The Chessman Cover
Sir:
While your March 21 Chessman cover is nauseating, congratulations on having the courage to print it.
H. L. ZIMMERMAN
Mountain, Wis.
Sir:
“Shocked” can hardly express my feelings.
AUDREY B. FOESTE Billings, Mont.
Sir:
Boo to you.
GERTRUDE REBSTOCK
Los Angeles
Sir:
It is a damn shame that horsewhipping of editors has gone out of style.
LEO F. FOCHA Berkeley, Calif.
Sir:
I must congratulate you on the completely dispassionate, logical, objective and impersonal manner in which you presented the facts in the Chessman dilemma.
JOHN STRANACK New York City
Crime & Punishment (Contd.)
Sir:
Re capital punishment: one’s own motivating forces and morals are the actuating or deterring factors. Even the question of incarceration does not preclude crime. Why should the death penalty, fading as it is, obviate crime, when the first step after apprehension is prison ?
GLORIA D. HOUGHTON
Miami
Sir:
The arguments against capital punishment all seem concerned not with the prisoner but with the collective conscience of humanity. If these people were truly concerned with the prisoner, not with themselves, they would favor capital punishment because it is humanitarian. Life imprisonment is a form of barbaric torture, indeed a cruel and unusual punishment.
STUART CAMPBELL
San Francisco
Sir:
The crime of murder is shocking in its impact on the public. So is the execution of the death penalty. Capital punishment also involves long periods of unhealthy sensationalism and emotionalism in trying a person for his life. It is something the public should not be required to endure just because there are still people who state that capital punishment is a deterrent, though they have no proof of it.
PHILIP H. BUNKER Attorney at Law West Roxbury, Mass.
Declaration of Independence
Sir:
Your Feb. 29 article on Larry Fleischman’s collection of American romantic painters says that John Sloan once attempted to proclaim a republic in Greenwich Village from Washington Square Arch. It was a student of Sloan’s, one Gertrude Drick, termed “the
Golden Bird,” who instigated the revolution. Gertrude Drick (who carried black-bordered cards engraved WOE, “because Woe is me”) discovered a way to the Arch’s top, decided to stage a revolution, and invited Sloan, Marcel Duchamp and others. After an all-night revelry with lanterns, red balloons and liquor, climaxed by Woe reading her “Declaration of Independence,” they left the Arch with balloons still floating from the top.
Sloan did an etching of the revolution entitled Arch Conspirators.
JACK THOMAS
Spokane, Wash.
The Meaning of Calvary
Sir:
I am not familiar with the script of the Oberammergau Passion play. Perhaps it does contain, or has contained, expressions of special blame and bitterness toward the Jews [March 21J. If this is the case, they are the product of a too general Christian failure to comprehend the meaning of Calvary.
Christians can easily understand how the Jewish people could wish that this cross of the Lord Jesus might be forgotten. All too often Christians themselves wish that they might be allowed to forget it; for when the people cried “His blood be on us and on our children!”‘they shouted not as the spokesmen of any religious group, but as the representatives of the whole human race. The Christian church has never taught anything less than this.
(THE REV.) HENRY SEARS SIZER JR. St. Andrew’s Memorial Church Yonkers, NY.
He Likes Ike
Sir:
I am a great admirer of President Eisenhower, and wholeheartedly approve his foreign policy. In view of this, it is incredible that you should report [March 28] that I listed as an issue in the coming presidential contest “the U.S. foreign policy mess.”
SAMUEL GOLDWYN Hollywood
No Ghost
Sir:
My lawyer tells me that he received an inquiry from you as to whether my book, Memoirs of a Professional Cad, was ghostwritten [March 28].
The answer is no, it was not. No one likes sitting on his astral plane more than I do, but I am far too stingy to contemplate being haunted by someone else’s cut, so I am neither ghost-ridden nor ghostwritten.
