Bucky's Manifest Positives

Sir: I didn't realize until I read your cover story [Jan. 10] that men like R. Buckminster Fuller still existed. What a refreshing breeze and delightful story. MRS. DONALD HUDSON New York City

Sir: You might be interested in the accompanying photograph. The chrome sculpture of Fuller, executed by Isamu Noguchi in 1929, seems to have something of the feeling of Artzybasheffs cover.

DWIGHT PENNINGTON Kansas City Star Kansas City, Mo.

Sir: I personally can appreciate Fuller and his dome. As a Marine fighter pilot stationed at El Toro, Calif, several years ago, I had maneuvers on a windswept island 70 miles off the coast. Well over $100 million worth of fighter and attack jets landed on this island and were greeted by high winds and dirt. There was no place to sleep, let alone a place for the mechanics to work on our planes. Yet within a few hours, two huge geodesic domes were constructed that withstood all the elements as well as providing hangars for our planes as serviceable as pur own back at El Toro, thus proving that delicate, multimillion-dollar jets could operate out of primitive conditions like those in South Viet Nam, or anywhere else in the world.

C. KING

Lieutenant, U.S.M.C.R. Chicago

Sir: I am deeply grateful for your generous treatment. The myriad of negatives in my first half-century uniquely generated experiences essential to whatever positives are manifest in my last 18 years. However, if my life provided nought else but legends to ultimately inspire Artzybasheff's cover, my life is fully justified.

BUCKMINSTER FULLER Rome

Man of the Year

Sir: Something I saw recently, driving home from work, gave me a sleepless night and left me feeling the time had come when I and others like me must declare ourselves on the issue of segregation v. integration.

At the counter of a small restaurant near my apartment, seven or eight Negroes sat quietly waiting for service they never received. Outside, a police car stood in readiness. Suddenly the problem had hit, literally, close to home.

I am one of many who have not the courage to join a freedom march, or carry a placard, or go to jail for a cause. But I can publicly declare the side I am on.

ARLENE DE BEVOISE Atlanta

Sir: Let me, a white Southerner, praise TIME'S selection of the Man of the Year. You may lose subscriptions from the bigots, but you have gained the respect of true Americans.

MARTIN K. PEDIGO Louisville

Sir: I am presuming on my status as a charter subscriber to TIME to register my protest against your selection of the Rev. Martin Luther King as Man of the Year. I took one look at the cover and threw the magazine in the fire.

TIME'S effort to canonize this black Savonarola was a serious misjudgment of public sentiment both North and South. MARK P. RAINES Sturgis, Mich.

Sir: On Okinawa beach, D-day-plus-ten, the enemy launched a surprise attack, and I made a quick run with others to a nearby cave on the shore. In my haste I cut my hand on a sharp piece of coral rock. It was a Negro soldier who took a bandage from his own first-aid kit to bind my hand and stem the blood.

DAVID M. LESSER Newton, Mass.

Sir: So many of us are ignorant of the architects, the surgeons, the bishops and diplomats whose achievement slaps the face of those bigots who brand the Negro as naturally inferior. I was filled with a sense of pride, especially since I am not a Negro, in seeing these men and women proving that the Negro's potential is equal to the white's and must not be wasted.

MICHAEL TRAISON Detroit

Sir: The Atlantic salutes you for your forthright appreciation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" also appeared in full in the Atlantic for August 1963.

EDWARD WEEKS Editor in Chief The Atlantic Monthly Boston

Sir: I am a Republican, with white skin, born in Arizona and living in Florida. Martin Luther King's smuggled comments printed in your magazine will be clipped put, framed and hung on my wall. Here is a man with deep devotion to his fellow man. I commend you for your fine choice of the Man of the Year. It is a tribute to the Almighty, who made us all, black and white, in his image.

MRS. RICHARD O. WELLS Sarasota, Fla.

Sir: It was particularly gratifying that you cited Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," giving the background and excerpts of this memorable document. Viewing it as a stirring summation of the current conflict, I have, with Dr. King's permission, recently completed a Cantata for Mixed Chorus based on excerpts of the letter.

PAUL REIF New York City

Sir: In spite of the consideration due the circumstances under which it was written, I must protest Martin Luther King's statement, "But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim . . ."

For the information of those interested in accuracy, lynchings are now largely a thing of the past. (There is no intention to defend even one lynching.) Very few Negroes of King's age have ever witnessed a lynching.

Furthermore, during the past 25 years, there has been a revolution in the way Negroes are "treated" in the South.

I believe that time will show that "the Negro revolution of 1963" (due largely to the type of leadership involved) retarded rather than speeded Negro progress.

FRANK WALLACE Editor and Publisher Mississippi Journal Clinton, Miss.

> Since 1900, nearly 1,800 Negroes have been lynched, the last one in 1959.--ED.

