Mothers Answered

Sirs:

Our news sheet tells us that Congressmen are being "troubled" by two questions from their constituents: 1) "Why isn't my Johnny getting home faster?" and 2) "Why are they drafting my Johnny, now that the war is over?" . . . Mother No. 1 should be among the most enthusiastic supporters of a peacetime draft law. Mother No. 2 should thank God that her little darling was born too late to fight in this war, and is only being asked to serve now, in perfect safety, to relieve a man who has, perhaps, already gone through months, or years, of hell.

HENRY C. MCILVAINE JR. Commander, U.S.N.R.

% Fleet Post Office San Francisco

"September 1945"

Sirs:

. . . The lead article entitled "September 1945" [TIME, Sept. 17] reaches rare heights in journalistic writing. This is the kind of picturesque reporting occasionally appearing along with the rapid-fire reporting that makes TIME even more human and puts it in a class by itself. In my eyes TIME is America's best-balanced news magazine for the busy folk who want to keep up with world happenings. . . .

PAUL MARKHAM Pastor

First Presbyterian Church Fairgrove, Mich.

Sirs:

. . . As long as people like your writer of "September 1945" are broadminded enough to see the nation as a whole, this nation can't stop--neither can TIME. Such an article should be framed. . . .

W. C. VAN METER Judsonia, Ark.

Sirs:

As you may well have guessed, the Nina Leen pix of the "U.S. Scene" has raised a storm of arguments as to its origin. To be sure it's home for all of us, but still to each of us it bears a marked resemblance also to each of our own home states (see cut).

There is blood about to be spilled, so please enlighten us, for sake of some threatened friendships and some folding green stuff to boot. Could it be Penna., Mo., Va., Conn., Calif., or even La., we dunno, do you?

Give us the word but quick!

Thanks a lot--one thing's unanimous, no matter where it might be, it looks wonderful to us all.

Six NAVY FLYERS

ENSIGN J. D. WILLIS (PA.)

ENSIGN M. E. BAND (CALIF.)

ENSIGN W. LINDEMANN JR. (Mo.)

ENSIGN H. W. KUTHLEY (VA.)

ENSIGN G. E. DUNN (CONN.)

ENSIGN J. R. HILLERY (LA.)

% Fleet Post Office San Francisco

Sirs:

I am willing to bet that the picture [illustrating "September 1945"] is taken near Pawling, N.Y., on the road to Quaker Hill, home of Lowell Thomas and Thomas E. Dewey.

(SGT.) SHERWOOD W. TRAVERS Boiling Field Washington, D.C.

P: Bullseye.--ED.

Yamashita to Leavey

Sirs:

Your otherwise excellent story on Jap surrenders--"A Bubble Bursts" [TIME, Sept. 10]--was dead wrong on one point. Yamashita did not surrender to General Wainwright but to Major General Edmond H. Leavey, Chief of Staff of the Army Forces in the Western Pacific, who was acting for Lieut. General W. D. ("Fat") Styer, commanding general AFWESPAC.

General Wainwright was there all right --but only as a distinguished visitor. Correction ?

(AFWESPAC LIEUTENANT'S NAME WITHHELD) % Postmaster San Francisco

P: Correction. Virtually all newspapers repeatedly credited Wainwright with accepting Yamashita's surrender. Everybody was wrong.--ED.

Man's Prime

Sirs:

Psychologists are the world's most inde fatigable fiddlers with figures, and from "Man's Prime" [TIME, Sept. 10] I note that Psychologist Harvey C. Lehman has averaged it all up to conclude that "top performances" come "at a precise figure for the prime of life: 33." An interesting commentary on the psychologist's mania for meaningless statistics would be a brief listing of some outstanding "top performances" in the arts, i.e., actual masterpieces:

Aeschylus: Oresteia at 67.

