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MABEL STEARNS MUNROE Coconut Grove, Fla.
TIME sincerely regrets having confused Author Kirk Munroe (The Flamingo Feather, With Crockett and Bowie, The Outcast Warrior) with Worth Munroe, son of onetime Commodore R. M. Munroe of the Biscayne Bay Yacht Club (of which Author Munroe is a member). The episode: Munroe Sr.'s sloop having been stolen from its anchorage, Munroe Jr. sped after it in a seaplane, recovered it at pistol point.—ED.
Muscular Mind
Sirs:
In your issue of March 10 I am referred to as "hardboiled hobo novelist." This may be quite true, but it may be possible to grow weary of truth. I smiled over the words myself, but several of my friends thought that in your effort to be staccato you might create a false impression.
For nearly ten years now I've watched unoriginal phrases crop up about me until I wonder just when I'll be able to stand on my own. Cannot a fellow be down to fundamentals as a writer and have muscles in his mind without being called hardboiled? I was a hobo and sometimes worse for seven years as a youth. A lad with no home is better off as a vagabond under the present economic system. So of my career I have nothing to be ashamed. Have I not earned, by labor that would kill ten oxen and a dozen editors, the right to be called something else besides a "hobo-novelist"? I am not a writer of romance for stenographers and club women—so therefore I am no longer a hobo. You don't refer to a senator as "shyster-politician," do you?
I realize of course that I am better known as a hobo than as a writer. Men are more interested in vagabondage. JIM TULLY
Hollywood, Calif.
Not again will TIME call muscular-minded Author Tully a "hardboiled hobo novelist."—ED.
Eyes in Athens
Sirs:
In the Jan. 27 number of TIME an article appeared in the Foreign News section, stating that in Athens, Greece, 40 children had been blinded for life, owing to hospital orderlies spraying the eyes of these 40 children with nitrate of silver.
The report sent you was premature, and although the cause of the accident, faulty sterilization, is no less crime than the spraying of carbolic, fortunately the results were not as disastrous as stated.
All the children were suffering from an epidemic now rampant among the refugees, two of them having an additional microbe, however, which the doctor failed to detect. From these two children eight others were infected. Of the ten, one child is blind, six have lost the sight of one eye, and three are still under treatment with hopes of complete recovery. The doctor responsible for this carelessness has been dismissed.
This affair is greatly to be deplored, but when the handicap of poverty as it is known by this country is taken into consideration, the wonder is that so few such cases occur. The great majority of Greek doctors have studied and trained in the universities and hospitals of France and Germany, but even those great countries have yet to produce the infallible doctor.