The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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WASHINGTON, Wednesday—And still today we are anxiously waiting in the hope that the Navy will be successful in its search for Amelia Earhart and her pilot. I begin to feel somewhat breathless, for every time the telephone rings I hope it will bring some kind of news—good news of course, but something definite. If one could only get word of her exact position, but I know from long experience that suspense of this kind is something we all have to learn to endure. I've always hated it in big things and in little things, but as the years go by I bear it better than when I was young and impatient.

An amusing headline in one of the papers struck my eye this morning. Here it is. "There's probably a king or two up in your family tree." I imagine that that is so of almost everybody's family tree, and I was tempted the other day to go searching back in my own, a thing I have never been interested in doing. Some kind friend sent me several typewritten pages which are being circulated in an effort to prove that the Roosevelt genealogy back in the sixteen hundreds had some particular strain of racial blood. I read it with great amusement, for I imagine that if any of us were interested enough to go back and search through our ancestry we could find almost anything we were looking for some time in the years gone by. After all, we either all came from Adam or from the monkeys originally, and down the line there probably must have been in every family some skeletons in the various closets and some things of which all families may be proud. The most that we can hope is that when the balance is made in each generation, the majority of our forebears have been useful members of society, regardless of what nationality or religion they may have belonged to as they meandered through the centuries.

I think I began yesterday afternoon for the first time to have a real sense of leisure, and after doing a certain amount of work, I put on a bathing suit and spent an hour in and out of the pool and lying in the sun. I had to get up this morning at six-thirty in order to catch the train for New York and do some errands there before taking the two o'clock train for Washington. It was rather a bumpy trip down but cooler than it had been on the ground, and I had a delightful book to read for a leisurely day, "The Town of Tombaril ," by William J. Locke. It is not a new book, but I think anyone would find the character of the Mayor of Creille charming, and the glimpse that it gives of the human stories that go on in the smallest of places might well serve as a suggestion to many of us who think we have to live in circumscribed surroundings. As a matter of fact, if you have eyes to see and a sympathetic heart, no matter how small the place you live in you can find any amount of human nature to study!

E.R.


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, July 8, 1937

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

  • Brick, Christopher (Editor)
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  • Regenhardt, Christy (Associate Editor)
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  • Black, Allida M. (Editor)
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  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
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  • Alhambra, Christopher C. (Electronic Text Editor)
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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project

Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

Published with permission from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

TEI-P5 edition published on April 28, 2017.

XML master last modified on June 9, 2017.

HTML version generated and published on May 3, 2022.

Transcription created from a photocopy of a draft version of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. My Day column draft dated July 7, 1937, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 7 July 1937, AERP, FDRL