Letters.

We Want Wilkie!

I was nostalgically amused to read your item about the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1940. I, too, was an attendee although, at age eight, I didn't appreciate it nearly as much as you did.

I only remember three things vividly: First, we were seated somewhere up in a loft, and the atmosphere was stifling. Needless to remind you--there was no air conditioning. Second, we were from Cincinnati and acquainted with the Taft family; thus, we were supplied with paper fans consisting of four panels which unfolded to reveal a letter on each--T-A-F-T. Finally, we couldn't hear anything except "WE WANT WILKIE, WE WANT WILKIE!" from all around the hall.

We were outnumbered and outshouted. But the experience remains chiseled in my now-faltering memory. Thanks for rekindling it.

TJADER MEIGHEN Washington, DC

Flight School

While the policy issues raised are important, much of Stephen Pomper's "Flying Too High" (October 2000) is far from the definitive (or even accurate) examination of these issues.

General Aviation is far more than "regulated in theory." The Federal Air Regulations rule book is thick, well-defined, enforced, and applicable to all air traffic. Flying ability is checked once every two years or more frequently, so ignore "no certificate renewal since Eisenhower." Flight plans are required of everyone to fly in weather or on instruments, not just "up high with the big jets."

Pomper picked up without checking (or even statistically understanding) Matthew Wald's 1999 mistake in The New York Times about 1 in 300 planes being involved in a fatal accident each year. The successful (and accepted) collision-avoidance measures around airline hub airports date to 1970, not the Cerritos collision of 1986, itself the result (in part) of these overly complex airspace structures.

The economic benefit of General Aviation is more than just the quoted $6 billion in global new airplane sales. An understanding of the subject would have revealed GA's $42 billion-a-year U.S. economic impact of 11 years ago, documented by the authoritative airline-funded "Partnership for Improved Air Travel" study by Wilbur Smith Associates, the industry standard.

General Aviation is not the driver of today's increased congestion. With only a handful of exceptions, we are 5-10 percent users of the largest control tower airports.

We are a minority (30 percent) user of expensive, radar-based control, and frequently not for our own needs but only because FAA has expanded its radar control over more territory.

That "AOPA is ... fighting for the right to exercise lethally poor judgment" is absurd, and insults the 50-year effort of our own AOPA Air Safety Foundation, now spending $5 million a year precisely (and very successfully) to improve pilot decision-making and all aspects of GA safety. These efforts are over and above the role of the FAA and the insurance industry.

DREW STEKETEE Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Frederick, Md.

Stephen Pomper replies:

My apologies to AOPA for repeating Matthew Wald's error (the amended figure cited by the Times is 1 in 600). As for Steketee's other points: (1) Regardless of what may be required by law, small-plane flying is largely unsupervised, which is the point that the piece is trying (albeit colorfully) to make. (2) My view of the importance of the Cerritos collision is hardly a solitary one; to quote from The Washington Post (February 10, 1997): "Experts say the sharp decrease in near collisions involving all aircraft in recent years is mostly due to changes in procedures and equipment that were required as a result of a midair collision on August 31, 1986 ... over Cerritos, California." (3) While the statistics that Steketee introduces are interesting, the article simply does not state that GA's economic benefits are limited to the $6 billion in factory billings that it generates each year or that it is the driver of today's increased congestion.

Scouting Out Peters

Charlie Peters is one of the greatest journalists alive, but he's dead wrong about the question of gay Boy Scout leaders. Since some gay men are "powerfully attracted" to boys, Peters writes, he sympathizes with the Scouts' efforts to block homosexuals from becoming scoutmasters. Would Peters also sympathize with schools that refused to hire heterosexual males as high school teachers, on the grounds that these men are "powerfully attracted" to nubile teenage girls? Peters clearly ascribes more "power" to gay attraction than to the straight version, believing that homosexuals yield more easily to temptation than heterosexuals do. And that's what I call prejudice.

