19th Hole: The Readers Take Over

AN ELOQUENT PLEA
Sirs:
The article by Wallace Stegner, We Are Destroying Our National Parks (SI, June 13), is greatly appreciated.

This is probably as eloquent a plea for better treatment of the national parks as anyone has ever written. It shows a profound appreciation of the values which have justified the establishment of the parks and a deep concern—which all Americans should share—about the various influences which threaten them.

I am happy that the scope of subject matter for treatment in SI is broad enough to permit publication of such an article; I am sure that many who share Dr. Stegner's concern—and ours—about what is happening to the parks will be grateful to you for having published it.
CONRAD L. WIRTH
Director
National Park Service
Washington, D.C.

WHO'S GLIB? WHAT'S GLIB?
Sirs:
Jack Russell obviously does not read the Daily Racing Form . In the 19th HOLE, June 13, he says, "The only words [in it] of more than two syllables are the names of the horses themselves."

I have been fighting a losing battle for years, trying to get a couple of the Form's columnists to write DOWN to me. Over a period of 60 days, columnists Charles Hatton and Evan Shipman used the following:

Insular—Sephardic—fin de si�cle—jady—aficionado—incursion—doyen—apogee—brio—�lan—committal—didactic—m�tier—contretemps—hiatus—de trop—rubicund.

After I papered the walls of three rooms with losing tickets, learning the difference between fast, good, slow, sloppy, muddy and heavy, Hatton and Shipman now baffle me by describing a racing surface as "glib," "fairly glib," "rather glib," etc.

Glib? What's that?
MIKE BARRY
Louisville

?One meaning of glib is smooth—that's for race tracks. Another is fluent—that's for writers like Hatton and Shipman. As we remarked at the end of Mr. Russell's letter, the Daily Racing Form is an eminently literate sheet.—ED.

THE BIG OLD U.S.A.
Sirs:
I was interested to read (SI June 13th) that Ted Atkinson "rides half a ton of horseflesh at 30 or 40 miles an hour around a circular track approximately a mile in diameter."