Girdler's Record

Sirs:

In your current issue, June 14, you credit Philip Murray, chairman of S. W. O. C., with the statement: " 'Girdler is not a steel man. He was chief of the Jones & Laughlin police force before he was dragged by the bootstraps to be president of the Republic. He's a company cop, nothing more and nothing less, and there's no company policeman big enough to whip us.' "

It happens that I knew Tom Girdler more than 25 years ago in Atlanta, and he was general manager of the Atlanta Steel Co. at that time. He was my tenant and next door neighbor. I was quite familiar with the affairs of the Atlanta Steel Co., and to my certain knowledge he was in charge of the company's physical operations, having been summoned to Atlanta as a steel expert who, in spite of his comparative youth at the time, had already made a name for himself as a steel operating man in the East. . . .

WILLIAM HURD HILLYER New York City

There is no question that Tom Girdler is a steelman of the broadest possible experience. Asked last week if he cared to reconsider his statement, Leader Murray said: "If you check with the records of Jones & Laughlin, you will find that Girdler was in charge of their police force during the 1919 strike." A check with the records of Jones & Laughlin reveals that Tom Girdler: Graduated from Lehigh University in 1901 with a degree in mechanical engineering; went to work for Buffalo Forge Co., was sent to London as sales engineer and assistant to its London manager. In 1902--1905 he was with Oliver Iron & Steel Corp. in Pittsburgh; in 1905 joined Colorado Fuel & Iron Co.; in 1907 became general superintendent of Atlanta Steel Co., Atlanta. He was made vice president : director of Jones & Laughlin in 1925, elected president in 1928, resigned in October 1929 to go with Republic. He was general manager of Jones & Laughlin in 1919. As such he was in charge of all departments, including the company police force.--ED.

Coryell's Help

Sirs:

Referring to your article entitled "Father & Son," p. 63, TIME, June 21, I wish to say that your writer did a very satisfactory job but seems to me to have missed the very point which might have made the article highly colorful and interesting. Your author is not to blame, however, since it would take much delving to get at what I am referring to. I speak of the heavy handicap under which Levi L. Coryell Sr. started life. When the boy was 10 years of age, on Oct. 30, 1878, according to our records and the tales which Mr. Coryell has told me, he entered this school almost totally blind with cataracts which, according to the surgical information at that time, were expected to cause total blindness within a few years. He came to the school in a lumber wagon after a heavy drive from the ancestral property in Nemaha County, 25 mi. away, which is now known as Coryell Park. Later in his life Coryell underwent operations which restored in a large degree his sight.

The story in your publication tells of his success in building a great business and becoming a wealthy man but that is not the phase of his life which seems most remarkable to me. In the years of his success he has not forgotten the school which gave him his start, or the superintendent who led him into the paths of righteousness (sometimes with a veritable board of education, two inches wide), or the teachers who taught him tactile reading and writing in line letters and New York point. Without letting the world know, he has been for many years the chief advisor for the Nebraska School for the Blind, its chief benefactor. He has helped me, the chief executive, with counsel. He has visited the school often. And he has provided funds in many, many ways. While school is in session every month there comes a check for our children from which 25-c- is provided weekly for those without means, with the understanding that the money is to be spent purely for happiness. Toys, candy, fruit and other things dear to the heart of children are purchased with the $1 monthly allowance. To our children it is known as "The Coryell" and Friday night is looked forward to.

Now, I should not have written this because it has been a confidential matter between Mr. Coryell and myself (I fear he will not like my doing it) but already there has crept into the newspapers some word of what he has been doing for his alma mater and I think it is better to give you the facts correctly than have them possibly seep into your office somewhat distorted. N. C. ABBOTT Superintendent

Nebraska School for the Blind

Nebraska City, Neb.

Twice

Sirs:

In its story on the ''Potomac Mystery" (TIME. June 14) TIME erred twice. S.S. District of Columbia is not "ancient," is not a "side-wheeler."

Ship was built in 1925, and is classed by the Department of Commerce as a steam-screw vessel.

I do not believe there are any paddle-steamers now carrying passengers on the Potomac. WILLIAM C. VESTAL Redlands, Calif.

Credit for Unions

Sirs:

Your apt description of Edward A. Filene as a "rich old Boston merchant . . . talking liberalism" printed in TIME, May 24, interested me no less than its refutation in the letter written by Mr. Joseph Warren Bishop Jr. [TIME, June 14]. It seemed to me that TIME did not err, was right as usual. . . .

It is inaccurate to speak of Mr. Filene as the founder of the Credit Union Movement. Other Big Boston Businessmen were equally influential and unsparing of time and money in pushing the Credit Union cause ahead, particularly Felix Vorenberg and Pierre Jay. . . .

Felix Vorenberg, another successful Boston merchant (perhaps not quite so rich), and Pierre Jay, then State Bank Commissioner, were both liberal enough to have sensed the potential value of Credit Unions for working people as far back as 1909, which was before Mr. Filene had become fully aware of the future possibilities of "talking liberally" about them. Had it not been for these pioneering crusaders, Massachusetts might never have had a Credit Union Law and Mr. Filene and his associates might not have had the cornerstone on which to build the National Credit Union Movement. . . .

