SPAN: December 1968

Santa rides again

SPAN

Cover Every Christmas, the legendary Santa Claus rides again to bring greetings and gifts to children the world over. His vehicle, as visualized

by Cam Snow, is a camel in place of the conventional eight-reindeerdriven sleigh. This change also recalls the origin of Santa Claus as St. Nicholas of Myra, an obscure fourth-century Middle Eastern saint.

For the story on "A Certain Nicholas of Patara," turn to pages 18-19.

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

Editorial Staff: Carmen Kagal, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal K. Sharma, Krishan G. Gabranj, P.R. Gupta, Art Staff: B. Roy Choudhury, Nand K. Katyal, Kanti Roy, Kuldip Singh Jus, Gopi Gajwani.ProductionStaff: Awtar S. Marwaha, Mammen Philip. Photographic Services: USTS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the American EJiJbassy, New Delhi. Printed bYi K. Mehta at Vakil & S9[1 .1 vt. Ltd., mbay-l.

Narandas Building, S Road, 18 Ballard EState' 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.

LAST MONTH Richard Milhous Nixon. above right. was elected President of the United States in one of the closest and most. exciting contests in American political history. The Republican nominee and his running mate, Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew, emerged as winners with 302 electoral votes but with only a narrow margin of popular votes over their Democratic rivals, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine. The "photo-finish" victory dramatized the reversal of Mr. Nixon's role in the Presidential election of 1960 when he lost to John F. Kennedy in an equal1y suspense-laden contest and by an almost equal1y narrow margin.

The President-elect, now 55, is no stranger to India. He visited this country in 1953 as Vice President in the Eisenhower Administration, and again in 1967, when he met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Deputy Prime Minister Morarji Desai and other Indian leaders. Hailing his 1968election victory, Mrs. Gandhi said: "The Government and the people of India warmly felicitate Mr. Nixon on his election to the Presidentship of the U.S.A. He comes to this high office with a distinguished record of service and experience of international affairs. We trust that his career will be marked by greater well-being for the people of the U.S.A. and steady progress towards international understanding and co-operation."

Mr. Nixon will be inaugurated as President next January 20 in a solemn ceremony on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. He will succeed President Lyndon B. Johnson who has served in the office since November 22, 1963.

Fifty-year-old Spiro Theodore Agnew has been Governor of Maryland since 1967,and prior to that served as County Executive of Baltimore County. As State Governor, he has sponsored civil rights legislation, carried out taxation reform and issued a "code of fair practice"¡ applicable to State employment and to private contractors working for the State. He has also been active in charting new approaches to the staggering problems of the cities.

Operation So

Adopting the techniques of Sherlock Holmes, Indian and U.S. geologists have discovered rich deposits of phosphate rock near the hill station of Mussoorie. Filling an important need of the Indian fertilizer industry, the new phosphate belt promises greater agricultural yields, a saving of valuable foreign exchange.

THE RECENTDISCOVERY of a phosphaterock belt near Mussoorie has been described by Mr. Bhagwan Singh, Chairman of the National Mineral Development Corporation, as one of the "most exciting" finds in the mineral development of India.

In India's drive to achieve self-sufficiency in food, the discovery is of particular importance: phosphate is an important plant food which many Indian soils lack and its application produces higher yields.

Every year many crores of rupees are spent on phosphate-rock imports. The rock, subjected to a complex treatment, produces superphosphate, a brown powder which contains the plant food in a highly soluble form. Until recently it was believed that India, which has rich deposits of iron, bauxite, and several other minerals, did not have phosphate-rock deposits of commercial importance. The Indian fertilizer industry was, therefore, reconciled to dependence on imported raw material. The Planning Commission made provision for continued phosphate-rock imports-and on an increasing scale, because of the growMotor-driven core-drilling rig brings up rock samples from depth of 600 feet. It took three weeks to pull rig over six miles-I,OOO feet down into a valley, 1,000 feet up a mountain.

ing appetite of Indian farmers for fertilizers. Therefore, the Mussoorie discovery is welcome from the viewpoints of the farmer, the fertilizer industry, and foreign exchange.

Operation Soft Rock is the code name of India's phosphate exploration drive. This name has been adopted in part to distinguish phosphate exploration from Operation Hard Rock which is concerned with copper, lead, zinc, and other non-ferrous metals. Both operations are aided by the U.S. Government.

In the past the men who discovered gold, silver, or copper deposits depended on their own hard and patient work-on brawn rather than brain. Nowadays geologists, such as those who discovered the Mussoorie phosphate-rock deposit, adopt the techniques of Sherlock Holmes or Perry Mason. They study events which appear totally unrelated to each other and make guesses-often brilliant-as to the place. where one should look for a valuable minerai deposit. Present-day geological exploration often calls for physical stamina, but to an even greater degree, it requires detective talents of a very superior kind.

Consider Operation Soft Rock. The Indian and American geologists who located the Mussoorie deposit had to make some

David Davidson, leader of the American Soft Rock team (right), discusses a phosphate rock sample with Indian geologists. Some samples are rich in phosphoric acid; others are not.

Far right, Josiah Royce, chief of USA/D's Mining and Transportation Division, examines specimen through magnifying glass. He has been associated with Soft Rock since its inception.

Carrying heavy logs of wood used to buttress walls and roof of mine shaft, workers struggle up a mountain peak 7,000 feet high. Steel helmets are protection against falling stones.

What we today know as India was once part of a vast continent named Gondwana which existed in the Southern Hemisphere. educated guesses as to what happened to the earth some 200 million years ago before they knew where to look for phosphate rock. This is because the phosphate did not come into being where Mussoorie is today, but in a vast continent named Gondwana which is believed to have existed in the Southern Hemisphere, thousands of miles from the Himalayan foothills where the Soft Rock geologists have today pitched their tents.

No man ever trod on Gondwana. It broke up into disparate parts long before man made his appearance on this planet.

Eduard Suess, an Austrian geologist, was the "discoverer" of Gondwana. He deduced its past existence from a number of striking similarities in the fauna and flora of widely separated regions: the lungfish is found in Australia, South Africa, and South America; both the kangaroo of the Australian plains and the opossum of the South American rain forest carry their young in a pouch attached to the lower abdomen of the female; a certain type of pine tree is found in South America and Australia and on islands in the South Pacific Ocean.

Fossils buried deep in the soil on several continents also suggest a common origin.

Coal formed from the body of two particular ferns is found in South America, Antarctica, South Africa, India and Australia.

Suess argued that these and other similarities could best be explained by the hypothesis that a huge continent existed in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It embraced almost all of Africa, Madagascar, peninsular India, Australia, Tasmania, Antarctica, the Falklands and all South America exce.r;tthe extreme west and northwest.

The Austrian named this supercontinent Gondwana, after the historical name for a large tract of hilly country in Central India.

The name is derived from the aboriginal tribe of Gonds, who ruled most of present Madhya Pradesh from the twelfth to the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Two hundred million years ago, Gondwana broke up under the pressure of forces originating in the earth's interior. The broken parts drifted away from each other.

South America finally attached itself to the tip of North America. Africa pushed itself north and squeezed out the ocean until only'the tiny Medi terrane an sea remained to separate it from Europe. ' These continental movements, of course, were not smooth, orderly and uneventful.

They resulted in the creation of new seas and high mountain ranges. Quakes shook the earth and volcanoes belched flame and lava. The entire topography of the earth changed.

A small portion of Gondwana, which is now known as India, drifted north for thousands of miles until its movement was brought to a grinding halt by its collision with Asia.

The northern shore of this drifting subcontinent was a plain richly encrusted with marine sediment. The rocks and soil caught in the middle of this continental squeeze were pushed up. The world's tallest mountain range, the Himalayas, was born.

This hypothesis explains the occurrence of marine fossils on high Himalayan peaks.

But what is the connection between phosphate rock and continental movements?

How does speculation on Gondwana's history help in locating phosphate deposits in North India?

Most of the world's economic deposits of phosphate rock are of marine origin.

Apatite is the principal ingredient of phosphate rock. Apatite received its name from the Greek word for "deceiver" because it does not have a distinctive appearance and is often confused with beryl, limestone, ferruginous oolite, flint or sandstone.

Apatite is composed largely of calcium phosphate, an important ingredient of bones, teeth and many shells. For millions of years these materials have accumulated on land and on the ocean bed. The rivers carry a continual flow of calcium phosphate into the sea.

Nearly 30 years ago geologists evolved a theory to explain the occurrence of ph osphate deposits. According to this theory, calcium phosphate makes its way to the deeper parts of the ocean. Strong ocean currents bring these deposits to the surface and deposit them on the western shores of continents.

Why western? Because the earth rotates from west to east and ocean currents are deflected to the right. They tend to graze a land mass on its western rather than its eastern side.

When an upwelling current flows above a shallow continental shelf, the apatite is deposited on the shore. This process, repeated over millions of years, leads to the formation of phosphate-rock deposits.

The theory holds that large phosphaterock deposits came into being on the shores of Gondwana, particularly along its westcontinued

At some places, rich phosphate rock veins, more than two feet thick, are believed to run 350 kilometres along the Himalayan foothills. Total deposits are estimated at several hundred million tons.

By the eerie light of a Petromax lamp, Indian geologist taps rock formation in the depths of a mine shaft. Below, a chemist at work in the well-equipped laboratory set up by the National Mineral Development Corporation in Mussoorie.

ern coast. Acting on this theory, geologists have been able during the past two decades to discover substantial deposits of phosphate rock in Peru, Colombia, and Angola.

These regions are today far removed from each other, but they have one thing in common: they all once were part of Gondwana.

The ever-growing demand for foreign exchange to import phosphate rock stimulated an intensive search by Indian geologists. But until two years ago the search was not successful. This was largely because it is very difficult to distinguish phosphate rock from flint and limestone. In other parts of the world phosphate rock is often embedded in deposits of shale and limestone.

Indian geologists knew that since this country was once part of Gondwana, there was a good chance of finding phosphaterock deposits along the edges of the ancient continent. They analysed rocks and classified them by their origin. They found that the edge of the ancient continent ran along tbe foothills of the Himalayas and across the Rajasthan desert.

In particular, tbe geologists searched around Mussoorie where, in 1884,two Englishmen, a Rev. Parsons and a Mr. Evans, had found nodules of phospbate. But an intensive search failed to reveal a big deposit of rock.

In 1941 the Geological Survey ofIndia (GS!) traced a small bed of phosphate rock near Mussoorie. The bed was overlain by a 50-foot-thick bed of flint, and this in turn was overlain by a 150-foot-thick bed of black shale. The phosphate-rock formation was too thin and too deep to be worth mining.

In March 1966, Richard Sheldon, a geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey, arrived in India on a month's visit at the request of the Indian Government. Dr. Sheldon specializes in the location of phosphate rock deposits. GSI invited Sheldon to visit Mussoorie and, with Indian geologists, he surveyed once again the excavations in that area.

Sheldon agreed with Indian geologists that the small pbosphate-rock formation located at a depth of200 feet was not worth mining. But he pointed out tbat in some countries rich deposits of phosphate rock had been found at the boundary between the flint and black shale formations. When an intensive search was made at this level, a thick vein of phosphate rock was also found in the Mussoorie formation.

Sbortly afterwards, Sheldon visited Bir'J

mania, near Jaisalmer, Rajastban, where geologists of the Oil and Natural Gas Commission are carrying out an extensive survey for oil. Here again a phosphate-rock deposit was discovered.

GSI greatly intensified its exploration in both Rajastban and the Himalayan foothills. Visiting India a few months later, Sheldon was greatly impressed with the progress of the work. "India owes a great debt to these fine geologists," he said. "At both Mussoorie and Birmania they have worked bard in the face of extremely difficult circumstances. They have not allowed the torrid heat of the Rajasthan desert or the heavy monsoon rains which lash Mussoorie to interfere with their work or sap their enthusiasm."

In January 1968 the United States extended a loan of $250,000 (Rs. 18.75 lakhs) to help finance Operation Soft Rock. The U.S. also made available the services of half a dozen experts with specialized knowledge of geology, chemistry, metallurgy, and other aspects of phosphate exploration. These experts have trained Indian personnel on the job in the latest techniques.

Recently, the leader of tbe U.S. team, David Davidson, a geologist 011 the staff of the U.S. Geological Survey, left India on completion of his assignment. At Mussoorie he worked alongside one hundred geologists and other experts of GSI and the National Mineral Development Corporation. "By the time I arrived, GSI had already done extensive mapping of a hundred-square-mile plot that looked promising," Dr. Davidson said. Tbe American team helped in carrying out intensive surveys and laboratory tests. The results are encouraging. At one locality a two-andone-half-foot-thick vein of high-grade rock has been found. The phosphoric-acid content is as high as thirty-four per cent. Some geologists believe that the phosphate-rock belt stretches out to a distance of 350 kilometres along the Himalayan foothills.

