Letters, Oct. 19, 1931

(2 of 3)

Name: Harry A. Rohwer

Age: 23

Weight: 787 Ib.

Place: Los Angeles

According to TIME, Oct. 5, footnote p. 23 ". . . Heaviest monster in history was Daniel

Lambert who weighed 739 Ib. . . ."

Monster Rohwer, I take it, then, is heavier by 48 Ib.

JOSEPH BACHHAUSEN

South Bend, Ind.

Monster Rohwer, trade-named "Happy High," last month married one Mereida Caswell (see cut).—ED.

Sell for Van Tassel

Sirs:

. . . Not to take one leaf from the hard-won laurels of me-old-friend-and-pal Chet Van Tassel, he was never the Editor of Harper's Bazaar. Nor was it under his business managership that it became a "valuable property." Chester hoed and planted and weeded and brought it to bud but succeeding Business Manager Eugene Forker, now publisher of the New York American, was the force that actually brought things about for the further successful succession of Business Manager Fredric Drake, now at it at the old stand and popularly known as The Right Man in The Right Place.

The Editor, during those trying seven years of Van Tassel to Forker to Drake during which Harper's Bazaar became a valuable property, was the now noted observer, successful Adman and happy TIME reader,

HENRY BLACKMAN SELL New York City

Editor Burton's Credit

Sirs:

On p. 24 TIME, Sept. 21, you give practically all the credit for the improvement in Physical Culture to Mr. Oursler. I do not think you are either right or fair in that. The marvelous change in the magazine during Mr. Burton's one-year editorship speaks for itself. And as editor of McCall's some years ago, he made just as great an improvement in McCall's. You cannot credit Mr. Oursler with that, can you? Please, TIME, "Honor to whom honor is due.''

KAREN LODGE

Los Angeles, Calif.

Sinkurea Jidai

Sirs:

I note in your last issue that I have been taken to a sanatorium for observation as a result of a nervous breakdown (TIME, Sept. 28).

You publish lots of gossip, and I suppose you cannot be expected to spend much time finding out whether it is true or not. A reporter for a Los Angeles newspaper called up my wife and said he understood I was suffering from a nervous breakdown. My wife replied that it was absolutely untrue, that I was going to a hospital to have my physician seek the cause of a feverish condition. Nevertheless, the story went out all over the country that I was suffering from a nervous breakdown. Apparently a man in America is absolutely defenseless against newspaper rascality of this sort.

Since you want all the gossip, I will tell you that the condition was what our grandmothers used to call a "cold on the kidneys," although the doctors have a fancy name for it now. I am home again and all right, and will continue to worry you with novels of which you strongly disapprove. They do not make much of a hit with New York intellectuals, it appears, but they have changed the mentality of a whole new generation of the students of China, Japan, India and Russia. Has any of your collectors of gossip told you that the present literary period in Japan is known as Sinkurea Jidai which means "the Sinclair era"?

New York is a small village.

UPTON SINCLAIR

Pasadena, Calif.