Let's give credit where credit is due: to Felix Vorenberg and Pierre Jay for initiating and sponsoring the Massachusetts Credit Union Law which made possible the first Credit Union in the U. S.; to E. A. Filene for his work in helping to finance the National Movement. ...

C. W. HARVEY Treasurer

Central Credit Union Fund, Inc.

Boston, Mass.

Scrambled Eggs

Sirs:

Re: Error-of-the-week [TIME, June 21].

Why, if you must scramble two good men and true in your journalistic frying pan, do you select above all, your noble brothers of the press Mr. Hemingway and Mr. Duranty? Possibly, may we say, because they are two good eggs, both used to the journalistic heat from the frying pan even unto the fire. . . . MILLARD L. WINTERS Bryn Mawr, Pa. TIME regrets that its cuts of Messrs. Hemingway & Duranty, illustrating the Writers' Congress story, were switched. --ED.

Sirs:

. . . What I think Hemingway and I should have done was to have sued TIME for $10,000 apiece, for libel, and I think we would have both won our case because it would surely damage his reputation if anyone thought that so eminent a romancer wrote only facts, while it would be equally fatal to me for the public to suppose that Death in the Afternoon was a suitable caption for Moscow news dispatches.

I think, however, we might compromise on say a year's subscription to your valuable and pungent periodical, supplied gratis by you to me.

WALTER DURANTY

New York City

To able Walter Duranty, special Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, now visiting Manhattan, a year's subscription to TIME, gratis.-- ED.

Contractors v. Pork

Sirs:

In your issue of June 7, in referring to the effort in Congress to try to earmark part of the "Relief" appropriation for useful public works, you say:

''They in turn had the backing of the lobbyists of the steel and cement industries and the American Association of General Contractors. What! cried the earmarking bloc. Billions for beans for the unemployed and not one cent for pork?"

Is this a distortion of fact in an effort to be humorous, or is your Washington correspondent as ill-advised on actual happenings as his unfamiliarity with the name of this association indicates ? If we are as powerful lobbying for "pork" as he intimates, he ought at least to be acquainted with the name of the lobbyist.

The Associated General Contractors of America are, in this instance, trying to do two things:

1) Save the construction industry for the contractors rather than permit Harry Hopkins to socialize it, and

2) Give the taxpayer some decent return for his money.

Repeatedly Harry Hopkins has publicly stated that WPA or some kindred bureau would become a permanent agency to take over all of the Government public works construction. To men who know construction, that possibility is nauseating. To the taxpayers of the country, it should be a warning of eventual national financial collapse. Only to the politicians is such a statement ''duck soup." If the men on WPA had been turned loose making automobiles, mining coal, or publishing news periodicals, the storm of protest would have been terrific, and the effort ended. Only in construction, the most disintegrated of all industries, could such an invasion of private industry be continued. We, in the industry, fight against its socialization.

Money expended on any construction project is 85% labor when traced through to the source of the materials. The Department of Labor says each man on contract construction under the commendable Ickes' WPA program meant 3 1/2 men working. Construction, the slowest of the great industries to recover, is operating on less than 50% of normal volume. If it were on a normal volume basis, it could employ 2,500,000 more men than it is now using. This, singularly, is the number now on "relief." . . .

These are some of the things the Associated General Contractors of America were fighting for--not "pork." These are some of the things the "earmarkers" in Congress understood and had courage enough to vote for. These are some of the things your Washington correspondent should know before he makes a rather slurring remark about "pork." W. A. KLINGER

President The Associated General Contractors

of America, Inc. Sioux City, Iowa

Santa Lucia Lady

Sirs:

. . . Along the road [Carmel-San Simeon highway, opened late last month--TIME, July 5] are the mouths of many lonely and inaccessible canons which creep away up into the Santa Lucia Mountains. Five miles up one canon is a large lime kiln deserted for more than 30 years. No wagon road ever went to it. The lime was brought down from the mountain to ships at the shore by a mile-long steel cable. The trail over which I suppose burros could travel is obliterated most of the way. We first explored this canon a dozen years ago--the kilns and a score of houses are deserted and overgrown with poison oak and empty save for bats and snakes and a few broken tables and benches. (A considerable enterprise--over 300 men were employed there.) No one goes there now. We were startled the first time to find standing on a floor in a dim corner, the portrait of an old lady in a massive frame in an otherwise empty cabin--a sensitive old face just come from some secure New England village!

Just now again we have been there and went at once to seek our old lady, pensive and enduring as ever, we found her, even more shut in and solitary. Outside her cabin are the only garden flowers (everywhere a riot of wild flowers--even wild rhododendrons), against her house a clump of calla lilies and a fragrant pink cabbage rose. We took her into the sun and photographed her [see cut]. Who can name her? UNA JEFFERS

Carmel-By-the-Sea, Calif.

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