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

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WASHINGTON, Sunday—Saturday was a very quiet and peaceful day in New York. I arrived from the country about noon, collected some seats to take my four children from Seattle and Texas, to the theatre in the evening; did an errand and then had a friend lunch with me on the quiet back porch of my apartment. She informed me that she had some friends who lived in an apartment on the other side of the street a little bit further down the block, and they had been very much interested in watching my porch. I told her that a number of people felt the same way, for not long ago some one told a friend of mine that she had been seen breakfasting with me on my porch the day before! Neither she nor I had been in New York on that day! Which just shows when you expect to see something how easy it is to see it!

I almost finished reading the manuscript during the afternoon of a children's book sent me by the Junior Literary Guild. If it is accepted it should give a great many children who know little about the 4-H Clubs a picture of what winning a prize in one of those clubs means.

My four children dined with me and went to see "Room Service." For some unknown reason we seemed much more conscipuous than usual and when we came out my little daughter-in-law from Texas asked: "Is it always like this when you go to the play?" I told her that often people were very kind; occasionally for the good of one's soul one was treated to some good harsh criticism in tones which were purposely not lowered, so that one never got too much set up by kindness!

My daughter and son-in-law and I met at the train this morning and had a grand trip down together. I brought out with great ostentation, some work which I intended to do, and both children said firmly "Don't you think we might talk a while before you start on that?" and I was lost for we talked from then until we reached Washington.

They were whisked off with my daughter-in-law, Betsey, to Annapolis to get on the President's boat and come up the River with him, reaching here for breakfast in the morning.

Later this evening my son Elliott and his wife, who were detained in New York, will arrive here. I always bemoan the fact that two of the children live so far away but somehow, fortunately for us, we never seem to drift far apart. This is a quality that I always admired enormously in the English people whom I knew whose familes were scattered all over the British Empire. When they came "home" they seemed to pick up the threads as though they had separated only the day before. Of course, that is the way it should be in families and yet it does not always seem to work that way. Few of us today are as good letter writers as some of these English families are, but perhaps as more people us a typewriter these long letters may come back into vogue!

E.R.


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, June 28, 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 June 27, 1937, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 27 June 1937, AERP, FDRL