19TH HOLE: THE READERS TAKE OVER

CREAMER CREAMED
Sirs:
If Robert Creamer were closer to Cleveland, I would push him right into Lake Erie for his story (Tell You What You Ought to Do, Commissioner Frick, July 22).

Along with many other sportswriters, he has blasted the Cleveland baseball fans, but he has not come close to the real reason why "only" 44,160 people attended.

That reason, plain and simple: ticket prices! Box seats $8, reserved seats $6, bleachers $2, standing room $3. You can see more on TV and know more details about the game just loafing in a very comfortable living room.
CHARLES MAYER
Cleveland

Sirs:
Baseball, Mr. Creamer, is not dead in Cleveland. It may appear to be so, but only because baseball enthusiasm in Cleveland isn't what it used to be. What it used to be was unsurpassed. Clevelanders may pride themselves on the knowledge that their city holds, in addition to the All-Star Game attendance record, the alltime 154-game-season attendance record (2,620,627) and the record attendance for a regular-season doubleheader (84,587), none of which is likely to be broken.
ROY DYE
Cleveland

Sirs:
Robert Creamer hit the nail on the head. I make a motion that we nominate him as the new commissioner.
BOB LAUDEN
New Orleans

STINGRAY
Sirs:
As a charter subscriber to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, I would like to express my sincere appreciation for Carleton Mitchell's fine article, East of The Race (July 22). I was with him especially when he went to that "stingray swimming south" called Block Island.
EDWARD SHOVE
Watertown, Conn.

DUCKS AND THE DAM
Sirs:
Your recent editorial, "The Price of Ducks and Progress" (Scorecard, May 27), makes, I believe, some unwarranted assumptions concerning Alaska's Rampart Dam.

By what evidence do you state positively that it will cost a million and a half ducks and geese? There are ample other nesting grounds and as the waters behind the dam advance, others can be created.

The salmon need not be lost. Moreover, you overlook the great potentials of a lake the size of Lake Erie for a freshwater sport and commercial fishery—whitefish, lake trout and other good species—stocked at the beginning of the 18 years it will take the lake to fill up. You conjure up a detrimental effect on the delta downstream. How do you know? The dam will control the downstream floods and make the delta safer.

As for the moose, they are happily running out of our ears and spreading all over Alaska so that we have had to lengthen the season and increase the bag limits.

As for the 2,000 Athabascan Indians, they could not but be better off than they are now. Their villages are flooded intermittently by the Yukon. Their habitations are miserable and their livelihood a bare subsistence supplemented by relief.

Construction of the Rampart Dam will give them ample gainful employment, and in their new locations, chosen by them on the lake's borders, they will have better homes, better community facilities and a permanent income from now nonexistent activities, generated by the lake.

As for the cost, these federal power projects are in essence loans repayable, principal and interest, through the years from revenues derived from the generated electricity, as in Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee, etc.

There is no dream—as you suggest—about this. The Russians in Siberia have already built a dam as large and are building bigger ones, whose sites I recently visited. The report made to the Corps of Engineers by the knowledgeable Development and Resources Corporation of New York makes clear that not only will all the Rampart power be utilized as soon as generated, but actually more will be needed.

Rampart Dam will both galvanize Alaskan economy and create additional fish, wildlife and recreational values.
ERNEST GRUENING
U.S. Senate
Washington

FUN ON THE LINKS (CONT.)
Sirs:
Mr. Jim Cass inquired in your July 22 issue if there were any husband-and-wife hole-in-one combinations on record. Both Mr. and Mrs. Al Hauptman of New Rochelle, N.Y. have scored holes in one on the 2nd hole of the Hollywood Beach Hotel golf course, Hollywood Beach, Fla. In addition, both holes in one were scored on Feb. 3—Mr. Hauptman's on Feb. 3, 1963, Mrs. Hauptman's on Feb. 3, 1962.
MIKE ALBER
New York City

HER GAME AND HIS
Sirs:
The opening paragraph of Arnold Palmer's My Came and Yours (July 15 et seq.) is one of the most eloquent descriptions of a game that I have ever read. However, the final sentence, golf "is the greatest game mankind has ever invented," causes some speculation on my part. For I would venture to say that, despite its lack of recognition, archery is the greatest game mankind has invented and the oldest. At one time our very existence depended upon it.
ANN MARSTON
Wyandotte, Mich.

•Ann Marston, the 11-time national archery champion who graced SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S cover in 1955 (see above) no doubt shares a prejudice with this week's cover subject.—ED.

YACHTSMEN YELLOW
Sirs:
That yellow slicker you speak of so disparagingly (Slicker than the Old Yellow, July 22) may be getting a lot of competition from fancy madras prints and bold-patterned what-nots, but I hope I'm not around when one of your fancy-pants yachtsmen gets swept overboard into a gray sea under gray skies when the wind is blowing half a gale and the spray is stinging the lookout's eyes. I somehow doubt that Captain Disko Troop chose his heavy-weather gear out of Vogue, but then what did he know, except to catch fish?
STACY NORTHRUP
Hempstead, N.Y.

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