THE RAFT

This will come down in history as one of the great -- almost miraculous achievements of ""men against the sea"". Thirty four days under tropical sun adrift in the Pacific in a rubber host, with no food, no water, no equipment, and -- towards the end no clothes. Vice-president Wallace spoke of this as ""the story that generations of Americans will be telling their children to illustrate man's ability to master any fate"". Most of you will remember the dramatic news story last Spring; some of you will have read it in Life. Robert Trumbull, a reporter who had the luck to be with Dixon and Aldrich and Pastula during their concalescence, has told the story as Dixon told it to him. There are no dramatics -- other than the amazing facts of each day; there is no dressing up of the bald details of how a miniature scale and a life jacket attached by the guard rope made an elementary form of navigation possible, of how the rubber soles of his shoes did makeshift duty as oar blades, of how one boy scout pen-knife served as weapon for occasional spearing of fish -- and of how sheer guts and stout heartedness carried them through to a friendly island shore. It is good to have this story in a form accessible to all. But don't sell it as a literary masterpiece.