The total deposits in this area run up to several hundred million tons.

These discoveries, combined with new seeds, improved management, scientific practices, extended education and ot er modern agricultural advancements suggest a brighter future for India's farmers.

Right, after waste rock is loosened with pick. it is hauled out of mine shaft in trolleys. As rock is removed, the widening tunnel is shored up with logs, a task that calls for great care.

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electronic jUngle The best-selling books at campus book stores in the United States these days are by 56-year-old Marshall McLuhan, a man who would seem, at first glance, to have little in common with universityage young people. But McLuhan is the first serious thinker who has profoundly probed the impact on society of television, transistor radios and other electronic communications media. The generation now in college in the United States is the first one in the world to be totally surrounded by these new electronic communications media since infancy, and itfinds McLuhan's • message, with all its disturbing implications, particularly relevant.

Most adults, however, cannot read his message, or they find it as distorted as the elongated image of McLuhan at left.

MARSHALL McLuHAN, one of the most acclaimed and controversial of contemporary intellectuals, paradoxically displays little of the stuff of which prophets are made. By trade, he is a professor of English literature at St. Michael's College, the Roman Catholic unit or'the University of Toronto. Except for his seminar in "Communication," the courses he teaches are the standard fare of modern literature and criticism, and around his own university he was, until recently, hardly a celebrity. Tall, thin, middle-aged and graying, he dresses conventionally and possesses a face of such meagre individual character that it is difficult to remember exactly what he looks like; different photographs of him rarely seem to capture the same man.

His book-lined office, full of professorial disarray, looks hardly different from the next scholar's shop, except that in a cubicle, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling books on three sides, sits a secretary who answers his mail, types his huge correspondence with the outside world, and intercepts an endless number of telephone calls with all those requests to write, to lecture, to sympose, to come to this occasion and that, to submit to interviews, and to correct the mistakes of previous interviewers.

Marshall McLuhan communicates to the larger world primarily by book, and his two major works, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), have won the most astonishing variety of admirers. General Electric, IBM and Bell Telephone have all invited him to address their top executives; so have the publishers of America's largest magazines. Certain famous advertising men reportedly open and conclude all their intra-office memos with epigrams from McLuhan, and the demands upon his activity have recently become so numerous that, as one friend of his put it, "He is by now a public resource."

His admirers are by no means confined to business; among them are intellectuals such as the avant-garde composer John Cage who several years ago made a pilgrimage to Toronto especially to pay homage to McLuhan and the art critic Harold Rosenberg, who judged that Understanding Media "takes its place in that wide channel of cultural criticism of the twentieth century that includes writers like T. S. Eliot, Oswald Spengler, D. H. Lawrence, F. R. Leavis, David Riesman, and Hannah Arendt." No thinker has had a greater influence upon intelligent students today than McLuhan, perhaps because his books reveal a reality perceived by them and yet invisible to their teachers and parents.

McLuhan's ideas defy conventional categories of thought such as "criticism" or "philosophy" and he prefers to consider himself, metaphorically, an explorer of uncharted contemporary jungles"detective" is one of his favourite words for himself. Thus, it is appropriate that New York City's Fordham University, a Jesuit institution, should have selected him to assume its Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities-a State-underwritten position that allots $100,000 for salary, staff and research expenses. After twenty-one years of snooping on American culture from Toronto, because, he says, "I can better observe it from up here," McLuhan is now able to explore, as well as agitate,

the jungles of New York on a full-time permanent basis.

What makes McLuhan's success so surprising is that his books c'ontain little of the slick style of which popular sociology is usually made. As anyone who opens the covers immediately discovers, Media and Galaxy are horrendously difficult to readclumsily written, frequently contradictory, oddly organized, and overlaid with their author's singular jargon. One explanation of . his stylistic sloppiness is that everything he writes actually originates as dictation, either to his secretary or to his wife; and he is reluctant to rewrite, because, he explains, "I tend to add, and the whole thing gets out of hand." Moreover, some of his insights are so original that they evade immediate understanding; indeed, some paragraphs may forever evade darification.

"Most dear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on," McLuhan rationalizes. "Clear prose indicates the absence of thought." he basic themes in these books seem difficult at first, because the concepts are as unfamiliar as the language; but on second (or maybe third) thought, the ideas are really quite accessible. In explaining the evolution of human history, McLuhan espouses a position one can only call "technological determinism." That is, whereas Karl Marx and other economic determinists believed that the economic organization of a society shapes every important aspect of its life, McLuhan believes that crucial technological innovations are the primary influence.

In developing his historical explanations, McLuhan recognizes the work of the historian Lynn White, Jr., who wrote in Mediaeval Technology and Social Change (1962) that the three inventions of the stirrup, the nailed horseshoe and the horse collar created the Middle Ages. With the stirrup, the soldier could carry armour and mount' a charger; the horseshoe and the harness brought more efficient tilling of the land and, thus, the feudal system of organized agriculture, which, in turn, paid for the soldier's armour.

Pursuing this insight into technology's crucial influence, McLuhan focuses on the role played by information technology.

He maintains that a major shift in society's predominant technology of communication is the crucially determining force behind social change. "Societies have been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication," he declares, because new media initiate great transformations not only in social organizations but human sensibilities. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, he suggests that the invention of movable type shaped the culture of Western Europe from 1500 to 1900. The mass production of printed materials encouraged nationalism by allowing a more uniform and wider spread of printed materials than handwritten messages permit.

The linear forms of print influenced music to repudiate the structure of repetition; as in Gregorian chants, for that of linear development, as in a symphony.

Also, print reshaped the sensibility of Western man; for whereas he once saw experience as individual entities-as a collection of J

continued

separate segments-man in the Renaissance saw life as he saw print-as a continuity, often with causal relationships. Print even made Protestantism possible, because the printed book, by enabling people to think in isolation, encouraged individual revelation. Finally, "All forms of mechanization emerge from movable type, for type is the prototype of all machines."

In Understanding Media, McLuhan suggests that electronic technologies of communication-telegraph, radio, television, movies, telephones, computers-are similarly reshaping civilization in the twentieth century. Whereas print-age man saw one thing at a time in consecutive sequence-like a line of type-contemporary man experiences numerous forces of communication simultaneously, pften through more than one of his senses. Contrast, for example, the way most of us read a book with how we look at a newspaper. With the latter, we do not start one story, read it through and then start another. Rather, we shift our eyes across the pages, assimilating a discontinuous collection of headlines, subheadlines, head paragraphs and photographs. "People don't actually read newspapers," McLuhan says. "They get into them every mo;ning like a hot bath."

Furthermore, the electronic media initiate sweeping changes in the distribution of sensory awareness-in what McLuhan calls the "sensory ratios." A painting or a book strikes us through only one sense, the visual; motion pictures and television hit us not only through the eye but the ear. The new media envelop us, asking us to participate. McLuhan believes that such a multi-sensory existence is bringing a return to the primitive man's emphasis upon the sense of touch, which he considers the primary sense, "because it consists of a meeting of the senses."

shapes its limitations and possibilities for the communication of content.

One medium can be more successful than another at evoking a certain experience. American football, for example, is usually better on television than on radio or in a newspaper column; a bad football game on television is more interesting than a great game on radio. Most United Nations hearings, in contrast, are less boring in the newspaper than on television. Each medium seems to possess a hidden taste me~hanism that encourages some styles and experiences and rejects others.

To characterize these mechanisms, McLuhan devises the categories of "hot" and "cool," which analyze the character of a communications instrument, the quality of the experience it communicates, and its interaction with human attention. A "hot" medium or experience has a "high definition" or a highly individualized character, as well as aconsiderableamountof detailed information.

"Cool" is "low" in definition and information; it requires that the audience participate to complete the communication.

McLuhan's own examples clarify the distinction. "A cartoon is 'low' definition, simply because very little information is provided." Radio is usually a hot medium; print, photography, film and paintings essentially are hot media. "Any hot medium allows less participating than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue."

The terms "hot" and "cool" he also applies to experiences and people; and, pursuing his distinction, he suggests that while a hot medium favours a performer possessed of a strongly individualized presence, cool media prefer more nonchalant, "cooler" people.

Whereas the radio medium needs a voice of a highly idiosyncratic quality that is instantly recognIzable, television favours people of olitically, he sees the new media as transforming the a definition so low that they appear positively ordinary; that exworld into "a global village," where all ends -of the plains why bland personalities are more successful on television. earth are in immediate touch with one another, as well "It was no accident that Senator Joseph McCarthy lasted such a as fostering a "retribalization" of human life. "Any very short time when he switched to TV," McLuhan says. "TV is highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and maga- a cool medium. It rejects hot figures [such as Senator McCarthy] zine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris." In and people from the hot media. Had TV occurred on a large scale his grand scheme of historical development, McLuhan during Hitler's reign he would have vanished quickly."

In his remarks on common phenomena, McLuhan possesses sees four great stages: (1) Totally oral, preliterate tribalism. (2) The codification by script that arose after Homer in ancient Greece the most astonishing capacity to perceive what remains hidden and 'lasted 2,000 years. (3) The age of print, roughly from 1500 tQJ from others-literally, to make the invisible visible. "As a rule," he says, "I always look for what others ignore." Most of his orig1900. (4) The age of electronic media, from 1900 to the present.

McLuhan's discussions of the individual media move far be- inality stems from a distinctly North American willingness to push yond the pieties of seriolls critics, most of whom complain about his perceptions beyond conventional bounds into an unknown their content, generally arguing that if television had more intelli- region where ideas and insights seem "mad" before they are recgent treatments of more intelligent subjects, its contribution to ognized as true. The ideas are not as neatly presented as this sumculture would be greater. McLuhan proposes that, instead, we mary might suggest, for McLuhan believes more in probing and discoveries"-than in offering final definithink more about the character and form of the new media. His exploring-"making tions. For this reason, he will in public conversation rarely defend most famous epigram-"The medium is the message"-means any of his statements as absolute truths, although he will explain several things.

The phrase first suggests that each medium develops an audi- how he developed them. ence of people whose love for that medium is greater than their orne perceptions are considerably more tenable than concern for its content. That is, the TV medium itself becomes the others-indeed, some are patently ridiculous-and all prime interest in watching television; just as some people like to his original propositions are arguable; so his books read for the joy of experiencing print, and more find great pleasure require the participation of each reader to separate in talking to just anybody over the telephone, so others like televiwhat is wheat for him from the chaff. In McLuhanese, sion for its mixture of kinetic screen and relevant sound. Second, the books offer a cool experience in a hot medium. the "message" of a medium includes everything in Western culture A typical reader's scorecard for Understanding Media that the new has influenced. "The message of the movie medium might show that about one half is brilliant insight; one fourth, is that of transition from linear connections to configurations." suggestive hypothesis; one fourth, nonsense. Given the books' Third, the aphorism suggests that the medium itself-its form-

purposes and originality, these are hardly discreditable percentages. "If a few details here and there are wacky," McLuhan rationalizes, "it doesn't matter a hoot."

McLuhan's ideas continually confront that great modern question of whether technology is beneficial to man. Many thinkers have argued, on the one hand, that technology stifles the blood of life by dehumanizing the spirit and cutting existence off from nature; more materialist thinkers, on the other hand, defend the machine for easing man's burdens and providing desirable commodities at a reasonable price. cLuhan pursues Ralph Wald'o Emerson's idea that, "All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of [man's] limbs and senses." That is, where a shovel is essentially an extension of the hand, electronic media atend the nervous system; for instance, the telephone is an extension of the ear (and the voice) while television extends our eyes and ears to a distant place. Our eyes and ears attended John Kennedy's funeral, for example, but our bodies stayed at home.

As extensions, the new media offer both possibility and threat; for while they lengthen man's reach into his existence, they can also extend society's reach into him, for both exploitation and control.

To prevent this latter possibility, McLuhan insists that every man should know as much about the media as possible. "By knowing how technology shapes our environment, we can transcend its absolutely determining power," he says. "Actually, rather than a 'technological determinist,' it would be more accurate to say, as regards the future, that I am an 'organic autonomist.' My entire concern is to overcome the determination that results from people trying to ignore what is going on. Far from regarding technological change as inevitable, I insist that if we understand its components we can turn it off any time we choose. Short of turning it off, there are lots of moderate controls conceivable." In stressing the importance of knowledge and man's capacity to shape his environment to his needs, McLuhan is a humanist.