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN Director, History of Education Program New York University New York, NY

I write about your conclusion that gay scoutmasters should be permitted to serve ("Tilting at Windmills," October 2000). Now, I was in the military in Korea and am a lawyer, so I look at both in a different perspective. In California there are myriad lawsuits against the Roman Catholic church by people who were abused by priests. We now have a law that says there is no statute of limitations for sexual abuse. The ability to sue the Scouts for sexual abuse by scoutmasters years ago is very important

FRANK SAMPLES Bakersfield, Calif.

Re: "Tilting at Windmills," October 2000. Do you really think that a man who likes to fool with little boys is going to advertise it? And since so many people think all gay men are pedophiles, do you think that a gay pedophile would even admit to being gay?

If I was running the Boy Scouts, I wouldn't worry about the openly gay man who's suing them to stop treating him like a child molester--I'd worry about the low-key, apparently straight guy who never married and keeps to himself, but is just so terribly fond of the company of children.

MARLA BRUNKER New York, NY

Charles Peters replies: All points worth considering--I'll reply in my next column.

Chemical Reaction

In your October 2000 issue, Nicholas Thompson presented an article entitled "Downsizing." As a chemist, I was disturbed by several erroneous statements he made about chemistry.

In his first paragraph, he wrote that "we yank iron up out of the earth, drop it in blast furnaces to make steel." No one mines iron anywhere. We mine iron ores, usually oxides of iron (not steel). Iron rust is a typical oxide of iron, and its properties are obviously very different from those of metal. The conversion of iron ore to metallic iron is a chemical process, where the carbon in coke or charcoal removes the oxygen from iron oxides to yield the metal.

Later, on page 25, Thompson wrote, "Arrange carbon atoms one way and you'll get a diamond.... Rearrange them and you'll get rubber bands." That's not true. Rubber is a polymer of isoprene, a hydrocarbon molecule composed of five carbon atoms and eight hydrogen atoms.

F.H. WESTHEIMER Harvard University Cambridge, Mass.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

I am writing to thank you for your wonderful piece ("Why Homer's My Hero") in October's Washington Monthly. I used to have no qualms in justifying, to myself and others, my decision not to pursue the almighty dollar in the greatest quantities possible. But lately my faith has been shaken by, of course, the needs of my family.

I graduated from Harvard in 1994 but, while my classmates and close friends went to law school or to work for consultancies or investment banks, I paid back the Navy by serving as an officer for five years. After leaving the military, I returned to graduate school to work on my Ph.D. in political science. My wife is an intern in pediatrics at the local university hospital, which means long hours for about the same salary I got just out of college in the Navy. We have a daughter who turns two in January, and another on the way.

Just this morning I was reading Business Week's guide to the best business schools, a special section of the magazine that includes before-and-after median salaries of graduates. Not only were all of the "after" salaries of these people (most of whom are now younger than my cohort) four to six times greater than what we live on, the "before" salaries were also all greater. In about four years, the salaries of my wife and me may approach the low end of the "after" range, but we'll stay there for 10-15 years, while these business school graduates are well into seven figures.

Is my story an American tragedy? Of course not. But every time I wince at a simple utility bill, or wonder how I am going to pay taxes, I think: What about college expenses? What about medical expenses? What am I doing not providing for my family? Why am I not working for stock options at a startup, or at least in business school, for god's sake, instead of dooming myself to "poverty" as a professor of political science? My wife has the same doubts. For four extra years of school (and student loans) she now makes half of what she could have made coming out of college, and will never see the money that the newspaper tells us is "enough."

Maybe if enough of us who still acknowledge that the median income in this country is about $30,000; who still make gagging noises in bookstores when we see Suze Orman's gold-clad face peering out at us (or my other favorite title, Rich Dad, Poor Dad; that one always makes me feel good about myself); and who still believe that there are more important things in the world than $60,000 automobiles, were able to get together and reassure ourselves that we are not aberrant throwbacks, discarded from the golden road to prosperity, then maybe our nation's distorted and unhealthy value system can finally get well. Thanks!

JACK BUCKLEY SUNY Stony Brook Department of Political Science Stony Brook, NY