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June 30/54 
Reno, Nevada

Dear Dorothy and Eddie: 

So today I got your letters. Know what I was reminded of? - That I talk too much. But will I correct the weakness? Most unlikely. "Out of the fullness of the Heart the mouth speaketh ----" As good an alibi as any. Besides, you are among the two or three people I talk to so you just might as well tolerate it. 

I'll try to get back to N.Y in two or three months and we will then discuss the whole problem of my pictures and the Museum of Modern Art. Something will probably work out to the best interest of all of us. After all, I am sharply aware that you were the people who were most effective in helping me break the political nets that the MacAgys and the Parsons Gang had thrown over me and my work. An effective work, hung properly, can give the lie to the insolent and the presumptuous, and be a reminder of your independence and courage at a very critical time. In a way I think we all deserve it before the little boys and the aesthetes and the expropriators take over everything they can get their clever little hands on. 

I have stopped in Reno for a few days and find it a hell of an interesting little city. Small in size it has a grand and genial cynicism about itself, as well as the bags and boilers from the middle plains who come to break their moral codes for a few days. I heard this the other night: 
"Yessir, that Nevada Club is a bad one. I thought that place we went to in Las Vegas was terrible but this one was really bad. Why, they must take in thousands of dollars a day in there. Why, I lost fifty-five cents in just a little while. Yessir, I aint goin' back to that Nevada Club. Its a bad one". I looked around and saw two middle-aged women, and a man who could have been a well-to-do garage owner from Omaha, Nebraska. The man was doing the talking. They waddled along like three serious, contented, over-fed geese, and passed out of my sight still mumbling about the injustice of the one-armed bandits. 

My favorite pastime has become one of wandering aimlessly about the streets just watching, and hearing, the amusingly lively exchange of these uninhibited (for the moment) characters. And the town itself takes it without batting an eyelash. If it has problems it deals with them in the offices of they tycoons who are treed, as it were, in their penthouses with the proper number of bodyguards properly armed. Will regret returning to the chill of the western coast in a few days. 
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May I ask one favor?... It is that you do not mention the name of Adolph Reinhardt in your letters. It induces in me a nausea identical with that which I experienced on my first visit to a slaughter house many years ago in Spokane. Forgive me, but I am quite serious about this. He carries the stink of an SS Corporal to my nostrils and I can tolerate no part of his sadistic