SPAN: February 1969

SPAN OF EVENTS "THERE'S A BEAUTIFUL earth ouf there," reported Co;nmander Frank Borman aboard Apollo 8, as the spacecraft orbited the moon on Christmas Day. He shared with his fellow-astronauts, James Lovell and William Anders, man's first lunar view of the earth in the jet black sky.

America's pioneering flight to the moon came just seven years after the first manned space flight in 1961 and opened a new chapter in the exploration of outer space. As President Johnson said, the flight compared with the epochal journey of Christopher Columbus to the "new world" 500 years earlier.

On December 27 when the Apollo-8 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific, the world applauded their historic space flight, describing it as "marvellous," "daring" and "extraordinary." President Zakir Husain

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said: "We in India have followed with great admiration and no little awe the incredible flight of Apollo 8 The safe and successful completion of this hazardous mission is a matter of universal relief and highest commendation."

The challenging nature of this space mission accounted for the fascination with which the world followed the 590,OOO-mile flight through its 147 hours-from lift-off on December 21 at 6 :21 p.m. (IST) to splashdown on December 27 at 9 :21 p.m. (1ST).

As the world cheered the Apollo-8 achievements, a giant Saturn-5 rocket was on its way to Pad B on Launch Complex 39 of Cape Kennedy spaceport. Atop this rocket was the Apollo-9 craft, scheduled for launching into earth orbit on February 28. Its mission: first manned testing of the four-legged lunar landing vehicle. Two months later, Apollo 10 will test everything required for a lunar landing except actual touchdown. And, perhaps as early as next July, Apollo 11 will make the first U.S. attempt to land men on the surface of the moon.

SPAN The American Magazine

2

by V.S. Nanda

Photographers

8

The Giant Little Magazine

16

by Carmen Kagal

Science Explores the Monsoon Sea

22

by Samuel W. Matthews

The Man Who Revolutionized Journalism 28

by Grayce Northcross

A Cool Cheer for Middle Age

34

by Russell Lynes

The New American Family

38

by Phyllis McGinley

The Apollo-8 astronauts saw a "vast, lonely, forbidding" moon landscape, leji, from 170 miles altitude. On homell"Qrd journey, they photographed "the good earth," lop. Astronauts Borman, Lovell and Anders, below, arrive on the U.8.S. Yorktown after frogmen, above, assisted in their recovery from spacecraft.

Front cover Apollo-8 astronauts photographed earth during their first orbit around the moon on December 24.

The lunar horizon, foreground, is some 500 miles from their spacecraft. The edge of the sunlit portion on earth cuts across Africa.

Back cover This issue is devoted to features from and about American magazines. An important window to the world, they reflect a wide range of interests and are noted for free expression of political criticism. Cover photograph by AvinashC.Pasricha.

W. D. Miller, Publisher; Dean Brown, Editor; V. S. Nanda, Mg. Editor.

Editorial Staff: Carmen Kagal, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal K. Sharma, Krishan G. Gabrani, P.R. Gupta, Art Staff: B. Roy Choudhury, Nand K. Katyal, Kanti Roy, Kuldip Singh Jus, Gopi Gajwani. Production Staff: Awtar S. Marwaha, Mammen Philip. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed by Arun K. Mehta at Vakil & Sons Pvt Ltd Narandas Building, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bon~bay-i: Manuscripts and photographs sent for publication must be accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope for return. SPAN is not responsible for any loss in transit. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged except when they are copyrighted. For details, write to the Editor, SPAN. Subscription: One year, rupees five; single copy, fifty paise. For change of address, send old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager. Allow six weeks for change of address to become effective.

)J A BOLD., COLOURFUL REFLECTION OF TODAY'S WORLD IN THE AMERICAN

Enjoying the fullest freedom to comment and criticize, American magazines of today cover almost every conceivable subject and interest, and are a true mirror of a free, democratic society. Of the 1,500 current periodicals, fifty-two have a circulation of more than a million copies per issue.

A cursory perusal also indicates the great freedom enjoyed by both publishers and readers; only the bounds of good taste and competent scholarship limit the content of American magazines.

"Of course there is junk published," one student of magazines said recently, "but what is amazing is the general high level of both content and presentation."

Magazines are an important link in the communications network which has, over the years, played a major role in the unification of the United States. In fact magazines formed the first truly national chain of mass communication. From 1900 to the advent WITHINFIVEDAYS of the cremation of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964, of national radio networks in the late 1920s, only magazines some forty million Americans saw six pages of colour pictures enjoyed regular circulation throughout the country. of the moving event in Life magazine. Three years later, Look In a sense the modern magazine is a product of the mass profeatured the Tanjore rice harvest in a spread of dramatic colour duction era-that period when technology made possible the lowphotographs. In Foreign Affairs, a scholarly journal on inter- cost production of goods in large volume. Magazines offered a national relations, a thoughtful review appeared of India's eco- vehicle to carry the message of advertisers into homes across the nomic problems. country at low cost. (While a page of advertising space may cost To these examples of American magazines' continuing interest $20,000 for one insertion in a magazine of ten-million circulation, in India can be added many more. In a House Beautiful feature the cost per copy is only .2 cent; if it is assumed that three to four Indian fabrics add colour and gaiety to a bedroom-cum-study. An persons read each copy, the cost per reader is even lower.) article in National Geographic portrays a wedding in Jaisalmer.

With its origins in both England and America of the eighteenth Esquire's travel editor reports from Jaipur. McCall's models, century, the magazine's present format is the product of twentieth wearing Indian silks, are photographed at Delhi's Red Fort. The century technology. High-speed printing machines and colour New York Times Magazine offers a perceptive report on Calcutta photography make possible weekly press runs-in colour-of by its India correspondent, Joseph Lelyveld. eight to ten million copies. And the American economy, based on In this century magazines have always been an important large-scale production, rising standards of living and mass eduwindow to the world for the American people, offering regular cation, helps to create the demand which these large print runs glimpses into the life, customs and culture of other peoples. In seek to meet. recent years they have assumed the role of educator, innovator, Of the American magazines established before 1900, The Saturconnoisseur and general counsellor on almost every conceivable day Evening Post, which ceased publication this month, was the subject. With the advent of national television networks in 1948, oldest. Founded in 1821, and starting as a four-page periodical, the demise of magazines was predicted, and several venerable it soon became one of the most important weeklies in the country. publications(Collier's, Woman's Home Companion) did succumb Financial difficulties led to a period of decline but in the late to TV. But scores of others weathered the electronic storm and 1890s it emerged with new vigour under its new owner, Cyril several new magazines entered the field.

H.K. Curtis, of the Curtis Publishing Company, and a new editor, All of the new magazines had a common denominator: each George Horace Lorimer, who styled the Post to appeal primarily was built around a specific interest-cars or conservatism, photo- to the American businessman. Its basic concepts offree enterprise, graphy or protest, farming or pharmacy. No matter what their competition and American nationalism remained unchanged special interest, profession or avocation, American readers can through the years, but lately there was a greater diversity of infind the subject covered in depth by some magazine or professional terests. The magazine attained a circulation of about seven million journal. There are magazines especially edited for civic or munici- in its closing years but was not able to compete financially with pal officials, police chiefs, institution managers, atomic scientists, its rivals. school-teachers, industrial photographers, Boy Scouts, oceanogOf the other current magazines founded in the nineteenth raphers, art directors, industrial designers, automotive engineers century, The Atlantic monthly has a high reputation as a literary -and for practitioners and followers of nearly every other in- journal to which the most distinguished American writers have terest, occupation, hobby or political viewpoint. consistently sent their contributions. Its early issues carried EmerAt the same time as special interest magazines have found son's poems, Thoreau's philosophic essays and Oliver Wendell success, the big general magazines, with their imaginative layouts, Holmes' "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." In later times bold typography and bright, interpretive photography, have national leaders of the eminence of Woodrow Wilson wrote for become even bigger. While television today brings events as they the magazine. happen into millions of homes, Americans still rely on these The Atlantic's formula is "To inoculate the few who influence magazines for a permanent, in-depth record of world events. the many." This formula may indeed be justly applied not only to.

Of the 100magazines with a circulation of over 380,000 listed in The Atlantic but also to at least two other contemporary literary The World Almanac, fifty-two produce more than one million journals-The Saturday Review and The New Yorker-which, copies per issue, and the top twelve are sent to more than five together with the older magazine, have exercised considerable million homes. All of the top one hundred are privately owned influence in moulding American thought and spirit. The New and supported almost entirely by advertising revenue. Altogether Yorker-founded in 1925 by Harold Ross who was its editor for there are more than 1,500 periodicals published in the United more than a quarter century-is pre-eminently a magazine of States. A random selection suggests the broad range of interests, satire and subtle humour. Sophisticated, intensively edited, chaste not only of the magazines, but of the American people. in style and conservative in presentation, it is perhaps the most

scholarly of mass-circulation, general-interest magazines. It has no colour on the editorial pages, eschews blurbs and sub-heads in display type, and gives a general impression of restraint and unity. Names of authors, even the most famous and prestigious, always appear at the end of the story or article. Candid, sometimes sharply ironic, biographies and amusing cartoons are two of its more popular features. The Saturday Review, at one time mainly a collection of book reviews, now covers a wider range of subjects including travel, concerts, recordings, television and the cinema, besides new books.

Another literary magazine of note, founded in 1850,is Harper's Monthly, which started as a digest-type publication and reprinted in its early editions some of the works of Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Mark Twain and Du Maurier. Its scope was later expanded to include vital social, economic and political issues. It was the first magazine to publish-in 1940-an appraisal of the discovery of atomic power. A recent issue was devoted to a comprehensive report of the Republican and Democratic Conventions by Norman Mailer, the well-known American author.

It was this magazine's weekly counterpart, Harper's Weekly, which developed pictorial journalism and can be truly regarded as, the forerunner of the American picture magazines of today.

Harper's Weekly made journalistic history by deputing its writers and artists to report on the American Civil War. Thomas Nast's war cartoons and drawings attracted the attention of Abraham Lincoln who remarked that Nast had been "the country's most effective recruiting sergeant." It was Nast's pictorial lampooning, too, which proved most powerful in exposing the corrupt practices of the notorious Tweed Ring and Tammany Hall which controlled the New York city administration and even the State legislature.

Spurning a bribe of half-a-million dollars in gold, Nast continued his attack on the Ring until it was smashed.

In the early 1900s big business in America, with its monopolies and trusts, was under a cloud and several U.S. magazines carried on intensive campaigns for business and social reform. Foremost among what came to be known as the "muckrakers" was McClure's Magazine, whose series of articles by Ida Tarbell on the Standard Oil Company was the first important expose of the unscrupulous methods employed by a large corporation to achieve its objectives. Written after laborious research by Miss Tarbell. a scholar and idealist, the articles roused public opinion and led to Congressional investigations and regulatory legislation. The reforms which followed removed the stigma of exploitation from big business and the term "capitalism" acquired a new and more favourable connotation. Not less significant was another series published by the magazine: Lincoln Steffens' "The Shame of the Cities," which exposed corrupt practices in city governments, and also resulted in needed reforms.

While literature, social and administrative reform are still important concerns of American magazines, in recent years they have developed a wide range and diversity of interests. Keeping pace with the expansion of the nation's economy, the increase in aflluence, the growth of communications and the emergence of the United States as a world power, the magazines have not only multiplied in number but considerably enlarged their horizons.

Many new magazines have come into being to cater for special groups. At the same time, the big national magazines cover global events and give their readers meaningful portrayals of other lands, their leaders, culture and economy.

American magazine publishers recognized early the need for

THE SECOND BATTLE OF

BRITAIN

continued

11YEARS

Portraying all kinds of movements, cults, groups, in the U.S., the larger magazines also cover important personalities, events, everywhere in the world.

special features for women readers. The Ladies' Home Journal, which developed from a women's section in another publication, has been for more than eight decades the American woman's guide and counsellor on all subjects relating to the home and family.

Two later magazines in the same class are Woman's Day and Better Homes & Gardens. In the realm of women's fashions, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, their pages replete with pictures of glamorous models displaying next season's hairdos, clothes andjewellery, are in the lead.

Beyond familiar domestic themes, women's magazines have often turned their attention to other subjects affecting women and the community. They have influenced housing development and community beautification projects, and campaigned against disease and spurious drugs. Some sixty years ago, when the subject was strictly taboo, the Ladies' Home Journal published a series of articles on venereal disease and its effects on the health of women and newborn babies. In spite of75,000 outraged readers cancelling their subscriptions, the journal kept up its fight and finally won the support of several prominent writers and public leaders. Today women's magazines carry informed articles on contraceptive pills and other modern drugs.

Commenting on the role of women's magazines in the U.S., Frederick Lewis Allen writes in his book The Big Change: "For decades they have been educating millions of women, month after month, in the techniques of better living .... Some of the information given has been superficial or complacent, but the net educational effect upon people whose horizons have been hemmed in by circumstances has been remarkable."

Trends in current magazine editing must necessarily reflect the accelerated rate of change in the present-day world and conform to changes in readers' tastes and demands. Robert Stein, Director of Editorial Development for McCall's-another leading U.S. magazine primarily devoted to women and the family and now nearing its centenary-states that two major reader requirements of today are greater depth and immediacy. McCall's, he reports, spent over a year and several thousand dollars in sponsoring a study on the effects of the birth control pill, so that an authoritative report could be made to its readers.

