Why Not Just Quote the Letter?

Re “Did Young Richard Nixon Romp Here?,” June 3:

Your article misleads readers about the Yorba Linda Historical Conservancy’s quest to preserve the 90-year-old Park Place house in the city where the distinguished American writer Jessamyn West allegedly lived for a while with her family. Your article rightly asserts that the allegation’s strongest evidence of her residency is a 1979 Yorba Linda Star letter to the editor from West responding to an earlier Star story accompanied by a photo of the house in question.

However, your article recklessly paraphrases her letter as having stated that “she believed it was the house where she lived during her college years.”

It would have been far more truthful and just to have instead quoted West’s precise language: “Thank you for sending the ‘Star’ with the picture of the house in which I lived through college days and from which I was married.”

Arthur A. Hansen

Yorba Linda