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Sir: TIME's patronizing account of Appalachia [Nov. 5] and its smug assumption that it is desirable to "transform the mountaineer into a middle-class American" makes my blood boil. One of the great glories of America is the wide diversity of people to be found within its borders. Homogenizing our population is deadening our culture as surely as leveling the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon would ruin our scenery..
(MRS.) LOIS S. DICKMAN Staten Island, N.Y.
Sir: As a member of the Handshoe family, I believe some reaction to your story is called for. There is no such place as Handshoe Hollow on Upper Quicksand. Your title "Happy Pappies of Handshoe Holler" and Handshoe Hollow Holiness Church have more alliteration than facts. At least five Handshoes have attended Alice Lloyd College, and all have gone on to become leaders in the mountains. We know our area is economically depressed, but we question if it is altogether quaint to prefer our beautiful hills to the slums and polluted air of cities. Perhaps our quaintness lies in our interest in perpetuating the real human values that our so-called civilization so often helps to destroy.
GARRY HANDSHOE Alice Lloyd College Pippa Passes, Ky. > While Handshoe Hollow is not a Post Office address, it is customary, as with many other small mountain communities lying in isolated valleys, to add "Hollow" to the official name.
Sir: As a freshman at West Virginia University and a true mountaineer of the Appalachian state of West Virginia, I congratulate TIME on an accurate report on the people of Handshoe Hollow.
SHEILA ROIE SIMONS Jane Lew, W.Va.
A Question of Belief
Sir: About Emory University's Prof. Thomas Altizer and the "death of God" cult [Oct. 22]: I judge this theological oddity to be a perversion of Christian truth. No doubt Altizer has read widely. But what is important is not what one has read, but what one has written. As one of the 25-member faculty of the School of Theology at Emory, I hold this teaching to be a repudiation of the Gospel. The truth of the ages, and of the age, does not stand with those who cut themselves adrift in a sea of speculative atheistic confusion. God has been able to survive the storms of attack both of His friends and His foes. I suspect He will survive this little puff.
CLAUDE H. THOMPSON Professor of Systematic Theology Emory University Atlanta
How Old the Fossils?
Sir: The laboratory that provided the date of 720 million years for the fossils our party found in the Canadian Arctic last summer [Nov. 12] now reports that on rechecking it has found a computational error and that the minimum age of the fossils is 445 million years. But the structural geologic relations indicate that this age is impossibly young: the fossils are almost surely preCambrian. Other tests by different methods are being undertaken. I hope they will resolve the uncertainty about the dates.
ANDREW H. McNAiR Professor, Geology Department Dartmouth College Hanover, N.H.
Walker Defended