Man of the Year
Sirs:
May I be the FIRST to nominate Henry Wallace as "Man of the Year"?
C. G. ABBEY
Geneva, N.Y.
Sirs:
YOUR DEFINITION OF THE MAN OF THE YEAR IS "THE MAN WHO HAD THE BIGGEST RISE TO FAME DURING THE YEAR AND WHO MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE CHANGED THE NEWS FOR BETTER OR WORSE." I ... SUGGEST SECRETARY OF STATE JAMES F. BYRNES. BY SPEARHEADING A FIRM AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE DIPLOMATIC GATHERINGS OF 1946 HE HAS UNQUESTIONABLY CHANGED WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN GLOBAL BAD NEWS DEFINITELY FOR THE BETTER.
JULIUS M. WESTHEIMER
Baltimore
Sirs:
. . . For doing the most to change the news for the worse by obstructing the path to a just and lasting peace: Joseph Stalin.
CLAUDE H. MORTER
Dallas
Sirs:
. . . The Secretary of State, James Francis Byrnes . . .
KAVANAUGH C. DOWNEY
Milwaukee
Gold-Plated Steaks
Sirs:
Your Business reporter in referring to gold-plated steaks from T. O. Pride [Nov. 4] has smeared the gold on with a lavish hand. Sirloin from this steer would be worth nearer $125 than $1,250 a pound. Perhaps in drooling over the thought of sirloin (with mushrooms) from this champion, his enthusiasm prompted him to place the decimal point one place too far to the right. Right?
SAMUEL W. PATTON
Altoona, Pa.
P:Wrong. Eddie Williams, buyer of the prize steer, sticks to his figure of $1,250 a pound for choice top sirloin. He estimates that he will get roughly 34 pounds of top sirloin from the animal. But Williams' calculation does leave out the revenue from beef ribs, chuck, loin butt, etc. which he will sell at regular prices; this should come to nearly $400.--ED.
Neat Trick
Sirs:
I've always relied on TIME to keep me alphabetically straight on the nation's many agencies and companies. So--please pass a memo to TIME's researcher in charge of alphabetizing. . . . It's Trans World Airline, and not Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc., which you labeled it in your Nov. 4 issue. Personally, I thought the airline did a neat trick in keeping their old call letters when they changed over to the new name.
JAMES F. PORTER
Kansas City
P:The company now calls itself Trans World Airline, but the official corporate name is still Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc.--ED.
The Lolos
Sirs:
I have read an article in TIME [Oct. 7] which tells us that Lolos are "fierce isolationist natives." It is rather a great shame for Christians to misunderstand a nation with a population of 2,500,000.
I am a common nomad of Tibetan highland but have visited frequently the Lolo-land. Because we have in common the right of montani semper liberi* I take the courage of expressing my heart to the world.
No race that dwells in Western China is either aborigine or native. To trace the source of Lolo one must study the history of the Indo-Aryan race who moved from Central Asia into Indo-Gangetic plain and then spread abroad. From the famous Indian Epic Mahabharata we know definitely that a large group of people did flee from Hird to the surrounding mountain countries. Further discovery of history is urgently necessary for scholars of atomic age.
KESANG WANGDI
Shanghai
Fat Cats
Sirs:
It is evident that Reader Williams [TIME, Oct. 21] knows much less about cats than TIME. He is suffering under the general false impression that cats only hunt mice and rats when hungry, therefore a poor skinny cat makes a good hunter.
Just the opposite is true; cats hunt first and foremost for the sport of it and as any athlete does best when in perfect physical condition, so cats also hunt best when properly fed and cared for.
Perhaps Reader Williams' cats are so undernourished they don't have the stamina to get the best of a rat, but since Esso Junior is seemingly well provided for he would exercise his muscles on large, fat rats for the sheer pleasure of it.
MARION BROWNE
Manhattan Beach, Calif.
Guardian's Trust
Sirs:
The last sentence of your excellent piece on the Manchester Guardian [TIME, Nov. 4] may have read like a non sequitur to many of your readers, carrying as it does the odd implication that by sending the paper's trust deed to America during the war, the Guardian in some mysterious way guaranteed that the paper would carry on, in C. P. Scott's words, "as a public service and not for private profit." May I fill in the mystery of this non sequitur?
The summer of 1940 was black enough for the trustees of the Guardian to get the deed out of England until, at some happier later time, they would be able to have it restored and get back to business on the principles of the Scott Trust. In 1907, Scott decided to pay himself a modest salary, turn any other monies back into the paper, and resolved to draw no more dividends from it. In 1917, he made it impossible that anybody else ever should: he divided the ordinary shares among his sons and son-in-law, to hold impersonally for the good of the paper. In 1936, J. R. Scott, the sole survivor, divested himself of the trusteeship and formed a trust, whose duty was and is to turn any dividends back into the development of the paper. The trustees draw no salary and have no sav whatever in the policy of the paper, which is the prerogative of the editor.
One can think of liberal newspapers that lose money, but few of them, I imagine, make it a point of honor to make none.
ALISTAIR COOKE
New York City
Westward Perambulation
Sirs:
My sense of direction was aroused to a small degree by a statement which appeared in TIME (Nov. 4) concerning the "Perambulating Pole." According to TIME, Roald Amundsen found the magnetic pole slightly northwest of where Sir James Ross had made the first reliable fix. Yet TIME plots Amundsen's fixing one degree, 15 minutes east of Ross's!! Apparently TIME is perambulating a bit itself. . . .
