Taft for President?

Sirs:

GO FIND YOURSELF OUT SOMETHING ABOUT CHARLES P. TAFT BEFORE DISMISSING HIM AS FAMED DO-GOODER (TIME, Oct. 4) .... HE IS MY AND COUNTLESS OTHERS' HOPE AS FUTURE PRESIDENT.

H. L. MCCARTHY

Highland Park, Ill.

> Readers with better memories than Reader McCarthy's know that Charles Phelps Taft II, son of the President, has had his share of TIME mentions--as "a bright young man" (Jan 8, 1934), "a socially conscientious progressive" (June 28, 1937), a "topflight layman" of the Episcopal Church (Dec. 8, 1941), etc. Many a reader will recall hearing of Charlie Taft as a Phi Beta Kappa football and basketball star at Yale, a World War I veteran (first lieutenant), the father of seven children, a 7-handicap golfer, a onetime Landon brain-truster, a personable Cincinnati lawyer, and the possessor of a typical Taft dimple as well as his father's ability to make friends and have fun. Once before, in TIME Letters (Aug. 24, 1936), he was nominated for President. TIME would be happy to record the further advance of Charlie Taft in public service--ED.

Great White Hope

Sirs:

TIME'S STATEMENT OF OCT. 11 THAT MONTANA'S SENATOR B. K. WHEELER IS THE "GREAT WHITE HOPE OF THOSE WHO HATE THE PROSPECT OF FIGHTING FOR THEIR FREEDOM" I CONSIDER TO BE AT ONCE THE MOST UNTRUTHFUL, UNFAIR AND UNBECOMING A GREAT NEWS MAGAZINE THAT I HAVE EVER READ IN TIME. WHATEVER YOU THINK OF B. K. WHEELER AND FOR WHATEVER REASON, YOU CANNOT DENY UNLESS YOU ARE BLINDLY BIGOTED AND HOPELESSLY BIASED THAT HE IS ANYTHING BUT A SLACKER OR A COWARD. MORE THAN ANY OTHER MAN IN THE U.S. SENATE TODAY B. K. WHEELER IS KNOWN AND RESPECTED FOR HIS COURAGE AND HIS AMERICANISM. . . .

WILLIAM MAGEE DUNN

Washington

> TIME disagrees.--ED.

Freedom Unlimited

Sirs:

The letter . . . from C. H. Armstrong, of Wichita, Kans., which you published in your Oct. 4 issue under the caption "Contented Cats" has attracted widespread and favorable comment in this community.* A friend has ordered our job printer to reproduce it (5,000 copies) and proposes to have it distributed from house to house. . , .

The fact about the Four Freedoms, as we see it out here on the West Coast, is that the instant you begin to number your freedoms you begin, also, to restrict and limit them.

What we should like to hear is for one of our statesmen, preferably the highest ... to enunciate a program of just one word, but that word total, entire and all-embracive. The word is "FREEDOM."

FRANKLIN KNOX

Tujunga, Calif.

> TIME agrees.--ED.

Short Shifters' Club

Sirs:

Taking a tip from TIME, the Fort Wayne Ordnance Depot has organized a Short Shifters' Club of Detroit business and professional men who work four or more hours a day at the Depot. . . . Without their help the Depot could not meet its huge tonnage schedules in the face of an almost nonexistent labor supply in this area.

RAY M. HARE

Colonel, Ord. Dept.,

Commanding

Detroit

Cover Wrinkles

Sirs:

"Critic" Linn may think a man's face looks like a retouched photograph (TIME, Oct. 11). He's wrong. All faces have character-showing forms, whether hills, valleys or ravines. This artist considers it his business to show faces as they really are.

ERNEST HAMLIN BAKER

New York City

Across North Africa

To TIME from a former TIME correspondence secretary, now a Red Cross worker overseas, came the following letter:

Just a list of the cities we have visited: Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech, Oran, Meknes, Oudjda, Algiers, Fez. We have spent a night in a Sultan's palace at Fez, we have visited the headquarters of the Foreign Legion in Sidi-bel Abbes . . . we have seen the Casbah in Algiers. . . . Three gals, two others and myself, drove all across North Africa from Casablanca to Bizerte. From Bizerte we flew over to Sicily. Bizerte was an appalling sight. ... At night ... the moon shines down on empty shells of white buildings with black windows.

. . . Every day has been madder than the one before and life literally never has a dull moment. . . . We never go anywhere but we get great attention. . . . They follow us in jeeps, peeps, weapon carriers. We can only date officers and it is always necessary to refuse six dates a night.

This trip across North Africa gave me a pretty good idea of what Red Cross is doing and I assure you it's a lot. They have showers, towels, soap. They have food that we try our best to make a little different from the GI stuff. Cold drinks. You have no idea what a luxury ice is. ...

Next to me is a hurdy-gurdy affair giving forth lovely Italian-sounding music. A funny old guy stands there turning the wheel as soldiers group around and listen.