Indeed, his thought implies radical reforms in education, for.he believes that contemporary man is not fully "literate" if reading is his sole pleasure. "You must be literate in umpteen media to be really 'literate' nowadays." Education, he suggests, should abandon its commitment to print-merely a focusing of the visual sense-to cultivate the I'total sensorium" of man by teaching us how to use all five cylinders, rather than only one. This dimension of his thinking particularly appeals to today's American youth, most of whom have been watching television since just after they were weaned.

McLuhan's ideas also provide the rationale for some of the most eccentric entertainment ventures of recent years-those multi-media discotheques that are especially popular among the young. Usually, within a huge room are hundreds of young people dancing, a rock 'n' roll band whose sound emerges from a plethora of speakers distributed around the hall, scores of slides and motion pictures all over the walls and sometimes the ceiling, the entire scene illuminated only by a pulsating stroboscopic light. Through electronic media largely unavailable a generation ago, the creators of such discotheques create an environment where attention is not focused, as by a book, but endlessly diverted.

Herbert (a name he seldom uses) Marshall McLuhan possesses a background as unexceptional as his appearance. He was born in

Western Canada-Edmonton, Alberta-on July 21, 1911, the son of a real estate and insurance salesman who, McLuhan remembers, "enjoyed talking with people more than pursuing his business." After taking his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Manitoba, he studied at Cambridge, where he eventually earned his Ph.D. Returning home in 1936, he took ajob at the University of Wisconsin. The following year he entered the Catholic Church, and he has since taught only at Catholic institutions-at St. Louis from 1937 to 1944, at Assumption in Canada from 1944 to 1946 and at St. Michael's College, a Basilian (C.S.B.) establishment since 1946.

In 1953, the year after he became a full professor at St. Michael's, McLuhan founded a little magazine entitled, significantly, Explorations, which survived only a few years; and along with his co-editor, the anthropologist Edmund S. Carpenter, McLuhan collected some of the best material in a paperback called Explorations in Communication (1960), which is perhaps the best introduction to his special concerns and ideas.

In 1963, the University of Toronto appointed McLuhan to head a newly formed Centre for Culture and Technology "to study the psychic and social consequences of technology and the media."

A visitor expects the Centre, so boldly announced in the letterhead of McLuhan's correspondence, to be a sleek new building with a corps of secretaries. In fact, as the Centre is more a committee than an institution, it exists, for the present, only in McLuhan's cluttered office. Bookcases cover the walls, with battered old editions of the English classics on the top shelves and a varied assortment of newer books on Western civilization on the more accessible shelves-6,000 to 7,000 volumes in all. More books and papers cover several large tables. Buried in a corner is a shabby metal-frame chaise lounge, more suited to a porch than an office, with a thin, lumpy green mattress haphazardly draped across it.

The professor is a conscientious family man with a Texas-born wife and six children. They live in an unprepossessing three-storey house that looks pretty much like all the other houses on its block in residential Toronto. The interior is modest, if not dowdy, and unexceptional, except for an excessive number of books, both shelved and sprawled. McLuhan likes to read in a reclining position, so across the top of the living-room couch, propped against the wa11,are twenty or so fat scholarly works; interspersed among them are a few mysteries. McLuhan rarely goes to the movies or watches television; most of his own cultural intake comes via print and conversation. Talking is his favourite recreation.

McLuhan looks and lives like most other small-city profeSsors until he begins to speak. His lectures and conversations are a singular mixture of original assertions, imaginative comparisons, heady abstractions, and fantastically compreht{nsive generalizations; and no sooner does he stun his listeners with one extraordinary thought than he hits them with several more. n his graduate seminar, he asks: "What is the future of old age?" The students look bewildered. "Why," he replies to his own question, "exploration and discovery." Nearly everything he says sounds important. Before long, he has characterized a TV show based on a comic strip as "simply an exploitation of nostalgia which I predicted years ago." About twenty-five or so students still look befuddled and dazed; hardly anyone talks but McLuhan. "The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer," he goes on. "Bad news reveals the character of change; good news does not." No one asks him to be more definitive, because continued

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nint fuam : aD pauaglnnn lIi Em iUii:maftulii tt ttlnina mauit ftJ! his talk has a way of intimidating his listeners.

He seems enormously opinionated; in fact, he is continually conjuring insights. His style demands a memory as prodigious and diversified as his curiosity. Even on the street, chugging through the Toronto scene, he showers his listeners with suggestive ideas on all subjects; no area of human endeavour escapes his concernor his original ideas. He often elevates an analogy into a grandiose generalization, and he likes to make his points with puns: "When a thing is current, it creates currency," His critics ridicule him as a communications expert who cannot successfully communicate; but his admirers reply that his detractors suffer from closed minds. he major incongruity is that a man so intellectually adventurous should lead such a conservative life; the egocentric and passionately prophetic qualities of his book contrast with the personal modesty and pervasive confidence of a secure Catholic. Similarly, the same man who has explored the new media so profoundly prefers to communicate in the archaic medium of the book. "Print," he explains, "is the medium I trained myself to handle." Indeed, all this recent acclaim has transformed McLuhan into a bookmaking machine-two more will appear soon; and perhaps reflecting his own idea that future art will be, like mediaeval art, corporate in authorship, McLuhan is producing several more books in dialogue with others.

McLuhan himself has always been essentially a professor living in an academic community, a father in close touch with his large family and a teacher who also writes and lectures. When some VIPs invited· him to New-Yark a- year ago, he kept them waiting while he graded his students' papers.: Although he does not run away' f~om all the reporters and 'visitors, he does little to' attract: publicity. His passion is the-dialogue; and if the visitor can participate in the conversation, he may be lucky enough, as this writer was, to help McLuhan write, that is, dictate a chapter of a book.

"Most people," McLuhan once remarked, "are alive in an earlier time·; but you must be-alive in our own time. The artist,:' he added, "is the man in ahy field~scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness." Although his' intention was otherwise, McLuhan was describing himself-the specialist in general knowledge. Who would dare surmise what thoughts, what perceptions, what grand schemes he will offer next?

END

Before writing, man relied on oral communication in such primitive societies as that shown on the opposite page. Here, the listener's relationship with the speaker was, of necessity, one of direct involvement.

With the invention o.(printing, man saw one thing at a time in consecutive sequence-like the lines of type, above right-and it became possible to communicate ideas that were contemplated by individuals. Today, man experiences many forces of communication simultaneously, often through more than one of his senses. This multi-sensory existence, created by enveloping electronic media, is symbolized in the intriguing picture which appears at right.

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THE ROADAND SEAWAYfrom Myra in Asia Minor to your street corner and chimney at Christmas is a long one, and was long in the building. Nevertheless, it is there, and one traveller voyages the incredibly long and circuitous route each year. He is somewhat metamorphosed, to be sure, as a result of the journey, but he is still one and the same: St. Nicholas and Santa Claus.

Tradition has it that a certain Nicholas was born in Patara in Lycia, that he led a holy life even as a youngster, was imprisoned and tortured for the faith under the reign of the Emperor Diodetian, but released under the more tolerant Constantine.

He Dr. Emrich,formerly Chief of the Folklore Section at the Library of Congress, was Cultural Affairs Officer at the American Consulate General in Calcutta, 1958-60.

Reprinted from American Heritage.

Copyright Š 1960 by Duncan Emrich.

attended the Council of Nicaea as the Bishop of Myra, and died on December 6-his saint day-343 A.D. Two sentences with the conjectured "facts."

Beyond that nothing, except for the cult and the legend.

The veneration of Nicholas begins sometime before the year 430 A.D. when the Emperor Justinian built the first church in Nicholas' honour in Constantinople.

The cult spread through the Eastern church, and he became the patron saint of Moscow and of Russia, giving his name to czars and, if only by chance or inadvertence, to commissars. Nikita is a diminutive form of the name.

In the West, admiring citizens of Bari, Italy, organized an expedition in the year 1087 against Myra (then held by the Saracens), seized the Saint's bones, and brought them back in triumph to their city. A basilica was built in honour of the relics, and an annual pilgrimage was instituted which is still immensely popular. The cult reached Norway, where Nicholas joined Olaf as a patron saint. He is the patron of

Aberdeen.

In England, where S1.

George is patron, there are 204 churches dedicated to that saint, but 446 to St. Nicholas. Even before the year 1500, it is estimated that there ,,,ere more than 3,000 churches dedicated to St. Nicholas in Germany, France, Belgium, and Holland. Besides czars, five popes were named for him, and a king of Montenegro.

And he is the sr::ecial protector and patron also of maidens, children, sailors, pirates, pawnbrokers, merchants, and students.

This brings us to the legends. Various tales describe Nicholas as the protector of children, and in another story, which represents him as a benefactor of maidens and virgins, he saves the daughters of an impoverished neighbour from a life of sin. Out of the fusion of these elements, there developed throughout Europe, and particularly in Holland, the folk custom of secretly giving gifts-nuts, apples, and small presents hidden in children's shoes and stockings-on December 6, St. Nicholas' day. S1.

Nicholas, though, remained for centu¡

vA certain Nicholas W PatarCL Folklore, the Reformation and three inventive New Yorkers turned a dimlyknown, fourth-century saint into a fat, jolly and secular Santa Claus.

ries a long-robed, bearded figure riding a horse, or making his rounds with horse and cart. He was still pictured as asaintanda bi.shop of the church. How did he turn into Santa Claus, and why did the day of giving move from the sixth to the twenty-fifth of December?

The answer to the shift of date lies in Europe, and two factors are involved. The first was the very natural tendency for all minor celebrations in December to gravitate towards the great feast of Christmas, a date on the Christian calendar coinciding with earlier pagan winter festivities and with the Roman saturnalia. The second factor was the Reformation in northern Europe, when the reformers attempted to wipe out all venerationand even memory-of the saints. They were successful, but not altogether.

Under attack, St. Nicholas went underground, to pop up under different disguises: Pere Noel in France, Father Christmas it~ngland, and Knecht Uprecht and Kris Kringle in Germany. The corpulence, however, the roly-poly person-that is the contribution of America, and specifically of New York City. Santa Claus as we know him is :1 New Yorker.

Now it has been somewhat generally but erroneously believed that the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam introduced our Santa Claus. Actually, in spite of the fact that the Dutch corruption of the words Sinta Nikolaas into Sinterklaes existed in the Old World-and presumably in the Newthe Dutch in New Amsterdam had little to do with him.

But the Dutch of New Amsterdam did provide Washington Irving the inspiration for his Knickerbocker History in 1809. And in that book there are some twenty-five references to St. Nicholas and Santa Claus. The immense popularity of Irving's book served to introduce---or re-introduceSt. Nicholas to the American public.

The good Saint, remember, had never taken strong foothold in America; without Irving's work there would certainly be no Santa Claus today. But still, in Irving, St. Nicholas is a figure of the church, bringing his gifts with horse and cart.

Slightly more than a decade later, however, in 1821, there appeared in New York a small juvenile called The

Children's Friend, which contained eight quatrains devoted to "Santeclaus," whom it exhibited riding in a sleigh drawn by exactly one prancing reindeer. So far as we know this is the first reference to the reindeer and sleigh now associated with Santa Claus. They are both purely American inventions, and never existed in any European tradition.

Both the sleigh and the reindeerand perhaps even Santa himselfmight have quickly expired, though, had it not been for Clement C. Moore, an Episcopal clergyman in New York City and the son of the Bishop of New York. In the year 1822, at the Christmas season, Moore wrote a poem for his children. The poem was "A Visit from St. Nicholas," or, as it is more widely known now, "The Night Before Christmas."

At first Moore thought the poem beneath his dignity, and would not acknowledge authorship of it until 1837, when it was published in a compilation of local poetry.

Moore had certainly read Irving, but in his creation of the poem he did one thing which seems not to have been noted before. From Irving and the Dutch tradition he drew St. Nicholas, the traditional St. Nicholas. But from his past reading of the Knickerbocker History, Moore remembered most vividly the descriptions of the fat and jolly Dutch burghers with their white beards, red cloaks, wide leather belts, and leather boots. Thus, when he came to write a poem for his children, the traditional and somewhat austere St. Nicholas was transformed into a fat and jolly Dutchman. Also, from The Children's Friend of the year before, which he had probably purchased for his own youngsters, he drew not one lone reindeer, but¡ the now immortal and fanciful eight.

In the same year, 1837, when Moore's poem appeared in book form, Santa Claus sat for his portrait in oil at-of all places-the United States Military Academy at West Point.. The painting was done by Robert W. Weir, professor of art at the Academy, and shows a fat and jolly Santa with a "finger aside of his nose" about to ascend a-chimney after filling the stockings beside it. His cape is red and white-furred, and the bag on his back is full of presents.

