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I suppose "The Pope's Day" [TIME, May 5] is sufficiently newsworthy, even for your Protestant readers, to be included in TIME. I read it with some interest. One must admire the Pope's systematic life, if the day described is typical. I was, however, impressed with the man's loneliness. He never eats with anyone. How different from our Lord, whose vicar he claims to be, and of whom we read that He ate even with publicans and sinners! He is not married. How different from the Apostle Peter, whose successor the Pope pretends to be, and who, like other Apostles, had a wife and a mother-in-law, the latter being healed of a fever by our Lord! The humblest Protestant preacher would not exchange positions with the head of the Roman Catholic Church.
(REV.) CARL A. GIESELER
St. John's Lutheran Church
Denver
Old Gag
Sir:
TIME'S usually astute radio department should have known better than to have given credence to one of the oldest myths in American radio! This legend has been wished on children's radio entertainers since earliest days of broadcasting. The Uncle Don "incident" story [TIME, Feb. 24] is definitely apocryphal. Don himself recalls hearing the same gag told back in 1926 before he entered radio, as having happened to an Uncle "Gee Bee," a radio uncle on the now defunct New York station WGBS. Incidentally . . . Uncle Don started a new half-hour series on WOR March 1 in the new role of "Children's Disc Jockey."
RODNEY ERICKSON
Station WOR
New York City
¶This old saw (about the man who got caught wisecracking with his mike open)—which TIME labeled a legend and said that Uncle Don had called a canard—popped up in print at least as long ago as December 1933. It first appeared in TIME Oct. 9, 1939 as a "persistent but apocryphal tale," and there's not a word of truth to the story.—ED.
Russian Refreshment
Sir:
In contrast to the flood of hate-Russia propaganda that is fed to us by the daily press, the continual description of the Russians as oppressed, discouraged and persecuted slaves, such an article as Samuel Welles's excellent report in your issue of April 28 is like a ray of sunshine.
To read of Russians "as chipper as chipmunks," of neat houses "with lace curtains, begonias and geraniums in the windows," to nave anyone compare the "wonderful, hardworking" Russians with the "free-&-easy, friendly Midwesterners" of Mark Twain's books, is indeed refreshing. . . .
W. L. RIDEOUT
Yucaipa, Calif.
Sir:
. . . If the Russians could read a few such pieces about us, and we could read more such about them, perhaps we couldn't think each other such monsters.
RUTH OLSON
Los Angeles
Spelling by Sound
Sir: