In an otherwise good article about Ruffian (September), Gene Smith really missed the boat with this statement: “It has nothing to do with male chauvinism to point out that male horses are stronger, even as male baseball players are stronger, as evidenced by no woman’s ever having played for the New York Mets or Los Angeles Dodgers or any major-league team in any city between the two.”
To argue that the absence of women in baseball is proof that they are unable to compete is ridiculous. I would suggest that the lack of women in baseball is, at the moment, evidence of their lack of welcome at all levels; it is only in the last decade or two that girls have been allowed to play in Little League. Girls/women are not welcome on the hardball diamond. Until they are, at all levels, we will not know if they can compete with men in the “bigs.” I suspect that this is one sport in which some women can do quite well, since, for the most part, it does not require brute strength pitted directly against brute strength.
Marguerite E. Horn
Davis, Calif.
Southpaw
In your November issue you printed a short piece under “My Brush With History” about New York Yankee great Joe DiMaggio.
It is certainly possible that, as a schoolboy, DiMaggio was able to throw with both hands. It is also possible, however, that the mind can play tricks on you after the passage of more than half a century. That is because, throughout his professional career, DiMaggio’s strong right arm was well respected by baserunners.
Marshall Adesman
Durham, N.C.
Equal Care
When J. S. Cartier’s article about the Western Front today (November) mentioned a German monument to their dead still “carefully maintained by the local French” people, it reminded me of a World War I battlefield tour I took shortly after the end of World War II. While I was exploring Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry I visited the American Cemetery and met the caretaker, who turned out to be an American himself.
We started to talk, and I found out he had been there all through the war just ended. I asked how the Germans treated a lone American taking care of an American monument in the midst of the Nazi occupation in France. “Well,” he said, “two well-dressed officers dropped in early on and asked to look around. I took them to the points of interest, ending up at the U.S. cemetery. They looked at the grave markers and asked if there were any German graves. I said yes and took them over to the smaller German cemetery. I could tell they were mentally comparing the maintenance of the American graves with the German ones. They had to admit there was no difference; I’d been very careful to see that all my graves were maintained as well as could be done. They left obviously pleased, and during the rest of the occupation many German visitors called upon me, but I was never molested in any way.”
Elmer S. Mumford
Kaysville, Utah
Jumping the Gun
Though much of it is excellent, the article by T. A. Heppenheimer entitled “Build-down” (December) disturbs me. It goes along with the widely touted notion that “we will no longer arm ourselves against a Soviet enemy that now is no more” and that “the new challenges are regional.” Isn’t this naive when the Russians still have all those long-range missiles? And now Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose party has emerged as the strongest anti-reform group in Russia’s new parliament, wants to become president, wants Alaska back, spews anti-Semitism, calls for absorbing Finland and the Baltics, threatens Germany (and Russia’s “enemiesÝ) with nuclear annihilation, and the like. This is not a time to “build down” unless we do it with the utmost care.
Robert Gumming
Moodus, Conn.
Queen and King
In the November issue Alan Hall wrote that a recent article on the Delta Queen had “solved a minor mystery that has plagued me since 1946”—namely, what was that drab-gray sternwheeler doing surrounded by Navy vessels in San Francisco Bay? But I’m afraid Mr. Hall’s mystery is not as neatly solved as he thinks.
The vessel in the photograph is not the Delta Queen. The Delta Queen had a wide stairway leading up to the hurricane deck, where the steam calliope is today, and she never moored in the old railroad-car float slip shown in the photograph. Only the Delta King moored there. Delta Queen, when at Treasure Island, moored at a pier not visible in the photo. I was a crew member of the Delta Queen during all of 1945 and 1946, up to the time the vessel was sold to a contractor, taken to Alaska, and converted into a barracks for construction workers. I was probably on board when your picture was taken.
A. P. Cooley
Lester, Pa.
Queen and King
You might be interested to know that the Delta King is operating as a hotel and restaurant in Sacramento, California, where she sits at the foot of K Street right where side-wheel river steamers awaited San Francisco-bound passengers on the first transcontinental railroad, which ended at Sacramento.
Stan Garvey, a Menlo Park writer working on a book about the Delta King and Delta Queen, learned that these two steamers apparently were the first passenger vessels to have air-cooled staterooms from the time they began operating between San Francisco and Sacramento in June 1927. True, it wasn’t refrigeration cooling, and it wouldn’t work in a swampy climate, but it did fine in California.
Richard E. Brown
Bakersfield, Calif.
Bad Association
I object to your use of the name “Dallas” on the cover of the November issue as a synonym for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The city is much more than the place where JFK died; after thirty years we should stop equating its name with a tragic event. When was the last time anyone referred to Robert Kennedy’s assassination as “Los Angeles” or to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination as “Memphis”?
Jerry C. Ray
Sherman, Tex.
The Myth of the West
In “A Tent on the Porch” (July/August) Wilfred M. McClay wonders if the myth of the West is vital and nourishing to the American mind or really nothing more than self-deception. While this and other questions raised by Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay are still debated, it is interesting to see how a “frontier consciousness” has informed some of our greatest literary minds. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, through his narrator Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby: “…for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” Carraway, like Fitzgerald and Turner, is from the Midwest (“the ragged edge of the universe”) and is drawn to the East by “civilization.” But he retreats to the West in the end, disillusioned by the excesses of the Jazz Age. Turner stuck it out in the East, occasionally taking refuge in the tent on his porch.
Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is another good example of twentieth-century American literature that incorporates frontier themes. Jack Burden, the disillusioned narrator, finds himself “in the West, at the end of History, the Last Man on that Last Coast.…” Certainly there are hundreds of similar examples in American literature.
Turner’s frontier thesis helped engender the myth of the West, which some consider a “barrier against the unpleasing truth.” But it also identified an important force acting on the American psyche, and it fed the minds of some very talented artists. For this I am thankful, and for McClay’s enjoyable article.
John S. Rogers
White Plains, Md.
Imaginative Philanthropy
John Steele Gordon’s otherwise fine sketch of “executive” contributions to the success of Sears, Roebuck & Co. (September) implies that Julius Rosenwald’s philanthropic works didn’t require much more than the ability to write checks. But it was there that his “executive” abilities were at their finest. After all, in setting up the Julius Rosenwald Fund, in 1917, Rosenwald employed some of the most able foundation talent, and the Fund’s stimulus packages were modeled after Rosenwald’s own uncanny way of “giving away” money. The idea was to stir local tax initiatives rather than to make people permanently dependent on charity.
Between 1912 and 1930, Rosenwald money built five thousand schools for African Americans in eleven Southern states, but one of the most salient side effects of the program was that it ameliorated the condition of white schools, since city fathers were determined that white facilities should be at least the equal of Rosenwald schools. Rosenwald, a Jew, understood the segregationist mentality well, and knew how to manipulate it for the betterment of the entire community.
