Bingham for Smith
Sirs:
TIME MARCH 6 REFERRING TO JUDGE ROBERT W BINGHAM STATED IN 1928 HOOVER WAS HIS CANDIDATE. THIS IS INCORRECT JUDGE BINGHAM AND HIS PAPERS VIGOROUSLY SUPPORTED SMITH AND THE GRACIOUS AND CHARMING MRS. BINGHAM WAS CHAIRMAN LADIES RECEPTION COMMITTEE TO MEET MRS. SMITH AND PARTY HERE DURING CAMPAIGN
J. E. RIDDELL
Chairman Smith Campaign
Louisville, Ky.
Thankfulness
Sirs:
Here I express my heartfelt thankfulness for your kind introduction about Mr. Seiji Noma, the president of the Hochi Shimbun and Magazine King, in your publication of TIME, Jan. 9.
Under the separate cover I send you a copy of Seiji Noma. A sketch of his life, character and enterprises. I wish you will accept with my best compliment, and believe me, most sincere of yours,
SHIZUMA NARA
Secretary of the President
Dai Nippon Yubenkai Kodansha
Tokyo, Japan
Ick-ees
Sirs:
On p. 15 of the March 6 issue you give the pronunciation of the new Secretary of the Interior's name as "Ick-us."
Secretary Ickes' youngest son, Robert, a freshman at Lake Forest College, pronounces his name as "Ick-ees." And people who know well-known Mrs. Anna Wilmarth Ickes say that she says "Ick-ees."
Can there be a difference of opinion in the Ickes family in the pronunciation of the name?
FREDERICK H. HAVE
Assistant to the President
Lake Forest College
Lake Forest, Ill.
TIME erred. "Ick-ees" it is.-ED.
Born into Pain
Sirs:
I beg to call your attention to certain errors of fact in the biographical sketch of Beniamino Bufano included in your article entitled ''Pacific Progress," of Feb. 13.
You say: "After the War, Bufano moved to San Francisco, married; had a child, deserted wife & child to study Terra Cotta glazing and firing in China." This is inaccurate. Bufano was not married until 1925, then to Virginia Howard, in Houston, Texas, by whom he had a son, Erskine Scott Wood Bufano, born in August 1928 at Ross, Calif. Mother and son have been residents of Mill Valley, Calif, for several years.
As to Bufano "deserting wife and child," such a phrase implies an attitude of mind that is scarcely Bufano. Bufano is the type to which the desertion of one interest merely means absorption in another.
Also, permit me to gently protest against the light way in which you discussed the artist's eccentricities. Sir, if you could but know the pathos of that powerful but thwarted will! To be born with any esthetic conception in this age is to be born into pain. Bufano's capacity to suffer is very great, and I cannot help but think how your article must have pained him. The creation of a colossal St. Francis was one of his great dreams. But he sacrificed too much for it, gave it the significance the world demanded for his wife and child. Although it should be very beautiful, it was foredoomed to the fate of all false gods.
VIRGINIA HOWARD BUFANO
Mill Valley, Calif.
Santa Clara's Play
Sirs:
At private dress rehearsal of traditional Passion Play of Santa Clara, to be produced here April 2-9, [I] chanced upon Richard Thrift, portrayer of Judas, reading TIME during delightful rehearsal interlude.
The Passion Play of Santa Clara, written by Clay M. Greene, '69, former Shepherd, Lambs Club, was produced first by U. of Santa Clara students in 1901 to celebrate Golden Jubilee of one of the oldest colleges in the State. . . .
Santa Clara, Jesuit college of 500 students, has produced Passion Play intermittently since 1901, with five years being usual period of lapse. The Santa Clara version Passion Play similar to Oberammergau except it is produced indoors, Christ is manifested symbolically. Charles Warren Stoddard placed Santa Clara production above Oberammergau. We believe this year's presentation will surpass those of past, mainly because of excellent cast, of whom Richard Thrift-avid TIME-reader-is the outstanding. Jackie Coogan, famed as "The Kid." now a freshman at the university, plays Jarom, a leper boy whom Christ healed. . . .
ANTHONY P. HAMANN
Santa Clara, Calif.
Alaskan Expiration
Sirs:
I wish you would discontinue sending me TIME. I am only terminating my subscription temporarily and it is entirely due to the financial stringency. I expect to be back on your books as a regular subscriber next fall as I figure times will be looking up some by then.