Sir: The white people of the South should take Martin Luther King Jr. to their bosom; without his leadership, the emotional racists, black and white, might have directed the revolution of 1963 to a much more violent and tragic conclusion.

MARVIN WACHMAN President

Lincoln University Pennsylvania

Sir: Dr. King is one of the best all-round scholars whose studies for Ph.D. degrees I have guided to completion in the last 20 years at Boston University. He was planning and preparing to be a professor of graduate studies in theology. Since taking his doctorate in 1955, he has been offered attractive teaching positions in at least two strong Northern graduate schools of theology. With real sadness he declined because he could not conscientiously leave the struggle into which he had been plunged in the year following his graduation.

L. HAROLD DEWOLF Professor of Systematic Theology Boston University Boston

Sir: In my capacity as president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, I wish to express to you the deep appreciation of myself and my colleagues of the story concerning Martin Luther King Jr. and other American Negroes of distinction. Your naming Martin Luther King Jr. Man of the Year meets with our entire approval and is most gratifying to us. The spirit underlying the extended story is as magnificent as the story itself and, together with the pictorial presentations, will make an unforgettable impression not only upon the American people but upon people everywhere in the world where TIME Magazine is read.

E. WASHINGTON RHODES Editor

Philadelphia Tribune Philadelphia

Sir: I wish to commend you on your choice of Dr. Martin Luther King as Man of the Year. Dr. King richly deserves this honor for his commitment to genuine interracial brotherhood and democracy. A. PHILIP RANDOLPH International President Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters New York City

Sir: We were thrilled, and our front page says so.

C. SUMNER STONE JR.

Editor in Chief Chicago Daily Defender Chicago

Sir: Thank you for the Martin Luther King cover and story. We decided to adopt two children: one white, one black.

KRISTINE AND TAGE PEDERSEN Scottsdale, Ariz.

Selective Generosity

Sir: It is good to read about the generous contributions to Mrs. Tippit and Mrs. Oswald [Jan. 3]. Has anything comparable been done for Mrs. Medgar Evers? LAWRENCE MORTON Los Angeles

> The Medgar Evers Memorial Fund collected by the N.A.A.C.P. totaled $12,089.49 by the end of the year. The scholarship fund for Evers' three children totaled $49,450.86. Personal contributions to Mrs. Evers have been "negligible."--ED.

The Rothschilds

Sir: If your story on the Rothschild family [Dec. 20] had appeared under Science rather than World Business, you would have given more space to the truly great contributions of the Rothschilds to science in the fields of entomology, mammalogy, ornithology and parasitology. Some of their work has had far-reaching effects on human health.

The Rothschilds themselves did much collecting, preparation of specimens, and writing of astute scientific papers. On a trip to Egypt, N. C. Rothschild and F. R. Wollaston collected a series of Xenopsylla cheopis. Xenopsylla cheopis (Rothschild) was described in 1903 as a rat flea which forms, together with the rats of the genus Rattus and the bacterium Pasteurella pestis, a triumvirate that is responsible for most of human plague. The discovery particularly aided the conquest of plague in India.

WILLIAM L. JELLISON U.S. Public Health Service (ret.) Hamilton, Mont.

Sir: May I say that we never take twelve servants anywhere with us--for several reasons.

If one rents a house for the summer in the northernmost parts of Europe, as we do, seeking the coldest weather, it is wiser to rely on local help. The French or the Spaniards, for instance, are apt to become unaccountably nervous.

For other travel, such as crossing the Anatolian desert to Lake Van or following the migratory tribes through Persia, as we did last spring, one guide may even be too much. A well-informed and quick-witted friend is far safer.

Besides, it must be almost impossible to get twelve servants to travel with you. Ask any man. It is, above all, fatuous.

I remain, most sincerely, a constant, if startled, reader of TIME.

PAULINE DE ROTHSCHILD Chateau Mouton Rothschild Pauillac, Gironde, France

Circulating the News

Sir: In some copies of your Jan. 10 issue, you erred in citing New York News circulation. We were fluttered somewhat by the flattery of being included in this article on "The Top U.S. Dailies," but we expect you'll have many dissenters from your selections.

F. M. FLYNN

Publisher New York News

New York City

> The latest Audit Bureau circulation figures for the News are 2,100,000 daily, 3,200,000 Sunday. Much lower figures than these appeared only in the early copies of the magazine.--ED.

Curable

Sir: I deny any responsibility for the "dreadful news about breast cancer" reported in the New York Herald Tribune [Dec. 27]. The sensational front-page statement that "a statistical review of all known methods of surgery for breast cancer raises the ugly possibility that none increases the chances of survival of the female breast cancer victim" is entirely false and contrary to all of the known facts.

It is perfectly obvious that breast cancer is curable, and the very best treatment is surgery at the earliest possible time. The many thousands of patients who are alive and well today--cured of breast cancer--are living testimony to the effectiveness of surgery in the treatment of this disease. EDWARD F. LEWISON, M.D. Baltimore

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