Woodpeckers
Sirs:
It is to he hoped that TIME'S "vocabulary-builders'' will be able to maintain their flair for vivid and witty epithets even during the summer's heat and humidity. Their characterization of members of the Civilization Conservation Corps, recruited from the unemployed, as "workers-in-the woods" (issue of June 19) is a bit flat.
Resort people in the Estes Park region, which adjoins the Rocky Mountain National Park, refer to these civilian soldiers who have flocked into our national forests, as ''woodpeckers." Aside from a common habitat there is a further resemblance, for the uniformed men migrate from work-spot to work-spot in old, red, sight-seeing busses from which they descend with a clatter to do their busywork.
L. J. DAVIDSON
Professor of English Literature University of Denver
Denver, Colo.
For latest woodpecker news, see p. 43.--ED.
Freaks
Sirs:
Three cheers to Reader Ritter, and if only women freaks (Husband Abbott) read TIME, may I be classed as a freak, for if needs must be that the beds go unmade and the five little Graves and Daddy Graves go without meals, Mamma Graves will continue to read TIME from cover to cover and be a happy freak.
MRS. PERRY GRAVES
Robinson, Ill.
Let neither Daddy Graves nor offspring fear. TIME, no alibi for slackness about the house, is read by able Mamma Graves in a fraction of the time which stupid housewives waste.--ED.
Sirs:
. . . Having a young baby and my own work to do, I plan my entire week so that Friday morning after baby's bath and feeding is free for reading TIME from cover to cover.
I might add I discovered TIME during the Hoover-Smith campaign, before we were married and introduced it to my husband. Now, unless I read it early, I haven't a chance at it. . . .
MRS. C. C. EDELEN
St. Louis, Mo.
Sirs:
If women who rend TIME are freaks, I had best try and get my better two thirds in a side show.
If TIME isn't delivered "on the dot" in our mailbox it invariably costs me 15-c-, because she goes straight to the drug store and buys an extra.
Being a husband interested in world happenings and even more interested in a brief accurate report of them, I am much pleased that my lady reads TIME carefully. It gives us much to talk of. . . .
J. P. ROBINSON
Dallas, Tex.
Sirs:
... I have never written a letter to a magazine or newspaper or radio station, but just had to break my record on this query.
I know one woman who is not an intellectual, likes the funnies in the newspapers, bakes a perfectly wonderful apple pie (which is justly the envy of all her friends), takes good care of and is deeply interested in her two children, prepares good meals for her family, plays the piano a little, fusses a lot with her clothes, is always late for appointments, is not at all hard to look at, likes the sweet tenors on the radio, plays a little contract, likes the movies and sentimental poetry and has just received a license to punish the family car. Oh! yes--and I almost forgot to say that she plans and administers the family budget with a close hand (though this may be proving too much) and yet devours TIME from cover to cover, and insists upon no less than two years subscription at a time. Is it necessary to say that this woman is perfectly healthy, except for a touch of hay fever. If this woman is a freak I believe the dictionaries will require a good deal of correcting. What do you think? MAYNARD L. GINSBURG
Southbridge, Mass.
To First-Letter-Writer Ginsburg. praise for an able portrait of a pleasant lady. --ED. Abbott Flayed
Sirs:
Husband Abbott certainly displays the eternal egotism of the male. We are sure he has been most unfortunate in the women he has known.
LUCILE C. DURFLINGER
Columbus, Ohio.
Sirs:
. . . I will say that Miss Ritter put it very mild when she said the remark that "women who read TIME are freaks'' displayed both ignorance and male arrogance.
There are not enough words to describe the "disgusting egotism" of the man, who knows very well that woman is his superior (leaving out politics and business) inasmuch as woman's brain is keener, woman is more subtle and a woman can read a man's mind like an open book. Men get their ideas, their inspirations, their ambitions from women, but how they hate to admit it!
I'm quite sure I read TIME with as much intelligence as any man and at that I probably benefit more by it because I don't think I know it all!
(Miss) CATHERINE M. LOCKE
Altoona, Pa.
Sirs:
. . . Isn't it about time that some men stopped classifying us as high-grade morons only interested in the recipes on the woman's page of our local newspapers?
JOSEPHINE DAY
Nazareth, Pa.
TIME-worthy Tabloid Sirs: I am not only a cover-to-cover reader of TIME but my freakishness includes the insane longing for a similar version of the day's news to make me forget the trials of a daily subway jaunt.
A long suffering straphanger, I constantly envy the tabloid addicts the ease and comfort in which they follow the day's events in yellow-journalese.
Why not a daily publication tabloid in form but TIME-worthy in content?
I have long intended to pop this question but it took "Husband Abbott's" challenge to conquer my procrastination.
(Miss) FRANCES W. TAYLOR
Assistant Secretary
East River Savings Bank
New York City
A tabloid-for-literates in New York has been advocated by many a journalist these ten years. If some able newspaper publisher does not undertake the job within the next ten years, TIME will.--ED.