AUGUSTE A. BOLTE JR.
Toronto, Ont.
P:TIME's map plotting was right, its writing wrong. -- ED.
The Birds & the Bees
Sirs:
WE HASTEN TO CONGRATULATE LETTERWRITER MRS. RAY S. ALEXANDER AND LITTLE ALEXANDERS 6, 4 AND 3/4 [TIME, OCT. 28]. THAT'S THE WAY HOME EDUCATION SHOULD BE, WITH BABIES, LLEWELLYN SETTERS, BEEHIVES AND NAILING DEMONSTRATIONS.
AT THE SAME TIME WE'RE AWED BY THE EFFICIENCY OF ALEXANDER PARENTHOOD. WHEN WE TOLD OUR KIDS THAT BABIES CAME FROM INSIDE THEIR MOTHERS, THEY JUST ASKED US HOW THEY GOT IN THERE TO BEGIN WITH. AND MAYBE WE'RE SISSIES, BUT WE'RE DAMNED IF WE'RE GOING TO DEMONSTRATE.
EVERY TIME ONE OF OUR RECORDS ANSWERS ONE QUESTION, IT STARTS A DOZEN NEW ONES. WE'VE TRIED THEM ON OUR OWN KIDS. BROTHER, THEY DON'T "WORK OFF PARENTHOOD BY PROXY." THEY WORK YOU INTO A RAFT OF NEW QUESTIONS THAT EVEN AN ALEXANDER COULDN'T ANSWER. . . .
WE PUT 18 PAGES OF FACTS ABOUT BEES INTO "WHY ARE BEES SO BUSY?" AND DO YOU THINK THAT STOPS QUESTIONS? THE LATEST FROM OUR HOME FRONT WAS: "IF THE DRONES ARE SO LAZY, WHY DOES THE QUEEN MARRY ONE?"
IF MRS. ALEXANDER KNOWS THE ANSWER, WE HOPE SHE'LL WIRE COLLECT. WE'LL SEND HER A BEEHIVE COMPLETE WITH BEES.
GRAPHIC EDUCATION PRODUCTIONS
Hollywood
Sugar Strike
Sirs:
Instead of glorifying Harry Bridges in your Nov. 4 issue wherein you commented on the great sugar strike in Hawaii, it is a great pity you could not have accurately visualized just what is going on. . . .
As pressagentry for Harry Bridges it was excellent; as a reflection on real Americans, their backs against the wall, fighting against all of the insidious forces which endanger our country, it was tragic. . . .
1) For the first time the entire economy of an American community is jeopardized by a single union (cut shipping from or to Hawaii and you have affected every business and every job).
2) Union leadership, trained and skilled in strike technique, exported from San Francisco to Hawaii, had enlisted into their longshoremen's union an estimated 16,000-17,000 of a total 28,000 sugar workers plus roughly 12,000 workers in 138 island businesses, 75% of which are not even remotely connected with the work of the parent union.
3) Taking advantage of racial opportunities, prejudice has been fanned, Japanese against Filipino, Filipino against Portuguese, all against whites. . . .
4) ... Requested wage increase amounts to four times the total net earnings of the plantations in 1945 ($20,000,000 wage increase asked; plantation net $4,386,216), plus, of course, a union shop and other union perpetuation guarantees.
5) 12,000 ILWUers in San Francisco sit back also on strike, their coffers wide open to the future weight of monthly dues of 38,000 buddies in Hawaii.
6) Meanwhile every business in Hawaii stagnates . . . vital housing construction is stymied, unemployment increases by the day, LIFE and TIME copies go begging on newsstands (if that's important), and TIME accuses the Big Five of "controlling" the Honolulu Advertiser and forcing it to shout "Power is what these unions want" etc., not wages.
If you need a perfect pattern of what Communism is out to do to America, look at I.L.W.U.'s Harry Bridges pattern, already nine weeks under way in Hawaii. . . .
LORRIN P. THURSTON
President & General Manager
Honolulu Advertiser
Honolulu
Sirs:
I was sorry to see that TIME in its Nov. 4 issue has extended its anti-labor bias to Hawaii's sugar workers.
After three years' close observation from various A.A.F. cane patches, I can assure you the mass of Filipino and Okinawan plantation workers are still in virtual peonage under the Big Five. They sleep in company hovels, eat company food, see their company supervisor before they dare think.
Despite the Honolulu Advertiser's understandable fear of Harry Bridges, any change of bosses that might increase their initiative would be a good deal.
FRED SKINNER Vancouver, B.C.
Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts
Sirs:
In your tribute to the late Ernest Thompson Seton [TIME, Nov. 4], it seems to me you go a little beyond reason when you give him credit for having started the Boy Scout movement, apparently on the assumption that every good movement must have commenced in the United States. It is a matter of history that the Boy Scout movement was organized in Britain, by the late Lord Baden-Powell. . . .
P. C. ARMSTRONG
Montreal
P:Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts in 1908--six years after Seton established his "Tribe of Woodcraft Indians." In 1910 the organization spread to the U.S. and the "Boy Scouts of America" was incorporated, absorbing Seton's "Indians" and also the "Sons of Daniel Boone."--ED.
*The state motto of West Virginia: "Mountaineers [are] always free men."
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