In defense of Dr. An Wang

The cartoon on your editorial page of Oct. 12 showed the ignorance of both George Danby and your editorial staff. To begin with, Wang Laboratories in Lowell, Mass., is an American-owned company founded by the late Dr. An Wang, whose only misfortune was having a Chinese name, which you mistook for Japanese.

When Dr. Wang passed away last March, all citizens in Massachusetts, especially those in Lowell, mourned his death.

Dr. Wang was born in Shanghai, China, in 1920. He came to America in 1945. He received a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard and invented a key element of computer memory. (He was a member of the American National Inventors Hall of Fame.) In 1951, with $600 in savings, he opened a one-man electronics firm in Boston. The company later introduced the first logarithmic calculators and the word-processing system. Wang Lab is still the largest employer in Lowell.

Dr. Wang contributed $4 million to Boston for the Wang Performing Arts Center, $4 million to Harvard, $1 million to Wellesley, $6 million for the creation of Wang Institute, and many other charities. In 1986 he received from President Reagan the Medal of Liberty, the highest award for a naturalized American.

The Bangor Daily News often claims that it deplores prejudice of any kind, yet you let an ignorant cartoonist make such a derogatory statement. It is certainly a sad day for you all. Martha Hsu Bangor