Husbands Away
Sirs:
. . . We do not have Friday in our week but instead TIME Day. And as hubby is away to business when TIME arrives I have it all to myself, and do I enjoy it! But it was friend husband who really insisted that I read TIME regularly.
Like a great many women, I thought because I had a home and children to care for I had no time to read a magazine each week. One evening my husband asked me my views on a certain topic of the day. "Was my face red," when I realized how little I knew about the subject. Right then and there I listened to one of the best lectures imaginable. It did not take me long to reach this decision. "If TIME was only half as good a news magazine as my husband said it was, it was certainly worth reading, and reading well."
I am happy to say I now read TIME from cover to cover each week. . . .
HILDA LAPHAM WOODS
Maiden, Mass.
Sirs:
. . . My husband is a constant reader of TIME, and being a traveling man is not always at home on Fridays, but he never forgets to mail in his copy for me to read, which I usually receive the following Monday. It is true that the greatest number of women are interested only in clothes, bridge clubs and entertaining, but occasionally it is refreshing, is it not, to run into those who know news when it is news? I think so.
MRS. FRANK FOLKS
Memphis, Tenn.
Husbands Silenced
Sirs:
. . . Also TIME finds favor in feminine eyes because it gives what we readers fondly think is the low-down on various news events, and in so doing it provides for wives admirable material with which to refute the generalities frequently propounded by oracular Heads of Families. To quote TIME as an authority seldom fails to silence a husband.
POLLY ANNE COLVER HARRIS
Williamstown, Mass.
Spirit
Sirs:
. . . In TIME, besides the reading matter, there is a spirit, whose name is Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the truth. Women, being more sensitive than men, are more able than men to detect the spirit, and appreciate it.
LUDVIK KRECMER
New York City
The sex-claims of Subscribers Krecmer and Locke (see above) are as unsupportable as those of Husband Abbott.--ED.
Ample Money
Sirs:
I wrote you recently advising that the data contained in TIME'S article of May 29, concerning Spain's public instruction, was entirely erroneous, and I further stated that the religious institutions were not teaching 50% of the Spanish children, and that religious teaching could be substituted easily by the State.
I am just in receipt of El Sol of Madrid, containing the speech of the Minister of Public Instruction in the Parliament emphatically stating that the number of children taught by the religious institutions, is 350,937, for the primary schools, and 17,098 for the higher schools, and the Republic will build this year 7,000 schools to take care of these children, for which the Republic has ample money and means.
The program of the Republic is to build 30,000 new schools. The first two years the Republic has built 10,000 schools, and in the third year will build 7,000, a total of 17,000 schools in three years. To substitute religious schools will cost the State around 60 million pesetas a year, which is less than the subsidy the Monarchy was giving to the Church so that the Bishops might live like princes.
If the Catholic Church in the U. S. was conspirating and working to overthrow the Government of this country, what the Government of the U. S. would do? I am sure that no less than the Government of the Spanish Republic is doing, or perhaps more. . . .
R. G. NIDAL
Tampa, Fla.
Mosquito Facts
Sirs:
If you were listening to the program being broadcast from station WRUF (University of Florida) yesterday morning perhaps you heard one of the most unusual duets ever put on the air.
Dr. T. H. D. Griffitts, surgeon of the U. S. Public Health Service, concluded his series of remarkable addresses at the Short Course in Town and Country Leadership sponsored by the University of Florida with a duet of ''two full-grown, well-nourished, female, Anopheles, mosquitoes." From a drinking glass covered with a taut handkerchief, these pestiferous insects sang a song that usually demands the immediate attention of most humans. Perhaps for the first time man listened to this familiar song in peace.
Speaking upon "Mosquito Control" to a small but appreciative audience, Dr. Griffitts informed and amused his listeners with such facts as these: "Perhaps Kipling was thinking of the mosquito when he wrote 'the female of the species is more deadly than the male,' for it is only the lady mosquito who bites. . . . Her persistence is due to more than just appetite; she must have blood or her eggs will not hatch. . . . Of 20 mosquitoes liberated in an airplane at Cristobal four were found on board 72 hours later in Miami. . . . They do not generally breed in tin cans, gutters, and stagnant ponds, but prefer clear pools and clean water.". . . etc.
This is but one of the TIMEworthy happenings at the Short Course concluded yesterday.
(REV.) GLADSTON ROGERS
St. Luke's Church Marianna, Fla.
Jumbled
"PICTORIAL SECTION ON BIG WIGS AND SIDELIGHTS AT LONDON CONFERENCE IN CURRENT ISSUE ON PAR WITH TIME'S USUAL EXCELLENCE STOP AMERICAN DELEGATES PICTURES AND SKETCHES FOOT PAGE 24 JUMBLED BEST REGARDS.
ELEANOR & HARRY CASE
Portland, Me.
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