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ing, Santa Claus appeared at Christmas time on the small pocket-sized advertising cards of New York business firms. It was not until 1863, however, that he showed signs of be corning a truly national figure. In that year Thomas Nast, the great cartoonist of the century, began drawing annual Christmas pictures of him for Harper's Weekly, the most -notable popular magazine of the era. And then he reached the White House. In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison told an inquiring newspaperman, "We shall have an old-fashioned Christmas, and I myself intend to dress up as Santa Claus for the children. If my influence goes for aught in this busy world, I hope that my example will be followed in every family in the land."

And so it has come to pass. The legend that began at Myra in Asia Minor, and travelled via Constantinople, Russia, and Holland to New York, now reaches nearly every household. It is quite a pilgrimage.

END

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The Kamal Institute has one of the largest and finest cattle herds in the country. At left are two cows in the Institute's cattle enclosure, while portrayed on the opposite page are: hybrid Napier grass, which has a high yield and, mixed with a legume such as berseem, makes good, economical fodder.. the milk-full udder of a crossbred Brown SwissSahiwal cow; and a fine specimen of a purebred Brown Swiss bull.

A ne~ deal for the Indian eo~ ACCORDINGTO LEGEND,the Indo-Gangetic plain, where the ancient Aryans founded their first tribal villages and towns, was a land overflowing with milk and honey. The Aryans reared large herds of cattle, and milk and milk products figured prominently in their diet.

While India's economy has been transformed over the centuries, milk and its products continue to playa significant'role in it. Although the present per capita national consumption of 4.8 ounces a day is low, the country's growing population, steadily rising living standards and changing food habits have meant a rise J in the total demand for milk.

But milk yields are notoriously low: an average cow produces only 150 kilograms per year (and an average buffalo 400) against yields of 3,000 kilograms or higher in developed countries. Although indigenous cattle stock is well adapted to India's tropical climate, it compares unfavourably in milk production with most Western breeds. To improve the productive capacity of cattle without impairing their ability to withstand local climatic conditions, cross-breeding ofIndian and foreign breeds such as Brown Swiss, Jersey and Holstein, is being adopted on an increasing scale, with encouraging results.

At the National Dairy Research Institute, Kamal (Haryana), crossbred cows have matured more rapidly-in thirty months against thirty-four to thirty-eight for the Indian purebreds. They calved a month earlier, and during their first lactation period of 305 days, produced 3,200 kilograms of milk against a corresponding 1,500 to 1,800 kilograms for the purebreds.

The first cross-breeding experiments started in Bangalore in the 1930's when Ayrshire bulls, and later Holsteins and Jerseys, were imported, but now artificial insemination is used; deep-frozen

semen imported from the United States, allows rapid cross-breeding. Each year the Institute distributes about 150 pedigree bulls to State Governments for intensive cattle development projects.

Milk yields depend not only on pedigree and planned breeding of cattle but also on the quality offodder. At the Kamal Institute's farm some 1,000 acres are under fodder crops to maintain its cattle and buffalo herds and to provide planting material to farmers and agricultural organizations. Experiments have been carried out with several types of indigenous and exotic grasses and legumes to improve feeding practices.

Hybrid Napier grass, cultivated in Kamal, is a perennial crop with a yield of about 100 tons per acre against thirty to forty tons of ordinary grass. Mixed with a small proportion of a legume such as berseem) a good source of protein, it makes economical fodder, with one acre supporting five animals. Berseem is highly nutritious and can replace the more expensive mixtures of wheat bran, gram and oilcake, without hampering the growth of the animals or affecting their productive efficiency.

Studies of fodder nutrition formed part of a recently concluded five-year project supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Another allied research project, also supported by a USDA grant, seeks to determine if urea, a chemical fertilizer, can be profitably added to cattle and buffalo feed. Cattle can utilize urea to produce protein and it may prove a good substitute. for concentrate feeds.

Housing and sanitation have an important bearing on milk yields. On the Institute's farm, cattle remain mostly in the open in fenced pastures but milking is done in well-ventilated sheds fitted with ceiling fans and shower baths. The average milk yield per cow is ten kilograms a day. continued

Dairy technologists seek to improve methods of manufacture and quality of milk products, evolve efficient storage and handling techniques, assist with plant and equipment design. .

The traditional method of churning curd to prepare butter; as shown at left, is still widely used in Indian villages. Above, technicians process curdled milk for preparation of cheese at the Institute's pilot plant and, below, they inspect the new spray-drier plant for . making milk powder, which has a capacity of one ton of powder a day.

PROGRESSING side by side with the development of animal husbandry is the many-sided activity covered by dairy technology.

At the Institute technologists seek improved methods of using the available milk to the best possible advantage. Mr. M.R. Srinivasan, head of the Institute's Dairy Technology Division, says: "We are evolving standardized procedures for the industry-for some 130Government-owned and co-operative dairy plants which handle from 2,000 to 200,000 litres of milk per day." Among the problems he lists are: efficient and economic handling and transport of milk from producing centres to dairies; location and avoidance of wastage; coping with seasonal variations ofproduction (it drops considerably in summer); efficient operation of dairy plants and designing of suitable equipment; development of improved techniques for making such products as cream, butter, ghee, cheese and milk powder; utilization of by-products such as milk-sugar and minerals; and trying out new materials and types of containers.

To prevent deterioration of milk awaiting collection in villages, a special type of cooler known as the Village Milk Chilling Unit and capable of cooling about 200 litres of milk, has been designed and installed in some rural milk collection centres. Use of this cooler adds from three to four hours to the life of the milk. If milk becomes curdled or sour, it need not go entirely waste. Successful experiments have been made with preparation of some varieties of cheese from such milk.

In India a large proportion of milk-about forty per cent of the total supply-is converted into ghee, but existing methods of manufacture are inefficient and wasteful. A ghee boiler has been designed at the Institute, which works on steam and has a heat control device. Processes have also been developed to prolong the product life without adverse effect on its quality. In a current research project-another example oflndian-American collaboration-a study is being made of the flavouring components of ghee, important for consumer preference.

Adulteration of ghee, a widespread malpractice, is also under investigation. The common adulterants are vegetable oils and fats, and a test to detect such adulteni.tion has been devised which is rapid, reliable and easy. Another test, known as the 'Ransa' milk test to detect adulteration of cow milk with buffalo milk, has been introduced in several milk collection centres.

With the market for cheese rapidly expanding in India, the Institute has produced several kinds experimentally: Cheddar, slow-maturing and kept in cold storage for about six months; Kamal cheese and a brick or hard cheese which take two to three months to prepare; and a soft cottage cheese. Some varieties are now being prepared from buffalo milk and methods of reducing the period of maturity are being studied.

Improvement offlavour in cheese is the objective of yet another Indian-American research project. It involves a study of the processes by which micro-organisms or "starter" bacteria can contribute to development of flavour during the preparation of cheese and fermented milk.

Among the new products with which the Institute is experimenting or hopes to produce are sweetened condensed milk, instant milk powder (not marketed in India at present) and evaporated milk, of which a large quantity is imported for the defence services. Another product, already developed, is "Coffee Complete," which contains milk, sugar and coffee and needs only the addition of water to make an invigorating cup of hot or cold coffee. continued

The Institute trains students and personnel from dairy plants, links dairy farming and industry.

THE INSTITUTEoperates a pilot plant which serves not only as testing ground for new dairy techniques but also as a practical training centre for students and personnel from industry. The Dairy Science College, a part of the Institute, offers B.Sc. degree courses in dairy technology and dairy husbandry, besides postgraduate courses.

Dr. S. N. Ray, who was until recently Director of the Institute, considers supply of trained personnel to the industry one of the

major achievements of the Institute. A large proportion of the technical staff manning some 250 Government, co-operative and individually-owned dairies in the country has been trained at Kamal. The forerunner of the Kamal Institute was the Imperial Institute of Animal Husbandry and Dairy, Bangalore, which was established as early as 1923. The National Institute was opened in 1955 in Kamal, which has some of the finest dairy farmland in India. Considerable development, including the opening of the Dairy Science College, took place under the Second Five Year Plan. The total staff is now eight hundred, including two hundred scientists.

As the results of research can be useful only to the extent to

which they are translated into practice, increased attention has recently been given to extension work. Through personal visits, demonstrations, exhibits, a bi-monthly journal, technical bulletins and pamphlets, the Institute's Extension Division disseminates information about the latest research findings and recommended practices. Its technologists visit the more important Indian dairy and milk projects and give advice on problems of milk procurement and production.

By its guidance and co-ordination of the activities of dairy farming and the dairy industry, the Institute is helping with the solution of the country's food and nutrition problems and making a major contribution to nation-building.

END

Cattle graze in the grounds of the Institute's main building. Above, a scientist prepares ampoules of freeze-dried "starter" cultures which improve flavour of milk products. Below, Dr. M. N. Razdan, Dairy Physiologist, supervises mixing of urea, a chemical fertilizer, with cattle feed. Urea may replace grains, oi/cake in feeds.

EVOLUTION OF AN AMERICAN CLASSIC For three decades, readers have succumbed to the magic of "Gone with the Wind," Margaret Mitchell's famous saga of the American Civil War and its aftermath. In 1939 the novel was translated into an engrossing film. Now re-released for 70mm. wide-screen projection, Miss Mitchell's timeless story is currently showing in Indian cinemas. The story behind the writing of GWTW-told on these pag~s-"is e uall~~ros~

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"SCARLETT O'HARAwas not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm ... " This opening sentence, suggesting the mysterious charm possessed by the heroine of America's all~ time best-selling novel, Gone with the Wind, also characterizes the magic wielded by the book itself. Since its first appearance in 1936, more than 10,000,000 people have purchased the book and fallen under the spell of Scarlett's story.

Professional critics, however, hesitated to praise this romantic tale of the Civil War which they found neither original nor profound, but admittedly fascinating. Their reluctance to reach for superlatives may have been based partially on the author's lack of literary credentials.

Margaret Mitchell, a shy, self-effacing Southern woman who had earned her living for a short time as a journalist in her hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, had never published a book or sold a story before. She tried to prevent the publication of Gone with the Wind. During a prolonged illness in 1925-and during the following ten-year period-she wrote her story about Scarlett and the downfall of the South merely to amuse herself. But carried on the shoulders of fate, her private occupation became a public entertainment.

For twenty-six years the book's publishing records have been unequalled. The original hard-cover edition, chronicling Scarlett's struggle to survive the privation of a total war that wrecked the social and economic foundations of her beloved South, is now in its seventieth printing, making it the most famous and financially successful American novel ever published. In 1937 it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Reaching beyond the most accessible audience, the 1,037-page book has been translated into thirty languages and transcribed in braille for the blind.

The equally famous motion picture, faithfully adapted from the original story, has been projected in a movie house somewhere in the world every day since its premiere in 1939. Last year, the technicolour film was technically re-processed for seventy milimetre projection and redistributed for the sixth time. This wide-screen version is now being exhibited in India. A new generation of moviegoers has responded to Miss Mitchell's tale with the same enthusiasm exhibited by their elders in preceding decades.

The miracle of the story, regardless of the media through which it unfolds, is its living quality. Households throughout the United States recall the incidents and personalities fashioned by Margaret Mitchell's pen as readily as they remember their personal family histories. In their imagination Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, Melanie and Ashley Wilkes, and a host of lesser characters evolve into flesh and blood, and waver life-like between good and bad qualities. Equally real and alive are the vivid scenes depicted on the pages-the destruction of Atlanta and the return of Scarlett to her gutted homestead, Tara. The transferral of these fictitious people and circumstances to the celluloid reality of a motion piccontinued "The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, wilful, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanour.

Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother's gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her nanny; her eyes were her own." Left. Vivian Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara.

"Standing alone in the hall ... he was dark of face, swarthy as a pirate, and his eyes were as bold as any pirate's appraising a galleon to be scuttled or a maiden to be ravished. There was a cynical humour in his mouth ....

But there was undeniably a look of good blood in his dark face."

Clark Gable as Rhett Butler.

"Ashley was born of a line of men who used their leisure for thinking, for spinning brightlycoloured dreams that had in them no touch of reality ....

Under

his smile a little sparkle had come into Melanie's eyes so that she looked almost pretty."

Leslie Howard as Ashley and Olivia de Havilland as Melanie. 'Y-2.7S-'2..

If the novel has a theme, said the author, it is the theme of survival. What makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others go under? ture was achieved with surprising fidelity to the collective imagination of millions of readers. Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable filled the roles of heroine and hero so well that in the following years they were primarily identified with these parts. Subordinate roles were equally well cast. Unlike most adaptations, the book and movie meshed in perfect harmony with the public's ideal.

The only personality capable of overshadowing Scarlett O'Hara in this publishing phenomenon is the authoress herself.

