Thousands of Fellows
Sirs:
There are thousands of fellows like me. They left school in the early '30s. A lot of them, like myself, couldn't finish college because of the depression. We couldn't get a job at that time because there weren't any .. . and if there were, older and more experienced men got them. However, we kept looking until we got something—anything. A lot of us offered to work for nothing, like I did, to get started....
Anyway, we worked hard as hell to keep our jobs . . . harder still to climb the ladder. Today a lot of us have advanced and are getting along pretty well, considering everything. A lot of us, like myself, are making between $2,000 and $4,000 a year.
Then came the draft! A lot of us were called. Frankly, we weren't enthusiastic about going, but we're patriotic Americans and we went . . . and smiled while we did it, too. Our $2,000 to $4,000 a year dwindled to $21 a month—$252 a year, but we're still not kicking.
Now the newspapers tell us that because a few of the boys working for some of the steel companies want a 5¢ or 10¢ raise, and/or A. F. of L. doesn't like C. I. O., they declare a strike, tie up production for national defense and crack a lot of heads to prove that they mean to get what they're after ... or else.
Yep . . . there are thousands of us who have worked like hell since '31 and '32 trying to lick a depression, get experience, get established, to climb the ladder . . . yet we gladly chuck it all to serve our country. Now, some of the boys are declaring strikes over petty arguments or small wage increases and in so doing bottleneck industry which makes possible a well-equipped Army.
We haven't got the answer. . . .
ROBERT F. KEMPER
St. Louis, Mo.
"Most Noble Message"
Sirs:
TIME for March 24 ended brilliantly with a long review of a book with a most noble message—that of sterilizing the German race as a whole. If TIME is suffering from a paucity of reviewing matter that it gives such important space to the mephitic work of a man whose whole book is evidently based on one fatuous idea, let TIME's book reviewers look around for something which might contribute more to American letters or at least be newsworthy.
MRS. WALTER BOERGER
Sheboygan, Wis.
>Theodore N. Kaufman's book, Germany Must Perish!, contributed nothing to U. S. letters but it was newsworthy. TIME definitely pronounced his plan "grisly."—ED.
Gallant Fegan
Sirs:
Why has TIME never published a picture of Fogarty Fegan, master of the Jervis Bay? His gallant conduct aroused great interest and, so far as I know, his photograph has never been published.
JOHN T. HACKETT
Montreal, Que.
>When the Jervis Bay, an unarmored merchant cruiser, went down after a heroic and hopeless engagement with a big German surface raider (TIME, Nov. 25), no picture was available in the U.S. of gallant Captain Edward Stephen Fogarty Fegan, who, with one arm shot away, stayed on the sinking wreck after ordering survivors to abandon ship. In response to Reader Hackett's inquiry, TIME gladly prints the best likeness of brave Fegan now obtainable.—ED.
Reader Wright's Holy Man
Sirs: