Letters, Mar. 3, 1947

Hunger, Thirst & Bombs

Sirs:

Your red-bordered article on atomic activity coming directly after and alongside [two articles headed] “Hunger, Unabated,” and “Thirst, Unslaked” [TIME, Feb. 10] is masterly placement.

Economics thus presented is no dry affair, rather something to make all that is human in its readers revolt. First we are told that the needs in dollars of hungry peoples come for 1947 to $583 million, then that a sum far greater is being lavished on atomic research by the very Governments which “might or might not act in keeping with their findings” concerning hunger.

What a parallel! . . . ANGELINE UMLAUF Austin, Tex.

Sex & the Harpsichord

Sirs:

In answer to Harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick’s statement [TIME, Feb. 3] that “audiences used to be largely . . . cranks who also liked folk dancing because it was pure and sexless,” I step forward boldly to defend the thousands of folk dancers both men & women in the U.S. Lusty, earthy, folk dancing is as “pure” an expression of the people’s simple joys as the “pure” tone Mr. Kirkpatrick clanks out of his antiquated instrument. … If anything can be charged with the character of sexlessness, it is certainly the harpsichord, whose voice is hard and chill, and rather exemplifies suppressed desires. .. . PAUL ERFER

Hollywood

Clang, Clang, Clang . ..

Sirs:

… I object to the so-called cable-car picture [TIME, Feb. 10]. The artist has fettered this poor thing with an overhead trolley wire and trolley pole. There is even a hook-shaped device on the front of this hermaphrodite for holding the trolley pole when not in use. . . . D. H. LEHMER Berkeley, Calif.

Sirs:

Let me be among the first 100,000 to advise you that the vehicle in your cable-car drawing is no cable car. It is supposed to, be the old trolley which ran on Fillmore Street and for a brief, hilly stretch was hauled up the grade by the weight of [another] trolley going down. . . CLINT MOSHER San Francisco

Sirs: …Off your cable, I’d say. W. J. KROPP

Toronto

¶ TIME’S National Affairs editor enters a plea of nolo contendere.—ED.

All Shady Hills?

Sirs:

You tell us how Shady Hill School was founded by two Harvard professors in protest at the backwardness of Cambridge’s public schools [TIME, Feb. 10]. Did it never occur to these highly intelligent men . . . that they could have turned the public schools into a series of Shady Hills? . . . We will have good public schools in Cambridge and everywhere else if or when we adopt the philosophy of the old Vermonter (mentioned by Dorothy Canfield) who said: “What’s not good enough for my children’s not good enough for anybody’s children.” MARGARET LEE SOUTHARD Hingham, Mass.

Sirs:

… It is a sorry commentary on our public educational system that, while our leaders prate about “progressive education,” educators themselves are establishing parochial schools for the training of their children.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s note, that stress upon training individual personalities has done away with some of the essential disciplines, and Director Taylor’s remark, “When learning becomes drudgery, it usually ceases to be productive,” taken together point the way to the fault of schooling today. Attempting to be good teachers and to eliminate drudgery, we have failed to replace it with useful work.

Modern methods of teaching can and should give children what they need as well as what they want. … It is unfortunate that faddists have warped teachers’, as well as the public’s, conception of progressive education. (The term is a stupid redundancy. Education implies progress.) Not until teachers are adequately trained and rewarded for their technical skill and knowledge can modern teaching be progressive in practice.

MARGARET HARMAN Parker, Ariz.

Pink or Red?

Sirs:

In your excellent piece on Lombardo Toledano, the Mexican labor boss and head of the Latin American Confederation [TIME, Dec. 30], you ask whether he perhaps has broken with the Communists.

Lombardo has always put on a candy face for powerful Mexican politicos and for “Yankee” reporters, but he has carefully explained his altered tactics to the faithful. In a speech in the Esperanza Iris theater, center for Soviet movies, Soviet Legation entertainment and other propaganda events, Lombardo painstakingly discussed the new tactic and justified his ten-year no-strike pledge and his pact with Mexican industrialists.

With copious quotations from Marx, Lenin and Stalin, Lombardo demonstrated that this was the “true” revolutionary line for weak and colonial countries: a “nationalist”, economic and political front to fight capitalist imperialism. . . .

Lombardo has always walked the tightrope between the Communist Party line and Mexican nationalism, and verbally has always managed to reconcile the two positions. In general, however, he has been closer to the Moscow line, and quicker to take it up, than the Mexican Communist Party itself, which as a result has had to go through repeated painful purges. . . .

