Berlin's Wall

Sir:

Peter Fechter's unattended death at the Berlin Wall [Aug. 31] should not be held to the account of the American troops there.

In war, soldiers commonly rescue their wounded and dead from exposed positions, often in defiance of orders. But in Berlin a different valor is called for: the courage to obey orders because they are right. When on each soldier's act hangs awesome consequences, he has no right of initiative.

So long as we preserve deep anger that such deaths must happen, we preserve the respect for the individual on which our way of life rests.

G.G.S. MURPHY

Assistant Professor University of California Los Angeles

Sir:

Gliickwuensche for writing such an excellent account of the Wall of Shame. Having visited Berlin during the past month, I can now wholeheartedly agree that the barrier is "unnatural and inhuman." To see the clean, modern and progressive city of West Berlin and, in contrast, the poverty of the Eastern half makes one realize that the benefits of Communism are few.

FAITH EVANS Western College for Women Oxford, Ohio

Sir:

I never realized the strategic implications of Berlin till I studied Robert M. Chapin's educative diagram. A glance at that map tells more than pages of writing.

BOLAJI OLADIPO TIKOLO Federal Science School Lagos, Nigeria

Sir:

The Berlin Wall was conceived from fear and forged out of hate. A monument to slavery and suppression, the ominous wall divides a great city. The Berliners call out for the destruction of this senseless structure. But Robert Frost, in his "Mending Wall," has said it best of all:

. . . Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense.

THOMAS D. WALTERS Lieutenant Fort Bragg, N.C.

Poet Frost himself read this poem to a Russian audience in Moscow last week, was greeted with uncomprehending silence.--ED.

Aid to Brazil

Sir:

You report that Teodoro Moscoso signed an agreement with the governor of the state of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil "promising an immediate $50,300,000 in U.S. aid plus enough U.S. technicians to make sure the projects succeed [Aug. 31]."

I believe the promised help was a loan of approximately $400,000, which would include 120 million cruzeiros for water supply in Natal, 49 million cruzeiros for water-supply services in three small cities, and $50,000 in technical assistance and equipment for carrying out other small water-supply projects.

The publication of erroneous figures regarding financial help to the people of Brazil has a doubly unfortunate effect: it could raise excessive hopes on the part of the beneficiaries, and it gives the American taxpayer an exaggerated idea as to how much U.S. money is being channeled through the foreign aid program to other countries.

CLEANTHO DE PAIVA LEITE Executive Director Inter-American Development Bank Washington, D.C.

TIME erred, based its story on figures from Brazil which proved to have been badly garbled by a faulty telephone connection, regrets any misconception deriving from its far-out statistics.--ED.

Laryngeal Cancer

Sir:

As a "cutthroat" myself for some five years, I am delighted by your article [Aug. 31] and fully subscribe to its observations on determination and the attitude of family.

There is, however, one statement you make with which I take issue--that one cannot play a wind instrument. I can give a spirited (and recognizable) rendition of Drink to Me Only on the tin whistle. My encore, Handel's Scipio, is not quite so virtuoso.

I did this before an international group of doctors and speech therapists here in London and when I finished, they were speechless. I didn't get any offers from the London Symphony Orchestra, but I got a writeup in the speech therapy official journal--having achieved, apparently, something which was thought by most experts to be impossible.

JOHN O'REILLY

London

Sir:

As the speech clinician responsible for the post-laryngectomy speech rehabilitation of many patients, I feel that many people who read the article on laryngectomy will believe that swallowing air is the only method of attaining intelligible esophageal speech.

There are several other very important methods of air intake: the suction, breathing or inhalation method, air injection by tongue and related structures, and glossopharyngeal press or plosive-injection method.

MARSHALL J. DUGUAY Rosewell Park Memorial Institute Buffalo

Sir:

There is a long and well-documented experience in the use of radiotherapy, where in the earliest stage of laryngeal cancer over 90% of those patients treated are free of disease at the end of five years and beyond. Further, even the surgical treatment of laryngeal cancer is unfairly represented by the 60% control figure which your article mentions. In lesions of limited extent, partial laryngectomy is also able to achieve a control rate of better than 90% with preservation of a good, if not entirely normal voice.

