Proud Laborer
Sirs:
"Whitecollar folk who are too proud to repair streets, too sensitive to sit at home eating their hearts out on the dole." So say you in writing on Relief in your April 15 issue.
No white-collar man should be too proud to repair streets. You can learn a lot in doing that. Why should a man worry what his friends say if they see him digging a ditch? It is honorable work. I'll tackle any job that comes along without batting an eye.
Of course I have learned to work, in recent years. For two years I hunted jobs that paid a salary, while selling all manner of things on commission. Then 1 got a job 'pumping gas." Held it two years and was laid off two months ago, with a lot of other fellows, when business took a big drop. And, believe it or not, from your office you can see the office I once was in. . . .
Well, most of my advertising friends can't do a thing for me. I've been out of the game too long. Some of these friends don't realize I took a filling station job from sheer necessity. Agencies I have talked to almost pass out when they hear I have soiled my hands by working at a manual job and badly as they may need someone won't consider me.
I'll repair streets any time. I'll peel potatoes if necessary. I'm not afraid of work. The chances are that the fellows I would work with would have a lot more to them than the average man at a desk. I'm trying hard to forget I ever went to college and handed orders for space to publications.
If someone comes to you asking where he can find a fellow to do a mean, dirty job, send him on to me. . . .
SPENCER BROCK JR. Rydal, Pa.
Monotonous Personalities
Sirs:
I am full of sympathy for illustrators hard hit by the growing use of photographs in place of their drawings and paintings in the advertising and story pages of the popular magazines. But the remark of James Montgomery Flags deserves comment when he says, "All ads now look alike. . . . The boy and girl in their bathing suits being too ecstatic about a case of beer are the same boy and girl on the next page swearing they couldn't live without one of the four cigaret brands that claim to be better than each other." (Time, April 15.)
Any reader of the big circulation magazines knows too well that Flagg's men and women show a depressing lack of variety, and the same is true of the other popular illustrators, John LaGatta, McClelland Barclay. Arthur William Brown, Howard Chandler Christy and the late Harrison Fisher, whose covers for Cosmopolitan year after year showed women whose hats and scarfs and coiffures varied but whose personalities were monotonously and inevitably the same . . . . For variety, give us photographs.
BARLOW WEEMS
Madison, Wis.
Far Too Dramatic
Sirs:
Moralless to the public and harmful to the aviation industry is the far too dramatic photograph of the remains of Damned Fool Floyd Davis (with all reverence to his soul) in TIME. April 15, under Transport. .
To the average layman your photograph of the gutted daredevil represents practically anything connected with aviation. If you don't believe it, show some disinterested friend of yours that picture and then offer him an airplane ride. . . . This same photograph ran in this paper because I noticed it too late to do anything about it.
MAX KARANT Aviation Editor Evanston News-Index Evanston, Ill.
Sirs: . . . Just before going over to my club for lunch today I stopped by the next-door room here in the dormitory to look over your magazine which had just come. What l saw under Transport made me not quite so eager for lunch. ... It could have been left out without any detraction from your story at all. It wasn't of nationwide interest, and it didn't have any special significance. ... I really didn't think TIME went in for that sort of thing. ... I am one of those who are pretty enthusiastic about flying, and I have a hard enough time selling the idea to my family with all the publicity that is given to aviation accidents. Now I realize that stunt parachute jumps have little to do with the safety of flight, but most of the public doesn't see it in that way. It is all aviation to them, and such a picture doesn't encourage them to go out and buy a ticket on an air line the next time they want to go some place. . . .
DAVID H. SCOTT Princeton, N.J.
Southern Spokesmen
Sirs: In your issue of April 15 you make this astounding statement with respect to the Supreme Court's second Scottsboro decision: "Alabamans and the Press of the entire South took that decision with a stunned and apprehensive silence. . . ." So far from receiving the recent findings with "a stunned and apprehensive silence," editors throughout the South commented immediately, and most of those whose comments I saw not only thought the Supreme Court entirely justified in its action, but expressed gratification that the conviction had been set aside.
