Education: Umfa Umfa, Glug Glug

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"The first people had hair growing, not just on their heads, but all over their bodies, like some shaggy dogs. They simply laid down on the ground when night came. They were bloodthirsty. They liked to drink the warm blood of animals they killed, as you would a glass of milk. They talked to each other with some sort of grunts—umfa umfa—glug glug." Thus did a Perth Amboy, N. J. public school teacher read last week to her sixth grade pupils. One little girl was immeasurably shocked & revolted, went home and told her father. He, Rev. Byron Christopher Nelson, vigorous young Lutheran minister, bounced off to a Kiwanis Club luncheon, read passages from the book, A Child's History of the World. Said he: ". . . There is plenty of other stuff to teach." (He is author of After Its Kind, considered authoritative by antievolutionists.)

Though A Child's History of the World is approved by the New Jersey State Board of Education, though its author is Headmaster Virgil Mores Hillyer of the Calvert School in Baltimore, it was forthwith Perth Amboycotted.

Next day Director Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union (champion of Evolution in the famed Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. in 1925) announced that the Union's Committee on Academic Freedom would urge the school board to recant. He thought the incident was significant: first of its kind in the North.