The fateful circumstances surrounding her work and her life overlapped so widely that it is impossible to separate the creator from her creation.

Margaret Mitchell's ancestors had lived in the South since the American Revolutionary War. As a child she was steeped in the story of the South's fight against the North to preserve the power of individual State Governments and the right to own slaves. Her father and brother were both amateur Southern historians and she naturally turned to this familiar source for her own inspiration.

Miss Mitchell wrote her story for the pure pleasure of self-

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expression, uninhibited by thoughts of future publication or of past successes or failures. She sustained a quality of breathless story-telling that sparkled with a sense of immediacy.

Like a person resting in an easy chair following the threads of inventive recital which his fancy dictates, her plot tumbled onto the pages. She followed no outline or chronological guide, but wrote those sections of her story which interested her most at a given time, regardless of their eventual place in the narrative. The easy, flowing quality of her story and the veracity of her characters show that the author maintained a strong sense of her plot which was never mislaid.

Miss Mitchell not only believed her writing was unsuitable for publication, but also believed her subject matter would find no audience outside her immediate family. "I didn't think much of my book," she later wrote. "In fact, I thought so little of it that I never bothered to try to sell it. I know good work and I know good writing, and I didn't think mine good. And I didn't think anyone except my history-minded family would be interested in a book about the Civil War." Her miscalculation of her subject's appeal was founded on her inaccurate description that her book was "about the Civil War." Later she defined her theme more accurately and provided a clue to its universal success.

"If the novel has a theme," she wrote in answer to a critic's question, "the theme is that of survival. What makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval.

Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those who go under? What was it that made some of our Southern people able to come through a war, a reconstruction, and a complete wrecking of all social and economic systems? I don't know.

I only know that the survivors used to call the quality 'gumption.'

So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn't."

Her heroine, Scarlett, was one of the people who had gumption in an abundant quantity, as well as a deep-seated instinct to survive at all costs. The more adversity she experienced, the more strength she gained. Miss Mitchell's hero, Rhett Butler, was drawn more closely on the outlines of a stock character of melodrama, but she injected him with a fresh vitality that made him a perfect literary mate for Scarlett.

Margaret Mitchell's instinct to survive as a writer, or at least to test herself in this profession, eventually forced her to release her manuscript to a publisher. Harold Latham, representative of Macmillan Publishing House in New York City, visited Atlanta in 1935 while on a scouting trip to find new talent. He asked to see Miss Mitchell's manuscript, which friends had told him about, but the soft-spoken author refused, explaining it was just her pastime and not a serious project. A few days later, when one of her acquaintances, who was inordinately proud of her own rejection notices, scoffed at the rumour that the light-hearted, former newspaperwoman was writing a serious novel, Margaret Mitc ell succumbed to a writer's vanity and exploded with anger.

"When I got home," said Miss Mitchell, "I was so mad still that I grabbed up what manuscript I could lay hands on, forgetting entirely that I hadn't included the envelopes that were under the bed or the ones in the pots-and-pans closet, and I posted down to the hotel and caught Mr. Latham just as he was about to catch a train. My idea was that at least I could brag that I had been

refused by the very best publisher."

Mr. Latham also vividly remembers: "I shall never forget the picture I have of Margaret Mitchell as I then saw her-a tiny woman sitting on a divan and beside her the biggest manuscript I have ever seen, towering in two stacks almost up to her shoulders."

Miss Mitchell's expectation that she would be "refused by the very best publisher" was short-lived. As soon as Mr. Latham returned to New York, he mailed a publishing contract to Atlanta, requesting the writer to finish the book as soon as possible. The manuscript he had read was unrevised, incomplete, and included several versions of many chapters. The entire first chapter was missing because the authoress had followed a long standing habit of writing the conclusion of her pieces first, and the beginnings last.

Most reviewers were favourably impressed with the author's ability to tell a story, but severely criticized her style. One hazarded more praise than others. J. Donald'Adams wrote in The New York Times' Book Review Section: "This is beyond doubt one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer.

It is also one of the best. I would go so far as to say that it is, in narrative power, sheer readability, surpassed by nothing in American fiction." Later the same reviewer noted that "although it never reaches the highest levels of literary art, (Gone with the Wind) will, I venture to guess, continue to be read long after more ~ --2.7'Âť)-

ambitious books are lost to sight and sound."

Mr. Adams' prophecy was true not only of the novel, but also of the authoress. From the day Margaret Mitchell signed the contract releasing her book to the public until the day of her death in 1949, her life was never divorced from that of Scarlett's and consequently from the public's eye. Her fans waited for a second novel, but she always procrastinated, saying that the complicated business affairs connected with the successive editions and the public's constant request for information and personal appearances allowed her no time for writing.

A more credible explanation appeared in a letter she wrote to Mr. Adams in later years. "I not only do not intend to set about another book too soon, but thank God, never intend to write another one if I keep my sanity. I wouldn't go through this again for anything." Scarlett O'Hara had managed to dominate her creator's life just as completely as she dominated all her fictional associates.

Once was enough for Margaret Mitchell, and one display of her talent was enough for her public to cast her forever in the role of a major American literary personality. Scarlett O'Hara's inherent impulse to survive and prevail has been proved over and over again during thirty-two years, not only in her fictional Southern world, but also in the real world of publishing.

END

Battle for Atlanta, which fills railroad depot with horde of wounded Confederate soldiers, begins most dramatic episode in action-packed story.

Route Map. After blast off from Cape Kennedy, Florida, above left, Apollo-Eight spacecraft will orbit the earth, then set course for the moon, some 233,800 miles away. After ten circles around the moon, crew will begin return flight to earth, shown by broken line, and land in Pacific Ocean.

Saturn Five Readies. Fish-eye lens captured this all-inclusive view of Apollo-Eight's Saturn Five space vehicle being rolled out from the Kennedy Space Centre's Vehicle Assembly Building, right, to the launch pad. The 7.5 million-pound-thrust Saturn Five rocket is 36-storey tall.

Apollo-Eight Crew. The men who will make America's first •.••• manned flight around the moon are shown at far right.

Astronaut Frank Borman, left in photo, is command pilot,j' and other members of the crew are James A. Lovell, Jr.,~ centre, and William Anders, making his first space flight.

c:

MEN

AIlOllNB THE

MOON THIS MONTH the United States will launch three men for a flight around the moon.

Astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr., and William Anders are scheduled to blast off in their Apollo-Eight spacecraft on or about December 21 and three days later enter lunar orbit. They are expected to circle the moon ten times and return to earth for a splash-down six days later in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

The Apollo-Eight crew will be launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida, by the SaturnFive rocket-five times more powerful than the Saturn rocket that launched the ApolloSeven crew on their eleven-day earth orbital flight in October. It will be the first manned flightJor the 36-storey tall booster that will send men to the moon's surface some time next year.

Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that a successful Apollo-Eight mission would speed up America's time-table to land men on the moon by about three months, eliminating the need for an additional far-out earth orbit Apollo flight. A December flight as successful as October's mission may allow a moon landing next summer or autumn.

Tentative plans for the Apollo-Eight flight call for two telecasts by the crew en route to the moon and telecasts during the first, second and ninth orbits of the moon.

The live telecasts will be seen in millions of homes throughout the U.S. and Europe during the Christmas holidays.

Colonel Frank Borman, 40, an Air Force pilot, has been named to command the Apollo-Eight mission. He was also command pilot. for the Gemini-Seven flight in 1965.

The second member of the Apollo-Eight team is another veteran of the Gemini-Seven flight, James A. Lovell, Jr., 40, a Captain in the U.S. Navy. Air Force Major William A. Anders, 35, was pilot of the Gemini-Eleven backup crew. This month's moon orbital - fligl1Cwill be his first journey into space. END

Confronted with limitless choices, the American consumer is demanding legislation ensuring product quality.

Largely responsible for the success of this battle is Ralph Nader, lawyer and author of "Unsafe At Any Speed."

As a one-man lobby, he symbolizes renewed faith in the old saying: "The customer is always right."

In the early 1960's the complaints of American consumers about many products offered by manufacturers prompted the Federal Government to investigate. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy recommended to Congress a comprehensive consumer legislative programme.

In the same year, he created a Consumer Advisory Council comprised of private citizens who were to act as liaison between the Government and the consuming public. In 1964 President Johnson sent another message on consumer legislation to Congress, created a President's Committee on Consumer Interests and appointed a Special Assistant to the President for Consumer Affairs.

One of the major concerns brought to light was automobile safety. For a long time the emphasis had been on driver efficiency and highway safety. But what about the car itself? Was it responsible for injuries that could have been avoided, accidents that should never have happened? A young man recently out of Harvard Law School thought so. In 1965 Ralph Nader sat down to

TODAY,ASRALPH NADERmoves quietly about Washington as a self-appointed lobbyist for the public interest, he shows signs of becoming an institution. For at 34, Nader is settling in for the long haul. He says he will make a career of opposing those centres of power-corporations, unions, government or whatever-he believes are infringing upon the public interest. Whether Nader can maintain his present momentum for very long is anybody's guess. But he has already proved himself to be one of .the most shrewd, controversial and enigmatic players to mount the political stage in many a year.

Nader's current activities include the following: He continues as watchdog and critic. of the National Traffic Safety Bureau, the Federal agency which administers the aoto safety bill that he helped pass in-1966. In so doing, he demonstrates Reprinted from The New York Times MagaYork Times Company.

zine. Š 1967 bylheNew

write his book, Unsafe At Any Speed, a meticulously documented report on safety defects in automobiles.

The excitement and controversy generated by the book was immediate, and Nader was called as a principal witness before a Congressional committee to further expound on his thesis. The result of these automobile safety hearings was the first law putting the Federal Government in the business of setting safety standards for all cars sold in the United States.

From then on, Ralph Nader was the country's number one advocate for. the consumer. He had the ear of Congress and the respect of the U.S. public. He had thrown the spotlight on problems that had long troubled consumers and by exhaustive research and documentation, had proven they were not isolated, passing difficulties. They required solutions. The business community found itself face to face with a vocal and adamant consumer community that was intent upon asserting its right to be heard.

his belief that effective reform must be a continuing process: public exposure, then legislative action, then administrative follow-up.

He is conducting a once-a-week seminar on corporations at his alma mater, Princeton UniversiJy; lecturing two or three times a month to various student and professional groups, and writing frequent magazine articles on corporate abuses.

He is openly active-as lobbyist, witness, writer, investigator and strategist-in two much-disputed issues now before Congressional committees: proposals to fix Federal safety standards for gas pipelines and for X-ray machines.

He IS at work behind the scenes in many other issues, such as the campaign to require automobile tyre-makers to recall defective tyres, led by Senator Gaylord Nelson, Democrat of Wisconsin.

Neither in his personal nor political life does Nader fit any familiar Washington pattern. ÂŤis go-it-alone operational style often annoys allies as much

as it outrages enemies. In a city which respects the fine art of compromise, Nader is determined, as he puts it, "to stake out an area in which there is no compromise." In a city which reveres status symbols and institutional ties, Nader has divested himself of both as a means of reducing vulnerability to outside pressures.

Nader lives in an $80-a-month furnished room, owns no car, eats in cheap restaurants, dresses plainly, works a lOO-hour week, has almost no social life and considers marriage at present incompatible with his career.

Why would a young man choose to lead such a life? Why, particularly, when he could open a lucrative law practice or launch a promising political career? (Nader says he has been asked to consider running for the House or the Senate from his native Connecticut, but he would rather contin~e what he is doing.)

In general, most people tune out society's problems and concentrate on continued

Much of Nader's strength results from the support that he gets from inftuentiallegislators and the press in bringing to' the fore his facts and figures, citing specific instances of defective products. their own personal affairs. Nader, however, has chosen to make society's problems his problems and as a result he exists in a state of constant, barely controlled outrage. He is outraged, for example, that tyre manufacturers have refused to give Senator Nelson information on defective tyres. He is outraged that General Electric produced some 150,000 colour television sets which emit dangerous levels of radiation and then, in Nader's opinion, was slow about recalling or repairing them. He is concerned, though not yet outraged, by many new socio-political questions that are just now gathering on the technological horizon. For example, he asks: "Who gets artificial hearts?

When? Under what conditions and warranties? At what price?"

The list of Nader's concerns could be extended indefinitely. It stems from the social consciousness of an ultraindividualistic lawyer who, since his teens, has been instinctively opposed to any action he views as an arbitrary exercise of power against the individual.

It happened, in the course of his law school studies, that the first issue in which he immersed himself was auto safety. The subject led him to focus on the nation's biggest corporations and today, a decade later, corporate abuses remain his chief concern. But he can be equally critical of unions, government, churches, the military or any group he thinks is suppressing individual rights.