A wholly incomplete list of papers which approved the Supreme Court's action would include the Birmingham -Herald, published in the State where the crime occurred: the Raleigh News and Observer, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The Memphis Commercial Appeal urged the authorities of Alabama not to try the defendants again, saying that there is too much doubt concerning their guilt. . .
VIRGINIUS DABNEY Chief Editorial Writer Richmond Times-Dispatch Richmond, Va.
Barbara Frietchie & September Morn
Sirs:
In your revival of interest in the painting, September Morn (TIME, April 8: March 18), I am wondering if any inquiry has been made of the artist as to the source from which he derived his title. It is pure surmise on my part that it came-- perhaps subconsciously -- from the second line of the poem, Barbara Frietchie. Every school boy knows those first two lines:
"Up grow the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn. . . ."
While their reference to the "clustered spires of Frederick" is made quite clear in the third and fourth lines, that second line was suggested to the writer immediately upon his first view of the picture. I am not sure that the Quaker poet would appreciate my suggestion of such a relation, but I do not believe the beauty of the poem would suffer thereby.
As one who refuses to have his love of the sheer beauty of the poem dimmed by the clamor of the literalists, so I can see--in the painting-- nothing other than what the artist so evidently meant to portray, the beauty of a young undraped female about to indulge in a recreation in the only way it could have been done before the invention of the seductive bathing suit. . . .
JOSEPH H. APPLE President Emeritus Hood College Frederick, Md.
Artist Paul Chabas named his painting Matinee de Septembre because, after two years of work with his model posing in the chill morning air, he completed it on a September morning. Speaking no English, he probably never heard of Maryland s Barbara Frietchie.--ED.
Fiddling Whistler
Sirs:
Letter, ''Oboe Notion," p. 4 April 15, "congestion in the head.''
In 1910 a young German officer spent about a year in my New Jersey home town. There are many who would recall hearing him whistle the most difficult violin music, accompanied by its proper piano part, in perfect imitation of the quality of that instrument.
The peculiar thing was, he insisted upon holding out his left arm--vibrating the hand--and bowing adequately (as to motion) with his right arm--throughout the performance.
After an hour of this we would always see him reel--no one dared try to spare him by stopping the stunt sooner--and before finishing, sometimes, he would stagger to a chair in the nick of time or most surely he would have fallen.
He could never do this again before the lapse of four days or more because his head took that long to clear! MABEL L. LUPTON Mattituck, N.Y.
Alarmed Housewife
Sirs:
Housekeeping in a congested New York City apartment is complicated by the fact that my husband refuses to discard a single issue of that encyclopedic weekly. TIME. The hall closet and a precious kitchen cupboard are as devoted to old copies as he. Reason: TIME is writing history.
Do other wives complain? When he renewed his subscription again yesterday, my admiration for TIME was tinged with alarm.
SONIA STEKOL
New York City
Grade A
Sirs:
In your issue of April 15, your magazine classes Seventh-Day Adventism with Christian Science, Buchmanism and Coueism. I am surprised that a magazine of your apparent intelligence should be guilty of such an error.
In a former issue you carried a news item concerning a graduate of a Seventh-Day Adventist school, the College of Medical Evangelists, Los Angeles, Calif., who is Dr. George T. Harding 3rd. In that issue you certainly did not class this psychiatrist with Christian Science. Coueism, and like bunk.
I wish to inform you that the College of Medical Evangelists operated by the Seventh-Day Adventists denomination is a Grade A medical school, having in its curriculum psychiatry, which subject is taught by a leading West Coast psychiatrist. The only diversion which S. D. A. practice from psychiatry is the Biblical method as outlined in James 5:13-15, which is not to be confused with any man-made formula for healing the sick.
I, being a graduate of the College of Medical Evangelists, very much resent your remark and wish it recanted in a subsequent issue. . . .
C. E. RANDOLPH, M. D.
Brewster, Wash.