Immediacy is especially important in the case of a weekly magazine such as Time which competes with the daily press in the dissemination and interpretation of news. Founded in 1923 by Henry Luce (see page 28) and Briton Hadden, Time, with its four international editions and a current circulation of nearly threeand-a-halfmillion, is at present one of America's most influential magazines. Life, also founded by Henry Luce, is perhaps the world's leading picture magazine. Its wide photographic coverage has included not only glamour girls, gangsters, sportsmen and world personalities, but such historic events as the Second World War and, more recently, the war in Vietnam. The poignant story of the Soviet army's march into Czechoslovakia and the heroic, passive resistance of a brave people, was told more effectively in Life's pictures than in most verbal accounts of the invasion.

Fortune was conceived by Henry Luce as a magazine which would "reflect industrial life as faithfully in ink and paper and

word as the finest skyscraper reflects it in stone, steel and architecture." It has established a reputation as an authoritative, welldocumented publication on business, economics, technology, labour and allied subjects. Sports Illustrated, the last of Luce's magazine enterprises, first appeared in 1954 and covered nearly a hundred sports during its first year of publication. It continues to publish authoritative, well-illustrated profiles of sports personalities and features on all kinds of sports, outdoor and indoor.

The expanding interest of American magazines in world problems is reflected in the increasing number of stories on developing countries including India. Besides those already mentioned, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report have published wellinformed articles on Indian leaders and this country's food and population problems. Both these magazines have developed special techniques for presentation of news.

The United States is a young country and it is not unnatural that Americans should be curious about the history and culture of older countries and civilizations while taking pride in their own heritage and progress. Magazines such as The National Geographic, Holiday and Horizons continually whet this curiosity and more and more people are taking advantage of increased leisure and improved transport facilities to satisfy their urge for travel and exploration. The National Geographic, founded in 1888 as the official publication of the National Geographic Society, has established a world-wide reputation for profusely illustrated articles on diverse lands, peoples and natural history. Detailed, meticulously accurate maps are a feature of the publication and, apart from .being incorporated into articles, are occasionally inserted as supplements. (This issue of SPAN contains a National Geographic map of the Indian Ocean Floor.) The National Geographic was the first magazine to use colour exclusively for its illustrations. Holiday, one of the most successful magazines of the post-war period, describes itself as "the magazine of creative leisure." It includes in its purview not only places of historic or tourist interest but sports, pastimes and hobbies, preparation of food, selection of clothing and furnishing of the home.

While the national magazines have a wide readership, in general each publication has a well-defined range of interests and does not seek to feature every subject under the sun. On the other hand, the average reader has an insatiable curiosity about many subjects and has not the time or the resources to read a large number of magazines or books. It is in this context that the Reader's Digest (see page 16), founded by DeWitt Wallace in 1922, has achieved one of the most spectacular successes in the history of journalism.

The phenomenal growth of American magazines and the vast improvements in printing and design have been made possible mainly by the development of advertising and the revenue derived from it. Apart from conveying information about products and services to readers, modern advertising has considerable intrinsic interest. Imaginative use of illustrations in colour and black-andwhite and well-written, provocative copy often make the advertisement pages of an American magazine as attractive for the casual reader as the editorial part. But advertising is not indispensable, as proved by another post-war success, American Heritage, which has been able to build up a sizable circulation without advertising support. A comparatively expensive magazine, with hard covers, elegantly produced and with full-colour illustrations, American Heritage is a scholarly journal devoted to American history.

Apart from the large, better-known magazines, hundreds of small magazines-mostly literary, professional or highly special-

ized-are published in the United States. Usually short-lived, with a small circulation and with little pretence to elegance of printing or layout, these little magazines are distinguished by their independence of spirit and disregard of convention. They have occasionally served to introduce writers who were denied larger platforms but later became famous. One example is Poetry, America's oldest little magazine, which published a poem by Ezra Pound in its first issue in 1912. Another small magazine, Little Review, published excerpts from James Joyce's classic Ulysses, then unpublished. But the editor and publisher, Miss Margaret Anderson, was fined by the court for her initiative; the judge ruled that the questionable passages could not be read aloud in the court "in the presence of a lady"-no other than pretty Miss Anderson, the publisher.

This quaint incident occurred half-a-century ago. Since then concepts of morality and propriety have changed radically and hardly any subject is taboo in American journalism today. U.S. magazines discuss fearlessly and with great candour the merits and demerits of their government and the personality and performance of the President. They are quick to point their finger at symptoms of inefficiency, corruption or nepotism at any level of administration or in business. Some of them are avowedly magazines of dissent-one is named Dissent-and continually examine and criticize government policies, both from the point of view of immediate or short-term public interest and from a longer historical and cultural perspective.

At the same time American magazines have travelled a long way from Victorian prudery and the puritanism of a bygone age.

Magazines like Playboy, which deliberately glamorizes sex and crusades against conventional morality, may offend some tastes but afford satisfaction and even pleasure to others.

Since the days of its original ancestors-Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's The Tatler and The Spectator in eighteenthcentury England and Benjamin Franklin's The General Magazine in colonial America-the magazine has developed and diversified beyond recognition. In contrast to the English periodicals, which were mainly a forum for literary exercise or a vehicle of social and political satire, Franklin's publication was a miscellany containing, besides news, such varied material as a discussion of the currency, sermons by noted clergymen and pages of verse.

Between this pioneering journalistic effort and the U.S. magazines of the present day are more than two hundred years of allround national development and the steady, vast expansIOn of the peoples' multifarious interests. By portraying all kinds of movements, cults and groups ranging from political leftists and religious zealots to nudists and hippies, American magazines today mirror the whole panorama of life and thought in the United States.

Through their foreign news bureaus and the enterprise of their reporters and photographers, the larger publications also cover important personalities, events and trends in other countries and give their readers meaningful portrayals of the world scene.

The fullest freedom enjoyed by American magazines to discuss and criticize public leaders, national policies and day-to-day events, and their complete lack of inhibitions, are in refreshing contrast to the rigid conformity imposed on the press in some other countries. Oscar Wilde's piquant comment that "In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever" is intelligible only in this context of the complete freedom of the American press and its pervasive influence in every sphere of life.

END

Howard Sochurek, whose picture above of construction at Bhakra dam appeared in "Family of Man" exhibit, made photos in India for Life's Great Religions series. His work also appears frequently inNational Geographic and Holiday .

Yoichi R. Okamoto, 53, was official White House photographer during Johnson Administration, made unparalleled record of Presidency. An American of Japanese ancestry, Okamoto photographed many world leaders including Mrs. Indira Gandhi during her '66 visit to Washington.

•

Andreas Feininger has specialized in tight close-ups of common-place subjects because, he says, "the camera can 'see' reality in a more penetrating way than the eye." The photobelowalso demonstrates Feininger's great technical virtuosity.

PHOTOGRAPHERS PHOTOGRAPHS ARE a powerful medium for communicating ideas and selling goods in American magazines. Of all the pictures printed, some eighty per cent are photographs; more than ten million are bought each year for publication. But editors are highly selective and stiff competition has been a stimulant to the creative talents of scores of photographers, many of them now world famous for their special ability to communicate through the medium of photography. Fourteen internationally renowned photographers-most still working-are represented on these pages.

Gjon Mili and Paul Nodler were among the first to use the speedlight for a series of unusual pictures such as this multiple exposure view of basketbal/'s classic hook shot. Mili's work has appeared in Life since '40s.

Edward Steichen, who will be 90 next month, pioneered magazine illustration in 1920s, headed U.S. Navy combat photographers in World War II and designed famous "Family of Man" photo exhibit.

His portrait of his brother-in-law Carl Sandburg, leji, has been widely reprinted.

Margaret Bourke-White, one of the most sllccessful women photographers, specialized in industry, joined Fortune in 1929 and made Life's first cover picture in 1936. During 1947 visit to India, she made famous photo of Gandhi shown below.

Arnold Newman's portrait subjects have included former President Johnson and Composer Aaron 'ropland, above. Newman often photo( graphs'nr.r;ubjects in[ront of object representative of their profession, posed Copland on piano bench with musical score in the background.

Philippe Halsman has made more than 90 COl'er photographs for Life-a record. And most have been studio portraits. Dramatizing Dr. Robert Oppenheimer's reputation as an intellectual, Halsmanfocused both camera and lights on the scientist's forehead for interpretive portrait.

NZy,: ).

路...-路路.路.-.A.

Henri Cartier-Bresson has been called "the world's greatest photographer." On every continent he has sought to capture moments that make a definitive statement of nre. His famous 1948 photograph of Gandhi's jimeral, right, records with clarity and precision a moment of anguish meaningful to all men.

David Douglas Duncan's widely published photograph of Captain "Ike" Trenton, above, brought the grim face of Korean war to millions throughout the world. An intrepid adventurer, Duncan's career as photographer spans some thirty years, includes three wars, coverage of the partition of India in 1947.

Mark Kaufmann was a Life staff photographer for nineteen years, covered major news stories on every continent before becoming free-lancer in 1960. His 1954 photo of Roger Bannister outpacing John Landy, in 3:59.4 minute mile run, right, appeared in Sports Illustrated, captures tension and triumph.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, a pioneer in candid photography, has perhaps snapped more celebrities than any other photographer.

But his versatility is demonstrated in the photo at left of elderly couple as they visit in front of their small-town home.

Irving Penn is widely reputed for por-

traits, still life, editorial illustration, advertising, photo-journalism and travel photography. The studied informality of the Penn photograph, below, established a new trend in fashion photography.

t)

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JERROLD SCHATZBERG

FORMOSTphotographers, there are few subjects they would rather shoot than pretty girls in swimsuits. But in the fiercely demanding world of fashion photography, pretty girls in swimsuits usually raise a problem: how to present what is basically the same old thing in a light that is new,

different, exciting. Jerrold Schatzberg's answer was to photograph the girls through a hazy curtain of water-drops, investing them with a touch of mystery. Forced to depict women's fashions imaginatively, American photographers have come up with some of their most creative work. And their pictures are splashed across the pages of the fashion magazines which are bolder and brighter than ever before. These magazinesnotably Vogue and Harper's Bazaar-and the fashion sections of other women's publications like McCall's and Ladies' Home Journal exert a powerful influence on the clothing and apparel industries. Because they are largely instrumental in determining what the American woman will buy, and where she will buy it. The swimsuits shown at left are of quickdrying knit fabric, one striped, one Harlequin-patterned. At right is a knitted sheath.

Perhaps the most remarkable publishing phenomenon in history, the "Reader's Digest" has grown over the years from a small, modest periodical . into a gigantic, immensely profitable and influential publication. It is published in fourteen languages and some thirty editions, with a total circulation of 28 million.

The brain-child of DeWitt Wallace, and carefully nurtured by him and his wife Lila, the magazine, with its compound of faith, idealism and optimism, has endeared itself to millions of readers. Its abridgement and editing of articles has become a higWyspecialized function which one writer regards a "minor art form."

WHEN THE EXPLORERAdmiral Richard E. Byrd spent five months alone in the AntaJ;ctic wastes, the only reading material he had with him was six copies of the Reader's Digest. There is little reason to doubt the accuracy of this story -it is thoroughly in keeping with the ubiquitous nature of the magazine.

Even in India, one is constantly coming across the Digest in trains and buses, in remote hill-station hotels and out-ofthe-way dak bungalows.

None of this is surprising for, with a current circulation of twenty-eight million, the Reader's Digest is by far the most widely read magazine in the world.

It is published in fourteen languages and some thirty editions, including one each for school and college students, and five language versions in Braille for the blind. It goes to more than 100 countries, in one-fifth of which it outsells all other monthly magazines.

These figures are part of the most remarkable publishing phenomenon in history: the modest little pocket-sized periodical that grew into a gigantic, immensely profitable, and possibly the most influential magazine in the world.

What are the ingredients of its amazing success? Given the harsh and highly competitive conditions of the U.S. magazine-publishing industry, where has the Digest succeeded where older and richer periodicals have failed?

There are, of course, no simple answers to these questions. But there are several

factors which have contributed in greater or lesser degree to the success of the magazine, The Reader's Digest is the brain-child of one man-DeWitt Wallace, a Minnesota minister's son who started publishing the magazine in 1922 with the help of 4,000 borrowed dollars. In conceiving of the Digest, Wallace had come up with an entirely new idea; but his great gift lay in k~owing exactly what people would be interested in reading. As Time magazine less charitably described it, "he had an infallible instinct for middlebrow tastes."

It is true that when Wallace thought of people he' thought of the average reader, the man in the street, the nameless millions scorned by more esoteric publishing ventures. At the Digest's headquarters in Chappaqua, thirty miles from New York, staff members still say, "If Wally likes it, then twenty-eight million other people will like it."

The secret of what the people will like is contained in the magazine's editorial formula, which has not changed significantly since birth. Over the years, each issue has offered in more or less the same proportions its unique blend of key Digest subjects: human interest stories, medicine, women, humour, inspiration, the art of living, adventure, science, morals, politics, and self-improvement. As the editor promised in his first issue, the magazine would carry "no articles of limited or specialized ap-

peal," would strive always for stories "of lasting interest."

In this, Wallace's judgment was incredibly accurate, for the first issue's table of contents could well pass muster today. How, for example, can one challenge the timelessness of: "LoveLuxury or Necessity," "How to Keep Young Mentally," "Wanted-Motives forMotherhood," "The Firefly's Light," and "Progress in Science." Equally important, the first issue also contained the humorous departments, fillers and one-line quips that contribute so much to the magazine's present individuality.

The fact that it has remained unchanged in content, size, format, and for the first thirty-five years even in price (25 cents in the U.S.) has gained for the Digest a valuable advantage: that of familiarity. Each issue of the magazine is greeted like an old friend.

