Friday, Mar. 03, 1961

What happens to a reader whose letter to the editor is published in TIME? "Strange and sometimes wonderful things," says the Rev. T. R. Baudler, pastor of the Zion American Lutheran Church in Eureka, S. Dak., whose letter was published in TIME, Sept. 12. Last week Pastor Baudler wrote:

"Let me enumerate a few: offers from various literary and publishing houses to print and publish, rewrite and ghostwrite 'forthcoming products'; a rash of letters from places like Nairobi, Johannesburg, Erlangen--and, of course, Dubuque, Iowa--often initiating a lively correspondence with strange people from strange places; a scholarship of $1,650 for one of my sons at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass, (after my TIME letter deplored the general trend of public education here).

"An old Russian proverb says, 'What you write in a letter carries as much weight as though you had hewn it in stone.' TIME's circulation has given that adage the jet-age momentum."

Mrs. William C. Daniels of Albuquerque paused in the eye of the housewife's hurricane to tell TIME her reactions to the painting of Yves Klein, who puts paint on nude models, then has them roll on a canvas. Last week, after her letter was published in the Feb. 17 issue, she wrote again:

"I'm sure that you cannot conceive of the pleasure of such an event in the life of a servantless mother of four with 1,800 sq. ft. of living space not counting the garage. I am more than occasionally saddened by the thought that my life is bounded on one end by scrubbing dirty bathtubs and on the other by baking brownies for the Brownies, instead of doing all those things for The World that I was so sure I'd accomplish back in college (Northwestern, '47). Therefore, to have a statement (bad abstract art is exceedingly bad) that I have been making for years to anyone who would listen circulated on a national level is a very heady experience.

"I've composed a thousand letters to as many editors (while washing the dishes), but I never actually wrote one. And then, the fait accompli. The neighbors were delighted. Friends I haven't seen in months have called. Mother writes that she's getting lots of reaction in Wichita. My dentist referred to it while filling a rather ugly cavity, and our minister greeted me with 'Was that our Virginia Daniels?'

"But the most important thing of all is that I have been reading TIME since I was twelve years old, which is like 23 years ago. I always thought myself fortunate that the children were all born on weekends and I was able to pack a fresh copy with the clean nightgown. I read a lot, but TIME is the only magazine I've clung to year after year, week after week, cover to cover."

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