THE KID AND THE NUN

Chris Goodrich’s review of “So Much to Be Done” (Aug. 19) recounts a faulty incident between Sister Blandina (born Rosa Maria Segale in Cicagna, Italy) and one Billy the Kid in the frontier environment of Trinidad, Colo.

Sister Blandina served in Trinidad in the early 1870s and was reassigned to Santa Fe, where she served from 1876 to 1881, and Albuquerque, from 1881 to 1889. She established schools in the New Mexico towns.

In the early 1870s, Billy the Kid (Henry McCarty, who used William Bonney later) would have been pre-teen or early teen-age. Researchers think Sister Blandina probably met up with one Billy LeRoy in Trinidad. That Billy was hanged some years later in Del Norte, Colo.

There were a slew of outlaws and self-styled outlaws of that era who called themselves “Kid” . . . but the Kid encountered by Sister Blandina probably was not McCarty-Bonney, way up in Trinidad in his childhood.

TROXEY KEMPER

LOS ANGELES