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

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SEATTLE , Monday—The trip up by air instead of beginning at 2:00 o'clock on Sunday morning, began at 5:00, a little detail which I did not have time to tell you about yesterday. A gentleman from Spokane, Washington, and I were the only passengers. He was a very pleasant companion with whom I enoyed talking until he left at Portland, Oregon. Then I came on to Seattle in solemn state. The delay had one advantage, for my family here did not have to meet me in the early hours of the morning. John, Sis and Buzz greeted me at the airport at 10:00 o'clock.

The stewardess on the plane was completing her ninth year with the company and has flown more miles than any other woman in this country. This so-called exciting career, which I think at times must be quite nerve-racking, has evidently agreed with her, for she looked like a young girl without a line in her face.

It is delightful to be back with my daughter and her family and we did nothing but talk all day yesterday, except for a few hours when I went to sleep, not having had a great deal of sleep the night before.

I woke this morning to blue skies and sunshine, and the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades standing out in dazzling snow-white silhouettes against the sky. My daughter and I spent the morning leisurely. At noon, with a picnic lunch in the back of the car, we picked up her husband and went to a delightful park where we sat in the sun among the trees and ate the first meal I have had out of doors this spring.

A most interesting letter has come to me from a young man who is abroad surveying youth conditions and the trend of young thought in different European countries. I shared that letter with my daughter and son-in-law, and then it was time to go to the train to meet Miss Thompson, who had journeyed up from Oakland in a more leisurely fashion than I did. Whichever way you come, the trip from San Francisco to Seattle is through beautiful mountain scenery.

In Texas and out on this coast, you feel that it is more a young man's country. Perhaps that is because the country itself is younger, but it seems to me that there is also a distinct difference to be found in group thinking. Texas is a little more tied with the South. Perhaps coming out to the Northwest was a trifle more difficult and tempted even more adventurous souls. In any case, the impact of thinking you get out here is not quite the same as what you feel in the South. There is something a little more windswept about it.

Have you ever noticed that different groups vary in their sense of humor and that that is sometimes a rather typical point of difference? In northern countries one is said to be more "dour" but there is enough softness in the air of our Northwest to keep one gently humorous, but not enough to make one peppery. The United States is a great country from both the physical and the human standpoint and its variety makes travelling forever interesting from both points of view.

E.R.

(Copyright, 1939, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, March 28, 1939

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.

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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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