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

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BONNEVILLE, Ore., Tuesday—Yesterday afternoon was an extraordinarily interesting afternoon. We drove fourteen miles through a reclamation project. I wonder if to any of my readers this means as little as it did to me before yesterday afternoon!

However, if someone had said to me that I would see a desert one minute with sagebrush the only visible vegetation, and the next minute some of the best farming land that I have seen anywhere, I would have thought they were telling me a tale! As I looked more carefully I saw the irrigation ditches with their companion drainage ditches. When I was told that the water cost in some places four to eight dollars per month, I could hardly believe that anyone could make a living on the land, but Congressman Pierce assured me that they had no trouble paying out because of the productiveness of the soil once they had water. He also said that in another part of the state not very far away the original outlay for providing water had all been paid, and when that was accomplished here the cost of water to the people would be negligible.

Many of the people in the areas which we went through were people from the Dust Bowl who had arrived with practically nothing in the way of material goods. Some of the houses did not look very habitable as yet, but the crops and the cattle and above all the children looked in very good condition.

What an interesting country this is in which you can see something new every day!

My attention was drawn to the fact the other day that we are beginning to have weeks commemorating different activities in such great number that shortly the fifty-two weeks in the year will be preempted for some particular activity!

We have safety week, fire prevention week and this week I am particularly interested to see we have furniture week. Just why we should have a furniture week and not at the same time have a week which covers all the other things that go into a house, I do not know, but being very deeply interested in furniture I am glad that we do draw the attention of our people to the importance of the furniture which they put into their homes! I long ago made up my mind that the most attractive houses were those which expressed the personalities of the people who lived in them and the choice of furniture is one of the ways in which we all express our personalities most effectively. I hope that our taste will gradually become so well educated that we will demand in all the furnishings of our homes- usefulness, good workmanship and beauty.

E.R.



About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, September 29, 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

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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.

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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 September 28, 1937, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 28 September 1937, AERP, FDRL