What's in the Pill

Sir: The space you devoted to the pill [April 7] gave me a lift and the hope that possibly enough will be done in time to ward off the specter that has stared at us so long--a world so full of people that life would be mean indeed. I commend you for using your mighty power to inform and influence now, when so many agencies that have some power are still testing the wind of public opinion.

RAMONA J. IRELAND Balboa, C.Z.

Sir: I'm not much of a letter writer, but I'm a confirmed pill taker, so I must congratulate you on your cover story. We have three much-planned-on children, which delights us. A source of equal delight is the fact that we can now say with confidence that our family is complete. No one will ever convince me that God intended people to bring children into the world to starve or be mistreated because they were unwanted.

SUSAN MAROTTA Philadelphia

Sir: As a mother and grandmother (six children, two after age 40), I've been afraid to risk the pill; I've let the wise women experiment. Now they can have the last laugh, as once again I am pregnant. After reading your cover story, I'm planning to join the "Planned Parenthood dropouts."

MILDRED MONAGHAN East Brunswick, NJ.

Sir: The cover photo is supposed to represent the scientific symbol for "female"? Don't make me laugh; anyone with half an eye can see that it is clearly a baby's rattle.

HARRIET S. SCHACHER Daly City, Calif.

Skywriting

Sir: I am intimately familiar with your "Crowded Skies" [March 31]. For 25 years as pilot, air-traffic controller, instructor and system researcher, I have worked and played in the realms of which you speak. Your pictorial documentation of TWA Flight 740 was a colorful and dramatic presentation of one of the most challenging, exciting and satisfying professions in aviation.

About the future, the FAA does indeed have a highly developed and intensified program for research and development; it appears that relief, in many areas, lies within the foreseeable future.

J. ROY BRADLEY JR. Somers Point, N.J.

Sir: Some footnotes to your story:

In 1935 the executives of some of the large airlines discussed the problem of control of air traffic with Government officials. Since the Government lacked funds, American, United, TWA and Eastern airlines each agreed to supply one of their experienced pilots to work with the one man, Earl Ward, paid by the Government Aviation Department, and to pool the costs of setting up an experimental Airway Traffic Control Center at Newark Airport.

The center was built in an unused loft. For months these men played a game of make-believe, pretending to control the airline traffic into and out of Newark Airport. Next, relaying instructions through the radio stations of the airlines, advice was given pilots on how to avoid conflicting traffic. For a long time the pilots resented being told "how to fly" by men on the ground. Later the Government made it mandatory for the pilots to obey the directions of the controllers. In 1936 the Government took over the operations at Newark and at Cleveland, where a second center had been put into operation. That was the start of the huge Air Traffic Control complex of the Federal Aviation Agency.

I was one of those five men, loaned by United Air Lines. When the Government took over, I went along and managed the third center at Detroit and later supervised all air-traffic control in the Southwest.

HARRY D. COPLAND Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Distinctly Native

Sir: You are to be congratulated for examining the problem of congressional ethics [March 31] thoroughly and imaginatively.

I believe it imperative that we add to the congressional reforms aimed at standards, and that we conduct a major reform in reporting campaign expenditures. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1925 is totally inadequate for campaigns of 1968. A system should be enforceable and fair, and should encourage small contributions, if the concept of citizen participation is to be meaningful.

The election reform bill I have introduced would 1) create a joint committee on standards and conduct, 2) make major changes in campaign reporting procedures --requiring that all expenditures be reported, 3) establish a federal elections commission to police campaign reporting, and 4) demand that office holders as well as candidates disclose personal assets, liabilities and income.

WILLIAM A. STEIGER Congressman from Wisconsin Washington, D.C.

Sir: Wasn't it Mark Twain who said, "There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress"?

BARNEY P. POPKIN Houston

K Yep. And he also said: "In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities."

Brief Candle

Sir: Joe Jacobs [March 31] was a brave young man who lived his short life with honor. Every human being has an obl gation to better the world and, at the age of 22, Mr. Jacobs fulfilled his commitment. It is heartening to know that there are those people who still have the courage to become involved, those who "would not run, would not hide, would not cry." Joe Jacobs' simple eloquence and candor have graphically portrayed to us all that war is hell; it can never be anything else if it robs us of such brief candles.

ANNE LING Los Angeles

Sir: I will never forget Joe Jacobs' great joy in getting involved with the world. We were good friends at Stanford, graduated together from the same department and then met here while he was taking his basic training. He would have liked your tribute.

In his last letter to me, Jan. 15, he wrote, "It's often very frustrating being over here. But it's often exciting as well." He told about his plans for a trip to Europe after separation this fall and said he planned to use his letters home as background material for a novel about the war.

(SP4) ROBERT L. SUFFEL Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.

Survey Course

Sir: The Riesman-Jencks evaluation of Negro colleges [March 31] deals only superficially with the problems and moods these colleges face. Many Negroes today reject the goal of "significant student integration"--or any integration. Yet this seems to be a major criterion for judging the worth of these schools.

