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There's lots of snow here and so thick blizzards that the Russians haven't been able to bomb anything, but now it seems to clear again. We have been coasting and sleigh-riding and I won't have to be alone, for I have five cousins here and we have quite a gay time together. We hear the day's news on the radio, a very good radio it is too, and we keep each other glad, for "we are not to be fed on sadness" [part of a Finnish song]. First we listen to the evening prayers and later on we even dance.
I hope that you write to us soon, even a card. With best regards from Finland.
ANITA
Sirs:
My son (eight months old) of Finnish descent tore the cover of TIME [picturing Joseph Stalin] in half as soon as the mail was brought into the house. I am wondering if this is the so-called Finnish sisu.
JOHN SAARI
Willmar, Minn.
No Thanks
Sirs:
Suppose a reporter from here, assigned to cover TIME, should poke his nose into the composing and press rooms, take a gander around the circulation and advertising departments; should then knock out an article which magnified the mechanical side, said little about your main job—reporting and writing ? We don't believe you'd feel grateful for that kind of coverage, thankful that you had been treated fairly.
No thanks, then, for your handling of the Ohio State University (TIME, Jan. 22). Of course, we're proud of our "horse doctors," our "tooth doctors," proud, too, of our "service stations" activities on the side. But your choice of pictures and captions and your unfortunate selection of facts contrived, TIMEstyle, to present the country's fifth largest university as a big, sprawling, ungainly institution—partly trade school, partly convention bureau, partly "service station," but a University, hardly.
Yet Ohio State is a member of the Association of American Universities, the nation's top-notch rating group whose select circle includes only thirty-odd universities and whose standards of admission and tenure are high and strict. Yet, during the recent holidays, Ohio State was host and manager, for the third time, of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Yet, just before your article was written, Ohio State professors were named to head three nationally distinguished groups: the American Botanical Society, the American Association for Applied Psychology and the American Chemical Society. This happens regularly—dozens of our professors have headed distinguished academic, professional, and scientific groups. The immediate past president of the American Medical Association is an Ohio State University professor (Dr. J. H. J. Upham). . . .