The reader knows just what to find and where to find it. He may turn at once to his favourite feature, and he probably reads the jokes all through and then goes back to read the articles. Recent research has shown that magazine-reading habits die hard; and for millions the world over the Reader's Digest has become a habit.

One of DeWitt Wallace's basic discoveries was that in today's fast-moving world people do not want to read long articles setting forth all the details. Here again, he correctly gauged the average reader's attention span. Though many continued

The critic H.L. Mencken once said: "I have yet to encounter an article that was seriously damaged by the condensation, and I can recall dozens that were palpably improved."

subscribers object to the Digest's encapsulated treatment of subjects, the vast majority, it would seem, like it better this way.

From the first summaries laboriously copied down by Wallace in long hand, abridging an article is now the highlyspecialized function of a group of Digest editors who subject each story to sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word scrutiny and consideration. In his book on the Reader's Digest, James Playsted Wood says, "The heart of Digest editing lies in this cutting and condensing. It is done with meticulous care and done so expertly that it has attained the dimensions and characteristics of a minor art form .... " To the charge that condensing distorts an author's viewpoint, there is the verdict of H.L. Mencken, as severe a critic of American writing as the country has ever produced. He said: "I have yet to encounter an article that was seriously damaged by the condensation, and I can recall dozens that were palpably improved."

Brevity apart, this kind of editing results in language that is clear, tight, and easily understandable with little room for literary ,embellishments or niceties of style. Sentences average sixteen words and paragraphs are seldom more than

three sentences in length. Simple, gra- troduction of the Digest's humorous phic words are preferred, rarely more and human interest departments. Acthan two or three syllables. For the tually, these and the Digest's bright reader, no great mental effort is re- fillers had appeared sporadically from quired-there is little danger of finding the very beginning, but now DeWitt himself out of his intellectual depth. In Wallace invited the active participation keeping with the text, Digest titles are of readers as contributors. The practice short, snappy and consistently provocaof paying for items at the rate of $10, tive. They are usually preceded by $100 and today as much as $7,500 (for intriguing sub-titles which arouse the "Drama in Real Life") has been a reader's curiosity, making it difficult powerful factor in boosting the maganot to read what follows. zine's popularity.

In his search for the right type of Digest readers are regular, industrimaterial for his magazine, DeWitt Wal- ous, in fact indefatigable suppliers of lace did not remain content with con- fillers and items for such features as densing articles from the pages of other "Humour in Unifonn" and "Personal magazines. In February 1933, the Digest Glimpses." For. "Life in these United published its first signed original article, States" something like 35,000 contribu"Insanity-the Modern Menace" by tions are received every month. They Henry Morton Robinson. In the follow- come from all kinds of people-farmers ing year, the condensed book at the end and teachers, mechanics and houseof each issue became a regular feature wives, doctors, lawyers and college of the magazine. presidents.

Around the same time, another kind One of the magazine's star contribuof Digest original was developed. These tors was an inmate of the Ohio State are articles commissioned by the maga- - Penitentiary, whose career progressed zine, then offered to, accepted by, and through a Jail in Pennsylvania, but published in other periodicals, and ended abruptly due to the lack of corfinally condensed from them for the respondence facilities at his next stop, Digest. Today roughly seventy per cent a Federal prison in Kentucky. of the material in the magazine originReader participation is not, of course, ates in this way. an unmixed blessing. So much mail is The early 1930s also saw regular in- received that it has to be transported in

Toward More Picturesque Speech [JJC~rc:'Jj21i~j[!mmmJC1't!jill~jillCJR!F"ill,[!J8c!jC!Jc;.Ii~'§~RJCJJCJml~lmffi;£'.J1'lR!Ji~mmri0"l~ri~mm.r0i~Jm NoUJ Is the Time. Political campaigns are based on the premise that you can't try a man for blaming (un-

C~ffee (Stephen

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I Armchair Travelogue I

laundry bags, and a whole army of readers has to be maintained to sift the contributions. But the biggest problem is raised by those who send in the same jokes-year after year after year.

In the early 1950s, the Digest was sent this story from a reader in France: As a young Frenchman pushed his son's carriage down the street, the youngster howled with rage.

"Please, Bernard,control yourself," the father said quietly. "Easy there, Bernard, keep calm!"

"Congratulations, monsieur," said a woman who had been watching. "You know just how to speak to infants-calmly and gently."

Then, leaning over the carriage, she said, "So the little fellow's named Bernard?"

"No, madame," corrected the father. "He's named Andre. "I'm Bernard."

Soon after the Digest printed the story it began to appear in Americanized versions in U.S. magazines, and within a short while it was being sent back to the Digest by scores of readers.

The humour in the Reader's Digest is sometimes earthy, often touched with sentiment, seldom malicious. Most of the time, in fact, it is a gentle humour and it accords well with the magazine's image of the world as a good, simple, happy place in which to live. The Digest's stories of unusual heroism and physical courage, of men battling against great odds, usually have a happy ending.

Among the hardy perennials that keep cropping up at the Digest from time to time is the one about the New York doctor who hung out' the sign "Long time no fee." Or the man at the bar who asked for something "tallcold-and full of gin," only to be told by an indignant drunk, "Sir, you are referring to the woman I love!" Or the man who played one note continuously on his one-stringed fiddle and, when his wife complained that other players had four strings and moved their fingers up and down, replied,. "They're looking for the place, but I've found it."

Whether its millions of readers recognize it or not, and whether it is the result of deliberate editorial intent, the Reader's Digest does offer a very definite philosophy of life: a compound of faith, idealism and optimism that gives its readers a lift in spirit. An Indian journalist, asked recently what he liked best about the Digest, replied simply: "It gives me hope and courage."

All this is not to suggest that the Digest arouses nothing but unqualified admiration. From its very inception, it has been the object of bitter criticism and derision. Liberals find it too staid, too respectable, too conservative; intellectuals object to its over-simplification of complex themes; and sceptics are irritated by its unvarying optimism.

Though the Digest generally looks at the world through rose-co loured glasses, it can-and does-speak out bluntly in anger or protest. One of the outstand-

ing instances was when an original article "-And Sudden Death" was published in August 1935. A short, hardhitting piece, the article was intended to shock Americans into realization of the thousands of highway tragedies, many of them due to careless or reckless driving. It was a gruesome account-full of blood, mutilated bodies and corpsesand it hurled all the pain and horror of a bad auto accident full in the reader's face.

The story had nation-wide repercussions greater than any magazine article before or since. It was reprinted in every U.S. city and small town, discussed on radio programmes, made into a motion picture, read aloud by traffic court judges and magistrates. More important, it had far-reaching effects on the automobile industry, and the formation of the Automotive Safety Foundation is attributed almost directly to it.

"-And Sudden Death" was the first of many Digest articles to perform a notable public service and to exploit the power of its vast readership for the common good. And the editorial results achieved testify to the magazine's deep and widespread influence. In April 1947, the Digest ran an article called "Sticky Miracle in a Tube," describing the properties of a new adhesive.

Before the article, sales of the product amounted to about $9,000 a month; a short time after publication they shot up to $1,000,000 a year. Another case is that of a Connecticut housewife who

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_T"~~ Thonw Henry Haxl<y: Perhaps thr most valuable result of aU C'du(,ttion is the ability to make yourself do thC' thing you have to do •. wh<'n it ought to be- dUM, whC'th-:r you like' it .If not; it is tile" lint 1('l$On that llu~t 10 be- !C'atM:d; a~ hoWC\'ct ¥

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,he was in(crtupttd~ by a liltCfttf who demand«!. "What about Ill< Pilsrim mochtrs?"

• "Wen. what about them/" tht speaker inquirnJ. "What about them! 'Th<y endum! aU that the Pilgrim (ttheN cndurt'dand they <ndum! the Pilgrim uthcn, bc-sides'" ~It

~QUOTABLE QUOTES X A POLITICIAN should have three hats. One for throwing in the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if he's elected.

c.,,..-. .•.

The Indian edition of the "Reader's Digest" was first published in 1954 and, with a current sale of 150,000 copies per month, is one of the most widely circulated magazines in the country.

began selling home-made bread baked in her garage. After the Digest had publicized Pepperidge Farm, it became America's largest producer of homemade bread with an annual business of $15,000,000.

Among the faithful, the Digest is read and believed, and its suggestions are acted upon. The magazine has a welldeserved reputation for- accuracy, the result of the meticulous fact-by-factchecking done by its research department. Because of this its influence is felt in government, in business and throughout American social life. There are readers, in fact, who insist that the Digest has saved their health, their marriages, and even their lives.

The power of the Reader's Digest as an advertising medium was obvious from the very start; but the astonishing fact is that for the first thirty-three years of its life, the U.S. edition carried no advertising at all. Moreover, the decision to publish advertising did not come quickly or painlessly.

The Digest had established itself solely on the basis of its editorial content and DeWitt Wallace was proud of the achievement. He was uncertain of the effect of advertising on his readers, but in view of rising production costs the question had to be considered, and as early as 1947the first tentative feelers were put out. However, it was not until April 1955, after polling its readers for permission, that the Digest finally began to print advertising. All the early fears were unfounded-circulation continued to climb even after the advent of advertising. In accepting advertisements the Digest exercises discrimination: no liquor or tobacco advertisements appear in the magazine.

The Digest's fabulous circulation is due to its editorial content, but it also owes a great deal to the selling pattern set by DeWitt Wallace in 1922. Unable to interest publishers in his venture, he went straight to the public through direct mail. Ever since, the Digest has

based its strongest selling effort on direct-mail appeals, and at present it is one of the largest users of direct-mail advertising in the United States. Every Digest reader is familiar with the magazine's special offers: short-term subscriptions, "paid in full" gifts, and Christmas concessions. All these are successors to the urgent appeals which DeWitt Wallace crammed into every available corner of his little magazine.

It is necessary to come back to.

DeWitt Wallace at every point in the

Hobart Lewis succeeded De Witt Wallace as president, executive editor of the magazine.

, story, because-perhaps more than any other magazine editor-it was his genius and perception, his guidelines for editorial and business policy that have made the Digest what it is today. His wife, Lila Acheson Wallace, has always been .closely associated with the projectfrom the days when the Digest was published from a basement in New York's Greenwich Village, through its existence in a garage apartment in Pleasantville, to its present sprawling offices on an eighty-acre estate in Chappaqua, New York.

Now seventy-nine, Wallace four years ago announced his retirement and appointed Hobart Lewis, 58, president and executive editor of the magazine. "I only go into the office for an Reader's

Digest

hour or so two or three times a week," he said at that time. Despite this, Wallace is still very much there, to supervise new ventures, oversee policy -and occasionally to pass judgment on an article for Digest publication.

One example of Wallace's ability to guess correctly occurred in 1938, when the British edition of the Reader's Digest was published. The first foreign language edition-in Spanish for Latin America-came in 1940, and from then on other language editions appeared swiftly, among them in Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Japanese, Dutch and Arabic.

The Indian edition, printed entirely in Bombay, was started in 1954 with a circulation of 40,000. Currently it sells 150,000 copies each month, making it one of the most widely circulated magazines in the country.

Just as it gave birth to its various international editions, the parent Digest has from time to time spawned other prosperous offspring. The. Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club, started in 1950, is now the largest in the U.S. Issued quarterly, each volume contains about five book condensations. Here again, the Digest staff brings to its task the high degree of professionalism that can satisfy even the most cantankerous author. After publication of his novel, one pleased writer commented: "If I hadn't written the book, I wouldn't have known it was condensed."

In 1965,the Reader's Digest acquired the publishing firm Funk and Wangalls, known mostly for printing dictionaries and other reference books. Another of its subsidiaries is a successful producer of phonograph records. Counting all its enterprises, the Reader's Digest Association claims sales of more than $350 million a year.

With circulation continuing to climb and advertising space sold out months in ad~ance, it seems safe to assume that the little giant has yet to reach full END growth.

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HIS NAMEWASABDULLAH. He was ten or eleven, a hard-worked ship's boy knobby of knee and elbow, dressed in ragged shirt and pants. All day he bailed the bilge, hauled on rough hemp lines, made the captain's tea-and watched the strangers who sailed in the creaking old dhow Sagar Pasha) or Ocean King, over the Gulf of Kutch on India's northwest coast.

Then the foreigners began diving. In face masks and flippers, they rolled off the rail into breeze-flecked shoal waters. They came back aboard with seaweed, shells, and globs of mud, all of which they put into small jars.

Abdullah watched in wonder. Mud? Why would these crazy Americans come all the way to Kutch to stuff mud into bottles?

Could Abdullah have spoken English, or the marine biologists Gujarati, the language of his native State of Gujarat, they might have told him of the International Indian Ocean Expedition, of the many men and ships then at work on the sea that rolls from Kutch far over the southern horizon.

Indeed, in a programme that would last for more than six years, scientists of some thirty nations of the world were taking the measure of an ocean-its rocky floor, the waters that fill it, the life Reprinted with permission from National Geographic magazine.

Copyright Š 1967 by National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C.

within it, the winds that sweep it. On gentle swells and in wild gales, forty research ships would sail a million miles across the sea of the Indies. Drifting on lonely ocean reaches, they would track currents, probe with echo sounders across unseen mountain ranges and canyons, bring up strange forms of life in their nets, and measure forces that shape the weather and the earth itself.

One result is the striking portrait of an ocean without waterINDIANOCEANFLOOR-that accompanies this article and first appeared in the National Geographic Society's magazine. The "portrait" was one of the last projects conceived by Assistant Editor Newman Bumstead, Chief of the Society's Geographic Art Division, who died suddenly on May 8, 1967. Painted by Heinrich Berann, an Austrian artist famed for mountain panoramas, it reveals many of the findings of the six-year ocean survey.

