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

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WASHINGTON, Monday —Yesterday was a quiet day. A few friends came to lunch, I had a swim, one or two visitors, and dinner at the big house in the evening with my mother-in-law. She is bewailing the fact that her great-grandson, Franklin, III, is leaving her today and going up to the house which his mother has taken for the summer at Beverly Farms, Massachusetts.

I noticed an amusing item about this house the other day. Some newspaper said that Franklin, Jr., and his wife were going to spend the summer in Beverly and that he would commute to the destroyer to which he is assigned.

It made me chuckle, for he would have to commute to someplace out in the Atlantic Ocean, since the destroyer is now on a twenty day cruise to parts unknown!

All of us have been anxiously waiting for some kind of news from Jimmy. When I called the President yesterday, he quoted the newspaper to me, which was not what I had hoped for in the way of "inside information." It looks as though Jimmy would probably return home after I reach Maine, where sometime before July first, I must go to put our house in order before we turn it over to the International Student Service.

I did a number of errands in New York City today, saw some people who are leaving for the summer, and at 4:00 o'clock took a plane for Washington.

A letter came to me the other day, some of which I pass on to you. It reads: "Returning from Europe, where I have lived for 40 years in France, travelling often all over the Continent, I am shocked by the waste of food on all sides, in this, my native land ***. Now that starving Europe is tugging at our heart strings, now that we may soon be in a position to furnish these poor people with part of what they need, can nothing be done to awaken our people to the crime of wasting food?"

I remember after three years of school in England under a French headmistress, returning to this country and being surprised and bewildered then by the waste of food I saw on every hand. The amount of sugar and cream wasted on cereal in the morning, which was often only half eaten!

I remember Mlle. Souvestre's stern eye across the table at school, and the admonition: "You need never take anything on your plate, but when you have taken it, you must finish it." My grandmother used to say when I was a tiny girl that there was an old adage: "Waste not, want not." Then she used to add that as long as there were hungry children in the world, we should be ashamed to leave any food uneaten on our plates.

E.R.

(COPYRIGHT, 1941, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, June 17, 1941

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

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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.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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