Letters, Oct. 15, 1934

(2 of 5)

Shame!

Sirs:

. . . For shame, TIME! If you really believe that religious periodicals nowadays can be described in those terms, your paper should bear the title ANACHRONISM, not TIME. But you don't believe any such thing, or you wouldn't find the church press sufficiently TIMEworthy to justify the quotations from it that are so often to be found in your columns. You know the Churchman showed up the movies years before the Legion of Decency was thought of; you know the Commonweal, the Christian Century, and many another religious periodical has fought for social justice in season and out; you know the Living Church exposed the armaments racket months before your own FORTUNE went over the same grounds. Here is consistency, yes; but no thoughts cut to fit theological patterns. And as for opinionated readers, can the correspondence pages of any church paper rival those of TIME for sheer dogmatism? What about the man that pontificates on hole-less doughnuts in the same issue of your estimable publication (p. 14)? Or the one who propounds the doctrine that insects enjoy being eaten (p.4)? Let TIME, living in a journalistic glass house, refrain from throwing editorial stones at its contemporaries.

CLIFFORD P. MOREHOUSE

Editor

Living Church

Milwaukee, Wis.

Thanks

Sirs:

This is just a note to thank you for that snappy news story in regard to our new journalistic venture. We get repercussions of this from many quarters. Certainly TIME is read. Your story was so completely fair and so well caught the spirit of what we are after that I just wanted you to know it.

EDMUND B. CHAFFEE

Editor

Presbyterian Tribune New York City

"Wrong Side" Pastor

Sirs:

I greatly appreciate the notice that you have taken of my move from suburb to city [TIME, Sept. 24]. And I appreciate also the opportunity to share a column with my admired friend, Ed Chaffee. He and I have shared programs together but never expected to find ourselves in mutual company under such delightful auspices.

As a matter of fact it will be with considerable relief that I find myself on the "wrong side of the New York, New Haven & Hartford tracks." And I am grateful to you for so succinctly and perfectly describing the situation.

DWIGHT BRADLEY

Pastor The First Church in Newton, Mass.

Newton Center, Mass.

Lindbergh's License

Sirs:

TIME airwriter erred again.

In TIME, Sept. 24, under Aeronautics, Col. Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis was referred to as the first of a series of planes bearing the license number NR 211.

As every boy who has ever pasted the license on his model of the Spirit of St. Louis well knows, the magic numbers on that famous ship were not NR 211 but NX 211.

The Department of Commerce in licensing airplanes uses the letter "X" to designate planes in the experimental stage which are not ready to be given a commercial license. Because of its huge gasoline tank which necessitated a periscope for forward vision, the Spirit of St. Louis fell in this class and hence got the designation NX 211 which is much more famous than the XR 211 born by the Tingmissartoq.

RICHARD L. STITES

Penn Valley, Pa.