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

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SAN FRANCISCO, Friday—I promised that I'd tell something about this trip, for it has been rather an amusing and eventful one.

From Cleveland to Chicago everything went smoothly, except that our youngest passenger, aged seven months, found the trip not to her liking, and told us so vociferously. I always have thought girl babies had better lungs than boys, and this one proved it. She never stopped! I was almost more sorry for her poor mother, who worried about the rest of the passengers, than I was for the baby herself, though there were moments when I thought she would burst.

Arrived in Chicago around 4 a.m., we were informed the ceiling was too low to proceed, so we all went up to the Blackstone Hotel and I hope everybody else slept as well as I did.

By 10:30 we were back at the airport. There Mr. C.R. Smith of American Air Lines came down to our United Air Liner and as we talked he remarked that the modern plane was so perfect that it required greater skill on the part of the pilots than ever before, and he showed me some of the new devices they were using to attain this skill.

When we took off, we had two babies on the plane. The second one was more sophisticated and not so decided in her tastes, so she did not complain as vigorously. But our baby of the night before had periods during the day when she told us in no uncertain terms what she thought of her travels.

In Omaha we ran into a muddy field and were mired, so had to spend nearly an hour getting the plane out again. I've often seen automobiles taken out of the mud, but I never thought of taking a plane out.

In Cheyenne we acquired another baby, this time aged three, and most sophisticated. She had made eight trips across the continent, and for a long time sat quietly in her seat. She had no one with her in the passenger compartment, but her father was the co-pilot and she was returning to her mother in Salt Lake City. He came out once and brought her down to introduce her to me. She took the introduction solemnly and with very little interest, but after he returned to the pilot's compartment, she waited just about five minutes, then came down the aisle and started making advances which ended in about an hour on my lap, with much entertainment on my part.

The last part of the trip was clear and beautiful, and flying over the Wasatch Mountains, covered with snow, and then seeing the sun setting across Great Salt Lake was one of those unforgettable sights which sometimes make an airplane trip memorable.

E.R.


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Geographic
  • San Francisco (Calif., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, May 1, 1937

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
[ ERPP bio | LC | VIAF | WorldCat | DPLA | Wikidata | SNAC ]

Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

  • Brick, Christopher (Editor)
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  • Black, Allida M. (Editor)
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  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
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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 April 30, 1937, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 30 April 1937, AERP, FDRL