3 November, 1957

Dear Mom and Pop,

Lu and I want to thank you very much for sending all the packages, and to apologize for being so tardy in writing. Lu says that the slippers are just fine, and she certainly appreciates the dish-towels. They go very well in our kitchen. The Chadwick plate isn't as bad as I was expecting; in fact, the shape of the glass plate is very nice, and should make a very nice camellia dish, or something like that.

Cheryl was four months old on Friday - she isn't terribly big yet, but she certainly is strong, and is very active. She eats a lot of things other than Lucy's milk, things such as bananas, apricots, peaches, squash, green beans, etc., and recently has begun getting supplementary milk feedings from a bottle. Lu is quite unhappy about this, but her milk isn't flowing in the prodigious quantities that it was earlier, so she is forced to feed Cheryl cows milk. She sleeps for twelve hours a night now (in fact has ever since we got here), and can do amusing things like laugh occasionally. She still hasn't learned how to turn over regularly, its just as well. She weighs a little over twelve pounds, which is supposedly underweight, but since she eats so well, and sleeps so well, I refuse to worry about her.

Did Linda and Barclay get the box we sent them? It was sort of expensive, and if lost or damaged in the mails we must be sure to take advantage of the postal insurance.

Rich Morgan pere's mother died a couple of weeks ago, so he was in town for a week looking after things. Last Sunday he brought over a whole lot of things from her house, things like spices, Bisquick, flour, six boxes of powdered sugar, assorted pots. Some of these will be quite useful; others we can discard, or take to the Goodwill. It was fun to see Rich; we took him out to the airport in return for all the stuff.

In view of the recently announced tuition raise I am no longer convinced that Reed is as desirable a place as it once may have been. Over the past three or four years the tuition has gone from in the neighborhood of $650 to $1050; over the past 16 months the endowment has become half again as large as it was. However, I can see no indication that there has been any improvement in the quality of education offered. By raising the tuition so high they will eliminate the lower income brackets entirely from Reed College, even though they claim they will not. Another thing that they are doing is attempt to offer financial aid in the form of loans rather than scholarships, loans payable twice-annually after graduation, at 1%, This, for four years at Reed, would stretch out over twenty years, and I hate to think of the interest that would be compiled in that time. So when you come right down to it they are trying to cut down on financial aid by disguising it in the form of loans.

Well, to work.

Crellin + Lucy