GEORGE SANDERS
Lausanne, Switzerland
Unsafe from Tigers
Sir:
As TIME points out [March 14], Alex King might be an ex-cartoonist, ex-artist, ex-editor, ex-playwright, ex-husband, ex-dope addict and ex-writer, but until he becomes an ex-purveyor of truth (even King’s brand of truth), he’s made it as a man.
BILL RAKOCY New Springfield, Ohio
Sir:
Author Alexander King, who refers to people as “adenoidal baboons,” sounds himself rather like a noodleheaded tackbrain.
ROBERT CRANE Ojai, Calif.
Man on the Flying Trapeze Sir: TIME made these simple mistakes [in the March 28 story on William Saroyan’s play, Sam, the Highest Jumper of Them All}: 1) Sam Hark-Harkalark [not Harkaharka-lark]. 2) 100,000 [not 500,000] defective £5 [not pound] notes.
Now, opinion. There has been no “return to creativity,” because there has been no departure from it. Why does TIME imagine that a writer “has long seemed written out” simply because TIME hasn’t written about his work? The tiresome technique of TIME operates only on the premise that when TIME writes of somebody he is discovered, resurrected from the dead, or born again.
This is pure , and as there is no other word for it, you ought to permit the word to appear in this letter.*
—”Pure Saroyan?” You are determined to pretend that I must go back to something that is real only in your own head. Why doesn’t TIME report the news of the late 19205 and the early 19305, when TIME first came out? TIME was really TIME then, and the news was really nicer news, wasn’t it? WILLIAM SAROYAN London — *Sorry, no.—ED.
Through a Glass, Darkly Sir: In your story on British liquor licensing laws [Feb. 15], you say that ingenious Londoners can drink round the clock. I tried it.
They can’t. There is no Running Donkey at Paddington. There is a Running Horse: it shuts at ii p.m. There are two pubs called The Cock at Euston, but neither is open before 11:30 a.m. As for The Eagle, South-wark—it shuts just when you say it opens.
NIGEL PEREGRINE LLOYD
London
¶ After its own try around the course, instead of taking other pub-crawlers’ word for it, TIME concedes that thirsty Londoners can, by careful planning, rack up 14½ hours of drinking time in 24. By judicious changing of pubs, they can drink from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., and from 5 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.—enough to set even Big Ben spinning.—ED.
Breadwinner
Sir:
I wonder if Mrs. “Pepperidge” Rudkin [March 21] has ever eaten a real, long, fresh, crunchy French loaf. Has she ever tasted the hard, dark bread from the Canton Valais in Switzerland? If she had, she would not have the gall to talk about showing Europe “how to make good bread.”
GEROLD BAUMANN Indianapolis
Sir:
My wife and I have one question: What became of Mrs. Rudkin’s son Mark? Henry Jr. and William are vice presidents of the company, according to your piece, but what does Mark, whose allergies inspired Mrs. Rudkin to begin baking, do?
BEN ALLEN
Danboro, Pa.
¶ Mark lives in Paris, eats French bread.—ED.
Another Ray Sir: Hey! The Ray Lincolnholl you were talking about in your Feb. 15 issue, who stayed overnight at a Butler University fraternity and left with some of the brothers’ possessions, is not me.
RAY C. LINCOLNHOL Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Mich.
The Good Old Days Sir: May I comment on your March 21 article on English nannies. Although many promising “girls from the village” are still employed, England has, for almost a century, had two major nursery nurses colleges, Norland and St. Christopher’s. I am a graduate of the former. Most of the English nannies who are with prominent families are from such a college. Some of my fellow students married their employers’ brothers, but there were always the few who ran off with the chauffeur. In the first job I had, I took care of the children of my employer’s first wife—he had divorced her to marry the nurse.
Now I am a housewife, and your article brought back glorious memories of being served my meals by a butler, never having to wash a dish, and nothing to do but be a good companion to my charges while we followed the sun around the world.
BLANCHE REID
New York City
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