Curtius & Kin

Sirs:

May I call your attention to remarkable statements regarding Dr. Julius Curtius, German Foreign Minister, to which I cannot be reconciled.

In your issue of June 15, you mention Husband Curtius as "a family man, devoted to his small children." Yet, in TIME, July 27 issue, I am amazed to find that 'German Foreign Minister Curtius had something real to smile about. Word had just reached him that he was a grandfather."

In congratulating Dr. Curtius, I cannot help but marvel at his children's unusually fast growth. My probable reason for noticing this error (if error it be) is that I was very much amused at your first description of family man Curtius and his bachelor friend. Bruening. Though a "bungler" and lacking genius, you must admit that Husband Curtius is no ordinary man, according to the above statements.

EDWIN A. HALL JR.

Binghampton, N. Y.

Husband-Father-Grandfather Curtius has six children: Barbara, 23, who married Hans Bernd von Maesten and whose son, Johan, was born July 19; Klaus, 25; Wolfgang, 20; Verena, 18; Dorothea, 16; Christel, 7.--ED.

Wisconsin's Nardin

Sirs:

The rightly admired brevity of Tune, for once, might have been profitably stretched a trifle in the characterization in your issue of July 20 of "Frances Louise Nardin, dismissed dean of women at the University of Wisconsin, as "the 53-year-old, unmarried dean.'1 I am sure that "understanding, sympathetic, hard-fighting" are descriptive terms which the great majority of the thousands of women students who have come in contact with Dr. Nardin in her 1,5 years' work at the university would have liked to have seen added, especially because they would have precluded any chance of an erroneous view which a too-ardent Freudian might have gotten "with half an eye."

As a reader I appreciate the news judgment of your magazine in grasping the importance and general interest of the fact that Dean Nardin was notified that her name was not included in the budget for the next fiscal year at the university. Disciplinary power at Wisconsin University now will rest with a committee on which the Dean of Women and the Dean of Men have no vote. Too few realize the enormous task faced by a dean of women in these days, standing as she does in the center of a dramatic clash between the "new liberalism" and standards of conduct which parents who trustfully send their immature and eagerly searching sons and daughters to the university believe to be beyond any challenge. . . .

Dean Nardin's fight at Wisconsin always has been based on her conviction that faculty believers in "new liberal principles" in student discipline should explain to the parents of their students exactly what they meant. The preposterous stories you mentioned in your interesting article as having been associated recently with Dean Nardin--that she told girls they should not lean over to drink at water fountains: that they should not "arouse" male students by wearing red dresses or clocked stockings or puckering their red lips--were first raked together in a collection of campus legends in an anonymous fictionized attack on deans of women in general more than two years ago. The article did not attribute the droll sayings to Dr. Nardin and she has the assurance of President Glenn Frank of Wisconsin University that he never believed them. Her complaint was and is that President Frank maintained a discreet silence in every attack by the "new liberals" without making definite suggestions on what he believed the situation should be.

The Milwaukee Journal, close to the situation at Wisconsin, stated in an editorial of July 14 that in the correspondence between Miss Nardin and President Frank "it must be said in truth that Miss Nardin has the better of the argument. Not on the point of Miss Nardin's administration, for the letters do not disclose, and nothing else has so far disclosed, what were the real criticisms of the dean. But on the question whether there was guidance from the University head as to what the deans should do there seems to be but one conclusion, there was no such guidance." The editorial explains: "In the Leonard-Goodnight war, brought about by Dean Goodnight's action [dean of men] in dismissing a couple caught in a love tryst, it was painfully apparent that President Frank had not made up his mind what the standards of life at a university should be. In such a situation it was. of course, impossible for him to guide his deans. As Miss Nardin so tartly puts it, quoting Theodore Roosevelt, 'You can't nail a custard pie to the wall." " BETTIXA DTLLARD WRIGHT New York City

Porter v. Eastman

Sirs:

In "Ex Parte 103." TIME. July 27, p. 12, Massachusetts' Eastman is called "most liberal and conscientious member of the I. C. C."

Does "most" modify "conscientious" as well as "liberal"? If such is the intention, does not TIME make a sweeping statement which may lack considerably for proof?

I have witnessed in action Commissioner Claude R. Porter of Iowa, a distinguished, alert, and intelligent gentleman and feel sure that if Mr. Eastman's conscientiousness is of a greater degree than that of Mr. Porter, the former is a record breaker.

Would not TIME be more accurate if it had called Eastman "best known" and "most listened to"? TIME might also have added that the liberalness of Commissioner Eastman has caused newspaper editorial writers to place him on the same shelf with the so-called liberal minority on the Supreme Court Bench whose every utterance or dissent is overpublicized as a liberal voice whether the matter at hand be of real importance or not.

JAMES FRANCIS KELLY

Mount Vernon, N. Y.

Reader Kelly takes his point well. TIME should eschew superlatives. For conscientiousness there is not a pin to choose between Commissioners Eastman and Porter.--ED.

Sugar Coated Idiots

Sirs:

I note in "Letters" a couple of issues back, in reference to Will Rogers, that he attended school at ''Willie Hassell," in Neosho, Mo. (TIME, July 6).

Having lived in Neosho from 1889 'til 1927, I have been wondering about such a school. Never was one by that name to my knowledge.

I knew this comedian in school days when he was a student at Scarritt Collegiate /nstitute in Neosho, when we "towners" referred to such students as the Sugar Coated /diots. GURNEY LOWE

Huntington Park, Calif.