CARLETON BEALS Guilford, Conn.

The Well-Bred Strain

Sirs:

I was greatly interested by your article [TIME, Feb. 10] about Mrs. Anthony C. Hartley (Deborah Kerr), because of the fact that I knew R.A.F. Squadron Leader Bartley when he was stationed at the Orlando, Fla. Army Air Base. I … have wondered why the great L.B. [Louis B. Mayer] doesn’t make his find a double-header and make a movie star out of Tony.

He not only has a background to convince anyone of “the well-bred strain,” but his good looks and personality, plus a superb vocabulary, would do a great deal to influence our American “bobby-soxers.” . . .

(MRS.) IRENE M. PRICE Palm Beach, Fla.

Sirs:

STORY OF DEBORAH KERR, A STAR IS BORN, BEST PIECE OF WRITING IN TIME IN MANY A MOON. YOUR CINEMA EDITOR HAS DELINEATED HER CAREER AS DEFTLY AS A STAGE ELECTRICIAN SPOTLIGHTING THE GRACEFUL GYRATIONS OF A BALLET DANCER.

MICHAEL MILTON

Detroit

And the Ricci Tensor . . .

Sirs:

For a few misleading words—”non-scientific Dublin, of all places”—in an otherwise excellent account,’ your reporter on Schrodinger [TIME, Feb. 10] needs a swift kick in the pants. The cut [Schrodinger’s formula] at the page-top tells all—a new message in words old but not outworn. The mathematician reads it thus: “Schrodinger bases his theory on Hamilton’s Principle, using as Lagrangian the square root of the negative of the determinant of the Ricci tensor.”

Never mind now about Lagrange and Ricci; who was this Hamilton? Born, lived, and worked (1805-1865) in “nonscientific Dublin, of all places”! . . .

JOHN L. SYNGE Carnegie Institute of Technology Pittsburgh

¶ Let Dublin-born Higher Mathematician Synge call to mind his city’s great ghosts (among them, his uncle’s—author of The Playboy of the Western World), and admit that Dublin is a writer’s town.—ED.

In Praise of Gambling

Sirs:

Quoting from the opinions of an allegedly “reformed” bettor [TIME, Feb. 3], you gave credence to several wild opinions, plus one statement, that indicate that your “authority,” Mr. Packer, is quite an abnormal fellow. . . . Mr. Packer is quoted: “The anxiety which follows a losing run, the empty feeling in the stomach … in time come to be appreciated in a masochistic fashion. . . .”

You reiterated the age-old cry, “Since most bettors lose, why do they keep at it?” Is it really necessary to bring in such abnormalities as masochism to explain that? The struggle to win, with its failures and successes, its climaxes and debacles, its endless variety of patterns, provides one of the most fascinating and exciting forms of amusement known to man. . . .

CHARLES M. LARSON Hawthorne, Calif.

Mature Individuals, Eh?

Sirs:

. . . Far from deploring that “handwriting was becoming a lost art” [TIME, Feb. 10], many outstanding present-day psychologists and psychiatrists feel that the script portrays accurately the writer’s character traits, being conditioned by the complexities of his personality. As a result of many investigations within the last two decades, a whole technique has been built around this phenomenon in the form of scientific handwriting analysis, which is considered among the most exact projective methods in order to determine character structure. . . .

Even if the signatures of Harry Truman, George Marshall, Louis Bromfield, Fiorello LaGuardia, Ginger Rogers are not “beautifully” penned, they at least have in common mental maturity, individualism, the desire and the capacity for absorbing new ideas, more-than-average flexibility. Thus their scripts differ from those of our contemporaries who may write a “copper plate” hand which contains the same elements as the writing they were taught at school 20 years and more ago. This subconscious clinging to the penmanship carefully learned in school so long ago is often an indication of lack of originality, inflexibility, lack of self-confidence—in short, a standstill in mental development.

HERRY O. TELTSCHER

New York City

Egyptian Divorces

Sirs:

You published a statement [TIME, Jan. 6] to the effect that divorces in Egypt were nearly half as frequent as marriages. From the enclosed official statistics (1941-45 marriage rate, 30.5 per thousand; divorce rate, 8.6 per thousand), you will find that divorces in Egypt are [slightly more than] a quarter as frequent as marriages. I shall appreciate it indeed if you would be so kind as to correct the aforementioned statement.

H. ROUCHDY Royal Egyptian Embassy Washington, D.C.