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Chicago, October 25, 1970 Dear Jack:

  Thank you for your letter of Oct. 22 and the generous clippings, and for the time it must have taken to cut them out and ready them.   I will be sending some of the clippings to my son, who lives in a county of southern California whose police are knee-deep in Birchism - Orange County - where Truman Capote spent a cuppla days in the crate for not revealing his source of information.
 I trust that you and your family are reasonably well, as I am, and was sorry to hear about the death of the ex-railroader relative of your wife.  In my childhood I used to be with old country Irish relatives a fair amount, and I recall their references to the good death - wherein a person doesn't suffer for long, just dies in his/her sleep or is taken suddenly in a heart attack.  Jack Sheridan died suddenly, though his symptoms (high blood pressure for one)  pointed to death at least five years beforehand, as I saw it.  I spoke of this as one  of the non-religious speakers at his funeral.  A Polish-American attendant at the funeral home asked me why no preacher was present.  I told him that this was an aggregation of freethinkers, but there wasn't a bomb in the crowd.
 Though I never write on books (having a feeling of worship for them), I couldn't resist making a notation re. the Clancy Sigal review in the Listener, a review no doubt prompted by Terkel.  Sigal referred to Amos & Andy as having been negro-baiting, I believe.  I can well remember how even negroes enjoyed those radio and later television programs, though the latter weren't up to the radio ones.   Amos & Andy had been known as Sam 'n Henry up to their departure from radio station W-G-N in 1928.  I remember going to see them at the Senate Theater, note in right margin: 1924 a really nice movie palace, located at Madison & Kedzie, where they appeared in person.   Far too much sensitivity is responsible for the feeling that some Jews and some Negroes express when white men, I mean non-Jews, even mention Jews or Negroes in jokes or where any of the two races appear as villains, as Groucho Marx said some years ago.   More lately, Italians and Poles (they've been telling jokes on one another) have been getting aroused when jokes are told about them.  One of the worst examples of Jewish sensitivity was when Jews picketed the Oliver Twist film about fifteen years ago - because Dickens' Fagin was a Jew.  I have met Jews who never read a line of Dickens but who are sure Dickens was anti-semitic.  When I ask them how Bill Sikes struck them, they usually wind-up admitting they hadn't read Oliver Twist.   I have seen three versions of the film over some fifty years and enjoyed all of them.  While living in Maidstone, I saw Clancy Sigal one Sunday on TV with a panel of critics who used to appear on a regular program.  I can't say this about Sigal, but the regular panel was a pack of snobs (England is plentifully supplied with 'em) who could always manage to find fault with every book and every play, demanding perfection all the way.   Which made me think, what did you ever write or create, you bastards?