Tug & Hop

Sirs:

Referring to TIME, April 5, p. 11, under "The Presidency"--col, 1--you mention Mr. Roosevelt's waving good-bye to his two mules--"Tug" and "Hop." Is it pertinent to inquire if these two mules might be named for Messrs. Tugwett and Hopkins?

At least, Tugwell denounced the proverbial stubbornness of mulish tendencies enough to remove himself from the present "monarchy."

Continued success to both TIME and LIFE; two splendid weeklies. KATHERINE F. HUTCHINSON

Grants Pass, Oregon.

P.S. In the event of a 3rd mule at Warm Springs, may I suggest the name "Perk"(ins).

Tug and Hop were indeed named for Messrs. Tugwell and Hopkins. No Presidential jenny is yet named Perk.--ED.

Scrammy & Mick

Sirs:

The excellent article on Canadian mining and the Toronto Stock Exchange in TIME, April 5 closes with a reference to a superstition among Toronto brokers that an uprise in mining stock prices invariably results when a certain tabby "kittens."

I am enclosing a clipping from the Toronto Star of April 7 which would cast some doubt on the biological possibility of this feat in view of the fact that the tabby turns out to be an "old tom-cat."

A. C. CLINE

Toronto, Ont.

The original cat that inhabited the old Toronto Stock Exchange was a tabby named Scrammy. From 1929 to 1934 she kittened twice, presaging two mining stock booms. Scrammy disappeared and was replaced a year ago by a tomcat named Mick, who so far has manifested no oracular qualities.--ED.

Message from Edison

Sirs:

In listening to the Edwin C. Hill program, Sunday evening, March 28, I discovered Thomas A. Edison had written a ten word message which only one person has access to. Believing firmly I have received this message clearly, the time has come to show the world that it is not impossible to hear from the beyond. But I am at a loss to discover the name of the one having this message. Will you kindly communicate with me at your earliest convenience, believing me to be ever grateful, and sincere in my desire to relay this message to those most interested. SYDNEY GREGORY (Mrs. A. C. P. Gregory)

Williamsburg, Ky.

"Mentalist" Joseph Dunninger, who can be reached through Frances Rockefeller King of the NBC's Artists' Bureau at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York City, has under lock & key messages left with him not only by Edison, but by Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, who said they would try to communicate them to the living after they died. Anyone who receives the message through spiritualistic communication which tallies with the one Edison left can win $10,000 from Mr. Dunninger and the Universal Council for Psychic Research, of which he is chairman.--ED.

Riding on Butler

Sirs:

The review of Malcolm Muggeridge's The Earnest Atheist (TIME, March 8) gives an excellent precis of the book, which is an attack on the integrity of Samuel Butler. Because it is an attack, and there are many people who believe in Butler's integrity, I feel that some account should have been given of his virtues and some correction made of Muggeridge's misstatements.

On the other side the following points should be made. Butler was a great purifier. He deflated Victorian optimism, but remained a healthy and vigorous and decently optimistic mind. The Way of All Flesh is not a hymn of hate against his father, but in greater part a caricature of himself as a young man. The delay in its publication was due to a desire not to hurt the feelings of his sister Charlotte. He would have married Mme Dumas, about whom Mr. Muggeridge tells an incredibly scandalous story; but she herself did not wish it, because under the terms of her husband's will she would have forfeited her income. Henry Festing Jones was not "one Festing Jones," but a musician of some distinction and the author of Butler's biography--a first-class work that was given the James Tait Black prize for the best biography of its year. He also wrote two valuable books on Sicily. Butler took issue with Darwin on no trivial point of evolutionary dogma. He was the first to note that the Abbe Lamarck had long before defined the principle of evolution, and without resorting to a theory of natural selection--the weakest element of Darwin's case.

Butler did not say that Homer was a woman. He wrote a learned and sober book in demonstration of the strong possibility that the Odyssey as opposed to the Iliad was written by a woman. His hypothesis is all the more remarkable in that he does not seem to have come across the classical reference charging Homer with having stolen the substance of the Odyssey from a woman writer called Phantasia. Butler also wrote an extremely interesting book on Shakespeare's Sonnets; it was Butler who started the close scrutiny of the homosexual element in them.

