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

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SAYBROOK, Conn., Monday—Storms hung in the air last evening and finally the rain came, and everything looked delicious and green and cool afterwards. I think perhaps the greatest luxury I know is sitting up reading in bed. Time after time I go to bed firmly saying to myself: "I will not read more than fifteen minutes.", and then the house is soquiet the light is good, and one is so comfortable, the book proves much too interesting to put it down, and ten thirty becomes eleven-thirty and eleven thirty becomes twevle-thirty, and when the book is finally finished, you either glance guiltily at the clock and try to forget what you see, or you say to yourself firmly: "As one grows older, one doesn't need so much sleep, so what is the use of wasting time that way!"

Last night I could only put in a short session because I was reading a manuscript for the Junior Literary Guild and was nearly through. I have strongly recommended that they accept it, but I don't know what the rest of the board will say. It is a very exciting story of the San Francisco waterfront today, not twenty or fifty years ago, though some of the things that occur may appear to people in other parts of the country to smack of the middle ages. I always feel when I am on the west coast, that it ought to be so easy to get people together and work out a practical solution of some of their difficulties, but apparently this is not as easy as it would seem and between employers and employees there is a bitterness existing which we rarely find in any other part of the country, except perhaps in some of our largest industrial fields, like coal or steel areas.

I was up bright and early this morning, did a number of things and at eleven o'clock, Mrs. Scheider and I started for Westbrook Connecticut. The roads in Connecticut are very lovely, there are so many trees and so much water, but they are not conducive to travelling very fast because no one has evidently considered straightening them. I rather prefer it myself when I am not in a hurry, though I always think of Colonel Frederick Stuart Greene, the Commissioner of Public Works for New York State, and his terrible logic when he once explained to me what a curve in the road cost in man hours and in tired.

We stopped by the side of the road and ate a sandwich and drank some milk and we are now spending an hour with two old friends of mine.

All day I have been thinking of Amelia Earhart somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and hoping she will make her flight safely. She is one of the most fascinating people I know, because she is so utterly simple which is an attribute I suppose of all great people, and she never seems to think that any of the things she does require any courage. The point of all these flights which are being made, outside of the scientific studies which may effect the actual safety of flying, is to make people realize what can be done and take it all more casually. I shall anxiously wait for the first radio reports.

E.R.


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Geographic
  • Saybrook (Middlesex County, Conn., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, June 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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  • Black, Allida M. (Editor)
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  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate 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 7, 1937, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 7 June 1937, AERP, FDRL