SARASOTA, Fla.—I took the 7:40 a.m. train to Hyde Park last Thursday so that I might reach the Library in time to meet the commandant from West Point, who always comes up on my husband's birthday to lay a wreath for the President.

The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis also always sends the polio poster child to lay its wreath. This year it was a whole polio family, a mother and two children who had polio. The third child and older boy had to leave and go back to school in Georgia, where his father is stationed in a service camp.

This is a remarkable family, and when one sees how serene they all are, one realizes that going through such an ordeal must have some kind of stabilizing effect and leave one with greater inner resources. The children are cheerful and well behaved but not in any way repressed.

They spent Wednesday night with a lady in Rhinebeck who has also been through a long siege of polio and has finally succeeded in getting back on her feet and is walking without crutches. She also has the same serenity which, I think, must be a great acquisition in today's hurried world.

It seems that another labor leader has proved as venal as some other human beings. He and his wife apparently have received large payments from the union. This is regrettable because it will make watchdogs over union funds more necessary.

One wishes that these organizations could police themselves rather than have the government step in, but with so much publicity about unfaithful stewardship within the unions, it is certainly going to be difficult not to undergo examination from without.

The story of the suicide of a New York City school principal is tragic, I think. And then there was the young man in Wyoming who killed 10 people. There is the talk, too, of money for bombers and money to give more military support to the Bagdad Pact. Force, force, force—and little regard for reason or for peaceful aims.

There are two things, however, to show there is another side to life. One is the spontaneous outpouring of sympathy and interest which has come from all over the country, from high and low, to Roy Campanella It is hoped that he will recover from his paralysis even if he cannot go back to baseball.

The other item is in an even lighter vein and suggests that we ladies are going to be free from the latest curse of fashion, "the chemise." According to the latest fashion show in Paris, these are going to be changed and not left in their straight simplicity.

I must say, looking back over the years, I sometimes think fashions might be kept away from the type of things that have been tried in the past and found extremely unbecoming and decidedly unattractive. But the waistline around the hips and short skirts, which one saw in some of the dresses of the `20s, are as little becoming today as they were then. I don't mind changes in fashion, if only they are attractive, but I can't beer changes just for the sake of a change!