Two basic fears underlie Nader's wide-ranging criticisms of corporations.

The first is his fear that modern science and technology are more often used against the consumer than for him. The auto industry's preoccupation with styling over safety-documented in Nader's book, Unsafe,At Any Speed-is a classic¡ instance. Another, Nader says, is air pollution: "The question is not whether we can build a car that won't pollute the air; the question is whether we can overcome the resistance of the auto industry and the oil industry to get it built."

As a political operator, Nader has tiona I interest by writing a piece on shown high intelligence and rare versati- X-ray hazards for The New Republic lity. He has variously functioned in magazine. Nor has interest died. Later, Washington as lawyer, legislative drafts- Dr. Morgan testified again, before the man, author and magazine writer, Health and Safety sub-committee of the investigator, public speaker, press agent Commerce Committee, on the perils of and political strategist. unnecessary X-ray exposure in mediMuch of Nader's strength rests upon cal diagnoses.

If Nader's voluminous reading is his his close ties with the press and with the key Congressional aides. And he has primary source of information, won their support because he has made countless phone calls and letters he himself one of the best-informed men receives are an important secondary in Washington. Nader could have been source. People somehow get his phone a brilliant investigative reporter. He number and address. They send him learned early that a great deal of valu- pieces of a tyre that blew out or a shatable intelligence can be gleaned from tered windshield. A judge in California public sources, and he spends many sent him an emergency brake along with anote: "It's come off twice-you keepit." hours each week skimming through Many callers want Nader to handle newspapers, magazines, press releases, Federal agency reports, technical jour- their law suits against corporations and won't believe that he doesn't take nals and similar documents.

Senate hearings in 1966 on the dan- cases. It was to escape the calls and gers of overexposure to X-rays resulted . letters, and to have some privacy to do directly from this sort of research by his work, that he took a hideaway office Nader. Early last year he came across a in downtown Washington. Yet, despite report in a medical journal on the dan- the fact that most calls and letters are a gers of ionizing radiation from medi- waste of time, Nader continues to read cal diagnosis, written by Dr. Karl Z. each letter and take each call because Morgan, director of the Health Physics now and then one contains a nugget of useful intelligence from a reliable Division of the Oak Ridge (Tennessee) National Laboratory. Nader wrote to source.

It was such a piece of unsolicited inDr. Morgan and asked for more information. Next, he sought more data formation that led Nader into his curfrom Federal and State health agencies, rent crusade for Federal safety standas well as from companies that manu- ards governing natural gas pipelines. facture X-ray machines.

A professor of engineering approached When Nader was convinced that a Nader at an engineering conference two legitimate issue was at stake, he wrote a years ago and urged him to look into lawyer's brief, in effect, arguing why the subject.

"He gave me a few names and outthere should be a Congressional inquiry lined the problem," Nader recalls. into the subject. He knew that Senator E.L. Bartlett, Democrat of Alaska, was "Then I went to work. I found some already concerned about radioactive Government reports and some people fallout and assumed that Bartlett would at the Federal Power Commission be interested in the related question of (FPC) who were concerned about pipeline safety; they'd been trying to get X-ray emissions.

Nader took his information to one Congressional hearings on it for ten of Bartlett's aides. The immediate result years. I began going through the techniwas a well-publicized Senate Commerce cal journals and finding pieces of information. One article discussed pipeline Committee hearing. Senator Bartlett chaireo it, Dr. Morgan was the star corrosion. Another mentioned an explowitness and Nader drummed up addi- sion or a lawsuit. Then I'd go to the

people involved and the thing began to safety bill, and a $26-million invasionfill out." of-privacy suit by Nader against the corporation, which now awaits trial.

As it happened, Senator Warren Nader's current adversaries seem to Magnuson, Democrat of Washington, who is chairman of the Senate Com- be following a more cautious policy, merce Committee and a leading advo- which combines watchful waiting with cate of consumer protection, was also . some not too subtle attempts to disbecoming interested in the question of credit him. The watchful waiting is pipeline safety and had asked the FPC based on the assumption that Nader will eventually make a personal or political to prepare a report for him. Nader first spoke out on the subject in June slip, espouse an unpopular cause or 1966, in a well-publicized speech before otherwise expose himself to effective the Washington chapter of the Ameri- counter-attack.

The attempts to discan Society of Safety Engineers. There- credit Nader centre on oft-repeated after, Senator Magnuson announced charges that he is enriching himself by hearings on pipeline safety and Nader his crusades and that he is a moralistic, was a witness. intolerant, and otherwise unpleasant fellow.

Recently, Nader has been working with the Commerce Committee staff in Nader says he has no income except drafting the proposed pipeline safety from writing, lectures and the course bill. It is standard procedure for com- he gives at Princeton. Unsafe At Any mittee staffs to consult lobbyists from Speed was a best-seller (60,000 hardboth sides of an issue-one side generalback and 400,000 paperback copies) ly consisting of Government lawyersand will bring him about $50,000 bewhen trying to write legislative language. fore ~axes. He says the most he ever Obviously, much of Nader's impact received for a lecture is $1,000 and is the result of his ability to popularize that often he speaks for free or for a other men's ideas. Nader's successful few hundred dollars. fight for auto safety made him someNader says most of his income goes thing of a popular hero-a newsmaker back into his work. His expenses in-and when he makes a statement, it is clude a massive telephone bill, office guaranteed an audience it might not rental, travel, subscriptions. to dozens command if someone else had said it. of publications and payments to law Realizing the fact, Nader has tried to students he sometimes employs to be a middleman between ideas originatconduct research. ing in scientific and academic circles and The criticism that perhaps strikes those journalists and legislators who nearest the mark is that Nader is selfcan translate the ideas into political righteous and intolerant. One industry action. critic says: "Like Martin Luther, Nader It would be naive to think that is a moralist who is uncharitable about Nader's corporate opponents would other people's behaviour. He arrogates shrink from any prudent means of all virtue to himself." Another critic halting his attacks. Yet ad versaries insists: "Mr. Nader doesn't believe must keep in mind General Motors' there's any integrity in anybody but experience when it tried to swat the Mr. Nader." young gadfly three years ago. General These are overstatements, but the Motors employed a private detective to fact remains that Nader is a moralist conduct what GM said was a routine and is sometimes intolerant of people investigation of Nader's past. who do not measure up to his exactThe move backfired rather specta- ing standards. cularly. It led to public humiliation of Nader is the son of an immigrant General Motors, passage of the auto- who made good. His parents came to 'J

this country from Lebanon, and Nader, tall, lean, with dark skin, jet-black hair, flashing brown eyes and slender hands that slap the air excitedly as he talks, very much shows his Lebanese ancestry.

His parents settled in Winsted, Connecticut, where they converted a rundown diner into one of the city's best restaurants.

He was born on February 27, 1934, grew up speaking Arabic as well as English, and has since learned Chinese, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese. As far back as he can remember, his father encouraged him to become a lawyer.

Nader credits his parents with instilling in him the sense of justice and civic duty that directed him towards his present career.

There seems to be no tidy textbook explanation for Nader's rare singlemindedness. His father was not run out of business by a large corporation, nor his mother struck down by a defective Buick, nor anything like that. Rather, his seems to be the case of an intense, intelligent, individualistic young man whose instinctive resentment of arbitrary authority led him not to withdraw from society, in the manner of his Beat Generation contemporaries, but to use his talent and legal training to challenge authority.

After graduation from Princeton, Nader attended Harvard Law School, and at both schools he was scornful of what struck him as the sheeplike conformity of his fellow students. He was offended by the rigidity of its curriculum and took the most flexible possible course, majoring in Oriental studies. At both places he was angered by the arbitrary power exercised by the administration; students were expelled, he says, with no right of appeal. But when he tried to interest classmates in the issue of due process for students, they were indifferent.

It was in law school that he chanced upon the subject of auto safety. While studying auto injury cases Nader visited the engineering departments of Harvard continued

"Today I am more inclined to see if a piece of legislation serves the public interest," says a Congressional aide. "This is because Ralph has often raised moral issues involved in the bills under study." and the Massachusetts Institute of "fantastic carnage" taking place on "add a new dimension to the legal highways. Senator Warren Magnuson Technology to gather data on automoprofession," he says. The firm would tive technology, and became convinced said in May he would hold Commerce handle no individual cases but would, that the law unjustly put all the em- Committee hearings on Gaylord Nel- as Nader has been doing, gather inphasis on the driver's faults and none on son's tyre-safety bill. formation on issues affecting the public the faults of his car.

Nader, meanwhile had left the Gov- interest, work with Congressional comAfter graduating from law school ernment and was holed up in his fur- mittees and appear before regulatory and serving a six-month Army hitch, nished room writing a book on auto agencies. It would be Nader's aim to safety. When he wasn't writing he was represent the public interest in WashNader began practising law in Hartford in 1960. His obsession with auto safety on Capitol Hill, feeding ideas and is- ington with legal services fully equal to continued. He wrote magazine articles sues to Senate aides conducting the those private interests are already reauto safety hearings. The publication on the subject and spoke to civic groups. ceiving from leading law firms.

He testified before committees of the of Unsafe At Any Speed, which made Beyond his impact on specific legislaConnecticut and Massachusetts Legisla- front-page news across the country, fur- tion, Nader has exerted another kind ther improved the climate for reform. of influence on Capitol Hill. As an intures on auto safety and still remembers Momentum was building-yet pas- fluential aide to an influential member a Massachusetts legislator who ascertained that Nader was from Connectisage of an auto safety bill was by no of Congress explained: cut, then asked: "Well, what the hell means a certainty. The dramatic event "Ralph has pricked the conscience that tipped the balance for auto safety of many Congressional staff members. are you doing in Massachusetts?"

In early 1964, convinced of the reform in 1966 was not a tragedy but a He has had almost a religious influence futility of fighting for auto safety on fiasco: General Motors' crude use of on us, and I use the word carefully. I hate to call myselfa convert, but today the local level,. Nader made the crucial private detectives to harass Nader. decision to carry his crusade to Wash- Nader prefers to think that auto safety I'm more inclined to look at whether or ington. "I had watched years go by legislation was on the way in any event not a piece of legislation serves the¡ and that his run-in with GM only public interest. In large part, this is and nothing had happened," Nader says. "Before that, decades had gone speeded the process. But many on because Ralph has time after time raised by. I decided that what it took was Capitol Hill agree with the Senator who the moral issues involved in the bills total combat." said of the bill's passage: "Everybody that come before us."

An earlier magazine piece by Nader As this suggests, the reformer has a was outraged that a great corporation in The Nation on auto safety had ap- was out to clobber a guy because he hard way to go in Washington, for all peared at about the same time that a wrote critically about them. At that the pressures are towards accommodasimilar one by Daniel P. Moynihan was point everybody said, 'To hell with tion with the status quo. No one has put the matter better than Woodrow published by The Reporter, and the them.' " Nader was instantly fixed in the Wilson when he said: "Things get very two men had corresponded. Now, five years later, Moynihan, who had be- popular imagination as a lone crusader, lonesome in Washington sometimes. come an Assistant Secretary of Labour, a battler against overwhelming odds. The real voice of the great people of hired Nader as a consultant to write a The image is accurate enough, as images America sometimes sounds faint and report on what the Government should go. The trouble is, Nader is not a distant in that strange city." do about auto safety.

Nader deserves to be judged by his romantic. An idealist, yes-but not a Nader began the assignment in April romantic. Nader has no special fond- own high standards, and he insists: "I haven't even begun my work yet."

1964. He worked at the job for a year, ness for fighting against overwhelming and during that time a number of other odds. He would like to be, if not a Still, he has begun. He has added new dimensionsAo the public interest lobforces were converging that would at Goliath, at least a bigger, stronger, He has last make auto safety a national issue. more effective David. That is why he is byist's role in Washington. the fact that consum.er The Democratic landslide of 1964 now thinking of a crucial change in his dramatized protection must be extended beyond promised a new Congress primed for style of operation.

Nader would like to obtain private helpful hints to the housewife. He has social action. Connecticut Democrat, If Senator Abraham Ribicoff, who had funds for a law firm to do what he is raised issues and set standards. won a reputation for cracking down on doing now, on a bigger scale. He be- Nader quit tomorrow, he would have highway speeders as Governor, an- lieves that the best young lawyers in earned a footnote in this decade's hisnounced in mid-February 1965, that America would come to work for his tory. If he doesn't quit, he may in time END he would open Senate hearings on the firm at modest salaries. They could accomplish a great deal more.

