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

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ROCHESTER, Minn., Friday—The days have slipped by very quickly of late, but I think it is just as well that I am going home tonight for everyone in Rochester will be tired of seeing me. I walk up and down from the hospital at least once a day and all the children recognize me and we say good morning as though we were old friends.

Last night I spoke in the auditorium at St. Mary's hospital to the nurses, the sisters and a gallery filled with their friends. They were a wonderfully attentive audience and I enjoyed seeing them all together, for they are an interesting group of women.

Everyone takes such a personal interest in everyone else here. The bellboys, the taxi drivers, the casual people who pass me in the street, all ask how James is feeling. I am glad to be leaving with such a light heart and a feeling that all is going to progress smoothly and well from now on. Jimmy could not be in a more friendly atmosphere.

I went visiting in the hospital this morning and called on two patients who are changing their rooms so that Jimmy can return to the same room (now that he is conscious of his surroundings) which he occupied when he was here last. One of the patients, from Houston, Texas, is two years younger than Jimmy and he will have a serious operation tomorrow. All my sympathy went out to his blond, young wife who will have to sit through those anxious hours with his mother, both of them wondering what is happening in the operating room. I feel sure that he will come through all right, because, as his surgeon remarked, he has youth and strength in his favor. Apparently you can almost take a young man apart and put him together again in these modern, scientific days, but you can not take away the anxiety of the people who wait while this is being done.

Father Shea was the last patient I visited. He is a dear old man who has been some months in the hospital and has called on Jimmy occasionally. His humorous and friendly personality made his visits welcome and Jimmy wanted me to be sure to bid him goodbye.

I open the newspaper every day with a feeling of dread and I turn on the radio to listen to the last news broadcast at night half afraid to hear that the catastrophe of war has again fallen on Europe. It seems to me that the Prime Minister of England did a fine thing when he went to visit the German Chancellor in a last effort to prevent bloodshed. It seems insanity to me to try to settle the difficult problems of today by the unsatisfactory method of going to war. If you kill half the youth of a continent, the problems will be no nearer solution, but the human race will be that much poorer.

E.R.

(Copyright, 1938, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Geographic
  • Rochester (Minn., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, September 17, 1938

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 UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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