The painting follows an extraordinarily detailed diagram of the Indian Ocean bottom prepared by geophysicists Bruce C. Heezen and Marie Tharp of Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory, in Palisades, New York. By plotting depth soundings of hundreds of scientific voyages-a tangled cat's cradle of ships' tracks-and converting them to three-dimensional perspective, the Lamont team produced one of the most accurate and informative maps of an ocean floor yet created.

Mr. Berann, working closely with Dr. Heezen and Mr. Bumstead, added northsouth curvature of the earth for even greater continued

j The journal of the National Geographic Society, founded in 1888, has become famous for its colour photographs of the world's fauna and flora. But perhaps the Society's most useful contribution is the frequent publication of specially-prepared maps. One of the most unusual, reprinted in India with the special permission of the Society, is inserted between pages 24-25.

Science eXPlores the monsoon sea

The single most significant feature to be mapped by the International Indian Ocean Expedition was the upside-down Y-shaped rift, top, that slash~he Indian Ocean basin. Skin-diving off India's coast, biologis Hardevsingh Toor above, bringS'¡¡up a nautilus shell. Clamdigge ,left, harve d free meal all Bombay's famed ClwlVpatty beach.

Evidence found by the Indian Ocean Expedition leads most scientists to accept the once controversial Wegener theory of continental drift. perspective. From his painting, in high relief, jump features of earth's wrinkled face that were unknown a few years ago: submarine mountain ranges, mid-ocean "microcontinents," undersea river valleys and plains, and jagged ridges and clefts in the sea bottom that support startling new concepts about earth's geologic past. The over-all view is much as if an astronaut, orbiting far out in space, were to look down upon a world drained of all its water.

Although only the third largest of earth's four oceans-Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic-the Indian Ocean covers 28,350,000 square miles, one-seventh of the planet. It rolls 6,600 miles from the tip of Africa to Tasmania and, with the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, about the same distance from the coasts of divided Pakistan to Antarctica.

Mariners of ancient Egypt and Phoenicia, far-trading Arab and Malay seamen, Portuguese carracks, British Indiamen, and China clippers long ago sailed the monsoon sea. Merchantmen and tankers, warships and liners today plough its shipping tracks.

To scientists who study the seas, however, until mid-twentieth century the Indian Ocean was a true mare incognitum. They called it the "forlorn ocean," so few had been the research voyages ever made there. When, in 1958, a co-operative full-scale assault on a single ocean was proposed by the august International Council of Scientific Unions, the Indian Ocean became the immediate choice.

Here were laboratory-like conditions-an ocean whose predominant winds reverse with the calendar. In winter months from the north and northeast, in summer from the south and southwest, blow the great winds of the northern coasts-the monsoons, from an Arab word meaning "seasons."

Nowhere else, on an oceanic scale, does such a reversing system exist; nowhere else could thus be studied the effects of wind and weather on currents, temperatures, mixing of waters, and the myriad forms of sea life.

Research vessels began going out, from Britain, the Soviet

How to explore an ocean bottom SUPPOSE all the water could be drained from an ocean!

What would the bottom look like? The remarkable mappainting that accompanies this issue, Indian Ocean Floor, combines scientific discoveries and an artist's skills to answer that intriguing question. To present visually the incredible detail newly available from the Indian Ocean Expedition, Heinrich Berann shows the round earth as flat from east to west, but rolling gently away northward, so that most of the vast Asian landmass is visible.

Colour, as well, gives depth to the map: light green for shallow seas and continental shelves; medium blue for sediment-covered plateaus and hills of the mid-depths; dark violet-gray for the abyssal plains; darker still for the great trenches. Towering undersea mountains and 'plunging slopes of this water-less ocean are shown as if at sunrise.

Elevations and depths include heights above the ocean's "ground floor," the 16,000-foot average depth of the abyssal plains. Thus, for example, La Reunion island, which rises 10,069 feet above the sea, stands revealed as the tip of a 26,069-foot mountain, rivalling earth's loftiest peaks in height.

Union, the United States; more than two dozen other nations sent ships or scientists. Data centres were set up in Washington and Moscow, a weather centre and a biological station in India. Officially begun late in 1959, the International Indian Ocean Expedition (nOE) continued through 1965. Its discoveries will be reported for years to come.

The sea-floor map-painting vividly depicts some of the nOE's more striking finds: A HITHERTOUNKNOWNmountain range, 3,000 miles long and up to 13,000 feet high, rises like a knife edge from the eastern ocean basin. First charted by American vessels and later by the Soviet oceanographic ship Vityaz) the Ninety East Ridge is the straightest range of such length ever found under the oceans. It runs almost due north and south along the 90° east meridian of longitude, from Bay of Bengal across equator to latitude of southern Australia.

OFF THE MOUTHSof the two great river systems of southern Asia, the Indus and the Ganges, ocean-bottom sediments slope hundreds of miles seaward. Deep valleys and canyons furrow these "cones," showing the force and extent of undersea avalanches of mud and silt-heavy water that periodically spill from the edges of the continental shelves.

So powerful are such turbidity currents-they are known to reach forty to fifty miles an hour-that they sometimes snap submarine cables lying in thei.r paths. As they hurtle down and out across the floors of the oceans, they carry their loads of sediment onto the deep, smooth abyssal plains-the flattest areas known on earth's crust.

ANOTHER DISCOVERY,still unexplained, may somehow relate to these unseen mud avalanches. In 1964 the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Ship Pioneer sailed into an area of oddly disturbed water off the northern tip of Sumatra. The ocean surface boiled in broad, parallel bands, alternating with slick areas of calm water. Pioneer)s instruments showed that, beneath the surface, layers of colder and warmer water were undulating in 240-foot waves-more than twice the size of the largest surface wave on record. Some crested near the surface, others dived as deep as 900 feet. They passed at five knots or more, running seemingly from horizon to horizon-yet what caused them is unknown.

During the Indian Ocean Expedition, I travelled more than 40,000 miles to record parts of its work. The South African Surveying Ship Natal took me within yards of the jagged headland of the Cape of Good Hope. Here, nearly 500 years before, Bartholomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama had first sailed out of the Atlantic and found the long-sought sea road to the East.

Seven hundred nautical miles out from South Africa and 450 south of Madagascar, S.A.S. Natal chanced one night on a shoal where no shoal should be. Her depth recorder showed the bottom rising suddenly to a jagged reef scarcely sixty feet dOWl1.

Natal had found the uncharted peak of a huge, steep-sided seamount, towering some 16,000 feet above true oceanic depths.

Walters' Shoals, which appear on the painting and on new Indian Ocean charts, bear the name of Natal's captain, Comdr. Johan C. Walters, now Hydrographer of South Africa.

On the eastern shores of the Indian Ocean, photographer Bob Sisson and I walked the still-steaming beaches of Bali only days after its sacred volcano, Mount Agung, had erupted. We landed on the lonely coral atoll of Cocos, where Charles Darwin came in the Beagle in 1836, and on Mauritius, once the home of the luckless dodo, today one of the world's most crowded islands.

Southwest of Mauritius by 110 miles lies La Reunion, an over-

MAP OF THE INDIAN OCEAN FLOOR ATTACHED

seas department of the French Republic. Its Piton des NeigesPeak of Snows-rises to 10,069 feet, highest point in the wide expanse of the Indian Ocean.

Mauritius and Reunion both are volcanic outcroppings, the tips of great towers of basalt thrown out over the ages through cracks or fissures in the ocean floor.

Another upheaval from earth's interior, incredibly larger, splits the entire Indian Ocean basin; it constitutes the single most significant feature charted by the nOE. This is part of the world-wide Mid-Oceanic Ridge, an enormous range of undersea mountains and valleys running down the middle of this ocean basin, as it does in the Atlantic and parts of the Pacific. Up to 1,500 miles wide, towering 10,000 feet and more, yet with its peaks still covered by 3,000 to 6,000 feet of water, the Mid-Oceanic Ridge is now regarded as the longest continuous feature of the earth's solid face.

In the Indian Ocean the ridge forms an upside-down Y. One arm curves out of the Atlantic around the foot of Africa; the other comes in from the Pacific sOllth around Australia. They meet east of Mauritius, near its outlying island dependency of Rodrigues, and together go north and then northwest across the Arabian Sea as the Carlsberg Ridge.

When the expedition began, the existence of the ridge in the Indian Ocean was known, but not its extent. Depth soundings during a multitude of crossings soon began to fill in blank spots and chart its shape.

In the early 1950's a dramatic discovery had been made, chiefly

by Miss Tharp and Dr. Heezen of Lamont, while mapping the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. They found that along its crestline runs a deep cleft, or rift valley. Now this rift showed up in the Indian Ocean, too; the Lamont research vessel Vema very early found the rift on crossings south and east of Madagascar. Other ships confirmed its existence wherever the great ridge was plumbed.

The oceanic rift follows with remarkable exactness a path that geologists earlier marked out by plotting the epicentres of oceanbottom earthquakes around the world. Thus it is believed-and most earth scientists now agree-that the mid-oceanic rift forms a continuous world-wide system of crustal fractures, a crack in earth's rocky skin that meanders on for nearly 40,000 miles.

All along this crack earth-shaking forces are at work. Here on the thin sea bottom, geophysicists say, earth's crust is being pulled apart and new rock added, welling up in molten form from the underlying mantle of the planet. And from the crack, constantly breaking and filling anew, the ocean floors are now known to be moving outward as fast as two to three inches a year.

Rocks dredged from the crestal slopes of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge support this conclusion by their relative youth, their lack of fossil evidence of life, and the absence of overlying sediments.

Ships passing back and forth over the ridge recorded magnetic differences in the sea floor, revealing progressively older bands of rock the farther outward they lay from the rift, thus measuring the rate the sea floor has been spreading for millions of years past.

The Red Sea and the adjoining Gulf of Aden, arms of Africa's Great Rift Valley, are both relatively young in geologic terms, and growing steadily wider. Earthquakes constantly wrench their floors. Sensitive probes, lowered to penetrate into the sea floor, show very high rates of heat flow from below.

Indeed, U.S., British, and German ships found deep holes or pockets of hot, supersalty water at the bottom of the Red Sea, up to 133 F., lying beneath much colder waters. Held down by their 0

high salt content..and hence greater density, these deep pools of sea water are the hottest ever found, and hold up to 50,000 times the normal concentrations of iron, copper, silver, and gold.

The yawning Java Trench along the Indonesian are, where the Indian Ocean floor dives to its greatest depths, is taken to be one result of the inexorable outward creep of the ocean bottom. Others are the huge canyons and fractures visible on the map-painting, slashing across the Mid-Oceanic Ridge.

Two British ships, H.M.S. Owen and the new Royal Research Ship Discovery, studied closely one such fracture that slices the northern end of the Carlsberg Ridge, shifting it 170 miles. The Berann painting shows a striking alignment of this Owen Fracture Zone with the sharply cut east coast of Madagascar, 2,000 miles south, and with the Malagasy Fracture Zone, 1,000 miles beyond.

It appears almost as if the earth once were struck by a giant cleaver, leaving a scar the length of the ocean basin.

Many intriguing scientific guesses relate to this oddly straight line of fractures and others like it elsewhere in the ocean. They add to mounting evidence that leads most earth scientists today to accept the once violently controversial Wegener theory of continental drift. Dr. Heezen, for one, points to such fractures as evidence that the sub-continent of India once lay much farther south, part of a southern "protocontinent" called Gondwanaland. When this primordial landmass sundered, perhaps 200 million years ago, Antarctica, Africa, and Australia moved gradually apart. India, split from Madagascar, drifted northward until it collided with Asia. Their meeting formed the Himalayas and Tibet.

Northeast of Madagascar the Seychelles sit atop a mesalike block of continental granite, the only mid-ocean granitic island group known on earth. They and other microcontinents in the Indian Ocean-Madagascar itself, the Kerguelen Islands plateau, and Ninety East Ridge-are all, Dr. Heezen believes, remnants of the ancient breakup of Gondwanaland and the northward drift of India.

Madagascar, like the Seychelles, is a geologically ancient island, a 1,000 mile-long upthrow of high red hills and plateaus resting on a foundation of granite. Fourth largest island in the world, after Greenland,. New Guinea, and Borneo, it is the home of peoples whose origins and arrival are lost in the past.

Though some¡ are Africans, others are more closely akin to Malays, far to the east and north across the ocean. Their languages have strangely similar words; their facial structure is of the East rather than of Africa. How and why their ancestors came to the great red island, somehow riding the winds and currents, no one really knows.

Such migrations are of a time unremembered. But over thousands of years, as long ago as the early kingdoms of Egypt, other sailors and explorers in graceful, sharp-prowed sailing craft have passed to and fro on the Indian Ocean's monsoons.

Arabs and Indians in far-ranging dhows still sail south and west down the African coast on the winter monsoon. When the winds turn, as always they do, the ships go home again to the Gulfs of Aden and Persia and Kutch. Bob Sisson and I went to Zanzibar, where the dhows still come to trade. But it was May, and the monsoon had already swung.

"You've just missed them," we were told. "The only ships still here are a few big kotias from Kutch-the Indians."

We walked Zanzibar town's shadowy, winding streets to where they lay moored. Several stood propped on mud flats for work on their bottoms. On their high stern quarters, above rough-timbered continued

REMOVE CAREFULLY TO PREVENT TEARING

,

American research ship "Anton Bruun" located areas in the Bay of Bengal which point to a huge fishery potential for Southeast Asia. rudders, carved nameboards read "Kutch-Mandvi."