Willie Hassell School which Will Rogers says he attended in Neosho when small, is in Vinita, Okla., 45 miles from Ne-osho.--ED.

Standard Stories

Sirs:

Thanks many times for the highly interesting historical note anent the demise of the Anaconda Standard (TIME, July 27). Herewith some addenda which may be of interest.

For a number of years before the final 30 was written, the Standard occupied the unique position of being probably the only news sheet in the nation with its editorial desk some 30 miles away from the press room* Before the advent of automatic printers, Butte copy was relayed to Anaconda via phone. This procedure was necessary since the Standard relied on Butte for its chief circulation and, because of AP franchise restrictions, was forced to publish in the smelter city.

Interesting among ancient traditions of the sheet is the "rubber da rag" (read the paper) anecdote. The story is told of a new man in the ad alley, a chap who was assigned the job of setting up an ad for one of Butte's big department stores. This man had begun his task when it occurred to him that perhaps the store in question employed individual makeup and type. He asked the boss of the ad alley about it. The boss, a squat and blue-jowled individual, spat on the floor, observed "Jeest, why don't yuh rubber da rag?'' Dr. Durston, on business somewhere in the background, overheard the remark, thought it apt. Next day every machine, desk, locker and press in the Standard office carried the words "Rubber da Rag" on neat white cards.

Incidental note: Dean A. L. Stone, head of the school of journalism at Montana's University, once stated that the best story he ever wrote was one he concocted while on the Standard staff. A spectacular railroad wreck had, so to speak, fallen in Stone's lap. The only newsman in miles, he strung thousands of words together while the blazing cars of the unlucky train made the night lurid in Hellgate canyon near Missoula. He filed the yarn on the wire. Discovered next day that the Standard office had burned to the ground.

Biggest day in Butte's history was when the late, great W. J. Bryan arrived in the city. Silver, no small part of Butte's mineral production, was a prominent item in popular mind. "Egg" Eggleston, in a stupendous splurge of sheer inspiration, concocted a long poem, title, "When Bryan Came to Butte." Ran it in the Standard. In later years, on Bryan's revisiting the city, the poem was trotted out and given front-page space. Interesting contrast, in a day crammed with 109 point heads, is the fact that the Standard's lead story on the day of Bryan's (Continued on p. 40) arrival was set two columns, 48 point Gothic condensed, "IT WAS BUTTE'S. BIG DAY."

One unintentional mishap, which the boys spent many years explaining to the inhabitants of Dublin Gulch, occurred in connection with the death of the late lamented Bishop Carroll. It so happened that on the day of the Bishop's death the smelter in Anaconda and the mines in Butte were reopened after a considerable shutdown. Now the Anaconda smelter stack, tallest chimney in the world, is emblematic to many a miner of prosperity or lack of it. When the stack smokes, men are making wages. Hence, considering the joy of the day, an imaginative Standard makeup editor secured a huge cut of the big stack to run down the middle columns of the front page. Then came the news of the Bishop's death. A banner was written for the top of the page, "BISHOP CARROLL DIES IN SWITZERLAND." Below this awful intelligence, with its mouth belching smoke under the line, was the picture of the stack. And down the center line of the tube were printed the lines from the old song "And the Smoke Goes Up the Chimney Just the Same." Circulation among the reverent Irish populace of the community dropped by hundreds in the first few hours after the Standard reached the streets, it is reported.

A training school and a hitching post for many of the roving members of the press gentry, many another ex-Standard man will read of the passing of the old sheet with a great deal of regret. JOHN F. RYAN

Appleton, Wis.

Jelinek's Elevator

Sirs:

In TIME of July 27, you have an interesting article on 25-c- wheat. The Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln) for about Sunday July 12 carried a feature article of about one-half page regarding the so-called Nebraska wheat king. In view of the publicity given these new monarchs the attached clipping from the State Journal of July 24 is of interest indicating that the wheat kings are losing their crowns about as rapidly as the other and more ancient kinds.

[The clipping reported that Wheatman James Jelinek, deep in debt, had lost his big grain elevator on the Burlington tracks near Alliance, Neb. through mortgage foreclosure.--ED.]

Sometime ago I lunched with an officer of one of the Farm Board's organizations and he told me that the information that the Board had accumulated regarding wheat raising on the null scale was about as disastrous as the ordinary kind of wheat raising. . . .

Much publicity given the wheat "tycoons'' leaves the impression that they are making a great success despite the low price of, wheat. Other information such as the attached indicating that the Nebraska king is losing his elevator to the mortgage holder and that he has heavy debts for machinery, seed and wages. One wonders if it is really so rosy with the other kings. To anyone in the Middle West an unfortunate who would give up a $50.000 per year job to raise wheat should sec his physician at once before the trouble goes any farther. Your article is really very good. Please give us some more on Husbandry from time to time.

LEO LIGGETT

First National Bank Utica, Neb.

Fairbanks Classics Sirs:

We note with regret the announcement of the retirement from the screen of one of the best exponents of fine clean sportsmanship before the public in the last ten years.

Douglas Fairbanks in his work has always been not only delightfully entertaining, but we fear the consummate grace and artistry of the man has not been fully acknowledged by the Press.

Let others destroy their screen efforts if they will, we would like the Fairbanks Classics preserved.

T. E. CREIGH Scarborough, Me.

Letters from readers who feel as Reader Creigh will be forwarded to Cinemactor Fairbanks.--ED.

-TIME'S editorial desk is 711 mi. (airline) from its press room.--ED.

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