterian Church may well be a catholic church, as he contends, it is most certainly not, and will never be, a Catholic Church. He affirms that there has been "persistent propaganda to apply the word Catholic to the Roman Church alone." That also is false, for it has never been necessary . . . The Western world has always called the Church of Rome "Catholic," and will undoubtedly continue to do so despite the occasional agitation the usage provokes.

Etymological quibbling, such as the Rev. Mr. Wolfe seems addicted to, is a dangerous and unlovely habit. Indiscriminately indulged in, it can lead us away from the truth as effectively as the subtlest sophistry. One cannot always tell the flowers by the roots . . . Take the word Presbyterian itself (from Greek presbyteros, comparative of presbys, old). It would seem to mean "of or pertaining to the elders." Thus any old people's home, of whatever religion, becomes by definition a presbyterian (though not, Mr. Wolfe, a Presbyterian) establishment; and the Elders of Zion have, by the same token, as good a right to the adjective as the Kirk of Scotland. Similarly, after rooting for the origins of the word church (from Greek kyriake, kyriakon, the Lord's house, from kyriakos, concerning a master or lord, from kyrios, master), we might forgivably maintain that the British House of Lords is as churchy an institution as St. Peter's in Rome, a proposition that even the staunchest peers would hesitate to defend . . .

A. HAAS

Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico

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