Sophocles: Oedipus Rex at 68

Euripides: Hippolytus at 52

Virgil: Aeneid at 51

Chaucer: Canterbury Tales at 60

Shakespeare: King Lear at 41

Milton: Paradise Lost at 57

Racine: Phedre at 38

Goethe: Faust I finished at 59; Faust II finished at 82

Beethoven: opus 125 (Ninth Symphony) at 53; the great string Quartets at 55

Wagner: Parsifal at 69

Botticelli: The Nativity at 56

Leonardo da Vinci: Mona Lisa at 54

Michelangelo: The Last Judgment at 66

Titian: Christ Crowned with Thorns at about 80. . . .

T. C. HOEPFNER Auburn, Ala.

Omniscience?

Sirs:

Would you care to know what irks me most about TIME? . . . It is a statement like the following [TIME, Sept. 3]: "When Soong talked tough, as he often did in the seven all-night conferences, Russia knew that Soong was not bluffing. Stalin, who likes straight talk, liked Soong."

Is your Moscow correspondent omniscient, or (as seems even more unlikely) does he have a direct pipeline to the Kremlin? . . .

MRS. RUSSELL HAYS

Lawrence, Kans.

P: Non-omniscient TIME'S source for such statements is almost always unimpeachable (as in this case), always unnamable.--ED.

Dilapidated Chronology

Sirs:

TIME, Sept. 10, 1945: "Clearly the 900-year-old Palace, which houses Britain's Parliament, was falling apart."

Well, maybe, but not as badly as your chronology. The Houses of Parliament were built from 1840-1850.

G. R. L. POTTER

Ottawa, Ont.

P: TIME'S error had a small kernel of truth: some of the original Palace, begun by Edward the Confessor (d. 1066), still stands as part of Britain's Houses of Parliament. But most of the Palace was destroyed by fires in 1512 and 1834.--ED.

"Confoozin' but Amoozin'"

Sirs:

TIME'S handling of psychoanalytical news bits has been fair and accurate in the past, a policy that is in complete accord with this writer's opinion of the magazine as a whole. In this light, your article under Medicine titled "The True Freudians" [TIME, Sept. 10], was very disappointing. Even if TIME'S writer is one of many violent dissenters I think that Freud and men of the Freud school have earned respectability at least, in the past few decades. . . . It seemed to me that the article was deliberately trying to picture analysts who are "Confoozin' but Amoozin'. . . ."

(CPL.) DAVID H. SIMONDS George Field, Ill.

Sirs: I am surprised and depressed that a book reviewer in TIME should be so old-fashioned as to write derisively of Freud. . . .

TIME itself, early in the '403, printed a penetrating and erudite review of Freud's last book (or an edition of his combined works), and referred farsightedly to future designations of our age as the Age of Freud--the first time, so far as I know, that this prophecy has been made in print, though it has since come into common usage. . . .

(MRS.) EVELYN MELLON Shaker Heights, Ohio

Sirs:

Nearly every psychologist is forced to modify Freud's theories of sexual determinism. . . . Your Medicine editor exposes nothing but his own folly when he equates Jung and Adler with Freud as the "Big Three" of psychoanalysis, and writes of the Freudian "monotheism" as though it were a slightly faded joke. . . .

LESLIE H. FARBER, M.D. Norfolk, Va.

Sirs:

Your usually objective reporter on Medicine [TIME, Sept. 10] titillates [meaning "titters?"--ED.] as if he had sneaked into a burlesque or found himself in the ladies' wash room. The only amusing aspect of the farcical appraisal of psychoanalysis in "The True Freudians" is the reporter's stammering concealment of his own embarrassment and diffidence. . . .

PHILIP S. WAGNER, M.D. Lexington, Va.

Sirs:

TIME writing is true to form in the article on psychoanalysis-- informative, humorous and stimulating; kick enough, in fact, to bring forth a letter from one who hates writing them. . . .

[NAME WITHHELD ON REQUEST] Middletown, Conn.

$728,000,000 Error

Sirs:

TIME refers [Sept. 3] to "The $132,000,000 Illinois Central Railroad."

