Letters

"Foster This Ripple"

To THE EDITOR: Your "Letters" column is doing it again! Years ago the suggested board sidewalk to Leb electrified the alumni body. Now you have presented to the current alumni body a new subject for seasonal foaming and frothing.

Mike Cardozo '32 led off in your November issue by suggesting Dartmouth's selection system was not so good. He offered, tongue in cheek, a predominantly Republican alumni group and his good self as fruits of the tree by which said tree might be judged. For your December issue John Moody '40 feels that Mike's bulge in cheek is gum and not tongue, and concludes "It's time to call.'' All of which would leave Mike to pick up his five cents and look for a pin-ball machine. I for one believe you may have started a real discussion. Of course only time will tell, but I feel sure some good shavian will write in as a reformed mink coat salesman and confess all. (My guess is that your mail will include several epistles suggesting for Mike's benefit that to err is human and that to forgive is humane.) Let us all hope that this wee spark is fanned into an issue.

Some 40 years ago one of Harvard's immortals observed it is strange that so many religious people get so little comfort out of their religion. So few politicians get so little out of politics. So few get anything out of life. So few live. So. ... We have boiled down existence to a dangerous point.

Any good insurance salesman will tell you how many more widows than widowers lurk behind bushes. The male of the species homo needs to be on guard. He also needs a wee shot in the arm. Mike started it, John has jumped in. You are the lab custodian. Foster this ripple of mental consciousness. Let's go and with a grin.

May I suggest the old one again? Look at the $l0 or $20 Federal Reserve note left in your pocket after Christmas. On its face is the warning that it is not "lawful money." Did Mike do it? Maybe this is another Soviet plan to get us Unitarians (Democrat Stevenson included) in power. Anyhow the warning is worth an editorial.

Quincy, Mass.

Visit To Moor head

To THE EDITOR: Clarke Bassett's account of his visit with William R. Tillotson '77 in the December ALUMNI MAGAZINE is of especial interest to me. The same day that I read it, I had been going through some letters which my father, Charles M. Cone '75, had written while he was travelling through the Middle West in the fall of 1881.

He arrived in Moorhead, Minn., the third week in November, and because he "found the air so bracing" he decided to stay for two weeks. He lodged at the Jay Cook House "my quarters here are all that could be asked; I pay 51.50 per day which, everything considered, is a fair price."

My father mentioned two brothers in Moorhead, Ozro and T. J. Burnham; he did some business with the latter relative to land investments. He wrote as if he were already acquainted with these men, so I infer that one of them must have been Mr. Tillotson's friend from Vermont, as my father also came from that state, residing in the town of Hartford.

He speaks of meeting Mr. Tillotson —"a graduate of Dartmouth admitted to the bar in New Hampshire last year, now in the office of B. & G.," among other "pleasant acquaintances here, both young gents and ladies the latter quite cultivated and I haven't seen them all yet." A later letter tells of attending a couple of "sociables" and of Thanksgiving dinner at Mr. Burnham's.

Though he wrote at length of the favorable prospects for capital investments in the region "for the next 30-50 years and possibly 100" —my father apparently felt no urge to leave his native state permanently himself. He returned to Vermont, where he engaged in business for the rest of his long life in the village where he had been born.

West Hartford, Conn.