I am still getting the magazine but think my subscription has run out. If it has, please send me a bill for what I owe to date and I will send you a money order. If not, continue to send it until it runs out.
I am enclosing a picture of the lead dog of our team [name, Dempsey]. If you should ever want a picture of an Alaskan dog for your magazine you have permission to publish this one.
This dog is known to thousands of Alaskans and is at present the leader of the team that carries the U. S. mail from Moose Pass on the Alaska Railroad, twice a month, to Sunrise and Hope. He has been over a big portion of the territory of Alaska. If he could talk he could tell things that would be interesting to a million chechacos.
FRANK ROYCROFT
Moose Pass, Alaska
To honest Frank Roycroft: his subscription continued free until next fall.-ED.
Robbie's the Name
Sirs:
0 blithertn' TIME,* it's unco hard
When ye misca' auld Scotia's bard
As "Bobbie" Burns! It gars me greet.
Ye're surely crackit!
Robbie's the name whaur Scotsmen meet. . . .
The Deil maun tak' it!
HUGHIE SUTHERLAND
The Brookings Institute
Washington, D. C.
Exacting Test
Sirs:
... I spent six months of 1932 in the village of Santa Eulalia, Guatemala, in the heart of a remote mountain section so completely cut off from the world that no piece of news either of the outside world or even of the Republic of Guatemala filtered in to us, save only the one appalling story of the Lindbergh tragedy. The life was a lonely and fatiguing one, and I felt as completely severed from the world I knew as though I had been translated like Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee completely out of my own century into some remote period of a forgotten past. For these six months I subscribed to TIME, which previously I had known only as a magazine on my friends' tables. Of course it came late, but that made no difference in such a place. I used to parcel it out, reading sections of the magazine each night by candlelight after I had finished writing up my day's notes, and restraining myself with great difficulty from swallowing it all at one gulp. I do not think a magazine could have been put to a more exacting test of its interest. Not only was it a tremendous relief to me there, but its news was so effectively presented and so complete that when at the end of my expedition I went down to the Coast to meet my wife, who was just ten days out of New York, I was nearly as well posted on all the recent events as she was. I found, as a matter of fact, that I had a rather more thorough knowledge of international affairs and national politics than she had acquired from the diffuse stories of the daily papers, and I was able to astonish her with my questions about new books and new plays of which I had read in TIME. I feel deeply grateful for what your magazine did for me. . . .
OLIVER LAFARGE
New York City
Aphakia
Sirs:
Your footnote, "When Siamese King Prajadhipok journeyed to the U. S. to have a cataract scraped from his eyes. . . ." (TIME, March 6) makes it apparent that you share with many others the erroneous idea that a cataract is a "growth over the eye," and that the way to remove it is to "scrape it off."
For your information--a cataract is an opacity of the crystalline lens-- that powerful and highly transparent little lens within the eye whose function it is to bring rays of light to a focus upon the retina. Due to injury, extreme heat, or any one of a number of causes, this lens may become translucent and eventually opaque. Since all rays of light must pass through the crystalline lens to be received upon the retina, it is easy to see how a loss of transparency results in serious impairment to the vision. Science knows of no way to remove a lenticular opacity, so in order to restore vision, it is necessary to remove the entire lens, substituting therefor an artificial lens in front of the eye (glasses).
The operation for the removal of the crystalline lens is known as a "cataractomy," and consists usually of an entrance made into the eyeball at the "corneoscleral junction"--where the watch-crystal portion of the eye joins the eye-ball proper. Such an operation requires real skill and great delicacy-- is feasible only after the patient has had his cataract for a considerable length of time, so that the lens is hard and easier to handle. When removed, the lens is about the size and the shape of a pea. The condition, eye without lens, is then known as "aphakia," and with the aid of proper glasses the patient has usually a return of comparatively excellent vision.
Quite different from "scraping," yes?
LEON WEINTROB, O.D.
Harrisburg, Pa.
Supervisors v. U. S.
Sirs:
In spite of Stanley Edward Beattie's protest TIME may be correct in its translation of Habeas Corpus to "you may have the body" (TIME, March 6 et ante).
In Supervisors v. U. S. tried before the Supreme Court in 1866 (4 Wall. 435), an old English case is quoted: "may, in the case of a public officer, is tantamount to shall, and if he does not do it he shall be punished. . . ."
I believe other cases hold that the word may in the above use is a command.
FRED ADAMS
Dallas, Texas
*TIME, March 6.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.