HOORAY CITY

I take strong umbrage with Madonna’s reported remark, “Bay City, Mich. . . . a little, smelly town,” as reported in the Morning Report (Aug. 11).

For one thing, Madonna, the Dow Chemical Plant is in Midland, not Bay City. And when Bay City’s air is occasionally done over, it’s done by the sugar beet factory.

However, Bay City is also a town full of glorious Gothic churches, a library as lovely as a Currier and Ives print, and lovingly looked-after 19th-Century farmhouses set among rolling fields of pure-gold wheat and tall-as-a-man corn. Those farms also make meat products so delicious I defy you not to wax poetic about their homemade bologna! And Bay City sits on soil so black, so sweet, so rich, it grows tomatoes you could cry over, cherries sweet as a swoon and cantaloupes rightly called “musk melons” by Bay Cityans because of their heady perfume.

Bay City, my hometown, is also a town where, until recently, you never had to lock your doors or your car, and discourtesy among neighbors was unheard of. That was before youngsters started emulating the trash-the-world, trash-the-self attitudes of media darlings, of whom Madonna is the latest example.

MELODY M. SUPPES

Rancho Palos Verdes