They were 2,800 miks from home.

We followed the Arab dhows north by air to Mombasa, in Kenya, but there, too, they had come and gone. In their place in old Kilindini Harbour, under the gray battlements of Portuguesebuilt Fort Jesus, lay a dark-blue little ship flying the Stars and Stripes. She was the Argo, of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, halfway around the world from San Diego, California.

Argo had been away a full year. She had crossed the Indian Ocean five times, following the Equator back and forth to measure its currents and deep-flowing undercurrents in both monsoon seasons. She had sailed far south to the Kerguelen Islands, where French scientists manned a lonely research station, and cruised east to Darwin on the Timor Sea, surveying the sea bottom wherever she went.

Off the Somali coast, where the dhows by now were riding the monsoon northeastward, Argo and the British Discovery and other research ships had confirmed the existence of one of the swiftest surface currents yet measured in any ocean. Under the steady, driving southwest wind, the Somali Current in places flows at more than seven knots, a river in the ocean a hundred miles wide and thousands of feet deep. The Atlantic's Gulf Stream, in contrast, rarely exceeds four knots.

The Somali stream is the only such current along a continental edge known to cross the Equator-and the only one that every Banyan trees, bowed by the summer monsoon winds, bend eternally

year reverses its course. When the monsoon winds turn and blow from the northeast, this racing river in the ocean slows, stops, and finally flows the other way.

In Bombay, farther north and east, a rambling old astronomical observatory served the nOE as "weather central." Chattering teleprinters and an electronic computer decoded weather data radioed from as far away as Moscow and Tokyo, Canberra and Pretoria.

An automatic weather buoy, nicknamed NOMAD, rode at anchor in the Bay of Bengal, transmitting readings around the clock.

Instruments on a raft in the Arabian Sea measured the exchange of heat energy between the ocean and the atmosphere-the "heat engine" that helps drive the world's weather.

Balloons 100,000 feet aloft, rockets stabbing 250,000 feet through the stratosphere, and orbiting TIROS, ESSA, and Nimbus weather satellites, hundreds of miles overhead, recorded energy flowing to and from space, and cloud patterns over the ocean.

Dr. Colin S. Ramage, an American who directed the HOE weather studies, described to us flights by specially instrumented aircraft into the centres of tropical cyclones. Strapped down and hanging on, weathermen measured winds of nearly 120 miles an hour blowing around the eye of one storm.

One result of the weather programme, Dr. Ramage predicted, may be a future ability to forecast local effects of the monsoonsjust how much rain the winds from the ocean may bring to the land, where, and when.

A rakish little white-hulled ship, her buff-coloured funnel bearing the stylized double-arrow emblem of the nOE, sailed the Indian Ocean for two years. This was the U.S. research vessel Anton Bruun, formerly the Presidential yacht Williamsburg, refit-

i'!}yfJ on India's coast. Mountains¡-lemper the force

of seaward winter winds.

ted as a floating laboratory and renameq for a Danish marine biologist who had helped plan the Indian Ocean Expedition.

Successive teams of marine biologists from the United States and fifteen other countries manned the Bruun on her months-long voyages. I joined her on a leg from Bombay around Ceylon and across the Bay of Bengal.

Heading south along India's Malabar Coast, we passed Kozhikode-ancient Calicut, where Vasco da Gama's three weather-beaten ships, their pennants bravely fluttering, made landfall on India in 1498. They had rounded all Africa, and with an Arab pilot had crossed from Malindi on the Kenya coast.

At regular intervals the Bruun's engines stopped, and she rolled quietly on the swell while her winches lowered water-sampling bottles, bathythermographs to record temperatures in the depths, and funnel-shaped nets of gauzelike mesh to sample tiny forms of sea life.

Using radioactive carbon 14 as a tracer, Bruun scientists measured the growth rate of microscopic plankton, upon which all other life in the oceans depends. They constantly analyzed the sea water for chemical make-up.

Late in March the northeast monsoon still blew out of Burma.

Chief goal of this cruise was to test the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal for regions of upwelling.

"When offshore winds steadily blow water away from a coast," explained Dr. Eugene C. LaFond of San Diego, chief scientist aboard the Bruun, "deeper waters come up, bringing dissolved phosphates and nitrates.

"These salts are the fertilizers of the sea. Where they reach surface sunlight, plankton blooms, and so does fish life."

The Bruun had found the centre of the Bay of Bengal relatively lifeless, a biological desert. Yet along the eastern shores, off Thailand, Burma, and East Pakistan, just the opposite was true.

Upwelling currents of cold, nutrient-rich water and the resulting high plankton growth here yielded heavy hauls of fish-great sting rays, 200-pound guitarfish, and noisy croakers-pointing to a huge new potential fishery for the nations of Southeast Asia.

Later the Anton Bruun, whose work for the Indian Ocean Expedition was directed by Dr. John H. Ryther of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, investigated other such upwelling regions off the southeastern shore of Arabia and the Somali coast. Here some of the coldest water anywhere in the tropics came welling to the surface. It carried ten to twenty times as much nutrient material as average surface water. Plankton bloomed so thickly here that the sea turned from blue to greenishbrown in soupy bands.

Such upwelling areas, paradoxically, sometimes are so thick with plankton as to turn deadly to fish; the blooms remove all available oxygen from the water. In 1957 a Russian merchantman crossing from Ceylon to Aden ploughed for three days through a solid layer of dead fish floating on the surface. The Russians estimated that an area larger than the State of Florida, 100 miles wide by 600 miles long, was blanketed by millions of tons of decaying fish-equivalent to world's commercial catch for a year!

Fortunately, such massive kills are rare. In abundance of fish life, the upwelling regions plotted by nOE ships rank among the richest ocean areas on earth. Just beginning to be tapped by deepsea fishing fleets-the first included Japanese and Russian vessels -they offer the promise of new sources of food for all the burgeoning nations rimming the Indian Ocean-for Abdullah of the Gulf of Kutch, his sons, and their sons after them.

END

In the most extensive sea exploration ever launched, scientists of some 30 countries probed the Indian Ocean, regarded till 20 years ago as ''forlorn ocean." Some 40 research ships sailed an estimated million miles surveying below, above and on the surface of this vast expanse.

Discoveries made bring promise of better long-range weather forecasts, more productive fisheries and other marine resources. Indian workers, above, at Mithapur haul salt from evaporation pans beside the Gulf of Cambay. From this raw material, industrial chemicals are manufactured.

THEM 'WHO REVOLUTIONIZED OU ALISM

Starting in 1923 and until his death in February 1967, Henry Luce introduced a whole new style and vigour into American journalism by his creation of "Time," "Fortune," "Life" and "Sports lllustrated."

Together they are the base of one of the world's largest publishing empires, but it is the spirit behind them that is their enduring strength.

Luce himself once said: "What we want to do is not to leave to posterity a great institution, but a great tradition of journalism."

HENRYROBINSONLUCE was a man who raised the emotional temperature of a lot of Americans-especially newspapermen of the old school and politicians both old fHenry f-uce, photographed shortly before his and young. He did it with a brand of jour'd$:ath,mt, and as a serious, self-possessed nalism that jarred and jolted the comfortthree-year-old. Below, the first issues of able conformists and infuriated many intelTime, 1923, and Life, 1936, made journalistic history, and were both immediately successful. lectuals. His ideas were fresh and his idiom was brash. Old reporters might bristle, politicians become apoplectic and the intelligentsia freeze with scorn, but his magazines were read and read and read.

His curiosity was insatiable-a fact that drove him to the self-assigned job of discovering everything he could about everything and sharing his discoveries with the widest possible audience. He recognized talent and surrounded himself with a brilliant staff-worked them as hard as they could go and paid them well. He admired style and stimulated and titillated his readers with stories and legends of the great and the famous.

Born in China of missionary parents, his love for his homeland and his aspirations for what he felt America should be were part of his faith. He was as dissatisfied with the state of his own knowledge, the performance of his magazines as he was with the performance of his country. But he was a malcontent with unswerving optimism-about the importance of his ideas, about the magazines he created to disseminate them, and about how the United States should fulfil the purpose of its destiny. Using a whole bagful of dramatic devices (perceptive personality sketches, provocative pictures and memorable anecdotes), he strove to lift the public taste in Iart. to bring understanding of the intricate : and fascinating advances in science. and to enliven an interest in the dynamic world of industry.

He had an ironclad set of convictions and a full set of prejudices as well. Nobody

TI M E

would call him a rebel. But in many ways he was a revolutionary. He created whole new styles, schools and channels of journalism. And, in the end, the important thing about Henry Luce was the magazines he founded. As ifhe recognized this, he had provided for their continuity without him.

And they, in their restive way, had remade American journalism and spread their influence to the ends of the world.

In the four decades from March 1923 until his death in February 1967, he built a publishing empire including four highly successful magazines-Time, Life, Fortune and Sports Illustrated-with a combined circulation of more than fourteen million.

He also moved into many other fieldsfilm¡ documentaries, radio, television and book publishing. More recently, he joined an exciting new field-the marketing of computerized educational techniques and materials.

The first venture, Time magazine, was a schoolboy's dream and was almost stillborn for lack of capital. Henry Luce (known to his friends as "Harry") and Briton Hadden, a college classmate, hatched the idea for Time during a tedious tour of duty in a World War I army training camp. Disappointed that the war ended before they could be shipped overseas, the two returned to Yale University where Hadden was chairman of the college newspaper and Luce was managing editor. The Yale graduating class of 1920 voted Luce "most briliiant" and Hadden "most likely to succeed."

After working a year as newspaper reporters, the two young men, both 23 years old, decided to quit their jobs and¡ concentrate on their plan for aweekly news publication. Setting up shop in an old remodelled house in New York City, they focused first on writing a prospectus. It declared: "People are uninformed because continued

A panoramic view of "Life": Success marked each of Luce's publications, but "Life" was his proudest achievemen,t.

1

J

Notwithstanding the depression, Luce started Fortune, above, in 1930 to portray the exciting world of u.s. business. Sports Illustrated, below, launched in 1954 to chronicle "the wonderful world of sport," achieved the highest initial circulation (450,000) in magazine history.

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j

Though his advice was ¡valued by American Presidents, Luce never sought political office for himself. His life-time passion was journalism and to it he gave a new meaning and dimension. no publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend simply keeping informed. '. . . Time is interested not in how much it includes between its covers but in how much it gets off its pages into the minds of its readers.

To keep men well-informed-that, first and last, is the only axe this magazine has to grind. [But] the editors recognize that complete neutrality on public questions and important news is probably as undesirable as it is impossible, and are therefore ready to acknowledge certain prejudices." Among those, Luce and Hadden listed: "Faith in the things which money cannot buy; a respect for the old, particularly in manners; an interest in the new, particularly ideas."

The young partners decided they needed $100/000 to start Time but after a disappointing year of seeking funds, they had raised only $86,000. Luce, later recalling that period, said: "We had to sell, to peddle stock to our friends and our friends' friends. We did not sell them on an idealistic notion. We sold them-when we did, and our sales were agonizingly few and far between-on a sporting chance."

From the first issue (March 3, 1923), Time crackled with a vivid new style, and made history by compartmentalizing news into sense-making departments. It hired .researchers to check the facts for accuracy and add depth of background material, and innovated a system of teamwork between them and their writers and editors that came to be known as "group journalism."

Hadden was chiefly responsible for the idiosyncratic style that made Time famous --coined words, double epithets and inverted sentences. Some words like "tycoon" (from the Japanese taikun, meaning prince) and "socialite" have long since become part of the language. Borrowing from The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid, Time's editors peppered its columns with inverted sentences and double adjectives. Instead of "rolling-eyed Greeks," TiÂťM im~tldefit1y described figures in the news as "haystack-haired," "beady-eyed," "jut-jawed" and "moose-tall." This saucy style was considerably toned down following a classic parody of Time in 1936 by Wolcott Gibbs in the New Yorker magazine. Two sentences from it have become part of American literary folklore: "Back-

ward ran sentences until reeled the mind" and "Where it will all end, knows God!" The partnership between the two young editors came to a tragic end in 1929 when Briton Hadden died of a streptococcus infection. As he took over the reins of Time, Luce also became fascinated with American business which he felt was "America's greatest achievement." To cover it in its widest aspects, in 1930 he brought out a new magazine, Fortune. Its charge was to report not dust-dry statistics but to explain how business works through the drama of personalities and the invention of new and exciting technology. Handsome and expensive (an unprecedented $1 per copy), Fortune came in with the economic depression that swept across the country and Luce himself said that it was difficult tQ imagine a magaz:ine less likely to survive. A later managing editor, Eric Hodgins, put it even more graphically: "Almost on the eve of Fortune's publication, the whole of the economy of the United States clapped a hand over its heart, uttered a piercing scream, and slipped on the largest banana peel since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations."

The next year, Luce launched an even more imaginative project, The March of - Time-filmed news documentaries. For - the next 'fifteen years, until it was phased out in th,e.face of television, The March of Time had an extraordinary impact on radio, movie news reporting and, finally, on television documentaries.

Luce's most ambitious publishing venture, unique at that time (1936) in the United States, was the picture magazine Life. He promised to scour the world for the best pictures and edit them with a feeling for drama and history. In his own words, the purpose of the magazine was: "To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed."

Life was such an instant and phenomenal success that as circulation outraced revenue from advertisements, it nearly bankrupted the company. (Rates are set in ratio to established circulation; the lower the circulation forecast, the lower the cost to advertisers.) Luce spent $5,000,000 to keep Life from dying of success before it

reached a profit level in 1939 with a circulation of more than 2,000,000.

