By Return Mail

Sir: While I disagreed with your jaundiced view of strikes against the Government, I liked the positive approach of the article urging realistic pay scales, good working conditions and an adequate collective bargaining machinery for our postal employees [March 30].

You don't have to have compulsory arbitration. Why not negotiated voluntary arbitration with expiration dates? This way you have the desired arbitration, but you keep the right to strike intact.

An unfair-labor-practice code should be applied to Congress, for certainly tying the President's corporation plan to a pay raise was not bargaining in good faith.

Our Hawaiian letter carriers tell me they handle so much franked mail from the Defense Department and other units of Government that the overworked postal employees feel they are subsidizing these agencies, looking bad themselves in order to make everybody else look good. And what about postal subsidies to corporations? If everyone paid its fair share, our letter carriers insist, the Post Office, together with its employees, would find its way into the affluent part of America.

WILLIAM L. ABBOTT Executive Secretary-Treasurer Hawaii State Federation of Labor A.F.L.-C.I.O. Honolulu

Sir: Part of the solution of the "mail mess" would be to raise the postal rate of bulk mail. This would rid the workers of quite a load of junk mail and would raise more money for the Post Office.

EDWARD DZIURA Jackson, Mich.

Sir: I had to agree with President Nixon when he wanted the Post Office to be set up as an autonomous corporation. If this were done, the employees would have a better chance of rising to better positions. Also, the corporation would have the power to raise or lower postal rates.

KAREN MOYERS Sugar Grove, W. Va.

Sir: I just read your article concerning Peter Stafford of the U.S. Postal Department, and it made me rather mad. You state that he only makes $8,030 a year, and that he should be making $11,236 merely because he has a large family. I can't see how one can determine a person's earning power by how well he can produce children. It seems to me that a person's earnings should depend on his skill and education. Can you say that a person earning the same amount as Stafford but having only one or two children shouldn't have a raise if he is doing the same job? What Stafford needs, or rather needed, is not a raise but some birth-control method that works.

F.M. WILLIAMS Gainesville, Fla.

Reality in the Kitchen

Sir: About halfway through your article "Inefficiency in America" [March 23], I was so discouraged that I felt in the need of a light refreshment. In the refrigerator I had two cans of Canada Dry ginger ale. Snapping both cans loose from the holder, the concern and reality expressed in your article were brought right into my kitchen when I found that the can in my left hand was empty--it had been scaled empty at the factory.

I called the factory manager, and while offering his apologies and a free six-pack to be delivered to my door, he suggested that I punch a hole in the can and use it as a piggy bank. Perhaps our ingenuity will overcome our inefficiency.

GILBERT ("SCOTTY") WILSON Boulder, Colo.

Sir: This is a slice of a letter that I received, explaining why Marlene can't find out her new telephone number: "Marlene has not had her phone number changed. The phone company has changed it for some reason and won't tell her what it's changed to, since they claim that it's an unlisted number. When I left she was still trying to get it all straightened out."

J.D. MEAD

Warren, Vt.

Sir: The inconveniences of packing water from the creek, running to the outhouse, and harnessing the team are far outweighed by the peace of mind that comes with knowing that all systems are operating.

HANK RATE Corwin Springs, Mont.

Sir: Enclosed is the extra TIME cover that came with the issue devoted to inefficiency in America.

MRS. KARL THEMAN Mesa, Ariz.

The Vital Element

Sir: In reporting Kathy Boudin's parents' refusal to cooperate with the police following the explosion which took three lives and demolished the Wilkerson house [March 23], TIME has accidentally touched on the vital element of America's woes visa-vis "the disenchanted young people."

Behind almost every school-disrupting radical, firebomb-hurling, hate-filled anarchist and law-defying exhibitionist there stands a set of doting, condoning, often proud and usually money-lavishing parents.

Here is evidence suggesting that a girl has contributed to triple manslaughter, was constructing bombs for whatever dastardly purposes, had thereby blown up one house and caused substantial damage to others--all of which must encompass a veritable fistful of felonies. And yet her parents, the father a lawyer no less, refuse to cooperate with the police.

KENNETH A. LABAND Lompoc, Calif.

Who's Boss

Sir: In the aerospace article [March 9], it is stated that the vacancy created by the retirement of J.L. Atwood as president of North American Rockwell will not be filled. Actually it was filled by Robert Anderson, who advanced from executive vice president to president and chief operating officer. Mr. Anderson is in charge of all company operations, including commercial products and aerospace.

H. WALTON CLOKE Vice President

Public Relations and Advertising North American Rockwell Corp. El Segundo, Calif.

Man with a Vision

Sir: The strong scent of fresh hope emerging from the article on Psychologist Morton Bard's love affair with New York's 30th Police Precinct Family Crisis Intervention Unit [March 23] brought tears to eyes that, accustomed to mirages, overreacted when a real oasis appeared.