Many early cases of laryngeal cancer can be cured without the necessity for laryngectomy, and with the retention of a more or less normal voice. This observation holds only for the extremely early laryngeal cancers, and should be an incentive for all persons with unexplained hoarseness of more than a few weeks' duration to be examined by a laryngologist without delay.

ROBERT ROBBINS, M.D. Director, Radiotherapy Temple University Medical Center Philadelphia

Sir:

My sincere appreciation for the article about my work that appeared in TIME.

Judging by my mail, there are still many, many laryngectomized patients who do not know that they can speak again. Through your article, hope and encouragement will be given to many more.

Much credit for any of my success should be given first to my surgeon, Dr. Le Roy A. Schall, and then to the many men and women who have had the courage and faith in me to accept whatever little I could offer to them. They are truly the unsung heroes. (MRS.) MARY A. DOEHLER

Boston

Sir:

In your article on the Kerkrade music festival in The Netherlands Aug. 24], you failed to note that any U.S. bands were represented.

We in the city of Clifton, N.J., take great pride in one participating group, the Clifton High School Mustang Band, which won first prize in marching competition, second prize in symphonic competition, and missed a clean sweep by only one point.

S. M. LA CORTE

Clifton, NJ.

Teaching the Teacher

Sir:

Before the skies fall in on my head, let me provide the second half of my statements on the summer institutes of the Commission on English [Aug. 31]. Whatever criticism I made of the schools of education was matched by criticism of liberal arts colleges, and all of it related to the training of English teachers only. In the main, schools of education take the profession too seriously and the subject matter not seriously enough; and English departments in liberal arts colleges and in universities have, with few exceptions, preferred to ignore the fact that a large proportion of their English majors are going to teach high school English right after graduation, and really need to know a great deal more than they do about language, about rhetoric, even about critical method in the reading of literary texts.

Also, a matter of protocol: I am a lecturer, not a professor, at Harvard.

HAROLD C. MARTIN Cambridge, Mass.

Sir:

The ordinary high school English teacher is confronted by a television-bred generation to whom reading is associated with chores like dishwashing, with the result that such a teacher is grateful to find an adolescent familiar enough with written English to write on an eighth-grade level.

To proofread the 500-word composition of today's high school student with his orally acquired vocabulary and sense of syntax requires 20 to 30 frustrating minutes; to read it for meaning of any kind, other than rudimentary structural coherence, is to undertake a task that itself has no meaning.

JAMES CARSWELL Livingston, N.J.

Architects' Signatures

Sir:

Your recent article on vacation cabins [Aug. 17] did not give the architects' names.

My own house is so much the expression of an individual talent that publishing it without giving credit to the architect, Serge Chermayeff, is like showing a painting without giving the name of the artist.

KIRK WILKINSON Wellfleet, Mass.

Other credits: San Francisco Banker Derek Parmenter's retreat was done by Designer John Garden Campbell, and the glass-walled pavilion near Inverness, Calif., by Francis E. Leighton. Lily Saarinen's Cape Cod cabin is by Olav Hammarstrom, the Pound Ridge home of John Straus by Edward L. Barnes, and Burton Tremaine's house in Madison, Conn., was converted by Philip C. Johnson.--ED.

High Standards

Sir:

We are indeed grateful for your very complimentary piece on our Los Angeles Track Club [Aug. 31], and for the fact that the dedicated efforts to raise the standards of distance running in the U.S. to those of the rest of the world are not going unnoticed.

Your kind reference to our coach has given this great man the due he too often is not accorded.

Mihaly (not Mihail) Igloi will become an American citizen this month, and one need only look at his results since coming to our country to see that he has already done a truly great service for his new homeland.

DICK BANK

President

Los Angeles Track Club Los Angeles

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.