In 1954, another magazine, Sports Illustrated, was launched to chronicle "the wonderful world of sport." Starting with the largest initial circulation (450,000) in magazine history, it has now climbed to nearly triple that number. Sensing that such a magazine would find a popular following, Luce reasoned: "It is a safe premise that there would not be a tremendous interest and participation if sport did not correspond to some important elements-something deeply inherent-in the human spirit.

Man is an animal that works, plays and prays. No important aspect of human life should be devalued."

All of these publications, plus the other related ventures Henry Luce gathered into

one Qrganization- Tim~ Incorporatedhave made it among the largest and most successful publishing enterprises in the world. But, as Life editors recently commented, "Size is not its substance. It is the product of a mind that never saw a frontier it did not want to reach and would not rest until it was passed."

A few years before his death, Henry Luce stated his convictions in this way: "I am myself convinced that the idea of justice and law is more universal, more readily understood than is the concept of political liberty, As we proceed, we will be able to show how justice must make room for liberty and how liberty lives only by and through the law. 'Give us that order which without liberty is a snare, and give us that liberty which without order is a delusion.'

Those words state the terms of the great conversation of mankind."

Henry Luce never held or sought a public -office but he advised American presidents as well as fledgling reporters. In the influence he had on world affairs, he might justifiably be described as a statesman. But the one distinction he chose for himself was "journalist." He once told his staff: "I suggest that what we want to do is not to leave to posterity a great institution, but to leave behind us a great tradition of journalism ably practised in our time." To this he later added: "I have sometimes said to myself that the one thing I was determined to do was to make 'journalist' a good word. And today it is a good word."

END

Answering the sharp criticism hurled at their elders by today's youth, the author makes out a good-humoured case for middle age, its joys and compensations, and its graceful acceptance of reality. The article is reprinted from "Look," a popular.U.S. fortnightly magazine (circulation 7,"732,000).

A FEW MONTHS A.GO, I found myself referred to in print by a young writer in her 30's as "an amiable, white-haired gentleman." For the next few days, I walked with a slight stoop, the palms of my hands felt clammy, and for the first time in years, I actually looked at myself and not just at my morning beard when I shaved. True, I now have quite a lot of white hair mixed in with quite a bit that is rather colourless, but I am only 56. (In ten years, of course, I'll be saying that I'm only 66.) But the young lady's remark made me feel anything other than "amiable," and not for several days did it occur to me why her description depressed me. The operative word was "gentleman." Tacking "gentleman" onto "amiable" and "white-haired" made me feel I was approaching the end of my tether.

Usually, the means employed by the current young to make the middle-aged feel as though they were entirely removed from reality are much less subtle. This has been demonstrated recently in a torrent of magazine articles on "The Generation Gap." In essence, these are attacks which accuse my generation of moneygrubbing, status-seeking, a shameful lack of humane standards and a negative attitude (the young love that phrase) towards life, love, liberty and the hot pursuit of honest pleasure.

I would like to strike an amiable' and (yes, dammit) gentlemanly blow in defence of middle age, a state of relative grace that the youth who defy us are going to find themselves encumbered by before they learn to spell "psychedelic!"

First of all, we need to set some limits. There is no question that I am middle-aged (though a century ago, I would have been considered old and would long since have given up active sports like tennis), but middle age is not easy to define.

It starts later every year. When you are 35, middle age starts at 40; when you are 40, you still think you have five years to go, though by the time you are 41, you know that you are going to have to give up fooling yourself-your wind is not quite what it was. I thought a dictionary would help me define the limits of middle age. The massive new Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines "middle aged" as "being of the age

A COOL

becomes important, as in, "He doesn't look a day over 45." Middle age is a chronological holding action, as only those who are engaged in it can understand.

This sounds defensive, but I do not feel defensive about my

intermediate between youth and old age, roughly betweel' 45 at1d

own middle age. I tho!'cmghly enjoy the cOI'dition. If there i

65." All this tells us is the probable age of the man who wrote the definition. Ifhe thinks "youth" lasts until 45 and "old age" begins at 65, he is probably in his early 40's.

Possibly the best definition of middle age is that it is the period of life when those who have achieved it are flattered for the first time to be described as "looking young for their age." Or, to put it in a slightly different way, in middle age, the phrase "day over"

tragedy about being middle-aged, it is not the loss of youth, but that middle age cannot last forever. T do not know anyone whom I respect who resents being middle-aged, and T know scarcely anyone of my generation who would put up with being young again or envies those who are. (There is nothing more Iudicrous than the middle-aged who would not admit they are and try to act as though they were still youngsters.) Perhaps we would all like to

11

CHEER FOR MIDDLE AGE

. ~.,

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giving in. By middle age, one knows, or ought to, what one's horizons are and is ready to accept them rather than be spurred to put them constantly beyond one's reach. Robert Benchley, the late great humorist, once wrote: "It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but J couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous." Obviously, his was a problem that not many people share, but his charmingly ironic statement flows from a resigned and amused middle age. It bespoke a reassuring acceptance of middle age.

I have asked a number of my contemporaries what they consider the greatest benefit of middle age, and almost without exception, they have mentioned variations on this same theme-the acceptance of one's limitations. This sort ofnegative attitude is exactly why the young look down upon us, but they are unaware that this is our grown-up avenue to the very thing they most want for themselves. The path towards freedom begins with the kind of acceptance practised by my generation. It embraces the right to feel that one is not impelled to attempt the impossible without sacrificing for a moment the right to enjoy fully and without embarrassment the possible.

Middle age confers the right to quit before exhaustion (there is likely to be a tomorrow) and to admit boredom. There is nothing unvirile about resting between sets of tennis when you are in your 40's, whereas in your 30's, it would be a minor sort of disgrace. Indeed, not until middle age in America is leisure likely to become anything less than frantic relaxation conducted at a tempo far faster than most work.

After 50, one does not have to pretend to like what one is told he ought to like but does not; and one can like without censure what one's contemporaries (to say nothing of the young) think is outrageous. This is in part because age substitutes modesty for some of the gaudier aspects of status, and partly because one learns by middle age (or should have) that he will impress neither nor his juniors with sham. And the motive his contemporaries to impress those who are older loses force. I look back with astonishment at how, when I was young and started to read a

!y..pJ;;V

be a little younger; but young? 1 remember a poem submitted to the magazine for which I once worked; the ode started, "Oh, youth, the pain of it!" a cry (and a cliche) from the heart. I have never heard anyone even suggest, "Oh, middle age, the pain of it!"

No time of life, of course, lacks its anguishes, and middle age book, especially one I thought I ought to read! I felt compelled has its own special brands of discomfort, fright, annoyance, dismay, upheaval and often loneliness, but not pain in the sense the young poet meant it, the pain of initial self-discovery.

Middle age believes that it has earned special privileges and delights, and whether earned or not, claim the right to enjoy them.

Possibly the greatest pleasure of middle age is the acceptance of one's limitations without surrender, the right to relax without

to push my way through it to the bitter end no matter how much it bored me. I did not think I could say 1 had read a book unless I had read every last, sodden word of it. I never walked out of a movie or a play or a ball game; it was somehow unfair to the authors and the actors and the players. I even tried to read The News of the Week in Review in the Sunday New York Times all the way through; I felt it was incumbent upon me to "be informed" continued

about practically everything. What nonsense! Not until middle age did I accept the obvious fact that I was boring myself stiff on many occasions merely for the slim satisfaction of trying to maintain a facade. It was then that I substituted in my leisure the concept of pleasure and dropped the burden of uplift. Middle age is a time when one can reasonably start throwing away a lot of the impedimenta gathered in earlier years.

Dumping the burden of a false front enables some of my contemporaries to say, "I know I'm square, but. ... " This is one of those middle-aged remarks that can be taken at its face value: middle age gives one the right to be shocked and not pretend one is not. However, the middle-aged squares are often a great deal less shockable than the young who hide their alarm behind a show of mini-skirted or bearded sophistication. The trouble with so many of the middle-aged is that they are shocked by the wrong things, the superficial extravagances of youth with which youth intentionally baits them.

I blushed for my generation when I read that the neat and able 17-year-old president of the senior class of a New Jersey high school had been suspended, stripped of his office, barred from the senior dance and graduation exercises by local school officials because he had sideburns that, according to a newspaper, "end about midway down his ear lobes." The action was defended on the grounds of "suitability," a humourless. namby-pamby stance.

Once a school principal myself, I know how easy it is to lose one's sense of humour about schoolboy antics, but anybody who knows anything about taste knows that suitability, like superficial manners, constantly changes. If the young decide that they want to adopt the hairstyles of their great-grandfathers, I do not see why they should not. Still, I would be sorry (indeed, I would be shocked) to have them go around stinking as high as their great-grandfathers unquestionably did.

Ideally, my contemporaries have reached an age and station where they can afford to be as eccentric as they please, to indulge their whims about fashion and taste, to live as they see fit without being offensive. Eccentricity in the young is likely to be either moral or social revolt or just a grab for attention; among the middle-aged, it is the unselfconscious expression of individuality.

American literary critic Alexander Woollcott made the immortal, but inaccurate, statement that "From middle age on, everything of interest is either illegal, immoral or fattening."

There are many things "of interest" that are only socially surprising and therefore considered eccentric-a veteran airplane pilot doing needlepoint to relax between flights, a banker writing for scholarly journals on psychedelic mushrooms, a wealthy matron labouring as a trainer at a race track. Eccentricity need be neither illegal, immoral nor fattening; it simply means the commonplace in uncommon places, times or circumstances.

One of the pleasures of middle age is to feel free to determine what time and what place are suitable. That is not to say one behaves without regard to others. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the great actress of three generations ago, told a young woman, "I don't care what you do, my dear, so long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."

One thing about their behaviour of which the middle-aged can be absolutely sure: Nothing that the young do embarrasses

their elders as much as middle-aged behaviour-especially the behaviour of parents-embarrasses the young. Up to a point, the middle-aged are not only responsible for the behaviour of the young, but are in a position to do something about control,ling it, or if they can't control it, at least of convincing themselves that they have tried to guide it. But the middle-aged are beyond the control of the young, beyond being made to conform to changing manners and attitudes, beyond the pale-if not yet quite ready for the grave. Their actions and their reactions can be counted on to make the young squirm.

Could they, for example, countenance a remark made in a literary letter two centuries and a half ago by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu? "At the age of 40," she wrote, "she is very far from being cold and insensible: her fire may be covered with ashes, but it is not extinguished."

The young see only the ashes of middle age covering its passions. and that is probably just as well. The under-40 generation will discover soon enough for themselves that love is not grotesque or repugnant because it is no longer youthful. "For real true love, love at first sight, love to devotion, love that robs a man of his sleep," wrote the novelist Anthony Trollope, "love that 'will gaze an eagle blind' ... we believe the best age is from 45 to 70; up to that, men are generally given to mere flirting."

He wrote with his tongue only slightly in his cheek.

Typically, the young argue about principles while the middleaged concentrate on details. One privilege of middle age is to have resolved the matter of principles in favour of the details.

"I don't think adults value and seek anything," said one of the critical young people who was quoted in Look magazine's issue on "Youth." "They just live." Cyril Connolly, an English literary critic and editor, went that statement one better some years ago: "Others merely live," Connolly wrote. "I vegetate."

It is unlikely that the gap between the young and us vegetables has ever been wider in some respects than it is now; certainly, the generation gap has never been more publicized, or so much enjoyed for purposes of self-pity on both sides. Everybody seems to wallow in being misunderstood-the young by the middleaged, the middle-aged by the young. There are many reasons for this: The weight of numbers of young people is one reason, and they resent losing their identities and becoming numbers in a school registrar's computer or a corporation's IBM cards.

When I was a child, there used to be a saying, "Nobody loves me; I'm going out in the garden and eat worms." Now, its equivalent is, "Nobody loves me; I'm going to my headshrinker and find out who I am." The difference is that we did not eat any worms; probably, we should have.

I like to think that one of the privileges of middle age is that it places me and my contemporaries beyond the worm-eating phase of life and even beyond the necessity to eat humble pie because the young disapprove my feeling glad and grateful to be still alive. (I represent, indeed, a whole new kind of mortality statistic that the physicians who are my age helped mightily to create). Until the young can think of something better to do with the electronic marvels that we have given them than to turn up volume all the way to create "total sound," I will choose pheasant rather than crow.

END

Dear Sir: Dear Sir: I read with interest the article "Ralph Nader: Public Defender No.1" by Patrick Anderson in SPAN, December 1968 issue.

The initiative and courage shown by a man like Ralph Nader in safeguarding consumers' interests against such centres of power as corporations, unions and the Government are really commendable and his achievement is a tribute to the successful working of the democratic system.

That in spite of a promising career in politics and a lucrative law practice he chose to become a public defender reveals his basic character and integrity.

Honest, conscientious people like Nader can no doubt change the fate of a nation, if they are determined to safeguard the interests of society.

Such courageous men are rarely produced by a country. It speaks volumes for Nader's selfconfidence and fearlessness that he successfully resisted General Motors' efforts at harassing him and fought back by filing an invasion of privacy suit against the mighty corporation.

America should be proud of producing a lawyer and undaunted defender of the public interest like Ralph Nader.

HARI CHAND BATRA New Delhi

Dear Sir: Being a teacher and author of textbooks for secondary school-children, I have read with considerable interest the article, "Dear Mr. Cline: I am glad you are my first Principal," in the December issue of SPAN. I agree with Mr. Cline's views that teachers, in whatever part of the world they may be, must show affection to their pupils because "these children know if you care about them; they can X-ray a teacher." It is affectionate exchange of ideas between teachers and students which strengthens bonds of trust and understanding between them.

spacecraft's crew of three brave men.

