Any Number Can Play
Sir:
Congratulations on your telephone cover [Feb. 23]! TIME's keen view of our No. 1 monopoly should be required reading for all teachers and lawmakers. It's time we realized that our business giants are giving us more and more for less and less.
DEIGH D. BOYD
South Laguna, Calif.
Sir:
The telephone is a Jekyll and Hyde invention, a curse and plague as often as it is a convenience. We list our present lack of a telephone as our greatest luxury. We no longer must drop whatever we are doing, day or night, and run to answer that raucous bell. I now have leisure to pursue a hobby, enjoy good music, read a book or converse with my wife. We are not dragged off against our will to meetings. We no longer must put up with the leechlike telephone salesmen and solicitors. Meanwhile, our health is better as we have eliminated one of the prime sources of emotional stress in 20th century life.
JOE W. RUESS
Grass Valley, Calif.
Sir:
In your article on the telephone, you mention "more than 600 patent lawsuits" in which Bell was involved before his patents expired. May I call to your attention one particular lawsuit, that of Antonio Meucci, 1808-1889, a native of Florence, Italy, who claimed the invention of the telephone?
LINO S. LIPINSKY
Director
The Garibaldi and Meucci Memorial Museum
Staten Island, New York
Sir:
At Tufts University, Dr. Amos Emerson Dolbear is credited with having invented the telephone, and with having made the first telephone call in history.
CECELIA VANAUKEN
Medford, Mass.
Sir:
Wouldn't it have been appropriate and also interesting to tell the readers of TIME that a German, Philipp Reis (1834-1874), invented the telephone in 1861?
ERNST R. MILLER-KLINKMULLER
Berlin
Sir:
You missed the opportunity to mention that there is a question whether Alexander Bell or Elisha Gray was the inventor of the telephone.
DANA D. CORROUGH
Stockton, Calif.
P: The claims of Meucci, Gray, Reis, Dolbear and numerous others were all fought out in the courts. The Bell patents were upheld in 1888 by the U.S. Supreme Court.--ED.
Sir:
We with telephone number 4-1617 are curious to know how this number was selected by Artist Artzybasheff for your cover.
JOHN MCLENDON
Jackson, Miss.
He picked it right off his own phone in Lyme, Conn.--ED.
Sir:
Could someone install a device on the common variety of telephone which will inform the telephone user, even though he is on the phone, when someone is trying to contact him ? Perhaps a light could flash, a buzzer buzz, or even a small shock be provided for those who still refuse to give up the line when someone is desperately trying the number.
NORMAN GOLDNER
Minneapolis
P: The cost would be prohibitive. And, notes A. T. & T., consider the chewed fingernails when a telephone user ends a conversation in response to such a signal--and is not called back.--ED.
Sir:
I don't mind being called a Wall Street broker under my photo [Feb. 23]. However, my life is dedicated to the great American onion, and my only affiliation with the brokerage business is the buying and selling of that flavorsome vegetable on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
PHILIP HORVITZ
Chicago
P: TIME did not know its onions.--ED.
The Ailing Secretary
Sir:
In this day and age, when it is who you know and not what you know that determines selection of a public-office holder, it will indeed be a difficult task for the President to appoint a man of intelligence and common sense as a successor of Mr. Dulles.
GEORGE F. REINHART
Ralston, Neb.
Sir:
May God keep him alive for a long time so that he will be able to advise his replacement against the treacherous men of the Kremlin.
HERNAN SANDOVAL LORA
Cali, Colombia
Sir:
We need Dulles like we need the cold war, brinkmanship, nuclear explosions, the arms race, high taxes, inflation, juvenile delinquency, ignorance, bigotry and poverty.
CHARLES H. McGUIRE
Brooklyn
Sir:
Do Americans consider their position in the world so secure that they can entrust their two most powerful offices to a cancer patient and a man with a heart so bad he can work only part time?
W. T. DAVIS
Lincoln, Neb.
Sir:
So why didn't you pick him for Man of the Year? I did.
HOWARD GOLDBERGER
Brooklyn
P: So did TIME, Jan. 3, 1955.--ED.
Unretired Crusader
Sir:
It is to your credit that in your Feb. 23 issue you took note of Carl Lindstrom's achievements in the interests of competence and responsibility in the daily newspaper business. I happen to be one of those working newspapermen who, like Mr. Lindstrom, believe in a newspaper's right to be solvent. We believe too that a daily newspaper's creed should be directed more toward educating and informing the public than toward peddling the virtues of department store corsets.
No person in my 27 years in this business has done as much as Carl Lindstrom in raising the quality of reporting, newswriting and editing. If there are publishing money-wielders who flinch from Mr. Lindstrom's analysis of their failure in responsibility, I am sorry for their predicament. They are also a barrier to the public's right to know.
JOHN H. PINKERMAN
News Editor
San Diego Union
San Diego, Calif.
Customs in Jamaica
Sir:
Regarding your Feb. 16 article on the Planned Parenthood clinic in Jamaica: water come in my eye, too, when I read of the do-gooding Mrs. Jacobs attempting to revise the generations-old social customs of these happy people.
WILLIAM J. BROMLEY
North Hollywood, Calif.
Sir:
What is Mrs. Jacobs' war cry? "Live, live, live"--just don't suffer the natural consequences. I do not see how she feels she is remedying the situation, when actually she is encouraging immorality.
KAPPY LAWLER
St. Louis
Sir:
Bravo to Beth Jacobs who is trying to improve the human race irrespective of creed or color.
L. B. AVEGNO
New Orleans
The Senator Speaks
Sir:
In view of TIME's regard for the truth, I know you will correct a misrepresentation which has twice occurred in TIME publications involving me, most recently in the March 2 issue. I have never told Lyndon Johnson that I was "the biggest birthday present of 'em all" for him. In fact I have never told Lyndon that I was any kind of a present for anyone.
WILLIAM PROXMIRE
United States Senate
Washington, D.C.
Art & Paintslinging
Sir:
Thanks for printing the article [Feb. 23] on the man who is probably America's greatest living artist--Thomas Hart Benton. Let others relegate him to the cellars; time will vindicate him. Eventually the world will gag on the "hysterical subjectivism" of the abstract expressionist paintslingers.
CHARLES CAGLE
Norman, Okla.
To Each His Own
Sir:
Re your report [March 2] which chides the Pantagraph (and its readers) for carrying world, national and state news on Page One, leaving local news for page three: the Pantograph's departmentalization of news may be unusual among standards adopted "by daily newspapers, but it is the pattern followed by weekly TIME in giving its intelligent readers the news.
Pantagraph readers overwhelmingly endorse this policy of news departmentalization. Speaking for the Pantagraph (and its readers), we say to TIME: "Suum cuique!"*
DALE LASKOWSKI
Promotion Manager
The Daily Pantagraph
Bloomington, Ill.
P: TIME reported, did not chide.--ED.
* From Marcus Andronicus' speech to his brother Titus in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus:
"Suum cuique is our Roman justice:
This prince in justice seizeth but his own."
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