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The writer has received about 600 letters during the past four years from classmates and only in two instances can he recall any note of discouragement, even though some were forced into such work as building birdhouses, lifeguarding, etc. To show you how they went after jobs: One chap in New York pestered the personnel manager of a large New York concern so much that the latter finally hired him to handle other pestering college graduates.
Dartmouth's '31 has practically the same number (30) of lawyers, teachers, doctors, bankers and insurance agents. Other occupations vary from politicians to ski school proprietors to ladies underwear to junk dealers to yellow fever research to CCC officers to the Yankees (Red Rolfe) to airlines.
The class has about 75 children so far and the bachelor ranks are becoming thin already. Of the hundreds of letters received, none has expressed any feeling of remorse for four years of college.
If this class is a fair sample of other classes of '31, it will take more than a mere Depression to keep down your recent college graduate.
CRAIG THORN Hudson, N. Y.
Milk Solution
Sirs:
Gratified and surprised was at least one TIME reader by TIME'S straightforward reporting on New York's milk troubles and its Pisecks (Sept. 14). Even farm papers tread gingerly about the edges of the current U. S. dairy muddle, view it with nothing more vigorous than plaintive editorials. Perfectly true had TIME chosen to mention it, is the fact that New York's conditions are typical of every major milk market. New England's producers are equally bitter but less vocal.
To produce a thousand quarts of milk weekly requires 15-18 milch cows, $10,000 investment in farm, stock, and tools, two men working 14 hours a day, 365 in the year, day help in rush seasons. Weekly return on such a layout today, $40. Wage scale for union milk wagon drivers in Boston: $38 a week plus commission, three days off a month, two weeks' vacation with pay.
Reason for the farmer's plight is not, as TIME seems to imply, failure to put a duty on Brazil's babassu nut. Prime reason is compulsory pasteurization of milk in all major markets. Familiar is everyone with the cry of the orthodox medic that pasteurization kills disease bacteria which might be present in milk. Unfamiliar is the average person with the fact that lactic acid-producing bacteria normally present in milk are likewise killed, retarding souring, making milk a semi-perishable which may be marketed as fresh milk up to ten days from the cow, average city supply five days old on delivery. Thus, via the pasteurizer, every quart of milk produced east of the Great Plains is potential fluid milk for city markets, arbitrary milk "sheds" or inspection areas notwithstanding. Farmers, whose milk always went to a creamery, cheese factory or condensery, now fight for the urban outlets. Dealer-controlled farmer groups, such as Dairymen's League help the farmer cut his own throat, make a united front impossible. The city distributor buys from 50 to 100% more milk than he can sell as such, juggles it among various classifications, does his own weighing and testing, returns to the farmer, in effect, what he pleases.