Loyal American

Sirs:

Certainly all of the gentlemen and patriots of your editorial staff were out of the office when the half tone of President Hoover sitting in front of the Holtz machine copied from the New York Daily News was admitted to your issue of Sept. 28.

How supposedly refined men catering to a refined public could so utterly have forgotten themselves as to do that low down thing I cannot see.

Such disrespect for the highest office of the land and for the gentleman who is so nobly filling it is a direct insult to the office, the man, and to each and every one of us who are your subscribers and readers.

No, I am not a rabid Republican partisan. On the contrary I am a Cleveland-Wilson Democrat, but better than that I am a loyal American! . . .

NEWELL C. KNIGHT

Chicago, Ill.

TIME reprinted the Daily News's composograph of Mahatma Hoover, not as news of the President of the U. S. but as a phenomenon of the U. S. Press.--ED.

Micks, Harps, Turkeys & Potatoes

Sirs:

Your uncouth crack about the little known origins of Irish hurly (TIME, Sept. 28) is most unTIMEworthy. It savors of the they-kept-the-pig-in-the-parlor ditties. It is no more probable that hurly started in a clubbed dispute over a potato than it is that tennis began in a courtier's attempt to ward off with a plate a hot dog bandied at him by an irate Louis the Whosis. Elsewhere you state that hurly is at least a thousand years old and the potato was not known in Europe until the 16th century. If you must link the potato with something you might tie it to the American game la crosse; 'twould be more accurate, less cheaply vaudevillian.

PATRICK O'BRIEN

Jacksonville, Ill.

Sirs:

I cull the following from your witty and disinterested account of the Irish game of hurling (TIME, Sept. 28).

"Perhaps it [hurling] began when two Irishmen fought with clubs for the possession of a potato and their neighbors took sides. There was hurling in Ireland a thousand years ago and it has been played ever since."

In its eagerness to up-to-datedly emulate mid-Victorian Punch's idea of being funny at Irishmen's expense TIME overlooks the fact that there were no potatoes in Ireland--or anywhere else in Europe--a thousand years ago. Will TIME forgive a slightly nauseated Irishman (Mick, Harp, Turkey, Flannel-mouth, if TIME prefers) if a mild passion for truth makes him a bit insensible to fun-loving TIME'S preference for what it deems to be humor?

JOHN M. FLYNN Chicago, Ill.

Farrar's Class

Sirs:

HEY YOU DONT PUT FARRAR [TIME, Oct. 5] IN ANY CLASS BUT NINETEEN EIGHTEEN GREATEST CLASS THAT EVER CAME TO YALE.

CHARLES P. TAFT II

Cincinnati, Ohio

To Yale's Greatest Class apology for misappropriating its Publisher John Farrar. But he took his degree with the Class of 1919 after a year away at war.--ED.

Monsters

Sirs:

For goodness sake don't go to aping Outlook in putting absurd and outlandish caricatures on your outside cover. The cover on your Oct. 5 issue is revolting.

F. GENTRY HARRIS

Spartanburg, S. C.

Sirs:

Was it for lack of space that TIME'S sport's writer omitted the name and poundage of this monster?

Name: Harry A. Rohwer

Age: 23

Weight: 787 Ib.

Place: Los Angeles

According to TIME, Oct. 5, footnote p. 23 ". . . Heaviest monster in history was Daniel

Lambert who weighed 739 Ib. . . ."

Monster Rohwer, I take it, then, is heavier by 48 Ib.

JOSEPH BACHHAUSEN

South Bend, Ind.

Monster Rohwer, trade-named "Happy High," last month married one Mereida Caswell (see cut).--ED.

Sell for Van Tassel

Sirs:

. . . Not to take one leaf from the hard-won laurels of me-old-friend-and-pal Chet Van Tassel, he was never the Editor of Harper's Bazaar. Nor was it under his business managership that it became a "valuable property." Chester hoed and planted and weeded and brought it to bud but succeeding Business Manager Eugene Forker, now publisher of the New York American, was the force that actually brought things about for the further successful succession of Business Manager Fredric Drake, now at it at the old stand and popularly known as The Right Man in The Right Place.

