Frank Lloyd Wright

Sirs:

Your Jan. 17 TIME was not cooked through. I tasted obsequious reverence in your article on Frank Lloyd Wright.

I prefer your usual recipe which has the sentiment boiled out. A meaty, appetizing dish of facts seasoned with shrewdness & balance--presidents, popes, abdicating kings, all, even Toscanini, served up without goo.

Leave out the sweet stuff. The sob sisters can dish out the halos and the Grand Old Man eulogies. I want TIME salty, penetrating. No drivel, not even in the Art Department.

IRA B. RUTHERFORD Honesdale, Pa.

Sirs:

To me, your article . . . on Frank Lloyd Wright, America's justly famous, world-re-nowned architect was most interesting and fair. The colored portrait I am framing for my room as the foremost masterbuilder of the age along with the foremost composer, Jean Sibelius. . . .

EDWIN GUNWALD

Harding, Mass.

Sirs:

Until news of the completion of architectural masterpieces is screamed from the headlines of the U. S. press. I count on TIME for as many unprovoked seven-column eulogies on Frank Lloyd Wright and others of his stature as seem necessary to keep readers informed about progress in this phase of our civilization. Congratulations on following and printing the cumulative news that is rarely run as front-page stuff today but tomorrow makes chapter headings in history.

M. A. LAHEE

Youngstown, Ohio

Sirs:

. . . I wish you might give us a picture and a fuller description of Mr. Herbert Jacobs' "one-story, six-room, $5,500 house" (designed by Mr. Wright) in Madison, Wis. It is what you call Exhibit A in Mr. Wright's scheme of things Usonian.

ERNEST E. RICH

Lawrenceville, N. J.

TIME herewith prints a photograph of the house in Madison, Wis., de-signed for Herbert Jacobs by Architect Wright. L-shaped, it stands with its back to the street corner on an acre lot. The short arm of the L is a big living room, the angle contains kitchen and bathroom, the long arm a hall, two bedrooms and a study. All the rooms face inward, opening tall windows on a garden space. A "carport," roofed and enclosed on two sides, saved money on a garage. About $400 was saved by omitting radiators and heating the house by steam pipes run under the concrete floor slabs.--ED.

Sirs:

A large bouquet on your excellent interpretation of Frank Lloyd Wright. The job was done in his grammar, as he would put it, but what of that part about my being the "rich Mr. Johnson?"

For the sake of accuracy, I want to suggest that hereafter you put the "rich" in the past tense. . . .

Anyway, I want to thank you and your wives and others for using Johnson's Wax. Keep on using it and the chances are that I will then be able to afford a few desks and chairs for the new office, and some furniture for my new home--if Mr. Wright doesn't get them completed too soon, which isn't likely.

H. F. JOHNSON JR. President

S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc. Racine, Wis.

Sirs:

Don't see why you're whooping up this Wright man so. Tiled walls & concrete poke-outs may be novel, but guests rate his Tokyo Imperial Hotel bunk in comfort. Though most guests are foreigners, a 5 ft. 8 in. man has to duck his head in the basement corridor leading to post office, shops & grill. That crackly effect of walls--a lot of crevices-- may complete Aztec blend, but the "functional" purpose seems merely to encourage cockroaches, which are numerous and of formidable size. . . .

In summer most rooms are insufferably hot & suffocating--a result of making windows so tiny they don't ventilate. Also, they're hinged, many of them, so you can't let a wisp of air in while keeping the screens on to keep mosquitoes out. . . .

Only way to reach second-floor rear rooms directly from lobby is to wind through a sort of eating annex, stepping on toes of Japanese at tea. So you'd better sick Friend Wright onto mausoleums or something where looks are everything & human comfort negligible. . . .

RALPH TOWNSEND

Oakland, Calif.

Sirs:

May the scribe who wrote the article on Frank Lloyd Wright be sentenced to live six weeks in the Nipponese monstrosity he so highly touts. The Japanese have good cause to hate us. Only one item is veracious. The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, did withstand the big shiver of 1923, although its corridors give one the impression of the witching waves at Coney Island's Dreamland.

Mr. Wright may run hog wild on art, but when he attempts functional designing . . . assuming that the function is to make the guest comfortable . . . he is distinctly a dud. The guest rooms are small. Light is furnished by a pillar in the centre of the room with a reflector directed at the ceiling. Only a fly could see to read. The windows admit as much air and light as those at Alcatraz. It is a sleeper jump from guest room to lobby to dining room. . . .

NED ALVORD

Providence, R. I.

Jauncey's Snorts

Sirs:

As one who spent a year most pleasantly as a minor research assistant to Dr. Jauncey, your article "Hunch" (TIME, Jan. 17) revived interesting memories. . . .

Thoroughly natural is your cut of Physicist Jauncey, slide-rule in hand, before a littered desk. Familiar to me are his mutterings while so engaged. Making some error in computation he erases vigorously, snorting in self-admonition, "Oh, you bloody fool! Jauncey, you idiot!"

J. H. DEMING

Texas Co. Chickasha, Okla.

Loyal Hungarian

Sirs:

. . . Purely in the theoretical interest of truth will you kindly revise your statement in the otherwise excellent account of the Rumanian political mess (TIME, Jan. 10) that Octavian Goga is Hungarian-born? ... I can assure you that by giving him back to his country without reservation, you will oblige your few but loyal Hungarian readers.

D. EMERICK SZILAGYI, M.D.

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Reader Szilagyi, though loyal, is wrong. Rumania's new Premier Octavian Goga who, among other things, does not like Jews, was born in 1881 in Rasinari, Transylvania, then part of Austria-Hungary. He was educated in Budapest and Berlin and once was a member of the Hungarian Parliament. When the Balkans were done over after the War, Rumania got Transylvania and Octavian Goga.--ED.

St. Louis Enthusiasm

Sirs:

YOUR CURRENT ISSUE (TIME, JAN. 24) WITH COVER MAN WALTER WHITE TOGETHER WITH ANTI-LYNCH BILL STORY DEFINITELY. STAMPS YOU AS JOURNALISTS OF THE AMERICAN SCENE WITHOUT PEERS. HOW MUCH IS A LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTION?

DAVID M. GRANT Assistant City Councillor

St. Louis, Mo.

TIME appreciates Reader Grant's approval, but no longer sells lifetime subscriptions.--ED.

No Recidivists

Your National Affairs editors and researchers are indeed a stiff-necked race. Of the Jan. 24 issue you administer "a shocked reproof" to them for mistaking the anniversary the Jackson Day dinners celebrate. And on page 12 of the same issue these same recidivists say "Lincoln has never had his birthday celebrated, like Jackson Day, with $100-a-plate dinners. . . ."

MARTIN M. STERNFELS

Waterbury, Conn.

"Jackson Day" is not "Jackson's birthday," and Reader Sternfels is being ungrammatical at TIME'S expense if he implies it.--ED.

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