Letters, Apr. 10, 1944

(2 of 3)

The Eyes of History Sirs: TIME (March 20) under Cinema, With the Marines at Tarawa: a profound piece of writing. In your review of this film some truly great sentences reveal the hidden iron within so many men fighting on our fronts. As an infantryman, I understand the "quality of loneliness in the midst of action with which no loneliness of peace is comparable." The battle-weary soldier, job done, does look into the eyes of history, generally without knowing it.

(Pvx.) CHARLES W. HILL Fort Meade, Md.

Sad

Sirs:

. . . Studying the last issue (March 20), I found three persons defined by the same adjective:

1) Sad-eyed Ambassador Bowers

2) Sad-eyed Rabbi Silver

3) Sad-eyed Samuel M. Levitas Unfortunately, some TIME readers might get

the impression that the magazine's store of adjectives is about to be exhausted and that, to be thrifty, it now has to use one and the same adjective for numerous persons. ... I would like to suggest that in the future TIME doesn't select adjectives to fit persons, but persons to fit adjectives that happen to be in TIME's possession. . . .

ALFRED POLGAR New York City

To keen-eyed Reader Polgar, celebrated drama and literary critic for Vienna, Berlin, Swiss periodicals of pre-Hitler Europe, a brave smile from nodding TIME.—ED.

"I'll Be Danged!"

Sirs:

My late father was among the first half-dozen Ontario County farmers to engage in commercial (carlot) cabbage growing in Western New York. That was just over 50 years ago. ... I once knew a few pretty tall stories about cabbage growers' achievements. But I'll be danged if I ever heard one to compare with that cabbage yarn from Texas (TIME, March 13). So "Farmer Felix Burns figured he had turned under 5½ million heads of cabbage on the 75 acres he had planted." Well, well! . . . Let's see now: about the closest that most varieties of cabbage can be set (for a good crop) is in rows 3 to 3½ ft. apart; and the plants are usually spaced from 2 to 2½ ft. apart in the row. Call it 7 sq. ft. to the plant. So what do we get? Well, both by arithmetic and memory, it's not far from 6,000 plants per acre set out—which, for 75 acres in New York State, would call for about 450,000 plants.

. . . Must be they've bred some sort of a hydra-headed variety down there that our growers up here don't know. Fact is, I'm mighty glad my father wasn't using such a variety when he sent me out to make the last cultivation of his cabbage crop, back some years ago. It was a long field, and I had the team and cultivator right in the middle of it when a warm rain began to fall. It rained pretty hard, and pretty soon those heads began to swell and crack. In a minute the air was full of cabbage-flak. A few minutes more and those cabbage heads had swelled until we couldn't move: my horses' legs were held as though in a vice. In fact, it took six men with sharp axes to chop us loose. Pappy, pass the coleslaw, won't you, please?

MARVIN T. FORSTER Rochester, N.Y.

Dang away, Farmer Forster. Cabbage Farmer Burns and some other Rio Grande Valley farmers grow cabbages (weighing about two pounds apiece) eight to ten inches apart, get a top yield of some 70,000 cabbages per acre