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

      

NEW YORK—The kindly feeling I told you about yesterday, which prompts so many people to send gifts of one kind or another to our royal guests, also inspires many people to send us food which they hope can be served at some meal while they are with us. This has caused a frequent variation in the menus for the various meals.

Perhaps it is just as well, for some of my correspondents seem very much troubled that we are not asking a hotel expert to order and oversee the cooking of the food for Their Majesties. The reason seems to be that they liked the meals served during the recent visits of the young Crown Princes and Princesses.

One particular correspondent seems to have been reading some columnist who writes on foods and wines. The columnist, in turn, seems to have taken everything he has seen printed without one grain of salt! Apparently even newspaper columnists will never learn not to believe everything they see in print.

I hope that the food at the White House will be good. During the past six years the same people have struggled through the preparation of meals for visiting dignitaries and people of importance in our own country. I can only pray that serving a King and Queen will not paralyze them!

As the food at the big house in Hyde Park will be entirely in the hands of my mother-in-law, I know it will be good. My responsibility in Hyde Park is only for one picnic, and even if everything should go wrong, the only result would be to make our neighbors across the water realize that we are still a young country and don't do some things here as well as they do.

One of our neighbors used to say that the only advantage in not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are. I should not be at all surprised if some of the things which the King and Queen will remember and laugh over, when they return to their own fireside, will be the differences between the English way of doing things and the way they are done in Canada and in the United States.

I remember a trip which my uncle, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, took which furnished us with amusing stories for years afterwards. It was not the pleasant, comfortable, usual things that he liked to tell about, but the things that were different and that struck him as a little queer or amusing. Isn't that so with you in your travels?

I had my last fitting this morning for a dress made from a silk designed by my niece, Eleanor Roosevelt II, which combines the English thistle and the American goldenrod. It is really a lovely material.

Then I lunched at India House, always an interesting place to visit, and returned to Washington in the afternoon.

E.R.

(Distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, June 7, 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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  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
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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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