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

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NEW YORK, Wednesday—It has been my intention for two days now to thank all the kind people who have written to me about the illness of my grandson, Curtis Boettiger. Many letters contained suggestions of all kinds of remedies, and I am sure that the great interest shown in the young man was partly because people felt it was hard on us that another member of the family, in the younger generation, should be striken with the same disease that afflicted my husband.

Fortunately, when quarantine time was up last Thursday his mother was told he was coming along perfectly well. He will be released from the hospital tomorrow having taken the necessary treatments, and is leaving for Paris with me next Monday for the United Nations General Assembly meetings.

When things go wrong it is always comforting to learn how many really kind people there are in the world. For that reason I wish I could extend my thanks personally to each person who took the trouble to write not only to me and to my daughter, but to young Curtis himself. His mother told me that he was so deluged with mail that he would never have time to thank all the people who wrote to him.

* * *

I went out to Orange, N. J., today to see my cousin, Mrs. Henry Parish, to say good-bye before going abroad.

Tonight I shall speak before the N.A.A.C.P. in Harlem, and this is the last engagement I have made.

Between Thursday and Monday I shall have to try and say good-bye to a number of friends, to do the inevitable small errands that always wait till the last minute, and, last but not least, to send to the publisher the final batch of copy on the second volume of my autobiography.

If I find I cannot get everything done before I start, Miss Thompson says the chances are that the trip to Europe will be smooth, so we can wind up the last details on board. I am not quite as optimistic as she is because, while I think the trip may be smooth, I am conscious of the fact that there will be much for me to learn. Briefing on the subjects that are likely to come up in the General Assembly will go on every day aboard ship. That means considerable reading of material that I have been setting aside for the last few weeks, labelled: "To be read on the steamer."

* * *

All liberals in this country must have a sense of sorrow over the death of former President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia.

It is not so much his death that makes us sad as it is the circumstances that preceded it. He believed that he could find a middle road to keep Czechoslovakia free and yet co-operate with the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. His disappointment and final defeat are a warning to us all.

Here was a man of strength of character who loved his country and had great good will for all other countries, a man whom many admired and followed, and yet he must have died with a broken heart.

E. R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1948, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC., REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)


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My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, September 9, 1948

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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Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

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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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