Startling Discovery

Sir: I read with great interest the startling discovery of the June graduates [June 13] that the world contains war, poverty, disease and hatred between races, and thus is not a fit receptacle for either them or Miss Mills' prospective babies. We are all much indebted to them for their shrewd observations and also for their forthright response to this situation --sulking, whining to their parents and destroying their universities.

JOSEPH GOLDBERG Peace Corps Volunteer Perak, Malaysia

Sir: It's too bad that state legislators can't pass effective social legislation as quickly as they pass laws to curb college and university rebels. I suppose it's cheaper and simpler to hire extra police to enforce the new laws than it is to reform the colleges and universities and make them more acceptable to the students. Unfortunately, the moderate student seeking legitimate change will suffer, and those of the extreme right and the New Left will delight in the continuing erosion of genuine democracy in this nation.

ANTHONY PEDERSON Waterville, Iowa

Let's Face It

Sir: You say "No one knows for sure whether they [the South Vietnamese] will be able to maintain the present military balance as U.S. troops are withdrawn," and that the "South Vietnamese are improving" [June 20]. Improving! Do you realize that we sent advisers there in 1950 to improve these people? Nineteen years. Man, that's one generation. If they haven't improved enough by now to cope with their military problems, let's face it, they never will. Let's give them a chance to try. North Viet Nam has the will --let's see if the South Vietnamese can get some get-up-and-go.

MARY EVADENE MALONE Bel Air, Md.

Hex on Sex

Sir: Wilfrid Sheed rarely nods (a fact that enables him to keep a remarkably long ash on his cigars), and I was therefore astonished to encounter a gross historical error in his essay on the Irish [June 20]. He asserts that the small Irish farmer could not even think about sex after 1662. What nonsense! The fact is that my great-grandfather Andrew Bowen, who was born in 1732, was a small Irish farmer (three inches taller than Keats) and thought about sex all the time. He thought about it with the kine in the byre, with the peat in the bog and with the kelp on the strand; and sometimes at night he would rouse himself on his pallet with a dreadful groan, exclaiming, "Oh, I am thinking about sex again!" This was so painful to his mother and father and three living grandparents, who slept like spoons in the big bed beside and slightly above his pallet, that they arranged for him to be shipped to the colonies. He was then approaching 40. He married here and, like most Irish-Americans down to the present day, never thought about sex again.

BRENDAN GILL Manhattan

Sir: Novelist Wilfrid Sheed seems to have spent all of his Irish hours on the Irish riviera, the west coast. Invite him to spend some time in the east, especially in County Meath. He may stand at the bend of the Boyne where the fate of both Ireland and England was settled. He may visit the abbeys Bective, Mellifont, Rathmore and Monasterboice. He could gaze across from the Hill of Slane to Tara and ponder the victory of Patrick over the pagan kings. He could visit the diggings of Louth. Does he know of the Pale at Dunsany's castle?

Half-Irish, indeed. All-English schoolboy, say I.

AUSTIN LEDWTTH Lawrence, Kans.

Sir: Nay, rather than curse the maneen, I would prefer to coat him in sugar with a favorite benediction of my uncle, Captain Bill Hennessy, one of the grandest old buckoes to have served on the Chicago police force: "May the wind be always at your back; may the roads rise up to meet you; may you live to be 101; and when you do come to die, may you be in Heaven six months before the devil knows you're gone."

(SP4) JAMES T. HENNIGAN U.S.A. A.P.O. San Francisco

Sir: "No Irishman ever publicly boasts that people of our strain possess a monopoly on wit, wisdom, good humor or the ability to rise above any oppression, repression or depression. Modesty, a characteristic trait of us Irish, forbids such a proud (though true) posture."

This remark of former Postmaster General James A. Farley effectively expresses the justifiable pride we American Irish have in our ancestry.

The curse of the banshees on ye!

EILEEN GALLAGHER Cincinnati

Sir: Beware, world! For if we Irish have no history or character, we have the right to demand, as others do, that you provide us with them by creating centers of Irish studies in your seats of learning and serving us "auld sod foods" in your cafeterias. And, not to be outdone by other underprivileged and uncultured groups, we might very well demand a couple of billion dollars worth of reparation from the Church of England, not to mention a few bucks from Rome for "Parricide."