Some of the substantive criticisms reported are valid, but the generalizations are far too sweeping.

It is an open question just how far ahead of grossly inadequate elementary-and high-school education such schools can expect to move. So long as the prior education remains poor, the remedial task of the colleges remains large, and that function is a viable one.

Despite unconstructive criticisms and lack of adequate resources, they do much more than give their students "an idea of what middle-class life is like." The truth is that the vast majority of Negroes who today achieve success in American life were educated in this "academic disaster area." And that is likely to be true for a good many years to come.

C. SHELBY ROOKS

The Fund for Theological Education, Inc. Princeton, N.J.

Sir: I heard Mr. Jencks address the liberal arts faculty of Howard University on March 22, telling us we were second-rate and would always be so. He admitted that his investigation of Negro colleges was "journalistic and impressionistic," not based on statistics or formal research. The white students in my graduate zoology seminar did not choose this university for "a mixture of idealistic, exploratory or neurotic reasons," though economic reasons may have influenced them.

A majority of both my Negro and white students, compare favorably with students of the same level in other universities of my experience. I have studied or taught at the University of Texas, University College in London, the American University of Beirut, the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory in Panama and the Mergenthaler Laboratory of Biology, and Johns Hopkins University. I do not find either my Negro or white colleagues at Howard second-rate. If anything racial distinguishes my Negro colleagues, it is perhaps an intense ambition for progress at Howard University.

As a scientist, I feel that Riesman and Jencks would have performed a service to education had they done more serious researching and had fewer impressions. Their book will only provide fuel for segregationists of both races.

SARAH BEDICHEK PIPKIN Associate Professor of Zoology Howard University Washington, D.C.

Sir: Riesman and Jencks have a valid argument. As a victim of a Negro secondary and college education, I will say this: the Negro-educated Negro, in college especially, is in a wonderland, a system so confused with nonessentials that if we were not so backward to begin with, there would be no hope for survival. When the college is supported by a church, it seems that the thing the college does best is de-feaUts purpose.

The best description of education by and for Negroes is found in Elliot Baker's A Fine Madness: "We have come a long way toward ignorance, and all uphill."

LLOYD T. JONES Washington, D.C.

Ahead but Not Against

Sir: As a Dutch-speaking theologian, I have some misgivings about your article on the Catholic Church in The Netherlands [March 31].

We boast of being the avant-garde of the church, but being ahead does not mean being against. Reformulating a doctrine, even radically, does not mean rejecting it.

You state that the encyclical Mysterium Fidei "was clearly directed against Dutch theologians who had proposed to describe Christ's real presence in the bread and wine as transignification rather than tran-substantiation." But the Pope approved the use of "transignification" provided it did not mean a merely subjective sense of symbolism. The net result of the encyclical has been to win over to the Dutch stand theologians of the whole world, who, after carefully reading the Dutchmen, found they not only met the Pope's requirements but offered an interpretation that combined modernity with tradition.

When a theologian says "heaven and hell do not preoccupy us any more," he states that most men of today don't care about the afterlife, not that there is none. (He may imply that Christian teaching has depicted it in an inadequate way.)

Some feel that one cannot brand as mortal sin all sex that is really premarital, i.e., between people who have firmly committed their lives to each other. But don't suggest that they recommend it, even less that they advocate sexual intercourse as iust a way to express affection. I am really afraid that your article, though based on solid information, will be widely misunderstood.

(The Rev.) JORIS VAN MASSENHOVE Loyola University New Orleans

Potboiler

Sir: I'd like to thank you for publishing "Turning Off" [March 31]. So many kids are now lost, unhappy acidheads.

I'm glad that the Sextons had enough sense to realize that acid is as unneeded as a cigarette. But now, because the mushroom and banana have become the new, legal ways to get high, there is no telling when or where this fad will end. I hope the Sextons keep up their fight.

NANCY KAPLOW South Orange, N.J.

Bench Mark

Sir: Our glory was short-lived. Judicial history was made in Jacksonville on March 10, when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sat en bane and heard arguments in the school-desegregation cases. It was the first time in U.S. history that twelve federal judges had sat at one hearing.

"The South" [April 7] not only had the court sitting three weeks later than it did, but in New Orleans. I know they sat in Jacksonville, because one of my duties was to seat all twelve judges in a courtroom that was designed to seat only three. WESLEY R. THEIS Clerk

United States District Court Jacksonville

>Glory to both cities. Jacksonville made the history, but the decision was announced at the Fifth Circuit Court's headquarters in New Orleans.

Soul of the Navigator

Sir: Before I met Sir Francis Chichester [March 31] in Sydney, Australia in 1966, I thought his ambition beset with madness, his folly shrouded with hope. But when I had a visit with him, I knew he would make it.

In a jiffy, I felt the soul of this wonderful man, for he displayed a quiet strength, utter conviction, a competence unassailable. He told me, "I am a navigator." Hearing his voice recently from his radio as he rounded the Horn, I wept. It is wonderful.

JULIUS SUMNER MILLER Professor of Physics El Camino College Via Torrance, Calif.

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