Moore's Suicides
Sirs:
I want to thank you for the way you handled "Suicide Disease'' in TIME, Sept. 6, 1937. It was very good of you to mention this and I appreciate it. . . . I like very much to see rather dry, factual material treated with editorial levity and inspiration, to mention Lowells and Kennedys enlightens the material greatly.
I think you might be interested in knowing that the article you referred to was first printed in the New England Journal of Medicine. It happened to be picked up by the Associated Press and sent out in a dispatch that practically covered the U. S. Since that time I have been deluged with perfectly amazing letters from an enormous number of people who are apparently on the verge of suicide and who are waiting for word from me to go ahead. So many of the letters are so pathetic and so complicated that in every instance I am taking the time to answer each letter personally and attempt to get each person who has written me into contact with a local physician or psychiatrist. . . .
MERRILL MOORE, M. D. Boston, Mass.
Stirrers
Sirs:
I was much interested in the proposition of Clem Sputter in his little "apple butter stirrers" in TIME, Sept. 6.
Don't make it a stag organization Clem, or you would shut me out. I'm in my 82nd year and I stirred apple butter every Fall for years in the late 60s—in my kid days I didn't stir it in the back yard though. There was a house built over the spring on my father's farm in Pennsylvania. Downstairs was where the springwater ran through a big trough, and there was kept the milk "crocks," butter jars, etc. In that room, we churned the butter in a good old dasher churn. Don't you remember?
"The churn my dear Grandmother had Was made of cedar wood, And many a good old fashioned rub Of soap and sand had stood. The hoops that bound it were of brass, And shone like burnished gold. Five gallons too of cream or milk, That good old churn would hold. Ker Chunk, Ker Chunk, etc."
Over this room was the "spring house loft" and in it was a big fireplace where hung the iron "crane" with its "pot hooks." On that crane hung the huge copper kettle in which the apple butter was made.
Now I'll tell you something we did, and I can imagine how the sanitary fanatics of today would look with horror at such a proceeding.
To help keep the butter from sticking to the bottom of the kettle, a handful of copper pennies was thrown in the butter and the stirrer would move them about over the bottom of the kettle and when they were retrieved when the kettle was emptied you never saw such lovely bright pennies as they were. Brighter I'm sure than when they came from the mint and none of us got sick from eating that apple butter. Our favorite way of eating it was to put it on nice brown buckwheat cakes and pour over all plenty of rich sweet cream. Did you ever try it?
I wonder how many stirrers you will find.
MRS. M. M. HOLT Newport News, Va.
Sirs:
Mr. Clem Sputter (Hugh J. Crossland) Marion, Ohio
Dear Nephew Clem: