The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
MAY 7, 1954
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NEW YORK, Thursday—After our meeting last Monday night in Champaign, Ill., we traveled back to Chicago and got a train that took us to St. Louis, where we arrived at 8:15 next morning. On arrival we were told that I had to be at the educational television station at Washington University at 9 o'clock to get ready for the half-hour interview on kinescope.
I could not quite see myself going without breakfast, so I urged them to get us to the hotel and then we would go on from there. We managed to have a good breakfast before starting for the university. The kinescope went off well, and then I went immediately to the chapel for a student faculty meeting.
The chapel was filled to overflowing and the questions could have gone on much longer than time would permit us to stay. I had to leave the university to go to an 11:30 meeting in a theater with the high-school model United Nations.
The St. Louis United Nations prototype is set up in a slightly different manner from the one at the University of Illinois in Champaign. In St. Louis the groups meet once a month and each high school represents a different country. Each does research on its "adopted" country and tries to represent it in the little United Nations.
I did not have time to see them in a meeting, but I was told that the young people's monthly meeting coincides with World Trade Week, which is in full swing in St. Louis.
The League of Women Voters has used this week as an opportunity for spreading world understanding and has promoted an extraordinarily good project. It was under the league's auspices that the model United Nations was started.
We walked from the theater to the department store of Scruggs Vandervoort Barney to see in their windows the displays from many different countries. Switzerland was represented by watches, locks and music boxes; Denmark by silver and pottery; England by a whole variety of silver and china.
Running through the middle of the store is an aisle called United Nations World Trade Exhibit, along which are goods gathered from the 60 member nations. There are samples of products that may be bought in various parts of the store—for instance, toys and leather goods from Germany, printed cottons from other areas, and altogether a great variety of goods.
This department store also has in its bookstore a full display of United Nations material. Here also are membership blanks for the American Association for the United Nations, waiting for prospective members to pick them up and sign their names.
So far the AAUN has not taken the spurt in Missouri that one feels other states have already accomplished, but there is the potential interest there.
On Tuesday afternoon there was a reception, followed by a finance dinner. I hope enough will be raised to pay for a secretary for the organization. They have been offered a room and telephone in the World Affairs Council office.
Once these facilities are established, they should begin to move on a businesslike basis to get chapters throughout the state and to have an active board.
In Kansas City the other day I was told that the AAUN had practically died out. It may well be that Kansas City will not cooperate with St. Louis and perhaps also in this state there should be a division of responsibility as there is in California and New York. Certainly, there needs to be an active organization at work, and I hope this second visit of ours will start the ball rolling.
E.R.
(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)
About this document
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, May 7, 1954
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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