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

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WASHINGTON, Thursday—From the time I reached Buffalo, N.Y., yesterday at 1:00 o'clock until I left at 9:45, I had very little time to waste. I lunched with the ladies of the various unions, and then we started to look at the housing site. The Grand Island Homes Cooperative Association, Inc., is a cooperative organization which has bought a tract of land on Grand Island and is going to build homes for workers. The sites will be about a half an acre each, so there will be plenty of room for a good garden. The down payment is reasonable and the monthly payments are well within the proper budgetary allowance for rents.

Since it is a cooperative scheme, they have guarded against the possibility of a man having to move, by making it possible for the cooperative to take back the site and reimburse the individual for what he has put in. There is another insurance phase which interests me particularly. Under this insurance arrangement, in case of death of the wage earner, the widow receives $5,000, which is the maximum amount put into the building. Any cooperative piece of work requires education but it is certainly possible for it to do a great deal more than any one individual. I shall watch the development of this particular undertaking with the greatest of interest.

On our return to Buffalo, we attended the induction ceremony where boys were taken into all branches of the service—Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Flying Cadets. Their families joined them in the recreation room which is provided by patriotic organizations for the use of men at the time of their induction.

The WPA band played and the oath was administered to each group with due formality and solemnity. The Mayor of Buffalo spoke and I was asked to say a few words. I always find it difficult to face these young people so eager and willing to give themselves. It is a most moving experience and one which makes one feel the weight of the civilian's responsibility at home to the boy who goes out to fight.

Before leaving in the evening, I had various meetings and ended with a dinner and a speech to the members of the various unions. I was fortunate enough to see the President of Peru again, who came to the dinner for a few minutes. It was most interesting to hear the impressions of his last few days' trip. I told my husband this morning that President Prado was pleased with his reception everywhere and felt that wherever he had seen our production efforts, they were wonderfully successful.

E.R.

(COPYRIGHT, 1942, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, May 15, 1942

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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MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

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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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