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

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HYDE PARK, Friday—Miss Thompson and I came up to Hyde Park yesterday and I devoted most of the afternoon to unpacking barrels of things which had come from New York. I try to decide for which child these things can be packed away and whether there is anything we can use anywhere now.

As far as possible, I am putting everything in use, but if the children cannot take their things at present, I have to mark them and keep them until the war is over. I have been through the experience of a generation in which things have been collected and not used, but kept for possible use sometime in the future; and am firmly convinced that everything should be in the hands of someone who can use it as soon as possible.

After lunch, the children and I read for a little while from a most charming little book called: "Masha," by MargueritaRudolph. She is a teacher in Manumet School and there has charge of one of my small guests, Michael Toombs, who is spending a week's holiday here with his mother. His father, our old friend, Henry Toombs, who was the architect for Warm Springs, is now in the Army.

We all had supper together on our porch. I never tire of the sunset hour. I think, perhaps, sunrise and sunset are the two loveliest times of the day. After supper, we all played games together and had to chase two active little girls to bed before we settled down to our grown-up occupations for the rest of the evening.

I am doing very nicely on saving my gas. My bicycle has taken me all the way to the big house and back. I was afraid I would never be able to negotiate the hills, but I find a little practice brings back one's old skill.

A rather nice story about an NYA boy was sent me from Missouri. I want to tell it to you because it is typical of what has been done for many boys. He was 17-years-old and had been hunting a job in the City of Joplin for days, when he was picked up by an NYA interviewer. He had no father, his mother worked away from home and he lived with his grandmother.

So the NYA interviewer suggested he return the next day and enroll in the NYA radio workshop. The boy worked so hard in the defense training shops and took the examination for all the licenses he required for employment, that he is now with the Federal Communications Commission in Memphis Tennessee.

The bugaboo of his first day's search for work had been the often heard question: " What experience have you had?" A boy with his schooling, obtained somewhere in the country near a city like Joplin, is not apt to have had much experience of which to boast.

E.R.

(COPYRIGHT, 1942, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC.)


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Geographic
  • Hyde Park (Dutchess County, N.Y., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, June 27, 1942

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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