Dear Sir: I read with interest P.M. Balasundaram's reminiscences in "Those Quaint American Ways" in the August issue of SPAN. I never had the privilege (or rather the courage!) myself of benefiting from hitch-hiking. At first I detested the sight of someone standing by the wayside and making peculiar gestures with his hands, but later I came to know what it all meant and then I enjoyed it. This is indeed a quaint custom but doubtless a helpful one, particularly in vast countries where travel over a wide area may be difficult for many simply because of its costliness. (For myself I made a compromise to travel from coast to coast by Greyhound bus.)

I was told by some American friends that this practice was more common in the past but due to increase in crime rates with unknown partners, * it is now very much on the decline, though it is by no means extinct. To a foreigner like me, the crime aspect has always appeared less significant and the pleasure of enjoying a free ride over vast distances in the company of unknown people most thrilling. I do not know if other large countries like Russia or Australia have anything approaching the American hitch-hiking but in India where road travel is fast becoming more popular with the development of national highways, I hope something similar to hitch-hiking gets promoted. It may well contribute to national integration.

Every people has ways that appear quaint to others. Some ladies in the United States would often ask me about the 'caste marks' that they had noticed at the hair partings of some of the Indian ladies and they would express a pleasant surprise when they were told that these were not caste marks but only a public prqpouncement that their husbands were alive. And some others would express more surprise at the loyalty of our women-folk when they learnt that we were in that country unaccompanied by our wives 0n an assignment that would ..mean-'separation from them for at least a year.

K.c. LALVANI Calcutta

* The low cost and availability of used cars, plus the rise in the standard of living, are also reasons for the reduced number of hitch-hikers in the United States.-Editor Dear Sir: Your article "Two dedicated healers of the blind" reminds me of an anecdote.

Forty-five years back a well-to-do local goldsmith requested my father, who was the District Magistrate here, to give him a letter of intro~ . duction to Dr. Mathra Dass. With this the wellto-do goldsmith reached Moga and had his eyes

operated upon by the famous eye-healer. On return home he called on my father and was full of praise for the nice treatment he received from Dr. Mathra Dass, whom he described as Eye God ("Ankhon-Ka-Devta").

Appearing before the doctor as a poor patient, clad in rags, he had received very sympathetic treatment.

The idea, he explained to us, was that doctors usually charged big fees from well-to-do patients.

In this case, however, he confessed that he was mistaken.

Later Dr. Mathra Dass established himself at Lahore and built up a flourishing practice. After partition, in spite of his growing years, he built. a very successful hospital at Delhi where, as you have noted, he is still busy as ever, restoring sight to the sightless.

Half a century back the then Maharaja of Kashmir was so pleased with his eye camps in Srinagar that he granted the doctor a plot of land on which to build his house and eye clinic.

Let us hope the dedicated healer of the blind will still have many more years to serve humanity.

RAJ KUMAR

DEWAN Kapurthala

Dear Sir: I read with considerable interest the article "How to plan an auto accident" by John L. Chapman, in the August issue of SPAN. It is extremely interesting, instructive and thought provoking. The motoring public owe a deep debt of gratitude to the scientists of the University of California for their 'staging' accidents and arriving at such useful findings.

Particularly, in these days of ever increasing automobile traffic, and the high rate of fatal road accidents, valuable findings of eminent research scholars will go a long way to devise ways and means at least to mitigate the consequences of such road-accidents.

S.V.B. ROW Chairman, Automobile Association of Southern India, Madras

Dear Sir: I have read SPAN for September, 1968, with great interest. I admire the article on Helen Keller which has inspired me and will inspire many other people to work for the good of their people. I would like to congratulate Ann Samson and the writer for such a beautifullypenned recollection of the visit of Helen Keller to India.

PREM BAL KHERA Ambala

"DEAR MR. CLINE: I'M GLAD One day, a smudged note with these words of love and trust was pressed into the hands of Ralph Cline, one of America's 72,000 public school principals. It was the kind of spontaneous gesture that occasionally brightens the prosaic world of a teacher.

Standing in the school corridors, Cline listens and watches, scanning the children's faces to see whether he is reaching them. As principal, he is like the conductor of an orchestra who must harmonize the various elements of their first school experience.

YOU ARE MY FIRST PRINCIPAL." THE WORD that best describes the challenges and demands of Ralph Cline's job as a school principal is "mobility."

The role played by his school in the lives of its students and community is growing constantly and to keep up he must innovate 2.nd change just as rapidly.

Consisting of eight elementary grades, the school of Villa Heights serves an urban area of Charlotte, North Carolina. The building, constructed fifty-five years ago, originally housed 500 students but today

enrolment tops 900. As families move in and out of Charlotte, the student body changes frequently, each time offering fresh needs and demands.

There is also a vast difference in aptitudes and cultural background between Cline's best students and his slowest, a problem he tries to meet by establishing flexible grouping according to ability rather than age. He is always urging teachers to respond affectionately to pupils. "These children know if you care about them," he

says. "They can X-ray a teacher."

Day by day, as Cline moves around his school talking to students and teachers, he underscores his own concern by words and actions. "We've got to meet each child's needs today," he insists. "Some lucky children can get by without much real education, but for many here school is the only chance. It breaks my heart to see one child deciding he won't come back, or one teacher wanting to quit because he's overloaded. So we invent as we go." cO/lti/l,Ueq

Principal Ralph Cline, extreme left below, keeps a watchful eye on his students as he goes about his day's duties. Participating in a learninggame, centre, youngsters experience the thrill of achievement. Below right, Cline pitches in to demonstrate new equipment that can "make each minute mean more." For teachers, a willing ear and steady guidance given by the principal, bottom, helps relieve the tensions of a heavy workload.

D-

I

r

~.

q.Lf&'" Affectionate exchange between teacher and students, top, strengthens bonds of trust. Third-grade students are summoned to principal's office ~ ~ for fighting, above, but rather than being punished they talk: out their troubles and get a fair hearing. Straight from a playground argument, , Tina listens tearfully, right, but Cline is left wondering if he has made her understand. Below, students participate in classroom experiment.

"You can't sit around waiting for the ideal ....

INEVITABLYin the course of the day, friction erupts between students and just as inevitably tears sometimes flow. As principal, Ralph Cline sets the tone of final authority-he can use it harshly or with understanding.

"John," he says to a boy called to his office, "why did you make Beverly cry?" Just teasing, is the answer.

"Well, when I see tears I know the teasing has stopped and the hurting has begun.

You give them what you can."

You hurt that girl with your teasing as surely as if you'd hit her. Now make up." John, who has expected more severe treatment, gladly says he is sorry.

Beneath the words of the principal runs the belief that students must be secure in their knowledge that adults care for them, in good times and bad. Schedules for pupils in the first two years of school are purposely kept flexible, "so a teacher can give

love," says Cline. Throug1:.out the school, there is an absence of rigid systems.

In the cafeteria, a teacher with a problem approaches Cline. "I can't stop my children from bursting their lunch bags in the classroom," she explains. Cline invents a game on the spot. "Put five word cards in each," he says. "Anyone who can pronounce the words gets to pop his bag." The children loved it.

"Getting people to help each other" is a full-time occupation.

THE RESPONSIBILITY of an elementary school goes far beyond the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic. As social change takes place, among the first institutions to be affected are the public schools. When Cline became principal of his school five years ago, its surrounding neighbourhood-and consequently its student body-was white middle and lower middle class. Now a predominantly Negro population has moved in from rural areas and poorer sections of the city in search

0c

of better opportunities. The total environment of a child has to be considered in the process of his education, and nothing can be assumed.

Part of Cline's programme has been his system of grouping students according to educational needs. He has also won better medical attention for his pupils, expanded a low-cost school lunch programme and, thanks to a Federal aid scheme, provides nutritious breakfast to youngsters from poor families.

Despite the problems, the morale of teachers and students in the school is high.

Led by Cline, who puts in a sixty-hour week, eleven months a year (including a special summer session), the teachers work hard, and their efforts are well rewarded.

"They're good," says Principal Cline about his staff. "Any weakness shows up in a week." Asked to sum up his job, Ralph Cline remarks, with obvious understatement, that it is "getting people to help each other."

END

Constantly making the rounds of his school, Principal Cline stops to talk to students temporarily resting because of minor ailments, below left. Attending to paper work after the children have gone home, Cline doubles as administrator, guidance counsellor, instruction expert, and psychologist. Acting out a story with puppets, right, adds a whole new dimension to learning, helps bashful children express themselves better.

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AH, BA,LLET. Gossamer goddesses tippytoeing through the glades. Princes bounding about like young stallions. And then" after a twitter of arabesques, the embrace.

Ecstasy.

Ah, nuts, says Choreographer Robert Joffrey. "I look upon ballet as total theatre.

I want to attack all the senses. I want my dancers to express my thing, the now thing, good or bad." Performing recently at New York's City Centre, the Joffrey Ballet nightly gave eye-dazzling testimony to that credo.

Running, bounding, diving, vaulting, cartwheeling and somersaulting, a dozen bare-chested male dancers in royal-blue tights flung themselves across the stage like beanbags. Crazed clowns attacked a plastic bubble, which ... devoured them alive.

Minstrels strutted, samurai cut curlicues in the air. And while filmed images slithered across a billowing screen, a man and a woman simulated lovemaking as strobe lights flickered, spotlights raked the auReprinted by permission from Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine. Copyright Š 1968 Time Inc.

dience, and a raga-rock band screamed bloody murder. .Least Inhibited. Far out, flashy, mod, mind-binding-that is dance today, the most inventive and least inhibited of the lively arts. Not even the new cinema has done as much as dance has to free itself from the rules, cliches and conventions of the past. In the regal prime of classical ballet, the dancer's craft was devoted to polishing and perfecting an established series offormalized gestures; choreography was as structured as a French garden.

Today, however, a ballerina may have to arch on point in one sequence, boogaloo in another, then writhe on the floor like a snake on the make.

Nor is choreography any longer an artistic handmaiden, subservient to the greater demands of score. In a reversal of precedence, music is now only one of many elements that contribute to the impact of dance, which is a matter of sight and sound as well as movement. In effect, the choreographer has become the Jack-of-all-artsthe director of a new theatrical form that has a total design for total involvement.

THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD oJ

"The days of Swan Lake and Giselle are gone forever," says Brian Macdonald, the director of the Harkness Ballet. "Today's choreographer can choose any subject he likes." In ballet, the fairy-tale prince of yore is now more likely to be an up-tight hippie blowing his mind on pot. Suicide, alienation, bigotry are all possible subjects for dance-as are cerebral abstractions or psychedelic nightmares. . . .

Looking Westward. The sets swing tooliterally. They reflect the trend of multimedia dance, which means that moving scenery, lights, props, sound effects and film clips have all become an integral part of the choreography, as in Joffrey's Astarte.

Accompaniment ranges from full symphony orchestras and electronic yawping to jazz and, as in the case of Jerome Robbins' Moves, dead silence. Costuming can consist of tossing on anything that suits the moment or, as in Parades and Changes, performed by Ann Halprin's Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco, taking it all off and cavorting around in the buff (although they wrap themselves in reams of f1esh-coloured paper).

Significantly, the new mod movement in dance is a phenomenon that can be labelled MADE IN THE U.S.A. "American dance," admits Benjamin Harkarvy, codirector of the lively and inventive Netherlands Ballet, "is the most advanced and richest in choreographic development in the world today." With rare exceptions, Europe's great and historic ballet companies ... almost invariably look westward across the Atlantic for inspiration.

In particular, they look to the prime movers of the first generation of dance rebels: George Balanchine and Martha Graham. A onetime dancer with Diaghilev, Balanchine not only built the New York City Ballet into one of the world's great ensembles but also shaped a new sty Ie of classicism that blended traditional movement with the exuberance of the American spirit. Far to the artistic left, Pennsylvaniaborn Martha Graham almost singlehanded moulded the modern dance, in which carefully formulated postures of ballet gave way to expressive writhings of existential psychodrama.

The new concept of dance as total

Freeing itself from the rules, cliches and conventions of the past, dance today is the most inventive and least inhibited of the lively arts. In the vanguard is American dance, "the richest in choreographic development in the world today."

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theatre is an eclectic hybrid: it borrows what it needs from classical ballet, modern dance, jazz, rock 'n' roll and pop art-and goes on from there. In recent years, it has found its expression in scores of versatile companies: not only the J offrey dancers, but also the Harkness Ballet, the troupes founded by Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor, Alwin Nikolais, Merce Cunningham and others. Uncommitted to principle or precedent, these organizations-and the dancer-choreographers behind them-have begun to have an impact on their masters.

Balanchine's newest ballet, Metastaseis & Pithoprakta, for example, is as strikingly original as anything that the new troupes do.

Jumping for joy. What makes the boldness of the new choreography possible is the exhilarating brio of American dancers.

