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Sir: I favor dropping an atom bomb on the state of Mississippi. I am ashamed that such a savage state exists in the country.
C. M. MOORHEAD
Bucyrus, Ohio
Sir: While there's Mississippi, how can there be the Great Society?
LEONARD SOLOMON
Indianapolis
Sir: Your reference to Mr. Edgar Killen as a Free Will Baptist preacher is in error and casts a serious reflection on our denomination. Mr. Killen is not, and has never been a Free Will Baptist preacher.
BILLY A. MELVIN
Executive Secretary
National Association of Free Will Baptists
Nashville, Tenn.
> TIME erred.
Free Speech at Berkeley
Sir: As a Republican and a student, I am very aware of our fine American traditions, including our freedoms of speech and of political action. Every American must always be willing to guard these precious liberties. The students and faculty of Berkeley [Dec. 18] are doing just this and deserve the admiration and support of every American who believes in democracy and the freedoms it guarantees. If it is the "Trotsky groups" and "members of the Communist front" who protect and defend these aspects of our heritage, I would clearly have to desert the Republican Party and register as a Communist!
RICHARD INLANDER
Berkeley, Calif.
Sir: The "civil rights militants, Trotskyites, and members of a Communist front" do not represent a majority of the students as far as their pro-Communist beliefs are concerned. We realize there are Communist-front groups at Berkeley, but the members of these groups are often the same civil rights workers in Mississippi whom TIME heralds as brave and devoted humanitarians. Why the distinction? The tactics of the students were not those of Castro but rather those of Gandhi.
PETE MOTOLA
University of California
Berkeley, Calif.
Fallingwater
Sir: May I speak in regard to two men who are not around to speak for themselves? There was no occasion to "talk" my father into building Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater [Dec. 11], now in the care of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. My role was to make Wright and my father acquainted, some two years before Fallingwater was designed. From there on, Wright's architecture needed no sales talk, and my father's quality as a client has been appreciatively described by Wright in print. Thank you for your good words about the Aalto room.
EDGAR KAUFMANN JR.
New York City
Pitching Camp
Sir: Re Susan Sontag and the derivation of the word Camp [Dec. 17], how the reference to the Aussie term "low saloon" was dug up is beyond me. Camp may be purely New York slang, argot. I first ran across it in the early '30s. At that time, groups of homosexuals lived together in apartments they rented en masse. The apartments were called "camps," and by extension the residents thereof were also called camps—I don't know why not campers, but they weren't. "He's a camp," was not an uncommon phrase.
JACK OSWALD
Miami, Fla.
Sir:
A Tiffany lamp is very "low" camp, Old postcards are Early Heterosexual, Scopitone's the rage, for those college age, And Miss Sontag's the square's intellectual.