Letters: Aug. 30, 1968

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Sir: A choice between Nixon and Humphrey is no choice at all. Rather, such an election is a pacifier with which the Establishment hopes to quiet the people, forcing them to endorse and continue the past. I intend to vote with my feet against TweedleDum and Tweedle-Hum. Sweden, here I come.

RODGER KNAUS Berkeley, Calif.

And How It Was Covered

Sir: A lot of people complain that the American press either slants the news, misses the point, or wastes time and words on irrelevancies. After reading "Search Beyond Sadism" [Aug. 16], I think I'm beginning to understand why. While a major political convention was choosing a national ticket, the Chicago Daily News was counting prostitutes; the Philadelphia Inquirer was sitting in a bar with John Wayne; someone called Agnes Ash of Women's Wear Daily was chasing hotel owners; and the New York Times was covering citrus commission ceremonies, Tony Martin's songs and the food in Miami restaurants. Then they have the nerve to say they were bored! Small wonder that there was only one reporter in America who predicted Agnew would make the G.O.P. ticket. He was apparently the only one paying attention to politics.

MANON McKiNNON Atlanta

Erratum

Sir: Your otherwise excellent story on the Campbell Soup strike [Aug. 23] errs on one point. Close study of the labor settlements reached in the copper industry and at Union Carbide shows that the unions did not win company-wide bargaining contracts.

WILLIAM A. LYDGATE Earl Newsom & Co. Inc. Manhattan

Character Actor

Sir: You describe Robert Mitchum well indeed [Aug. 16]! One day in the late '40s, he came alongside as 1 was getting the car out for a run into Hollywood and asked for a lift. He asked if I would mind driving down Gower to the RKO studio and waiting for a minute. I did, and in about ten minutes he came out with two suits over his shoulder. "Something you forgot?" I asked him. "No," he said matter-of-factly. "RKO gets a fat fee for loaning me to Warners, and doesn't share it; so I needed a couple of suits, went in, and snitched these." He cast me in my first role as driver of the getaway car in a robbery — and he enjoyed it.

BARNEY OLDFIELD Vice President

Litton International Development Corp. Beverly Hills

Too Much to Swallow

Sir: Very interesting article on Anton Webern [Aug. 16]. It reminded me of still another musician who died a bizarre death. The 19th century Polish composer Czeslaw Modrzejewski is probably the only composer to be chewed to death by his own false teeth. The teeth were on a table next to his lawn couch, where Modrzejewski was reclining while attending an outdoor performance. Curiously, it was one of his own marches that set up the sympathetic vibrations in the teeth. They fell from the table; before anyone could reach him, Modrzejewski was fatally bitten by the vibrating dentures.

DAVID L. SCHWARTZ Albany, N.Y.

> After chewing this one over, TIME is convinced that the mythical Modrzejewski died from jumping to occlusions.