On the safe return of the astronauts, I send you our heartiest congratulations and through you to the American nation on this marvellous and unparalleled achievement.

The article "Dear Mr. Cline" is highly educative. Mr. Cline is a psychologist when he says, "They can X-ray a teacher." Even the smallest turn in the teacher's behaviour, attitude, or mode of work can make an impact on the young minds which are sensitive like photographic plates. The teacher has to behave cautiously, decently, and sympathetically, keeping his personal habits and prejudices in the background as far as possible.

"The teasing has stopped and the hurting begun," is a correct psychological analysis of the child mind. The tear in the eye of Tina Beverly in the photograph is really pathetic and an index to the mental torture she has suffered.

DHYAN

SINGH

Kapurthala

Dear Sir: I read with interest and some anxiety the informative article on "Restless Youth" in your November issue. The emotional stir in the student community the world over is the rumbling of a deep-seated turbulence difficult to 'explain easily. We are presented with an inversion of values when the cult of the bizarre, the ugly, and the monstrous passes for art and culture.

Youth seems to be drifting rudderless without an aim or an ideal before it.

One can only pray that your assessment is correct and that their culture is vibrantly alive with only an element of nonsense in it. The most ominous portent is the cry: "We are the future generation!" Let us hope that when the day arrives for youth to take over, it will do so in an orderly and disciplined manner, without recourse to fanaticism or violence.

M. FRAMJI

N.L. DUDEJA

Bangalore

New Delhi

Dear Sir: Mr. Ralph J. Gleason's article, "The Dear Sir: It is gratifying to note that in SPAN, December 1968 issue, you have given a brief description of "Men around the Moon," along with sketches of the moon, Apollo-8, and the

Making of a Nation's New Songs" (SPAN, November '68) was very interesting and absorbing.

The writer's intention is to convince readers that today's music is young peoples' music. The

Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, etc., represent the music of the young generation. It expresses their longings and their aspirations.

But, while the writer has mentioned such rock 'n' roll and pop-music exponents as the Beatles and Bob Dylan, the name of rock 'n' roll wizard Elvis Presley has been sadly omitted, for reasons best known to the writer himself. Undeniably, Elvis holds a unique position in the pop-field, and, this position he has held from 1956 to this day without even a slight lessening in his popularity. I would not know who was the originator of rock 'n' roll, but this much I know-a point which I can argue at any length-that Elvis breathed fire into it; he gave it significance, Or, look at it this way: rock 'n' roll was in the bud form; with Elvis Presley it blossomed into a flower which radiated fragrance to all corners of the world! All the music authorities call him "the king of rock 'n' rolL" Beatle John Lennon says: "Elvis gave me inspiration to step into the music field. He's the best thing that ever happened to me."

FELIX RADCLIFFE Kanpur

Dear Sir: As one who had the pleasant and proud privilege of receiving American students of the Project India group in 1967 at my campus, Vaishnav College, Madras, I read with great interest the article on Project India which appeared in the November issue of SPAN. To be frank, as one who had a preconceived opinion that American students would evince a superiority complex, I was at once surprised and happy to hear them talk with us in such an unassuming and sincere manner. For instance one American girl in reply to a question whether sbe would settle down in India if she happened to marry an Indian, frankly replied with a smile: "Oh, no!

It's just three weeks since I left home and I'm already home-sick." They later wrote to me: "Unfortunately, our visit was relatively short, but still we will have fond memories of it for a long time to come." Indeed, yes. We, too, continue to cherish in our memory the day they spent with us on our campus.

V. MOORTHY Devakottai

"The Saturday Evening Post," which was foundea in 1821 and ceased publication this month, reached its peak under the editorship of George Horace Lorimer who made it an institution- "a kind of social and emotional denominator of American life." The "Post" continued to attract top writers and had attained a circulation of nearly seven million when it closed down owing to financial difficulties. In this article from a recent issue of the magazine the author, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner, says that today's parents are much like America's early settlers.

In the article at right, author Phyllis McGinley discusses the new generation of American families-their problems and prospects.

The photographs recount the story of one American family-that of industrial worker Gene Page, 39, left, a tyre builder, union member and the head of a family which includes his wife Janice and their six children: Kevin 15, Karen 13, Kelly 10, Kristy 6, Kathleen 3, and Keith 1. Employed for 19 years at the Goodyear Company in Los Angeles, Calif., Gene receives, in addition to his pay, free life insurance, up to 730 days of free hospitalization, 44 days of sick leave, a four-week paid vacation and retirement benefits. He works an eight-hour day, five days a week, plus some overtime to provide a comfortable living for his family, above.

THENEW AMERICAN FAMILY THEREIS NOTHING pundits love like a crisis. Give them something to deplore and they are happy as a child with a sweet.

They can view with genuine alarm, cry authentic woe and ruin. And of all the topics for lamentation, the collapse of the American family is the most reliable. It is as handy now as it was, no doubt, when some early colonist set up the first gazette and needed a paragraph of prophecy to titillate readers. We know the problem bothered the seventeenth century Puritan fathers. One thundered from various pulpits that God had His eye on household rebels. Even in what seems to us the safe, patriarchal era of the late Victorians, oracles were warning of catastrophe.

"Ever and anon," wrote a doomsayer in The Saturday Evening Post at the beginning of the century, "rises a cry that the home is perishing fr-0illour midst and civilization must perish with it."

Then he went on to explain what he believed was at the root of that doom. He had to reach farther than his handwringing brother today. There was no Dr. Spock to blame, no space programme; the country was threatened by no unpopular wars, few divorces, fewer precooked dinners.

The Bomb was not so much as a gleam in a scientist's eye, and the word "alienation" had not entered the mass vocabulary. But there was one change in American habits he had observed with anxiety sufficient to unsettle him.

"If domestic virtue is decaying," he continued, "the real cause is found in the rapid disappearance of the family horse and buggy. That conveyance preserved a sweet and delicate atmosphere of family ties. The citizen, shaken loose from his safe domestic base by much streetcar straphanging, takes to socialism and drinking. The matron, without the steadying discipline of having to get home in time to feed the horse [the italics are mine] gads and grows extravagant."

As for the children of this riotous pair, one surmises that they were ill-clothed, ill-fed, ill-bred.

There is consolation in knowing that our ancestors faced dilemmas which, quaint as they sound now, must have seemed in their era as disturbing as ours. It is soothing to read that more than 100 years ago moralists were concerned Reprinted with permission from The Saturday Evening Post.

Copyright Š 1968 by the Curtis Publishing Company.

over the dowhfall of parental authority. Children were called "selfish and wilful," and communities bewailed the "decay of discipline and the alarming development of juvenile depravity."

The consistent message seems to be that the American family has always been in crisis, yet has always muddled through. And I, by nature an optimist, cannot entirely despair. From my suburban terrace I survey the betrayals, the accidents, the triumphs of middle-class American life (which is the life of an enormous majority of citizens and the only one I can write about with conviction) and feel a kind of hope. Certainly this amiable village is as thorned with problems as any other community of its type. Generation misunderstands generation. Ideas and ideals of sex, politics, religion, the arts, have been radically altered in so brief a time that all heads swim. Here, too, we come across drugs circulating in schools and youth in flight from authority.

But for one thing, these are the noisy singular, not the ordinary quiet, examples of family life in our region. (Most of us are on good terms with our children and grandchildren; we are trusted and loved by our descendants.) And for another, parents here have never before worked so hard at understanding the forces of chaQs that imperil their young. There is little abdication, simply concern. We have begun to realize that parental failures have not necessarily caused these rifts and tensions; only the world around us all.

At base the American family, I rosily believe, is in pretty good condition, considering the brutal buffeting it has taken during the twentieth century. Scarred but intact, it survives. It has not abandoned its aspirations; merely changed society's shape and its own.

For there has been a revolution. It was apparent as long ago as the First World War, quickened in the next few de¡ cades and has come, during the present years, to high clio max. Yet it is a revolution rather than a mere rebellion. The wheel of time has turned full circle, wholly revolved.

We are back where we began, on a frontier. That large, warm, papa-dominated Victorian family group is what we look back to wistfully, thinking it the norm. Actually it existed for less than half a century and then chiefly in fiction.

That it is envisioned today as an image of lost contentment only demonstrates the persistence of legend.

Families now resemble that vanished concept far less than they do the pioneer clusters at the start of our country's history. Like the pioneer families, they face a wilderness where few trails have been blazed, few signposts erected.

Though the wilderness is moral .and psychological rather than geographic, its dangers are real.

Oscar Handlin, in his illuminating book, The Americans, reminds us of the stresses of frontier life upon the first families to venture from the Old World. "In Europe," he says, "the family had been a functioning economic unit, in which ... each person had duties defined by age and status, and each was subject to the authority of the master. ...

The community of which it was a part assumed general oversight of the family .... The disapproval of the neighbours, the reproof of the church and the punishment of the state hung above those who failed to comply with the accepted code."

New England's Pilgrims came here in bands large continued

Always on the move, 'a junior executive and his family often shuttle about from city to city-and find security in closeness. enough to ensure some clinging to the old behaviour. But even they, fanning out from Plymouth to wider territories, lost touch with inherited customs. Later travellers into strangeness forgot them altogether. They were forced by circumstance to adopt new creeds, new standards of domestic life. Authority fell away, children grew mutinous, and sexual morals relaxed, as they tend to do in any time of change. We think of our ancestors as prim and stern. Except in the heart of New England, they were nothing of the sort.

They were earthy. Separated from what has been called "monuments of his past," the man of the frontier shrugged off moral taboos. Courtship became casual, marriage often undertaken without benefit of clergy. Even in Massachusetts, stronghold of European tradition, sexual conduct was haphazard, If the young of today seem bent on inventing temptations for themselves, they have early precedents to follow. We smile tolerantly at the picturesque custom of "bundling." Yet going to bed together, even with a presumed pine board between them to hamper embraces, must have appeared to young couples then as inciting as today's unchaperoned meetings in college dormitories. Many a pioneer bride went to her marriage wearing, in the ballad phrase, "her apron high." And the farther west the settlers pushed, the weaker became antique notions of decorum, harmony, order.

Living conditions did not permit such luxuries. Each family had to fend for itself. And that family consisted usually of a solitary unit-parents and children only, no older folks. Whatever shelter they inhabited had to be built by their own hands. So houses were small and cramped, and elegance impossible where help was scanty, children

always underfoot, and wives as necessary in the fields as their husbands. There was "alienation" among those forest families, and loneliness on the prairies.

In this decade, I repeat, the frontier returns. Under the impact of sociological pressures, pillars topple, established mores crumble. Religion, custom, common opinion-none is strong enough to regulate the new liberty. Ours is a bracing but a foreign clima~e. And people of my age can learn to breathe its air but cannot shelter our young from the winds that blow upon them.

My generation was spared the worst of the storm. We had our Depression and our War. But we were able to earn our livings and bring up our children during a time when standards, however frayed and fraying, were still familiar.

On our side we had the weight of solid social approval (or disapproval) to guide us. Extramarital experiment, however widespread, was not publicly condoned. If we had heard of marijuana it was distantly-as a mysterious dissipation prevalent only among jazz musicians. Lady Chatterley's Lover and Ulysses were still the most scandalous reading we had undertaken. A "blue" joke in the theatre set the town rocking. Nor had we spent our entire lives in the knowledge that annihilation of the planet was not only possible but perhaps imminent. Nazi concentration camps were unknown to us; and the plight of the Negro had not been made vivid. Safe, a little smug, we lived by old dogmas and inherited creeds.

We were not people of the forest. It is our descendants, now in their 20's and 30's and forming family units of their own, who must nearly unassisted mark the roads, forge new cultural values, invent a different civilization.

Their resemblance to frontiersmen is not altogether figurative. Even actualities obtain. So far I have spo,ken in generalities, and they have glittered a bit. With something of a thud I turn to similarities mundane but realistic.

Early marriage is this generation's reality. So is the

necessity for do-it-yourself-manship. So is the blurring of distinctions between those tasks that belong to women and those to men. All were phenomena of frontier existence and have revived today. So also have certain deprivations that still harass Americans-a lack of permanence, services and ordinary housing space.

Most immediate is lack of space. Where now are the houses that can mingle children, grandparents, servants and dependents in comfortable juxtaposition? Certainly not in cities, seldom even in the suburbs where novice families can afford to live. Moreover, necessity has bred desire. No longer do the generations wish to live together. Privacy has become their passion as it was often the passion of the frontiersman. The newly married consider it an inordinate hardship to live with parents. They will rent a loft, pitch a tent, inhabit a trailer, go to any lengths to escape the company of in-laws. And parents, in turn, feel no inclination to spend even old age with their offspring.

Today, over and over, one hears a slogan repeated by every aging couple, "All we hope is we'll never have to stay with our children." Pensions and savings and Social Security have made the hope attainable in most cases, and one supposes it works for the best. Still, from a romantic point of view, it seems a ruthless and lonely concept. Grandfather is no longer in a niche by the fire but in an expensive nursing home. Grandmother is dispensable. Generations no longer have the power to pass along their wisdom, if any, to blossoming families. And those families lose not only unpaid help and entertainment but the capacity for generosity.

But housing is not all. There is recently another tendency in middle-class life that elaborately frustrates the closeness of generations. This is the policy developed by large corporations of sending their junior executives shuttling about the nation. From city to city they are shifted like puppets, from job to job, and from one suburb to another. Each move confronts the family with an alien society, a varying

An energetic woman, Mrs. Page finds being a housewife and mother of six an almost full-time job.