LORCAN J. BOWDEN

Mill Valley, Calif.

Beauty and the Beastlies

Sir: Your story on the hippies in Taos [June 20] does not give the full picture. The bitterness of the local population in this splendidly beautiful part of the world comes from the fact that this is a poor region, with a heavy percentage of the population on relief. The hippies move in, buy land for cash and then immediately go on relief.

The high incidence of disease, their lack of sanitation in their crude settlements, their display of nudity in public are true--contrary to your story. Hence the local unrest and anger which seems to me fairly well justified.

As a visiting Swiss, let me add that Taos and the high mountain valleys around it are--I hate to admit it--as beautiful as anything in the Alps. No one can blame the hippies for zeroing in on it.

ERICH P. J. GROSS El Prado, N. Mex.

Somewhat Deflating

Sir: The article on inflation in the U.S. [June 20] will leave many Europeans puzzled. In view of the market prices you publish, which strike us as being generally much lower than those quoted in Western Europe for similar articles, the predicament of the cited middle-income families is difficult to understand. Our market basket is certainly much more expensive than the U.S. housewife's, but in Europe no $25,000-income family would think it had to do without its annual vacation or renewing its dining-room chairs, and an $8,600-income family would certainly not be looked upon as impoverished.

ALFRED PARENT Pey, France

Sir: Upper-Middle-Income Costley's $9-a-pair sneakers have got to be a figment of somebody's imagination, unless they're being imported from Spain.

Middle-Income Munson's homemaker sounds like the brat-of-the-year! A presumably healthy 27-year-old woman who needs a mother's helper four mornings a week to care for only two babies; who can't make an average dress for under $25 and who needs a $45 dinner party once a week, is not a representative sample of any Illinois homemakers I know. My neighborhood had a healthy howl over that one.

MRS. C. A. SCHNEIDER Rock Island, Ill.

Throwing the Book

Sir: Jacqueline Susann's statement that she is in the same league as Nabokov [June 20] is comparable to the Arkansas

Poultry Farmer's declaring that as a publication it is competing tooth and nail with the New York Times. Categories apparently have been shuffled behind my back in a singularly shifty manner.

Upon reading your review of Miss Susann's book and facing the distressing fiscal facts contained therein, I rushed forth and bought a color television set of heroic dimensions, broke off all diplomatic relations with my book clubs, and now, with shriveled soul and bated breath, I wait for the dawn of McLuhan's Millennium of Non-Linear Information.

CAROL ROBINSON MOORE Jackson, Tenn.

Whiz Kid

Sir: I was amused at your discussion of pickpockets [June 20]. As an ex-member of a whiz mob (pickpocket group), it is evident to me that the kind of people Detective Inspector Candlish has had his experience with are pretty crude operators. Nor is his information entirely correct. A stall is not a "runner"--whatever that is supposed to be--a stall is an extremely skilled kinetic psychologist who knows exactly how to walk alongside or in front of the "mark" (victim) so that he is forced to slow down or turn aside, right into the wire. This is called "framing the mark," and brushing against the mark is pretty crude--it can result in unpleasant attention.

Nor does a good wire argue with a victim over a taxi. Can you think of a better way for a mark to pick out a mug shot of you later in the police station?

It all sounds like a knockabout mob at work, no-class cannons. It is all a damn shame; it used to be beautiful to watch two stalls frame a mark at the command "Turn John in for a pit" and see the poke come out. A good whiz mob could do it in three seconds without the mark rumbling.

NAME WITHHELD BY REQUEST Manhattan

Cotton Pickin'

Sir: Community Organizer Frank Ditto may be important to Detroit [June 13], and may have, for all I know, been a broth of a 13-year-old in his native Texas, but the fact is neither he nor anyone else chops 500 Ibs. of cotton in a day or a week. He might pick 500 Ibs. or chop an acre, but cotton is not chopped by the pound. Chopping is using a hoe, first to thin the plants for best growth and then to keep the weeds out. It is measured by rows or by acres.

ARTHUR B. BATTY Lompoc, Calif.

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