The Editor, during those trying seven years of Van Tassel to Forker to Drake during which Harper's Bazaar became a valuable property, was the now noted observer, successful Adman and happy TIME reader,

HENRY BLACKMAN SELL New York City

Editor Burton's Credit

Sirs:

On p. 24 TIME, Sept. 21, you give practically all the credit for the improvement in Physical Culture to Mr. Oursler. I do not think you are either right or fair in that. The marvelous change in the magazine during Mr. Burton's one-year editorship speaks for itself. And as editor of McCall's some years ago, he made just as great an improvement in McCall's. You cannot credit Mr. Oursler with that, can you? Please, TIME, "Honor to whom honor is due.''

KAREN LODGE

Los Angeles, Calif.

Sinkurea Jidai

Sirs:

I note in your last issue that I have been taken to a sanatorium for observation as a result of a nervous breakdown (TIME, Sept. 28).

You publish lots of gossip, and I suppose you cannot be expected to spend much time finding out whether it is true or not. A reporter for a Los Angeles newspaper called up my wife and said he understood I was suffering from a nervous breakdown. My wife replied that it was absolutely untrue, that I was going to a hospital to have my physician seek the cause of a feverish condition. Nevertheless, the story went out all over the country that I was suffering from a nervous breakdown. Apparently a man in America is absolutely defenseless against newspaper rascality of this sort.

Since you want all the gossip, I will tell you that the condition was what our grandmothers used to call a "cold on the kidneys," although the doctors have a fancy name for it now. I am home again and all right, and will continue to worry you with novels of which you strongly disapprove. They do not make much of a hit with New York intellectuals, it appears, but they have changed the mentality of a whole new generation of the students of China, Japan, India and Russia. Has any of your collectors of gossip told you that the present literary period in Japan is known as Sinkurea Jidai which means "the Sinclair era"?

New York is a small village.

UPTON SINCLAIR

Pasadena, Calif.

TIME felicitates Author Sinclair on his return to health, gladly prints this correction of his reported ailment.--ED.

Bowdoin's Gibson

Sirs:

In your Sept. 21 issue, under Business & Finance, I read your article on Harvey Dow Gibson with a great deal of interest.

I notice in your articles that generally when a man is a Harvard or Yale man or a graduate of some of the other large universities you mention the fact. Why wait for an obituary notice to let the world know that Mr. Gibson is a Bowdoin alumnus?

LUTHER DANA

Westbrook, Me.

Trapped Miner

Sirs:

TIMEsters will be interested to hear of the outcome in the case reported in the current issue of TIME: a miner trapped in the mine eight or ten miles from Montgomery, W. Va., and emergency amputation of the right arm, bravely and successfully performed under adverse conditions by Dr. W. B. Davis (TIME, Sept. 28). The left arm was fractured in the slate fall.

This morning I am informed by our orthopedic surgeon that the convalescence thus far has been satisfactory and that the prognosis is C. L. WOODBRIDGE, M. D. Montgomery Clinic Montgomery, W. Va.

Maidofallworks

Sirs:

Every inventor feels he has invented everything, but even after discounting this professional weakness, I was surprised to read about the claviphone in your columns (TIME, Sept. 14).

Some time ago, a celebrated German pianist visited my house and laboratories at Gloucester, Mass. He saw and heard the Piraphon, my child, then some years old. He called it "maid-ofallworks" in German, and it was. The "Pi" for piano, "ra" for radio, and "phon" for phonograph were embodied in a single instrument which had been carefully studied by the Aeolian Company of New York. In this instrument, a common radio tube amplifier builds up radio, phonograph, and piano tone, making a baby grand sound like a concert grand and producing radio tone, which through the piano acoustics are far superior to any boxed radios. The combination is my dream of the instrument of tomorrow, and I am happy that Bechstein has the vision to promote it.

I am also equally happy that the U. S. Patent Office has granted me some basic claims on the invention.

JOHN HAYS HAMMOND, JR.

Gloucester, Mass.

In the Manchester Guardian lately appeared the following:

Seated one day at the organ, I was feeling excessively cross, As grim as a grisly old Gorgon And generally quite at a loss; So, seeking to make my horizon Less damnably dismal and blue, I pushed every knob I set eyes on To see what that organ could do.

At first I secured a loudspeaker Which bellowed and blustered away, And then, as its volume grew weaker, A gramophone started to play; A spinet I found I could wangle, And then I perceived I had hatched A really magnificent mangle With vacuum cleaner attached.

A harp, a trombone, and a mincer

In rapid succession were seen;

There followed a washer and rinser,

A loom and an adding machine;

But a twist from the knob that was neater

Than any I'd hitherto tried,

Delivered a slap-up two sealer

In which I went forth for a ride.--ED.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.