The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
APRIL 5, 1949
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NEW YORK, Monday—My one peaceful day in the country yesterday proved to be quite busy!
After breakfast I did get a walk with the dogs in the woods, and I can report that the buds are beginning to show on a few of our trees. But only the crocuses appear on the lawn and a few little green shoots, which may some day be tulips or daffodils, are in the garden. I suppose I should be glad that everything isn't coming out too fast because we may have another frost before the end of this month. Someone was telling me the other day in Cleveland of a snowstorm that fairly buried them one year on the 14th of May. So it is well to progress rather slowly in the early spring, and that is exactly what we are doing.
I had a young companion with me to church yesterday morning and, being the first Sunday in the month, it was a very long service. I kept wishing that he had gone, as usual, to Sunday School and come with me some other Sunday.
We drove back through the woods and looked at all the new building being done, and I found that, like most small creatures, he had very long ears, for he told me all the difficulties that he had heard the workmen talking over with my son, Elliott.
My son John and his wife are here from the West Coast and he is working hard as usual. It was fun, though, to have them at Hyde Park over the weekend and to see them again in New York City. I hope they will get up there on other weekends and that occasionally we may get together here in the city if we can both be free at the same time.
Roger Butterfield, a magazine writer, came over from Cooperstown to lunch yesterday and we got into the usual argument that is bound to occur when East Coast residents and West Coast residents meet. The latter think their climate is perfect. Mr. Butterfield, who spends his winters in Cooperstown and his summers in various mining towns in Nevada, sided with the West. Yet, he is here in the spring, which I think is far more exciting in the East, especially following a real winter.
In the afternoon a poor lady whose son was killed in the Army Air Force a short time ago came to see me, and at teatime Mr. and Mrs. Herbert C. Pell brought me a very interesting drawing done by Thomas Derrick at the time of my husband's death. He wants us to hang the drawing in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. Mr. Derrick is an English illustrator who has done some very interesting and original work on religious subjects.
Two young friends dropped in later in the afternoon, and the day came to an end with very little work done but I enjoyed a pleasant sense of leisure.
No sense of leisure could last, however, after reading in the papers the agenda for our United Nations spring meeting! This morning we held another briefing session, and tomorrow work on the U.N. will begin in earnest.
It will be interesting to see the answers made to the United States' notes sent to Bulgaria, Hungary and Roumania. We told them that we feel they have repeatedly violated their obligations under the respective peace-treaty articles requiring them to secure to all persons under their jurisdiction the enjoyment of human rights and of fundamental freedoms.
I have no idea whether any penalties may be meted out to the above named countries for their violations, but action of this kind, and the results coming from it, will be of interest to the Commission on Human Rights when it meets to consider the Covenant of Human Rights and the ways of making nations observe their promises made under this covenant.
E. R.
(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1949, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC., REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)
About this document
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, April 5, 1949
Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007
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.
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