Rod & Child

The sedate Letters-to-the-Editor columns of the New York Times are usually stiff with sesquipedalian discussions of such matters as the U.S. debt and the minority problem in Macedonia. It is a forum that attracts Supreme Court justices, ambassadors and college presidents. But occasionally, as last week, a plain, ordinary person sounds off on a really universal theme.

"If more parents were in the habit of taking their offspring over their knee and applying a generous dose of strap oil, we'd all be better," wrote Mrs. T. Scholz. "My three teen-age girls have felt the beneficial sting since way back. . . ."

An indignant Teen-Ager retorted: "Mrs. Scholz's letter in today's paper cost me a licking. Mine come whenever mother reads articles in the paper favoring spanking. Mother takes me to the basement recreation room and uses a piece of rubber tubing--you know where. It hurts terribly. . . ."

And an anonymous lady (the "Mother of Four Satisfactory Unspanked Children") really went for Mrs. Scholz and the Teen-Ager's mother: "We have been horrified by the beating of helpless persons by the cruel guards in the prison camps of Germany and Japan. Is it not time for us to be deeply shocked by ordinary American parents who use rubber hose or strap on their defenseless children?"

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