LETTERS: HISTORICAL SOCIETY HAS REAL THING

To the editor:

Once more to the Titanic. So how did you like the movie? Certain movies one must see. Certain books one must read. Some TV shows one must be able to talk about if he wishes to keep his citizenship current in this modern world. One could ignore all of these pressures, true, but do I really wish to be marked as the only one in town who did not see the movie?

But movies are too much talked about, I feel. I see grown, able-bodied men quite capable of digging drainage ditches or shucking corn who waste their manhood discussing the technical details of movies. All of them overestimate my interest in these things, and I begin to think that I should not spend most of my remaining (perhaps few) years in the neon world of make-believe.

There was a ship. It did sink. Many died.

But there was no ship in the movie. No one died in the movie. It could not sink, for it had never floated.

If I made movies, I would not have tell-all TV features in which I revealed how the ship was second-rate plywood -- and only half a ship, and much shrunken in size. And even the water was computer created, they kept telling us. We will call upon those wizards if we have a drought next August. Perhaps their computer creations can save our corn crop.

But the people were real? Yes and no. They were not heroic and consumed by passion. They were professional actors who got more for making the movie than some of us earn in a lifetime of honest work.

Certainly I value make-believe, but one must keep things straight. My father's friend was Anna Funk from Illinois, I believe. She was a missionary to India and after four years sailed for home by way of Asia and took passage from London on the Titanic. That fateful night she gave her seat to a father separated from his family. A modest monument in her home churchyard remembers her. Her story, if I have tears and sobs, calls more from me than the movie. She was real. The seas which drowned her were not computer created.

Come to the meetings of the Greater Cape Girardeau Historical Society. We talk about real houses and people and actual water.

PETER HILTY

Cape Girardeau