Lastly, Butler was never an atheist. He never ceased to regard himself as a 'Broad Churchman.'

LAURA RIDING

Lugano-Paradiso, Switzerland

Awful!

Sirs:

TIME, April 5, 1937, page 41, second paragraph AWFUL!! The President of the General Federation of Women's Clubs of these United States to be dubbed "first vice president"--referring to Mrs. Roberta Campbell Lawson! I am only one of a million federated clubwomen to protest.

ELIZABETH B. KING

President

Woman's Club of New Kensington

New Kensington, Pa.

TIME'S apologies to President Roberta Campbell Lawson of the General Federation of Women's Clubs and the 2,000,000 U. S. Clubwomen behind her.--ED.

White Man's Lies

Sirs:

Referring to the exasperation of Pan American's Captain Edwin Musick (TIME, April 5, p. 63). He is not the first man to find his irritation of no concern to Samoans. The following trivial footnote to an important page in aviation history may be pertinent.

In the summer of 1923, the U. S. S. Milwaukee lay in the harbor of Pago-Pago, second port of a long shakedown cruise to Suva, Sydney, Rabaul, Noumea, etc. Coming on deck that morning I heard the engine roar of one of the biplanes she carried, and as I stepped over the hatch coaming I saw the plane just beginning to lift from the thrust of the catapult. Almost immediately, from an elevation of, perhaps, two hundred feet, she fell into the bay. Thus ended man's first brief flight in Samoa.

Pilot and cameraman were rescued with minor injuries, certain parts of the ship salvaged, and the rest left, half submerged, on the beach.

On a bleak, rainy afternoon, years later, in an office in a northern navy yard, a group of men talked idly, as sailors will. What more natural than that their memories should revert to sunnier scenes, and several having served in Samoa, the talk soon turned on this very incident. As the event was illuminated from different points in time the following sequel developed.

After the Navy was finished with the wreckage the native population took up their own investigation of the affair. This investigation was no less thorough and weighty than the Navy's, and, for that matter, no less official, for chiefs came, with their official advisers, from far and near to participate in the deliberations. Qualified experts carefully examined the wreck above and below waterline, and reported in detail to the august conferees, ranked in due order of precedence on the beach. After mature consideration the congress of chiefs pronounced the following findings for the information and guidance of their people:

a) Minute inspection failed to disclose any evidence, not even a feather, to support the contention that the white man's contraption might be able to fly.

b) According to testimony of reputable witnesses, when by means of a powerful bow which the cruiser carried, the thing was shot into the air, it had fallen ignominiously into the water. It was not even a good arrow.

c) The white man was a fool. He had tried to build a bird, had achieved only a dead fish, although in strict fairness, it was admitted that he might have something in the big bow, if he ever learned to make a proper arrow.

Thereafter when the white man told tall tales about flying machines he was politely listened to with visible tolerance, but if he pressed his story, or attempted to substantiate it with pictures, he was ceremoniously escorted to the beach to view the bleached remains of the white man's folly, and to listen to the proper member of the local chief's staff comment sadly on "white man's lies."

Let Captain Musick cure his impatience with the knowledge that the cause of his annoyance was not the simple curiosity of ignorant natives, but the consternation of a thoughtful people whose considered and long settled opinion has suddenly exploded in their faces. ORIN SHINN

Palo Alto, Calif.

De Mortuis

Sirs:

My attention has been focused upon the diatribe in TIME, of March 29, directed against the memory of the late Admiral Richmond Pearson Hobson, quite obviously written by one unfamiliar with the text of the old Latin proverb enjoining upon all persons of good breeding to de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

It has apparently escaped the attention of that writer that embraced in Admiral Cervera's squadron, were four armored cruisers each more heavily gunned than any vessels of the corresponding type in the U. S. Navy and of almost equal speed. These are the fine vessels that the writer contemptuously refers to:--"wretched ships, equipment and support, sailed his rusty little fleet of four cruisers and three destroyers across the Atlantic, etc."

