To the Editors:
While reading your cover story on earthquakes [Sept. 1], I was shaken by a small earthquake (4.4 on the Richter scale), the first to occur in Birmingham in 18 years. Your article was certainly TIMEly, and the special effects were outstanding.
Frank C. Galloway Jr.
Birmingham
The "inexorable movement of opposing plates" poses a serious political question. What do we do, 30 million years hence, when Los Angeles gets up around Vancouver?
I think we should make the Canadians take it.
Stephen B. Maurer
Princeton, N.J.
Even after reading your description of a possible disaster, nothing could destroy our hopes of some day returning to San Francisco--once that unique city is in your blood, nothing can tear you away, not even an earthquake.
Ronnie Feldman
Guadalajara, Mexico
Re the reaction of animals prior to an actual earthquake: a friend in Santiago, Chile, told me that his dog began acting crazy and whining for no reason --except that minutes later came the earthquake.
If dogs can hear whistles beyond the reach of human ears, why not sounds from the earth? And if these are perceptible, surely science can make machines to perceive them.
Frank A. Magary
Miramar, Fla.
As most of my generation will never forget Nov. 22. anyone around Los Angeles that day will never forget Feb. 9, 1971.1 was hitting the sack about 4 a.m., after entertaining some visiting firemen. An hour and 59 minutes later all hell broke loose. My first reaction was that some unforeseen force was trying to break down the walls of my room. It wasn't a nightmare; the building was moving.
I was on the 17th floor and was positive our building was going to pitch too far and crash to the ground. I have had a couple of close calls flying in two wars, but I have never been more frightened than that morning. And my life did pass before my eyes.
How do I feel about living on a shelf that is moving in the opposite direction from the shelf beneath it? I am surprised to find that I am fatalistic. When those two shelves grinding against each other have had it, maybe so have I.
Ed McMahon
NBC-TV
Burbank, Calif.
Kent State and Guilt
The Kent State verdict [Sept. 8] is one more illustration of the system's refusal to redress the most legitimate grievances of its citizenry. Those who still believe that it is possible to attain fundamental justice from the agencies of a corrupt and decadent power structure have one more tragic example of the uselessness of such misguided faith. Moreover, it is now abundantly clear that white middle-class youngsters are as vulnerable to the system's excesses as are blacks, Indians, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and poor whites.
William M. Kunstler
New York City
Dissenter Kunstler has been an attorney for the defense at the trials of Rap Brown, the Chicago Seven, Attica inmates, Wounded Knee Indians and is now representing Jack and Micki Scott.
I do not understand the Kent State lawsuit. Students did riot. Students did violate the civil rights of others.
Walter Marshall
New York City
Messing with Welfare
You state that the "U.S. has the world's worst welfare mess ... a monster" [Sept. 1] because we are spending $45 billion annually on 25 million welfare recipients.
Using your own figures, it seems we spend $1,800 per year on each welfare recipient. This amounts to $34.88 per week per person.
Is it really extravagant when the richest, most wasteful nation on earth spends $34.88 a week on the poorest 8.4% of its citizens?
Dennis Kruszynski
San Francisco
Even more disturbing than the swelling welfare rolls, I think, is the large number of welfare frauds.
Six months ago, I noticed that a local judge had toughened up and was sending convicted welfare fraud artists straight to prison.
The day after we broadcast that news story, 50 people called up the welfare office and canceled off the rolls--no reason given.
Carissa Howland
News Reporter
KRCR-TV
Redding, Calif.
The Complacent Americans
I was startled to read the story of the "lucrative deals between the Mafia and Teamsters" [Aug. 18]. Do the American people really accept the influence of organized crime in their society so complacently?
Jose Candida de Silva
Campo Grande, Brazil
"Success brings... money, and money attracts the Mafia," writes TIME axiomatically. The CIA turns to the Mafia for help in its foreign intrigues. What has happened to our sense of outrage? I, for one, experience a nauseated feeling when newspapers and magazines write about organized crime as if it were an inescapable fact of life, like the common cold.
Kevin Casey
Cologne,
West Germany
Betty's Boudoir
Any assumption that Mrs. Gerald Ford eagerly volunteered to tell me all about her boudoir life [Sept. 1] is very unfair to her.
I brought up the previously published quote, "They've asked me everything but how often I sleep with my husband, and if they'd asked me that, I would have told them," and then asked for a response. Rather than duck the question she answered with humor, "As often as possible." At no time have I heard Mrs. Ford volunteer any smart quips on any of the many subjects the press is currently chastising her for.
Sleeping with one's husband is, presumably, one of the accepted joys of wedlock. The way you tsked-tsked, one would think her admission was endangering national security. Only last year TIME did a cover story that in part took political wives to task for their dreary role playing. Now that we have a First Lady who speaks her mind, she is branded as tasteless. No wonder so many political wives hide behind frozen smiles and innocuous comments.
Myra MacPherson
Washington Post
Washington, D.C.
Ipso Twisto
In your first article on our documentary film The Second Gun, revealing that a second weapon may have been used in the R.F.K. assassination, you accused my co-producer Theodore Charach and myself of willfully distorting the facts--"ipso twisto," etc. In your second article, you were tamer. In your third, "Rechecking the Bullets" [Aug. 25], you seem impressed that the Los Angeles board of supervisors and the "prestigious" American Academy of Forensic Sciences are discovering the same facts we brought to Time Inc.'s attention five years ago.
The fourth time around you may even apologize for ridiculing us in your first story.
Gerard Alcan
Hollywood
Super Rip-Off
Ford wants to lift controls [Aug. 25] to "discourage oil use." That, some estimates say, could raise costs "$400 to $800 for the average family of four."
But Louisiana builds a $163 million Superdome that "contains 9,000 tons of air conditioning and heating equipment." Someone's being ripped off. I suspect it's that "average family of four."
Wanda L. Casperson
Marshfield, Wis.
Give Us More Atheists
If the theology of liberation [Sept. 1] is the wave of the future, I can only hope for more atheists. Furnished with such glowing examples of workers' Utopias as totalitarian China and Russia, can these new theologians seriously accept the words of Marx and the economics of socialism as valid?
John C. Hilgartner
State College, Pa.
The parallel between Judeo-Christian and Marxist social ethics is ironically correct. Why did it take 100 years for theologians to find out?
Glenn Hallock
Redwood City, Calif.
Those who are exercised about the inequities of capitalism might consider that issue's revelation that the American farmer is ten times more productive than his Soviet counterpart.
Clark T. Irwin Jr.
Northampton, Mass.
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