“Reforming the Law” (“Business of America,” September) managed to jog some aging memory cells from my earliest, introductory days to the law now some two decades ago, when the mysteries of the Field Code were ever so briefly explained to the greenhorns populating the first-year class at the Duke Law School. “We stand more frequently in need of being reminded than we do of education,” Samuel Johnson is reputed to have said. I stand in need of both, thus I am doubly grateful for the piece.
Kenneth W. Starr
Solicitor General of the United States
Washington, D. C.
The Last Packard
Brock Yates’s nostalgia-laden tribute to the U.S. auto industry of the 1950s (October) was a refreshing, welcome commentary. Mr. Yates embodies many of the best qualities of automotive journalism, and 1 am a long-time admirer of his work, but there was one statement that should be corrected: “Once-proud Packard ended production in 1962. …”
Production of the large, luxury cars that created the Packard legend stopped in 1956 at Packard’s Detroit production facility. During 1957–58 several hundred “Packardbakers,” heavily optioned Studebaker Hawks with Packard nameplates, were manufactured at Studebaker’s South Bend facilities in an effort to keep the Packard name alive.
In 1958 this Studebaker-cloned Packard was discontinued because of dismal sales—the last time the Packard name ever appeared on a production vehicle. Mr. Yates was probably referring to the April 26, 1962, annual meeting of the StudebakerPackard Board of Directors, when the Packard name was officially dropped from the corporate logo.
Joseph L. Kalousek
Valparaiso, Ind.
First to Die
An item in the excellent “Time Machine” feature in your October issue asserted that the eleven crewmen lost when the destroyer USS Kearny was torpedoed in 1941 “had become the first Americans to die” in World War II.
They were the first American servicemen to die in the European theater, but it should be remembered that six valiant American Red Cross nurses on their way to succor the blitz-battered British perished in the North Atlantic after U-boats torpedoed the SS Vigrid and the SS Maasdam on June 10 and 18, 1941—some four months before the October 17 attack on the Kearny.
Baxter Omohundro
Columbus, Ga.
Brother, Can You Spare a Billion?
In his article on the rites of reparations (“In the News,” July/August) Bernard A. Weisberger states that in November 1923 the German mark reached 4.2 billion to the dollar. He is off by a factor of 1,000. The mark actually dropped to 4.2 trillion to the dollar!
That sort of confusion is understandable. If the author relied on British or German sources, they would (correctly) report an exchange rate of 4.2 billion marks to the dollar. To most Europeans a billion is the same as an American trillion, 1 followed by 12 zeros. An American billion, 1 followed by 9 zeros, is spoken of as a thousand million by an Englishman and a milliard by a German.
