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In TIME (July 31) I saw an article which said that on New Britain G.I.S had to come back to the theater three separate times in order to see The Hard Way. I have one to top that. Last May we had to come back to the theater on five separate nights to see The Major and the Minor. The first night the hospital electric generator broke down. The second night the projection lamp burned out and there were no replacements handy. The third night one of the tubes in the amplifying system burned out. On the fourth night the excitor bulb burned out, and finally on the fifth night, just as the final reel was completely through the machine, the motor burned up. After that we got a new machine.
FRED T. BURKE c/o Postmaster San Francisco
"Our Girl"
Sirs: TIME'S story (Oct. 9) titled "Daughters for Harvard" inspires me to forward to you a letter dated November 1847, regarding Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the U.S. to gain admittance to a man's college. Elizabeth and my father, Dr. Norman R. Cornell, became friends during the days spent in Geneva Medical College. Their friendship continued through the years. To my mother, he wrote, in part: ". . . In regard to the College all things progress finely, and agreeably, with the exception of a subject or two on hand for dissection, that smell most intolerably rank of spoilt meat.
" 'Our Girl' — as the students call her —Miss Elizabeth Blackwell, gets along finely.
She can behold the nakedness of male or female before us without a blush. Which is more than my hardened face can always endure without a change of color. I think she will be distinguished. . . ."
DIXIE CORNELL GEBHARDT Knoxville, Iowa
"Oh, Brother!"
Sirs:
Senator Claude Pepper is, politically, completely impossible to me, but I must now, I confess, "give the devil his due." His idea of putting Congress on the air [TIME, Oct. 9] is a classic. It could not fail to have a salutary effect.
And, oh, brother! It would certainly expose the absentees, logrollers, floor-hoggers, etc., in our legislative houses!
HENRY LEE JR.
Chicago
Cool Facts
Sirs:
The history of wars has always been written differently by different authors, depending a great deal on their sources of information. Some day, when historians start writing "Inside World War II," they could find no wider and more reliable source of material than TIME.
There are a lot of people around the earth that consider luncheon speeches, income taxes and propaganda as necessary evils of civilization. Nowadays it is much easier to get to know how guns are being fired than to find out why those guns are in action. TIME is fulfilling a mission amongst those who prefer cool facts to wishful thinking, even during a world war.
OLOV HJELMSTROM Swedish Consulate Rio de Janeiro
What Is a Dictaphone?
Sirs:
In TIME (Oct 2), in an advertisement of Dictaphone Corporation, appears this statement of fact: "The word DICTAPHONE is the registered trade-mark of Dictaphone Corporation, makers of dictating machines and other sound recording and reproducing equipment bearing said trade-mark."