Saigon's Santa

In her spare time, Mrs. Ruth Kasper of Pennside, Pa., managed to collect 800 Ibs. of pretzels. In Dubuque, Iowa, Businessman John Walsh and eleven friends in five weeks rounded up enough books, cigarettes, candy, peanuts and soap to fill 3,500 cartons. Boston's Christmas Festival Committee, which is usually preoccupied with decorating the Common in late fall, raised $3,000 to buy gift packages from the city's fanciest grocer, S.S. Pierce. In Richmond, a neighborhood civic association passed the hat, bought 1,656 fruitcakes. A Charleston, W. Va., record-store owner asked teen-agers for their old records, was deluged with 3,300 in one week.

In Dover, Del., U.S.O. Worker Pansy Pendergrass collected 8,000 books. In Michigan, with Republican Governor George Romney's blessing, a newspaper reporter organized a drive that amassed 7,000 cans of soft drinks, 6,500 cans of foot powder, 5,000 bottles of aspirin, 45,000 tubes of toothpaste, 4,500 packages of gum, and thousands more handy items from applesauce to shaving cream.

"Our Answer." Last week all those and many more tons of gifts were on their way to U.S. soldiers in Viet Nam for Christmas. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, it seemed, had responded to the same gut reaction that moved Virginia Beach, Va., Housewife Betty McKenzie, co-chairman of a gift-collecting group that came up with 8,440 shoe boxes full of socks, tobacco, razor blades and candy. Said she: "It was our answer to draft-card burners, beatniks and anti-Viet Nam demonstrators."

To move most of the million-plus pounds of goodies, the Pentagon hurriedly organized Operation Christmas Star, a gift-lift mounted by Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard planes and pilots (who flew on their own time). By last week, 64 planeloads had been ferried the 8,000 miles from California to Viet Nam, with 18 more scheduled to go before Christmas. Many more gifts went by mail or private transportation. Michigan's Booth newspaper chain picked up the tab for airlifting the state's Christmas packages to Michigan boys in the war zone.

Nor were the embattled people of South Viet Nam forgotten. YES ACTT (Youth Expresses Support Through America's Christmas Trains and Trucks), a nationwide effort sponsored by the Junior Chambers of Commerce, the Young Democrats and the Young Republicans to send them $100 million worth of food, clothing, medicine and school supplies, was more than halfway toward its goal last week as a California-bound train left Washington to pick up 100 boxcars of goods across the country.

Christmas will be hardest perhaps for the families of the 1,438 U.S. soldiers who have fallen in Viet Nam. They, too, will be remembered--by the people of West Berlin. As a result of a campaign by the city's ten dailies, each bereaved family will receive a bone china replica of Berlin's Freedom Bell--itself a copy of the U.S. Liberty Bell--inscribed with the words: "From freedom loving Berliners who know the liberty of their city is also gallantly defended in Viet Nam."

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