But she plans her household duties so that she also has time for other activities. At left, she attends a social function to raise money for a church's building fund. Her husband Gene is fond of sports, likes to spend Saturday afternoons playing baseball with his sons, far left. His other outdoor interests are fishing and deer hunting. Every autumn, he goes on such trips. Both Mr. & Mrs. Page are native Californians. They were married when she was 17 and he 21, and Gene invested his small bank savings as a down payment on the house they now fully own.

culture. Kansas City is not Los Angeles. New York's customs differ from Houston's, and Montana's from Connecticut's. Yet over ten or twenty years young parents and their children often have to adjust to such a variety of places.

It makes for flexibility. It also makes for disruption of fixed values. Not only are the parents cast adrift by each move, but the children are disoriented. Continuity is sweet to the juvenile mind, one of the prime stabilizers of adolescence.

Sensing their children's confusion, parents attempt to make home itself a bulwark. Families draw ever more tightly together into a cellular group, as covered wagons used to form a fort-like circle against marauding American Indians.

Each transportation is a new wilderness. And to guide them the travellers have only one compass, one North star-their personal beliefs and ideals. Unsupported by the wisdom of any stable community, they must work out a bond strong enough to bind them through the years.

As they must do it without ethical guideposts, they must also frequently depend on no actual labour except their own.

The most dramatic difficulty for modern families is the disappearance of household help. It is the stigma of the age. In few other epochs hav~ parents been forced so singlehandedly to cope with houses, jobs, children. Before, there was always a neighbour, an aunt or a grandparent to see the family through childbirth or an illness. Now the recently married, even the well-to-do, have no such solace. They go it alone.

As a consequence they have developed a remarkable self-sufficiency. I watch them walking their hardy paths and marvel at their stamina. They expect and ask no quarter. If they are no longer required to cut logs for a cabin or trap game for food, they must still bend themselves to a hundred domestic tasks. Union-wage artisans are either unavailable or beyond their economic reach. So fledgling professors learn to be carpenters and renovate their own attics. Salesmen lay bathroom tiles. Ingenious accountants paper their walls, repair plumbing, build garages. There seems little feeling of resentment about such an atavistic pattern of hardship; only a continual drawing together. Youthful fathers know about changing diapers as their wives understand electric cables. Indeed, the young appear to court difficulties.

Nor do the young expect things to change. They comprehend that no matter how well they fare financially, the baby sitter and the occasional cleaning woman will be the extent of their household staff.

A friend of mine reports a significant question asked by her grandson. His parents are for their age happily prosperous. They have means for trips, a car, membership in a small club. Yet their seven-year-old son, Tony, has lived all his short life in a servantless menage. "Where's your lunch?" he asked a classmate the other day at noontime.

The classmate evidently belonged to a family out of touch with reality, for he replied nonchalantly, "The maid's bringing it."

All the rest of the day that strange response must have nagged at Tony's mind, for on the way home that afternoon he asked his mother quite seriously, "Mommy, what is a maid?"

It is a far cry, that, from my heyday in the 30's, when one might not be able to afford a new winter coat, but there continued

The new generations; says the author, have tender consciences. They long to spend themselves for the good of society. was always a Cora or a Jessie in middle-class kitchens.

That kitchen, of course, is the architectural omen of a new kind of family life. What the bath was to the Roman, the dining room to Regency times, the parlour to affluent Victorians, kitchens have become to modern homes. (And it, too, was a frontier symbol.) Meals are cooked there, but there also the family dines, entertains, supervises homework and commands the gossiping telephone.

Formality has fled the nylon-curtained homestead. Who now recalls finger bowls and five-course dinners? Certainly not families under forty. Young wives have mastered many arts. They are better cooks than their mothers, reading cookbooks with the same ardour they spend on volumes concerned with infant care and child rearing. But their party menus depend chiefly on a casserole and a salad.

The point scarcely needs to be proved. But to bolster it I quote another gem of childish ignorance. A suburban neighbour here had a daughter of eight who was recently invited to dine with a school friend. She returned that evening, full of wonder. "You know," she told her mother at bedtime, "they don't have napkins at Debbie's house. They use pieces of cloth."

Oh, Pioneers, indeed!

A member of my generation cannot but feel wistful about a society thus insulated against one form of luxury. It is no longer true, as we used to say, that money is the best laboursaving device in the world. Not even wealth can solve the help problem any more than can the most exalted battery of mechanical blenders, sweepers, stoves and garbage disposers. One cannot rely on what does not exist. The kind of fastidiousness that yesterday's middle classes strove for

The Pages are a closely-knit family, with each member sharing household responsibilities. Routine chores are assigned to each of the elder children.

Mrs. Page, right, prepares dinner in her small but efficiently organized kitchen, fitted with modern appliances that eliminate much drudgery in modern homes. They have no servants.

Daughter Karen assists her mother in the cooking by baking a cake for dessert, while son Kelly waits to clean out the frosting bowl. Weekly grocery shopping at the neighbourhood supermarket is a joint venture for the Pages, far right. Living within their weekly budget requires careful planning. Their attractive well-kept home includes a living room, dining room, kitchen and three bedrooms.

.disappears along with vanished cooks and nursemaids. Still, there are more important gains. It speaks well for the health of an economy that domestic service is no longer the sole opportunity open to the unskilled. And that the underserved refuse to complain is also good. I believe with all my heart that children forced early to accept household responsibility will grow up more adaptable and stronger of character than the generation before them. I even predict that among them will be fewer adolescent rebels. For from the time they are born, the children of today fit totally into parental arms. No intrusive presence comes between mother, father, offspring. Where parents go, there goes baby-to the store, the party, the skiing week-end. The cabin in the clearing fostered no stricter bond.

So far, my metaphor has been elastic enough to explain most new vagaries. I have yet to mention one significant variation of this theme which, at first, may seem to throw the analogy out of joint. That is the matter of wholesale prosperity.

Those who hacked from virgin territory a new civilization were largely the less privileged of the population. They owned little except a set of tools, a team of horses or oxen and whatever dowry of household goods the wife had brought to¡ marriage. They expected nothing much except hardship. Theirs, they knew, would probably be a marginal living and a spare old age.

Today we drown in affluence. Youthful families cannot even remember hard times. They have romped through a world where, no matter how rigorously their parents had fought for an economic foothold, they themselves have been conditioned by security. Few of them have gone short of food, clothing, education. (I speak again, of course, about the middle classes. Slums and ghettos are aberrations spotlighted ever more fiercely as society in general continues to flourish.)

All have grown sleek as race horses in body and mind.

They have been fed fluori<:fe and vitamins; they have been immunized and vaccinated and orthodontured within an inch of their lives. Specialists have removed their tonsils, and psychologists their inhibitions. Many have made it to college. Medicare and old-age subsidies will insure their futures.

And, for them, everywhere is employment.

On the steps of his university the graduating scientist is met by scouts from fifty businesses, each bidding for his services. The engineer, sheepskin in hand, is offered a wage larger, often, than his father ever received before retirement.

Newspapers in New York recently made much of the fact that law offices were offering starting salaries of $15,000 a year; and even at that astounding figure the large firms there could not find enough young men to staff their cubicles.

Even the budding writer, composer or artist is enabled to remain in his tower of imagination by an easily available grant. That there is discrepancy between their lot and that of the hard-core poor only emphasizes to these lucky seniors a sense of unending abundance. They refuse to worry about a rising cost ofliving. They expect to rise with it.

But to inhabit such an extraordinary economy is itself a form of pioneering. So vast a prosperity becomes a frontier hardly yet explored. The habits and casts of mind it engenders are quite different from those of any people before their time.

Not too many years ago, for example, debt was a disgrace. A mortgage was something to be wiped out with all possible speed. burned in a ritual ceremony. Nowadays mortgages are considered assets, paid off in a future where sums now owed will presumably have dwindled in purchasing¡ power and so bear less heavily on the debtor. The national theory of deficit-spending has become a personal one.

Young families buy houses on time, furnish them on credit, vacation by flying-now-paying-Iater, entertain on expense accounts. Thrift as a virtue has lost its appeal.

Those of my era, for whom balancing a budget was con-

sidered crucial (for the country as for households) turn apprehensive eyes on the progress of our cavalier descendants. We cannot always understand their goals and grails.

"Here is my youngest son, John, graduating from Harvard with honours," complained a distracted father to me the other day, "and all he plans to be is a teacher in a ghetto.

He doesn't seem to care about getting ahead."

What this parent cannot appreciate is that the very glut of opportunities proffered our children has made them contemptuous of the material values that guided us. John, his father thinks, ought to study medicine or law or business. ought to be embarking on some financial course earmarked "security." But John has known nothing but security. Now he wants adventure. He also longs to spend himself for the good of society.

The new generations have tender consciences. They can afford them better than could we who were so engrossed in trying to ward off from our front porches the wolves of the Depression that we paid only lip service to good causes.

Who among us in the 30's or 40's would have clamoured to join a Peace Corps, a Head Start, a neighbourhood renewal project? Or spurned private industry for work in government? Or dedicated our spare time to politics and protest?

Only an elect and eccentric few. Yet it is famous that great companies have a harder and harder time recruiting talent emerging from college. In a material setting, materialism loosens its hold. We in youth wished to make our fortunes.

Many now yearn to make a world.

I call that very hopeful indeed. If the American family seems threatened-by the impact of violence and war, by frequent divorce, changing sexual attitudes and a general atmosphere of weariness towards established religion-it is also protected by this fresh concern for the rights of human beings. No group can survive without an ideal. The name of that ideal now is civil reform.

Advancing this cause becomes the cement of family relationships. Boys and girls meet in picket lines, marry for love of justice, together rear children imbued from the cradle with the conviction that they must give service to humanity.

Something larger than financial gain freshens their days.

They are never bored (and boredom can hugely endanger felicity) since they own a hundred outlets for their surplus energies. They enlist for duties among the poor. They work on ecumenical committees, pressure their Congressmen, sustain the arts. Fathers who might otherwise pass their evenings watching television now nightly knock on neighbourhood doors, petitions in hand. Mothers with children packed off to school give importance to their mornings by attending lectures on sociology or instructing the retarded or working for the League of Women Voters.

They may live strenuously. But they are a free people.

Medicine has enabled them to bring children into the world when they are most wanted. The economy has allowed them-women as well as men-to follow careers or not, as they choose. And prosperity permits them to expend both their lives and leisure on projects that enrapture them.

I like what I see. I admire the new generation. And 1 believe the American family has never before had a better chance for a rewarding life, for enlightened liberty, and for the pursuit of its own and everybody else's happiness. END

T'HE READING HA BIT

From Art to Zoology, there is hardly a field of knowledge which American magazines do not cover. The nine United States Information Service Libraries and Reading Rooms . in India subscribe to hundreds of American periodicals with a range of interests as varied as it is comprehensive. Apart from the news and picture magazines popular with the casual reader, there are scholarly and professional journals of all kinds. The serious student of literature, art, history or law, the inquisitive engineer or technician and the progressive farmer may find in their pages much material of interest and profit. Providing uptodate information on all aspects of life and culture in the United States, these periodicals are a useful, almost indispensable, supplement to the books available in USIS libraries and reading rooms located at Bangalore, Bombay, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Madras, New Delhi, Patna and Trivandrum. Some back issues are loaned to members.

Providing rich, varied fare, some five hundred American magazines are available in USIS Libraries and Reading Rooms throughout India including the American Cultural Centre, Lucknow, right and above.

For nearly a eentury, women's magazines in America have guided women in the techniques of better living and influenced the nation's economy. They have set styles in feminine fashions, given the housewife ideas on homemaking and helped introduce new products and designs such as the attractive Indian fabrics and handicrafts shown on these pages.

A pair of divans and a lavish use of colourful Indian textiles give the small study, left, in an American apartment an exotic look worthy of a Maharaja's abode. Patterned fabrics in green and pink blend with wallpaper, flowers and plants in bedroom, below, to create a charming decor.

EVER UNDERESTIMATE the power of a woman," advised a leading American women's magazine recently, "nor of the magazine women believe in." Certainly no American advertiser who wants to bring his products or services to the notice of women, can afford to ignore the women's magazines. For so profound is the influence of these magazines that many women decide not only what purchases to make but also where to make them only after they have carefully scrutinized their pages. For some five decades, women's magazines, with their cornucopia of ideas, have introduced scores of new products into American homes and educated the housewife in the art of homemaking-how to care for children, how to plan a garden, how to decorate the house tastefully and elegantly, how to prepare well-balanced meals. Among the scores of women's magazines in the U.S., Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and McCall's fall into the category of what might be termed service magazinesjournals that advise their readers on a variety of domestic interests. Two top fashion magazines are Vogue and Harper's Bazaar whose pages are replete with glamorous models displaying the new hairdos, cosmetics, clothes and jewellery.

Mademoiselle and Glamour are aimed at college and career girls and portray fashions more suited for middle-income groups. Better Homes and Gardens, House and Garden and House Beautiful deal, in general, with house planning and interior decoration.

Women's magazines, while differing in style and presentation, have a common formula: useful instruction on running the home, combined with advice on clothes and fashions. Some also include fiction. For many years American magazines have introduced exotic fashion and interior design ideas to their readers.

Indian themes are currently enjoying popularity in both the service and fashion magazines. Exquisitely-embroidered cushion covers, delicately-carved brass and woodwork, brightly-hued fabrics and scores of other Indian handicrafts are shown throughout the magazines' colourful pages. Some photographs from recent issues of American women's magazines are published on these pages.