If an old institution like the police department can be changed in substance and image by one man with a vision--a vision that must have appeared incredible, if not ridiculous, to our polarized and fragmented society, what potential for real hope could lie ahead if other institutions would find their Morton Bard!

PAUL PHILIPP

Clinical Psychologist Veterans Administration Hospital San Juan

Ah, So

Sir: The same ones who are saying that Carswell won't make a good Justice said that Agnew wouldn't make a good Vice President.

RALPH E. MCLAUGHLIN

Homelake, Colo.

Potatoes for the Pyre

Sir: While those potato growers in Idaho are burning their crops in a demand for higher market prices [March 23], they may add to their pyre the 10 lbs. I bought last week. One-third was too badly rotted to use; one-third was usable only by cutting away half of the potato; the remaining third was just slightly blemishsd and required only a minimum of surgery before eating. I'm not sure, but I think this batch was a vast improvement over the 10 lbs. I bought several months ago, which were so green that I had to let them sit for weeks to ripen. All were conveniently packaged in a handy brown camouflage bag I could neither open nor see through. Burn, baby, burn.

PAT SKAGGS Elmira, Ore.

A Switch in TIME

Sir: Voters in the Seventh Congressional District of Texas were amazed to read in TIME that I am a Democrat running as a Republican for George Bush's U.S. House seat [March 30]. Although I was first elected to the Texas house in 1966 as a Democrat, I changed my affiliation to the G.O.P. in 1967 and was re-elected in 1968 as a Republican, receiving more votes than any contested Republican has ever polled in the district.

W.R. (BILL) ARCHER

State Representative Seventh Congressional District Houston

The New Royalists

Sir: If nothing else, the Cambodian situation [March 30] has provided the world with the belly laugh of the year. We now witness the hilarious spectacle of the Russian and Chinese Marxists falling all over themselves offering support to a prince of the Cambodian aristocracy who is trying to regain his kingdom. If the world revolutionary timetable is still in order, we can now expect the S.D.S., the New Left and the hairy cohorts of the Chicago Seven to hit the streets with rocks and clubs, shrieking "Solidarity with Cambodian Royalty!"

BOB GARY Ely, Minn.

Sir: Funny your Cambodian demonstrators' placards should be in English. Doesn't the CIA speak French?

GRAHAM JOHNSON

Wellington, N.Z.

The Deadly Slicks

Sir: You refer to the leakage of oil off the Louisiana coast [March 23] and remark that "fortunately the slick blew out to sea." Oil slicks out at sea are scarcely to be preferred to oil slicks on shore.

On Feb. 4 the tanker Arrow ran aground on Cerberus Rock in Chedabucto Bay, Nova Scotia, and began pouring out its cargo of bunker oil. Much of this oil was deposited along 70 miles of rocky Cape Breton coastline, but a large slick was blown out to sea. Company men, press and public rejoiced, and efforts were made to tow the stern section of the broken ship out to sea and scuttle it with its tanks still full of oil. Fortunately the stern slipped off its ledge and sank into the bay. Fortunately, because the company was forced to pump the oil from the tanks.

Sable Island, a 20-mile-long crescent of sand, lies only a hundred miles off the coast. A month after the stranding of the tanker in the bay, thick bunker oil, which analysis has shown to be similar to that leaked from the Arrow, began to wash onto Sable along with thousands of dead birds, chiefly murres, dovekies and fulmars. I censused stretches of the beach on Sable Island, and I estimate that about 5,000 seabirds were washed up on the island. This can be only a small part of the total kill.

A.R. LOCK Halifax, N.S.

First Things First

Sir: Now hold on there just one minute. I realize that there are more important issues than movie reviewing for one to get outraged at these days, but the person who made the statement, "In the hands of such masters as Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, individuals were always shown to be deviates first and human beings second," in a review of The Boys in the Band [March 30], is an idiot. Is Amanda Wingfield more deviate than human? Is Blanche DuBois? Is Maggie Pollitt? Is Serafina Delle Rose? Is Tom Wingfield? Is Mitch in Streetcar"? Is Big Daddy, for that matter? If these people are deviates first and human beings second then I am not a homosexual sitting at a typewriter in Philadelphia; I am a dog on the moon baying at the earth.

J. NICHOLAS KNEBELS Philadelphia

Sir: For almost a year I directed the Institute for Sex Research (Kinsey) study of homosexuals in the San Francisco Bay Area for which we recruited almost 6,000 homosexuals. Only a small percentage of those are represented in Boys in the Band. Some day someone will produce a play or movie that depicts a typical homosexual role in our society. And it won't portray a "deviant" behavior but rather a "variant." And that can be beautiful!

TOM B. MAURER

Associate Director National Sex and Drug Forum San Francisco

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