Letters: Jan. 20, 1967

(4 of 4)

Chairman, THINK Editorial Board IBM Manhattan

Grandfather Goose

Sir: TIME'S usually thorough researchers did not go far enough into the ancestry of the Ford "Tin Goose" [Jan. 6].

William B. Stout was not its "original designer" but rather the visionary promoter who persuaded Henry Ford to make three-engined passenger aircraft.

The first version was created in the Stout Metal Airplane Co. (which Ford partly owned) by mongrelizing a single-engined plane, the "Stout Air Pullman." Only one of these bulbous-nosed trimotors was made flyable, and it was flown only once. Immediately after its hair-raising test flight, the pilot, Shorty Schroder, went to Ford and for several hours heatedly described its ungainliness and capricious lift characteristics. The next day Ford bought Stout's company.

My father was hired by Ford's chief engineer and given a free hand to design the Ford Tri-Motor. It is to Torn Towle, a relatively unknown aviation pioneer, that credit should go for designing the Tin Goose, with its legendary lifting power, durability and structural integrity. He is the real grandfather of the Bushmaster 2000, son of Tin Goose.

AUSTIN C. TOWLE Cincinnati

His Mug Runneth Over

Sir: The leftist camp sometimes produces a man of such honesty that he cannot help attacking folly everywhere.

Such an old warrior is Malcolm Muggeridge [Jan. 6]. "Compulsive readability" he has indeed, but deeper yet, the reader senses a whole man, responding to the falseness, betrayal and insatiety (to use Philip Wylie's expression) of much of modern life. It will be sad if Muggeridge ever rebounds all the way over to the tight little camp of religious orthodoxy. Understandable, but sad. For then free men might lose a vigorous spokesman, standing in the unaffrightable position of Emerson's thinking man, sending out his shafts wherever merited.

"It is greatly to be hoped" that Muggeridge will remain, as Orwell characterized Dickens, "a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

GORDON WILSON Detroit