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Sir: There is a gross misstatement of fact in your story dealing with the efforts of a coalition of unions to try to force the Campbell Soup Co. into company-wide bargaining [Aug. 23]. You state: "Behind the demand is the burgeoning drive by A.F.L.-C.I.O. Organizer Stephen Harris to duplicate company-wide contracts that he won from the Union Carbide Corp. and the copper industry." This statement is as far from the true facts of the situation as it could possibly be. In 1966 and 1967, the Industrial Union Department of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. led a coalition bargaining drive against Union Carbide Corp., and Mr. Stephen Harris was involved in this effort. Eleven plants were struck for periods varying from 44 days to 246 days. Separate contracts were eventually negotiated on a local basis, each covering only the particular plant involved. The length of the individual contracts varied from twelve months to 38 months. On the basis of these facts, I trust you will agree that no company-wide contract was won from the Union Carbide Corp.
CARL H. HAGEMAN Vice President Union Carbide Corp. Manhattan
Free as the Wind
Sir: To describe Vladimir Tallin as a product of Communism [Aug. 9] is incorrect. He was a rebel and a free thinker. I knew Tallin in the mid-thirties, in the days when Russian men of culture were slaughtered in the name of international Communism. I last saw him in his tiny one-room apartment in Moscow, which was dominated by a huge black and white canvas entitled The Fish Merchant and Fish. Neither merchant nor fish were in evidence—it was hardly an example of having "knuckled under" to Communist social realism. We drank tea and listened to Tallin playing a lute (made with his own hands) and singing old Russian ballads learned from blind minstrels, with whom he traveled from village to village begging alms when he was a young boy. I was told that he ran away from home at the age of nine and lived free as the wind ever after.
I asked him whether Ihe flying machine that he was building in the bell tower of a nearby monastery would really fly. He grinned and said, "If it looks like flight itself, does it really matler?" This is my memory of "Tallin al Home."
NICHOLAS D. BORATYNSKI Pasadena, Calif.