Helping Out

Henry Dietrich earns a modest $125 a week at his job exercising horses at a race track not far from his Broward County home in Davie, Fla. When doctors told him that his oldest son Jody, 6, was suffering from a serious heart defect that would require treatment costing $2,500, Dietrich was hard pressed to come up with the money. What's more, he apparently misunderstood hospital administrators when they told him that they would appreciate a deposit before admitting his son. They were not demanding any money in advance, they said later. But no matter. Dietrich told friends about his plight, and a women's service sorority promptly set up the Jody Dietrich Heart Surgery Fund.

The fund languished, however, until last week, when a thin blonde woman in her early 20s walked into Davie's Sterling National Bank, mumbled something to a secretary, and left a package addressed to Robert Ruckman, the bank's president and the chief collector for the fund. In the package were $2,000 in twenty, fifty and one hundred dollar bills and a letter explaining the gift: "What the hell is happening in this country when a six-year-old child needs life-saving surgery and is denied treatment because some hospital demands a down payment on the inherent right he was born with to health and happiness? We are enclosing $2,000, which we hope will give Jody Dietrich at least a small shot at life, and we soundly condemn people in the system who made this action on our part necessary, although we do it gladly."

The letter was signed Cannabis Rex for the Broward Marijuana Dealers Association. Such charity by the counterculture set is not new (TIME, Sept. 17), but one could wonder at the reaction in the upper councils of the association when the organization learns what Jody Dietrich hopes to grow up to be: a policeman.

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