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"Critic" Linn may think a man's face looks like a retouched photograph (TIME, Oct. 11). He's wrong. All faces have character-showing forms, whether hills, valleys or ravines. This artist considers it his business to show faces as they really are.
ERNEST HAMLIN BAKER
New York City
Across North Africa
To TIME from a former TIME correspondence secretary, now a Red Cross worker overseas, came the following letter:
Just a list of the cities we have visited: Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech, Oran, Meknes, Oudjda, Algiers, Fez. We have spent a night in a Sultan's palace at Fez, we have visited the headquarters of the Foreign Legion in Sidi-bel Abbes . . . we have seen the Casbah in Algiers. . . . Three gals, two others and myself, drove all across North Africa from Casablanca to Bizerte. From Bizerte we flew over to Sicily. Bizerte was an appalling sight. ... At night ... the moon shines down on empty shells of white buildings with black windows.
. . . Every day has been madder than the one before and life literally never has a dull moment. . . . We never go anywhere but we get great attention. . . . They follow us in jeeps, peeps, weapon carriers. We can only date officers and it is always necessary to refuse six dates a night.
This trip across North Africa gave me a pretty good idea of what Red Cross is doing and I assure you it's a lot. They have showers, towels, soap. They have food that we try our best to make a little different from the GI stuff. Cold drinks. You have no idea what a luxury ice is. ...
Next to me is a hurdy-gurdy affair giving forth lovely Italian-sounding music. A funny old guy stands there turning the wheel as soldiers group around and listen.
DORIS RIKER
"The Bonham General Store"
Sirs:
I have just completed a minute search of the city of Bonham searching for "the Bonham general store" which the writer of your article about Sam Rayburn in the Sept. 27 issue so glibly mentions.
There are some 100 stores in Bonham, including two banks, 12 cafes, six drugstores and seven dry-goods stores, but not one of them will acknowledge to being "the Bonham general store" where Sam sits with cronies for "big-town" photographers. The general store to which the author refers, I presume, is the store owned by Ernest Parker at Ivanhoe, 15 miles north of here.
Bonham has an estimated population of 9,230 . . . does not claim to be a metropolis, but it is definitely out of the general-store class. . . .
R. M. (Bos) CANTRELL, Editor
Bonham Daily Favorite
Bonham, Tex.
> Bonham's Cantrell presumes correctly, TIME'S writer was wrong in presuming.—ED.
Doughboy Trademark
Sirs:
Please, please, TIME, restrict your usage of the term "doughboy." It's one of the few individual trademarks we of the Infantry have.
We're the front-line troops who lose the blood and sweat and life, who dig the foxholes, who sleep on the ground every single night of our overseas lives. . . . Our job is a dirty and uncomfortable one, and we do it without too much complaining. . . .
When you label some service soldier in a service unit in a very rear area "doughboy" (TIME, Aug. 16), up comes our dander. . . .
(Sgt.) DUANE D. OLSON