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

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Eastport, Me., Sunday—These few days have certainly been full of interest. On Friday morning, Mrs. Albert Lasker arrived. I tried to meet her myself in Ellsworth, Me., only to find that the tide was so low I could not get across the ferry in time. So a car went for her from Lubec and brought Mr. and Mrs. James Wechsler also. Mr. Wechsler is lecturing on labor in defense and the young people are finding him very interesting.

Incidentally, several photographers have appeared on the scene. On Saturday, they tried to catch Justice Frankfurter and Dr. Alfred Cohn as they came across on the ferry. They were going to have one photograph at least, taken with me on the beach. But we were not caught by the photographers for Dr. and Mrs. David Levy arrived first and I drove down to the village with them, and returned to find Dr. Cohn and Justice Frankfurter had been ferried over, landed and started on the road to the house.

Dr. Cohn and Justice Frankfurter are both staying in the house with the students. Justice Frankfurter has already had a number of interesting talks, though his lecture is not being given until Monday. He has done an interesting thing in posing two questions to the students and he feels that, from the answers, he will be able to discover what they know about the law and how he must arrange his subject.

We were half through supper when Mr. and Mrs. Archibald MacLeish appeared at our door. They had left home at six a.m. and driven 440 miles. They were to stay down in the village, but they washed up and came down to supper and then went over to the student's cottage for the evening's entertainment. The students put on excellent songs and skits and, inspite of their weariness, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. MacLeish enjoyed themselves.

Justice Frankfurter kept saying: "This is better than the Gridiron." I am afraid our friends of the Gridiron would feel a trifle insulted, and yet the scripts these young people wrote were clever and witty and made many allusions to local happenings that evoked great laughter from all the young people.

I often wonder how much of a gap there really is between these young people from colleges, the cream of their various crops, and the boys working in Quoddy. It seems to me that the same qualities of leadership which are found in one group are found in the other.

On Friday night, in Quoddy, I met a Mrs. Fountain who has won the title of "Mother", through her kindness to all the boys on the project. The girls in various neighbors' houses are always willing to help her out, so she manages to keep the cookie jar filled for the boys and to make little extra things for them to eat every now and then, which make a homesick boy at once feel less keenly the need of his home environment. The boys are all devoted to her and call her "Mom."

E.R.

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


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

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  • Eastport (Me., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, July 14, 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
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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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