The Biblical method of psychiatry, practiced by Seventh-Day Adventism:
Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms.
Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord:
And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.--Ed
Frog Measurements
Sirs:
In TIME, April 15, Science, concerning an albino frog, you say, ". . . Size is the only clue to a frog's age. . . ."
Not so--and the error is particularly subject to correction because a great disparity in the rates of growth and development among frogs of the same age is a peculiar characteristic of these animals.
There is Jumbo 11, my pet bullfrog (rana castesbiana), who blinks at me through the glass cover of his cubicle. He was hatched from an egg laid at midnight, April 11, 1933, and now; measures three inches, snout-to-vent. One of his brothers measured three and one half inches in October, 1933 and still another frog from the same spawning measured four inches in July, 1934, while many of the tadpoles of that spawning did not metamorphase until the spring of 1934.
Only doubtful clue to a frog's age is appearance.
BENJAMIN M. RUFFNER
Southern (Experimental) Frog Farms Jennings, La.
Sirs:
Washington readers of TIME [April 15] who would like to see an albino bullfrog will find a very fine specimen in the reptile house of the Washington Zoo. Although reared in captivity, being discovered as a tadpole, this frog, in company with the other inhabitants of the finest reptile house in the U. S., lives in a very froggy, naturalistic setting and is apparently quite happy. A mating between him and the New York frog might produce interesting results.
MYRON GLASER
Washington, D. C.
Since both the Manhattan and the Washington albino frogs are of the same species (rana castesbiana), a union between them should produce a batch of albinos--a prospect in which Herpetologist Gladwyn Kingsley Noble of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan is keenly interested. Prime obstacle: Washington Zoo officials suspect their frog is, like its prospective mate, a female.;--Ed.
Master Choynsky's Voice
Sirs:
I do not know whether it is intended for a joke but it is ill timed; on p. 42 of your prized magazine dated April 1 is a squib about Ruddy, an amphibian of parts who claimed to have punched my .optic. . . .
The story:
I was boxing instructor at Pittsburgh Athletic Association. The club had just been inaugurated [in 1911] and a night set apart for the opening of the beautiful pool. The elite of Pittsburgh were in attendance; a polo game was the exciting event. I was merely a spectator on the side lines. Ruddy punched an opponent on the nose and a reciprocal punch from his swimming antagonist caused Ruddy's nose to bleed. . . . I ordered the swimmers out of the tank and they knew their master's voice. Like a lot of sardines they crawled to the dressing room. . . .
JOSEPH B. CHOYNSKY
The Cincinnati Club
Cincinnati, Ohio
Joe Ruddy, famed water polo coach of the New York Athletic Club, insists that he not only hit Pugilist Choynsky in the eye but that he could have hit him two or three times. He firmly denies that anyone hit him (Ruddy) on the nose. Ten years after the Pittsburgh incident Ruddy met Choynsky in Chicago and Choynsky challenged him to a public fight. Ruddy said he was willing if they could make any money out of it. Nothing happened.--ED.
Long Deleted
Sirs:
Your reputation for accuracy is impugned. You carry ads April 22 issue TIME indicating one of four episodes of current release March of Time is descriptive of Kingfish Long's career. . . . We have made repeated inquiries from R. E Toups, local manager of Loew's State, and also F. F. Goodrow, local manager First Division Film Exchange, who vigorously maintain they do not know why this subject was deleted. Where can it be seen?
DAVE BOUDREAUX
New Orleans, La.
Sirs:
I think it is a shame to keep such worthy things from the people, more so some of our poor ignorant Creoles, who believe most everything this Long says. . . .
F. M. MALLORY
New Orleans, La.
Fearing that New Orleans audiences "might riot" if shown The March of Time's sequence on Huey Long, the Manhattan headquarters staff of Loew's Theatres Inc. ordered that sequence deleted in that city. Fearing a revenge tax from the Long Gang if the sequence were not deleted, and riots from anti-Longsters if it were, the Sanger Circuit decided not to show this March of Time issue at all in Louisiana.--ED.
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