The Illinois Central is an $860,000,000 property.

W. A. JOHNSTON President

Illinois Central System Chicago

P: Right is Illinois Central's President; wrong was TIME, which stupidly took his railroad's current assets for total assets.--ED.

Admirals by the Nose?

Sirs:

Let's get down to these purported sacrifices of the WACs, WAVES and Red Cross girls who have gone overseas. . . .

They've had the time of their lives. They've built up an aristocracy all its own. They made the rules. They led admirals and generals around by the nose. They snapped their fingers, and the officers jumped.

They have been wined & dined in luxurious officers' clubs and elsewhere in the most deserted places. They've had diamonds, jeeps, jewelry, money and love thrown at their feet.

The only one they never gave a tumble to throughout the war was the enlisted man. He couldn't afford them. He'll remember their arrogance. . . .

(Y 3/C) HENRY JASON

% Fleet Post Office San Francisco

Caserovingedsable to Oinc

Sirs: Refurart (referring to your article) "Oinc, Moinc, Soinc" [TIME, Sept. 10], perhaps the puckish Washington Post would enjoy estimating the thousands of man-hours . . . annually saved by frequent use of the 30-page abbreviation annex ... to the U.S. Naval Communication Instructions alone.

The peculiar thing about Naval abbreviations is that they work (reliability is paramount in Communications), mainly because they follow a system, i.e., 1) component parts remain constant and result in pronounceable compounds, 2) when double letters occur, one is Winchellishly dropped, and 3) abbreviations for Fleet or Force are eliminated when superfluous. A typical "change of duty" dispatch to one officer (of which there are dozens daily) contains 200 words, yet the agglutinous "transmitted version" normally contains less than 50 words.

Contrariwise, the British use initials only and the occasion frequently arises when one hardly knows if CECP represents "Commander Escort Carriers Pacific Fleet" or perhaps "Commander of the Entrance Control Post," etc. . . .

Oddly enough, compound abbreviations, etc., originated in the Post's profession, news gathering. Between 1851 & 1856, Mr. Daniel Craig, A.P.'s second general agent, suppressed the tendency on the part of telegraph operators (who were reporters as well) to compress phrases & parts of sentences into a polysyllabic whole, because "important . . . details were worth the wire costs." However, little did he know that "words" such as caserovingedsable, rehoeingedableness, retack-mentativeness, etc., had paved the way for our present-day agglutinous institutions!

J. E. DUNCAN Ensign, U.S.N.

% Fleet Post Office San Francisco

Shostakovich Quantity

Sirs:

In the Sept. 17 issue of TIME . . . you stated: "As a symphonist, Dmitri Shostakovich was now up to Beethoven--in quantity. Last week his new Ninth Symphony was tried out in Moscow."

I disagree with TIME on the part of the statement which says that the Russian is as great in quantity. I would like to call to the attention of TIME'S editors that Shostakovich has written six symphonies, having skipped the numbers 2, 3, 4, in numbering his works.

I would appreciate it if TIME would correct either mine or their error.

ALAN LEFKOWITZ

Pittsburgh

P: Reader Lefkowitz stands corrected. Shostakovich's Second (1927) and Third (1928) were not popular in Russia, his Fourth (1936) was so bad it was played only in private rehearsal.--ED.

Erroneous Ad

Sirs: TIME readers of United Aircraft Corp.'s advertisement, "Air Power," in your Sept. 3 issue may well have raised their eyebrows.

Through an unfortunate typographical omission at our typesetter's the aircraft industry was made to appear to take undue credit for its share in the wartime production of en gines and propellers. [Said United Aircraft's ad: "Up to 1942 . . . .nine-tenths of the propellers and engines."] The facts ... are that since 1942 over nine-tenths of the airframes and about half of the propellers and engines were produced by the aircraft industry. The rest were built by the auxiliary producers.

WILLIAM A. FORBES New York City

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