DORIS RIKER

"The Bonham General Store"

Sirs:

I have just completed a minute search of the city of Bonham searching for "the Bonham general store" which the writer of your article about Sam Rayburn in the Sept. 27 issue so glibly mentions.

There are some 100 stores in Bonham, including two banks, 12 cafes, six drugstores and seven dry-goods stores, but not one of them will acknowledge to being "the Bonham general store" where Sam sits with cronies for "big-town" photographers. The general store to which the author refers, I presume, is the store owned by Ernest Parker at Ivanhoe, 15 miles north of here.

Bonham has an estimated population of 9,230 . . . does not claim to be a metropolis, but it is definitely out of the general-store class. . .

R. M. (Bos) CANTRELL, Editor

Bonham Daily Favorite

Bonham, Tex.

> Bonham's Cantrell presumes correctly, TIME'S writer was wrong in presuming.--ED.

Doughboy Trademark

Sirs:

Please, please, TIME, restrict your usage of the term "doughboy." It's one of the few individual trademarks we of the Infantry have.

We're the front-line troops who lose the blood and sweat and life, who dig the foxholes, who sleep on the ground every single night of our overseas lives. . . . Our job is a dirty and uncomfortable one, and we do it without too much complaining. . . .

When you label some service soldier in a service unit in a very rear area "doughboy" (TIME, Aug. 16), up comes our dander. . . .

(Sgt.) DUANE D. OLSON

c/o Postmaster, New York City

> Needed: a name for soldiers who also serve--behind the front.--ED.

Bartholomew on Miller

Sirs:

Your article captioned issue of "Sousa with a Floy Floy" in the Sept. 6 issue of TIME has been bothering me ever since I read it, and my distress was fortified by the letters commenting on the article which you published in TIME'S Sept. 27 issue. I decided (in the interests of Lux et Veritas) to do a bit of personal investigation. . . . Circumstances favored me in this quest because:

1) Captain Glenn Miller's 418th Army Air Forces Band marches directly under my window twice every day. . . .

2) I have been an ardent student of music for almost 50 years, have had a particular passion for military bands ever since I was a kid and my experience in this field ranges from the gutter band of six dilapidated instrumentalists who used to collect pennies on summer evenings in my home town to the best military and concert bands of three continents.

3) I have heard every military march composed by John Philip Sousa . . . and most of the operettas he wrote in the days of his great popularity. . . .

I am well aware that much could be done to improve the status of military-band music in the U.S. but the trouble lies in Washington, not in New Haven. My hat is off to young men like Captain Glenn Miller who can put aside the glamor and the big money of top-flight professional careers and enter upon the unexciting routine of an army band on army pay and throw into this new task such energy, enthusiasm and skill as to quicken the pulse and lighten the heart of everyone within hearing distance.

Let John Philip Sousa rest in peace; his marches are not being played in "jive tempo" and his scores are not being touched up with "hot licks and modern dance-hall harmonies." And let Bandmaster Edwin Franko Goldman forget his rage. He was misinformed.

MARSHALL BARTHOLOMEW

Yale University

>; TIME'S thanks to Marshall Bartholomew, famed conductor of the Yale Glee Club since 1922, for an informed judgment on a debatable subject.--ED.

Man of the Year

Sirs:

Man of the year: MacArthur. . . .

ALEXANDER McKAY PARKER SR.

Tucson, Ariz.

Sirs:

... I wish to nominate General Josip Brozovich, leader of the Partisan Yugoslavs whom the Spaniards in their revolution named "Tito."

. . . When the last shot is fired in this World War II, historians as well as his own Slavic people will claim him as their George Washington, Simon Bolivar, Benito Juarez and Bernardo O'Higgins. . . .

(Corp.) NICHOLAS C. RAGUS

Camp Stewart, Ga.

Sirs:

I take off my $1.98 chapeau to Chicago's elite milliner, Mr. Ben Greenfield (TIME, Oct. 4), and suggest he toss one of his "$37.75 and up" specials into the ring. He is my candidate for man of the year.

LUCILLE E. BLOCK

Washington

Sirs:

. . . For Men of the Year--having proved themselves better than Axis supermen: Ivan, Tommy and Yank.

(Serviceman's Name Withheld)

Barksdale Field, La.

Important Information

Sirs:

Congratulations on carrying the item about Zeniths new hearing aid, in your issue of Oct. 4!

. . . Thousands of TIME readers will have marked this item for special interest-- either for themselves, for a member of their family, or for a friend.

Zenith appears to be doing for the hard of hearing what Ford did for the man of modest means--in making available to everybody the best that science can produce, at a nominal price.

Congratulations . . .for bringing this vitally important information to the attention of the public.

DOROTHY G. POPE

New York City

* Reader Armstrong visited a zoo, found the caged animals enjoying the Four Freedoms but not, of course, freedom of action. Neither did the Atlantic Charter, he realized, make any promise of this "all-embracing" freedom.

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