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Patrick Reusse's paean to town ball ("Minnesota's nod to tradition," Sports, Aug. 13) was priceless, and here's to another century of small-town competition and character.

I am personally bound to Stearns County and teams in Freeport and New Munich, because of relatives there and in the case of New Munich, buried right behind the outfield fence.

Beers? Budweiser? Schmudweiser! Cold Spring or Grain Belt Premium in the land of Sinclair Lewis, or Bub's in Winona!

P.S. Reusse for official Minnesota sports historian; it would formalize his self-inflicted passion.

John A. Ehlert, Sarasota, Fla.

A large part of the movement downtown consists of older people moving in, but sadly we older ones will fill those spaces only for a short time before we die or move to assisted-care facilities. On the other end, the young people moving downtown will leave for bigger yards, parks and perceived better schools when or if they have children. Could these effects make it possible that the downtown housing market could collapse due to runaway effects of rising vacancies and falling values?

An ironic side note: If the downtown housing market did indeed collapse catastrophically, would this suddenly solve another long-standing issue? Voila! Affordable housing!

I'm all for including affordable housing in the downtown mix. But if the city would like to keep the other groups in the housing equation, then there must be room for child-friendly amenities and schools as well as assisted living and nursing homes. I know these are not the things people think about when the glamour of downtown is considered, but if you want people there long-term, they should not be forgotten.

L. Peter Erickson, Minneapolis

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Believe me, downtown is far from dead. But don't just take my word for it. Recently I spent a day with visitors from Los Angeles and Palm Springs who had never been here. After three days getting to know the city, they used words like "vibrant, alive, clean, safe" to describe downtown. They commented that everyone looked "fit." Maybe that's because we downtowners walk a lot, since almost everything we need is a few blocks from our homes. After a late dinner in the North Loop, we commented on the streets filled with people and near-traffic-jams as we traversed downtown to my home in Loring Park.

Dead and devoid of people? Hardly. Hundreds of thousands of people have come downtown this summer for the Pride Festival, Taste of Minnesota, big-name artist concerts, Twins games, live theater. The streets are once again filled with conventioneers (so easily identifiable that we lovingly call them "bag-n-tags" because of the name tags dangling from their necks and the branded bags they carry).

Downtown is just doing what cities do: It's changing. And changing again. We need less office space, so we repurpose it into housing. There are fewer office workers but more residents. There will still be people downtown, but it will be a new mix that will need services and retail that cater to residents rather than employees. That change will be exciting, and as a downtown resident, I'm glad to have a front-row seat.

Steve Millikan, Minneapolis

As Kathleen Bangs admonishes us to "listen to our inner Oppenheimer" ("There's a little Oppenheimer in all of us," Opinion Exchange, Aug. 13), let us hope that world leaders would do the same, neither using nor provoking a nuclear response from a threatened nuclear power. They seem undeterred by history, including the impact of maliciously intended bombings and the 2,000 worldwide nuclear "tests," which we should also be memorializing along with Trinity ("They didn't value our lives or our culture," Science+Health, Aug. 13).

Researcher Keith Meyers accessed these records a few years ago when they were declassified. He cross-listed high levels of radioactivity in the soil and found high levels of "excess deaths" in those Midwest counties in the 1950s due to multiple nuclear tests in Nevada. Cows ate the hay grown in radioactive soil. Children drank their milk. We all ate the crops. High rates of thyroid cancer and other effects. Here is Meyers' conclusion (tinyurl.com/meyers-fallout):

"Over approximately two decades, the aggregate mortality effect is substantial and suggests that atmospheric nuclear testing contributed to approximately as many deaths as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

We built these machines, we can take them apart — as we did under President Ronald Reagan in complete cooperation with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Fifty thousand of them were dismantled (can you imagine?), probably saving the world we now live in.

Call on your inner and outer Oppenheimer to save us now. It is simple rocket science.

We need a planet to live on!

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I imagine that many people had visited the Trinity Site before Kathleen Bangs did and had seen that same piece of Trinitite on the ground that she describes in her Aug. 13 commentary. (Trinitite is a glassy green rock formed by the nuclear test.) They may have noted it, and even marveled at it, but they left it there, as they were supposed to. That allowed it to one day fall upon the gaze of Ms. Bangs, who chose to pick it up and hide it in her boot. That Trinitite sample will no longer inspire the amazement of any Trinity visitors — it is instead under the watchful eye of the cobweb builders in Bangs' garage. What she did (as she notes in her commentary) was illegal, which bothers me a little, but also selfish, which bothers me much more.