Envious European ballet masters concede that in terms of physique and stamina they are the world's best. The girls are lean and leggy, with an air of wind-swept prairie about them. The boys are tall, sturdylimbed, and have athletic bearing. Their attack is clean, crisp, and wide open ....

They jump for joy. Arcing skyward, legs continued Dramatic opening tableau from Alvin Ailey's "Revelations," a dance of the religious and secular experience of U.S. Negroes. Far left, graceful moment from "Game/an," by members of Jaffrey Ballet which visited India in 1963.

Robert Joffrey, one of the new unfettered choreographers, advises his dancers "to learn classical technique-then forget it."

insisted on changing the company's name to her own. Joffrey refused, and so they parted. Broke and unable to offer his dancers any future, he lost all but two of his twenty-six-member troupe, fourteen of them to the newly formed Harkness Ballet. extended and arms pointing the course, Anguished Recesses. Joffrey huddled they seem to be saying "Wheee!" with two friends who had helped him build In the wings, urging dancers to higher the original troupe: Choreographer Gerald leaps and wilder arabesques, is a corps of Arpino, 37, and Business Manager Alex inventive and unfettered choreographers, Ewing, 37. Over the next year, in a kind of for whom dance is not so much an art as a freewheeling fiscal pas de trois, they raised way oflife. Robert Joffrey, 38, for example, $165,000 and landed two Ford grants totalhas been in love with dance since he was ling $165,000. Ewing, a Yale graduate, nine. Christened Abdullah Jaffa Anver Bey arranged for a one-week tryout season at Khan by his immigrant Afghan father and the City Centre. Arpino created two new Italian mother, he started taking ballet ballets. Joffrey, meanwhile, hand-picked lessons as a strengthening way to ward off the best twenty dancers in his school, and asthma attacks. At eighteen, convinced rehearsed them until ten every night for that dance was his profession, he hopped a nearly seven months. When the revitalized ride to Manhattan, and outstepped 200 Joffrey Ballet finally made its City Centre candidates for ajob as soloist with Roland debut in March 1966, it scored such a rePetit's Ballet de Paris. sounding critical success that it was quickly After one season with Petit, Joffrey said installed as the theatre's resident company. "goodbye to union wages" and set out to The troupe has since expanded its anlay the groundwork for a company of his nual budget to $1,500,000 and its repertory own. He taught by day, took classes by from six to thirty ballets. Four works night and, beginning at sunrise, held re- donated by Balanchine-Pas de Trois, hearsals for his own ballets, which were Pas de Dix, Scotch Symphony and Donizetti performed at a nnd Street theatre. In Variations-form a solid classical found1952, he rented a loft in a Greenwich ation. But what gives shape and personality Village building that formerly housed the to the company's artistic profile is the choreAmerican Communist Party and, in the ography of Arpino and Joffrey. Arpino is best spirit offree enterprise, opened Robert a chameleon. In Clowns, he flashes the J offrey's American Ballet Centre. frozen, mocking smile of the eternal sad Coke on Wax. By 1956, Joffrey had slapstick hero bested by a world beyond created enough of a repertory to launch his control. In Viva Vivaldi!, one of the seven of his dancers on a tour of one-night finest examples of bravura dancing ever stands in twenty-three Southern towns. fashioned, he is all glitter and grin, allowThey travelled like gypsies in a borrowed ing his dancers to free their inventiveness in station wagon and a rented trailer crammed a blur of twinkling allegros .... with hand-me-down costumes and disNever Let Down. Joffrey also ranks with carded scenery .... They danced in movie Balanchine as one of the nation's most theatres, veterans' halls and gymnasiums. gifted-and most demanding-teachers of To ensure their footing, they often had to dance. He currently conducts his school in sprinkle a tacky coating of Coca-Cola on a converted Greenwich Village chocolate freshly waxed stages .... factory, where his 6-ft. by 10-ft. office is The prospect of prosperity came in 1962, appropriately painted a kind of chocolate when Standard Oil Heiress Rebekah colour. On his desk is a bronze bust of Harkness, a longtime ballet buff, invited Napoleon, a symbolic gift from his stuthe company to her forty-nine-room ocean- dents. At five feet six inches, he looks the front mansion in Watch Hill, R.I., to role-and sometimes feels it. "You must initiate a summer dance workshop. Lady never let down!" he duns a student. "No Bountiful they called her, and so it seemed day should be wasted! Every minute, every during the next two years when she helped step is precious!"

The thrust of Joffrey's teaching is "to finance the successful Joffrey tours of the Near East and Russia. As time went on, tune the body so that any choreographer, however, Lady Bountiful began to seem modern or classical, can do what he wants more like Lady Macbeth to Joffrey. She with it." The method, in short, is "to learn wanted more say in artistic matters and classical technique-then forget it." The

best way to do that is to get down on the floor in the modern way and "dig in and search." For reasons of "mental independence," Joffrey separates the boys into classes that stress' the he-man aspects of stamina, big jumps and multiple turns ....

Nymph on a Gambol. Unlike Balanchine, who drills his girls until they look: like so many identical windup dolls, Joffrey encourages his dancers to express their own personalities. Feathery Lisa Bradley, 20, is a fragilely beautiful study in symmetry; fiery Luis Fuente, 20, is built like a blockbuster and has the same impact; sinllous Trinette Singleton, 19, dances like a sensuous nymph out for a gambol; and then there is airborne Robert Blankshine, 19, who has mastered the neat little trick of sailing into the wings as he kicks the back of his head. They all help give the Joffrey Ballet its hallmark: go power plus grow power.

In spirit if not in style, the Joffrey troupe owes an intellectual debt to the work of Balanchine. At least four other companieS' have been created by former Marth, ~ Graham dancers, who nonetheless reject' as much as they borrow from the grand guru of gyration. Not that she minds. "I am particularly pleased," she says, "that there are no replicas of me in the field.

Everyone should be doing something else, meeting their own challenge." In other words, echoing the hippie maxim, do your own thing. That they have-and their disparate styles might well be summed up as Tuned-In, Turned-On, Dropped-Out and Flipped-Out. PAULTAYLOR,38, is a tall, block-shouldered Tuned-In from Pittsburgh who spans the gap between classical and modern like a colossus. He had his fling at the far-out, once stood stark still onstage for four minutes (Dance Observer responded by running a review that consisted of four inches of blank space). But today ... he injects moments of broad, bawdy humour into a probing of the epic theme of God, man and nature. Cosmic it may be, but he gets through.

ALVINAILEY,37, is a Turned- On with a streak of the revivalist in him. "Look!" he tells his Negro brethren. "Look what you have made. Look how beautiful it is.

You made it out of adversity. Be proud continued

The Murray Louis Dance Company performed in several Indian cities earlier this year. The company's repertoire includes "Landscapes," above right, which/eatures moving scenery. and "Junk Dances," a satire on workaday living.

Mushrooming dance companies and the growing audience at dance performances point to a revival of interest in the art form. of it!" He is talking about their cultural heritage, and when he celebrates it in dance, it is something to be proud of. . ..

MERCECUNNINGHAM, 46, Dropped-Out from the Graham company twenty-one years ago because of her "psychological drift." He didn't want a mother figure, he wanted Dada instead. Ever since, he has been one jump beyond the avant-garde.

He was among the first American choreographers to use musique concrete, the first to leave the structure of a ballet to chance.

He rehearses in silence so that his dancers will not be influenced by the music.

Themes? "Supply your own," he says.

Yet for all his seeming whimsy, Cunninghamisadancerandchoreographerwithserious intentions. He wants to take chances, shift the angles of balance, create new patterns that will be as distinctly different as the mobiles of Alexander Calder. Rhythmically and spatially, like commuters crisscrossing in a train depot, his dancers move independently of one another. The effect is often riveting. . . . .

ALWINNIKOLAIS,56, is a Flipped-Out, plugged into a high-voltage fantasy world where stage and sound effect share equal billing with the dancers .... Nikolais, an ex-puppeteer who creates the music as well as the costumes and lighting for his dances, calls these trips into the twilight zones his "aesthetic Rorschach." Some of Nikolais' Flipped-Out spirit is reflected in the work of one of his dancers, Murray Louis, whose Junk Dances is a kind of op art satire in motion. . . .

Out of Indecision. To be sure, not allor even most-of American dance is on the wiggy fringe. In its own clean, frostily abstract ballets, as well as in classical standards such as the Nutcracker, the New York City Ballet is the peerless pro. Ranking not too far behind is the American Ballet Theatre, founded (in 1940) and largely financed by Lucia Chase. Emerging strongly now from a gloomy decade of indecision and decline, Ballet Theatre has the most balanced repertory in the country; its full-length Swan Lake ranks with the world's best. . . .

Beyond this galaxy of talent, there is even more unmistakable evidence that the U.S. is in the midst of what amounts to a

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resurgence of interest in dance. A decade ago, there were only seventy-five dance companies in the U.S. Now there are at least 450 professional and semi-professional companies.

The modern-minded National Ballet of Washington, D.C., performed twentysix different dances last year while building its season to ninety-four performances.

During its forty-five-week season, the Utah Civic Ballet plays to an audience of more than 90,000. Like many regional troupes, the Cincinnati Civic Ballet, which has 475 students presently in its school, imports such stellar guests as the New York City Ballet's Violetta Verdy and Edward Villella....

Beyond the Elks. Not even the smaller cities are immune. There are four dance companies in Tacoma, Washington, three in Jacksonville, Florida, one in Huntsville, Alabama. In Alaska, the Anchorage Civic Ballet has graduated from the Elks Club to the West High School auditorium, where its performances of Nutcracker attracted sell-out crowds of over 2,000.

Dance has also arrived in suburbia, where leotards and toe shoes are beginning to replace the piano as a culture sym,bol. Manhattan has seventy dance schools, greater Washington, D.C., has sixty. . ..

Each September, when Balanchine's School of American Ballet holds auditions, the line of hopefuls stretches around the block.

The few who are accepted are properly proud and even a little haughty. Says Nanette Glushak, 17, of Manhattan: "We saw a movie of Pavlov a the other day, and I can tell you that she was pretty bad. I don't think she would get accepted here today. She just was not good enough."

Sissy Stigma. Nijinsky, though, might have had a good chance. While the U.S. is developing more female dancers than it can productively use, there is still a dearth of male talent. Unlike Denmark, where women curtsy in the street when a ranking male dancer passes by, or Russia, where Bolshoi stars are accorded the same respect given to cosmonauts, the stigma of sissy still lingers in the U.S. Many dance schools offer free scholarships to any boy who will don tights; others patrol atWetic clubs to recruit prospects. But the climate is changing: the ratio of girls to boys taking up dance, once 50 to 1, is now only 15 to 1. . . .

Feet in Toe Shoes. One nagging problem is, as always, money. Despite growing national interest, most of the forty or fifty

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professional companies in the U.S. are direly pressed to meet their weekly expenses of $10,000 to $100,000. Production costs are prohibitive; the American Ballet Theatre, which carries fifty-eight dancers, plus thirty-eight musicians and technicians on tour, plays to packed houses but still loses $10,000 every week it sets its feet on stage. Just to keep those feet in Capezio toe shoes ($9 a pair) costs $1,000 a week.

As a result, the history of many troupes has been distinction verging on extinction.

Fortunately, the Ford Foundation had a better idea. Since 1963, it has given a total of nearly $9,000,000 to major dance groups, while the National Endowment for the Arts has divvied up another $1,000,000.

Says National Arts Council President Roger Stevens: "Dance needs money more than any of the other arts. A writer needs pencil and paper, a painter needs canvas and paints. But a choreographer needs bodies, and they have to be paid." ...

Most of the ballet masters see some sort of State or Government aid-a commonplace in Europe-as their only prospect for .solvency.

Total Cinema? In spite of its financial problems, insists Joffrey Business Manager Ewing, "the dance world is by far the most creative of all the performing arts in America today." Ewing's boast is not just hyperbole. Last year there were at least 100 premieres of new dance works in the U.S. Since its founding, the Harkness Ballet alone has commissioned more music scores than any U.S. orchestra except the New York Philharmonic. One sign of dance's expanding horizon is the interest of artists in exploring its possibilities.

Painters Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella have collaborated with Merce Cunningham; Underground Film Maker Ed Emshwiller is filming dancers in what may be a dance-dominated "total cinema."

Even more telling, perhaps, is the fact that the audiences flocking to dance performances these days are getting more youthful all the time. Raised on TV and movies, a visually oriented younger generation finds something in the spectacle of dance that turns on the mind's eye. Following a recent performance in Manhattan of John Butler's Ceremony,' two flower children stopped the choreographer on the street. "You Butler?" said one. "Saw your ballet. You tell it like it is, man." Says Butler: "It was the best compliment I've ever been paid."

END

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