Reader to Reader

Re the July 8 letter from Cathleen Cross Ohanesian, daughter of the celebrated painter and teacher Watson Cross, in response to the article about Chouinard Art Institute (“True to a Significant School,” by Suzanne Muchnic, July 1): While I did not attend CalArts during the period her father taught there, my good friend Edward Reep was the chairman of the painting department and one of Cross’ mentors. We were both surprised and saddened to read her bitter and grossly inaccurate interpretation of Walt Disney’s ideals for CalArts.

Chouinard was indeed to be dissolved into the new campus of CalArts, which was to be made up of five separate schools of art, under the direction of a board, with Mr. Disney, Mr. Reep, Bill Moore, Millard Sheets and Robert Corrigan, a doctorate in dance, among others. They were thrilled to be a part of an exciting new school infused with a great deal of new capital. The only thing we can possibly fault Mr. Disney for is contracting cancer in 1966 and subsequently dying from the disease in December of that year.

The “New York academics” Ohanesian refers to were none other than H.R. Haldeman, who left CalArts to go do some kind of work in Washington with the Nixon administration, and his replacement, Harrison Price, the accountant and owner of Price Waterhouse who caused the mass attrition in 1969. To blame Walt Disney for the demise of Chouinard in 1972 is blatantly unfair.

For anyone really interested, there is a book titled “Chouinard, an Art Vision Betrayed” by Robert Perine.

DON MANN

Van Nuys

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I’ve read a lot of weird things about myself in the newspaper’s pages, but Mason Malugeon’s July 8 letter takes the cake.

I’d like Mr. Malugeon to introduce me to whoever it was I “luckily went to college with” who “got [me] a job at ESPN,” or to explain how my career was “founded on nepotism.” And I know you can’t control which fantasies your readers believe, but you do have a choice of whether to print the more libelous of them.

And, incidentally, Mr. Malugeon’s “beloved Dodgers” were in trouble long before my hiring in 1998. I don’t think it was anybody from Fox who traded Pedro Martinez for Delino DeShields.

KEITH OLBERMANN

New York