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Sir: May I just express grateful thanks? I thought the review was a brilliant piece of work and it was very good of TIME to publish it. I am now going to read Study of History, not because I want to, but because I feel I must. DONALD H. McCULLOUGH London
Cherished Heritage
Sir: The obituary in your Milestones column [Oct 25] about my father, although not intentionally so, I am sure, is cruelly misleading. Your phrase, "born into grinding poverty in the Mississippi backwoods," connotes a "Tobacco Road" environment. Like most formerly affluent Southern families, following the Civil War, his was impoverished financially, but his were the riches of the influence of a Spartan but cultured mother and a cherished heritage from his father, a Confederate cavalry officer. Your statement that he "roared around town yelling 'Hiya, boy' " is simply not true. He was not uncouth, as suggested, but very much a gentlemanly man. E. H. CRUMP JR. Memphis
New Directions (Contd.)
Sir: In your article on David Riesman [TIME, Sept. 27] you opened up the subject of how rapidly America is changing. I feel you should be apprised of still another significant change in the U.S. scene. On leaving a Manhattan restaurant today with two friends, we were approached by a tweed-bearing, clean-shirted, clipped-mustached man of about 60. Said he, in an Ivy League accent: "I don't know my name. I can't think what my name might be."
Said I: "What is your name? Come, come. Everybody knows his name."
Said he: "That's just what I can't remember since it happened to me."
Said I, genuinely concerned: "What happened to you?"
Said he: "I got rolled by a beautiful call girl. Can you gentlemen spare me a quarter so I can get back to Wall Street where I have friends who will recognize me?"
I am old enough to remember when a beggar merely held out his cap and asked for an unspecified sum for an unspecified purpose. I can remember: "Sir, will you give me a nickel for a cup of coffee?" and the great democratic and inflationary shift to "Brother, can you spare a dime?" I have even been held up at pistol point and asked for $1.60 —no more, no less —an experience which Max Weber would somehow have been able to work into his great work Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But I never expected to live long enough to be panhandled in quite the way I was today.