Later these same ships fought most valiantly but unavailingly against the superior force of the American Fleet, under the command of that gallant and chivalrous Spanish gentleman and brilliant officer Admiral Cervera, who justly gave merited praise to the handsome manner in which Lieutenant Hobson executed a most difficult and hazardous maneuver, under which the unarmed, frail collier was subjected to what was probably the heaviest fire ever concentrated upon a single ship, before or since.

A vast volume of public adulation descended upon Lieutenant Hobson, but overwhelming as it was it failed to turn his head, nor thereafter and in more mature years did it ever dampen the ardor of his fervent patriotism.

His friends who knew him best will continue to "carry on" and to bring to full fruition the ideals that he strove so gallantly to accomplish during his all too short lifetime, requiescat in pace and continued honor to his memory.

This is a richly deserved tribute from one who had the honor to have merited his friendship and the happiness to have enjoyed it for 40 years.

H. G. DOHRMAN

Pittsburgh, Pa.

That the Spanish fleet which holed up in Santiago harbor was no match for the U. S. fleet, is no discredit to the bravery of Lieutenant Hobson, whose attempt to cork the harbor entrance was nevertheless a fiasco. But Reader Dohrman does not know much about his friend's era if he is not aware that two fleets were never more unevenly matched than the Spanish and U. S. at Santiago on July 3, 1898. Admiral Cervera's fleet consisted of four cruisers, three torpedo boats. One cruiser, the Cristobal Colon, was minus her main battery, it having been still in the foundry when she had to leave Spain. The whole Spanish cruiser force could not throw a broadside equal in weight to that of the U. S. battleship Oregon, which belonged to an armada of four battleships, one cruiser, two armed yachts.--ED.

Murphy's Teahan

Sirs:

When Mr. Frank Murphy was Governor-General of the Philippine Islands he engaged as confidential secretary one William Teahan, a Canadian citizen. Unless he has been naturalized since his return to America, Mr. Teahan is still a Canadian, and has continued on the payroll of the U. S. Government as secretary to Mr. Murphy, now Governor of Michigan.

Mr. Teahan's qualification for the post is that he is married to Mr. Murphy's sister. Both he and his wife lived in Malacanan Palace, Manila, during the entire regime of Mr. Murphy.

Americans with Civil Service rating were refused employment in the Governor-General's office on the plea that there were no vacancies (while the position of private and confidential secretary was held by a Canadian).

Cannot there be found in the entire State of Michigan an American woman or man who could qualify (barring nepotism) for the post now held by Canadian William Teahan?

M. OLIVER

Sausalito, Calif.

When Bachelor Frank Murphy went to the Philippines he took along his sister to be his hostess, his newlywed brother-in-law because his sister insisted on it. As soon as Mr. Murphy gave up his Manila post, Mr. Teahan left Mr. Murphy's payroll. About to take out his final U. S. citizenship papers, he currently works for no one.--ED.

Wichita's Creation

Sirs:

In reading an account, of the Municipal University of Louisville's centennial celebration [TIME, April 5], I note with disappointment that you fail to mention the Municipal University of Wichita, Kansas, as one of the nine municipally owned universities in the U. S., although the other eight are named.

For your information, the Municipal University of Wichita, a coeducational institution, was created by a referendum vote of the citizens of Wichita in April, 1926, and established around the nucleus of old Fairmount College, a Congregational school, founded in 1892.

The creation of a municipally owned university was accomplished under the leadership of Dr. John D. Finlayson, then president of Fairmount College and later chancellor of the University of Tulsa. From an enrollment of about 400 in 1927, the University of Wichita has grown rapidly, having an enrollment of over 1,500 in 1936. The equipment and plant have kept pace with this growth. . . .

The University's greatest distinction is its school of fine arts. Dean Thurlow Lieurance, famous composer of Indian music, composer of By the Waters of Minnetonka, The Minisa and others, is head of the school of fine arts.

Dr. W. M. Jardine, Secretary of Agriculture in former President Herbert Hoover's cabinet, is president of the University. Doctor Jardine was formerly president of Kansas State Agricultural College and served as U. S. minister to Egypt. His daughter, Ruth, attends the University of Wichita.

BYRON W. BEEBE

St. Louis, Mo.

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