Fun With Friends

(See front cover)

One chilly morning last week President Roosevelt got off a special Atlantic Coast Line train at Jacksonville. Behind him was the work and worry of Washington; ahead of him, fun with friends off Florida. For a stag party he had brought along only Gus Gennerich, his bodyguard, three secret service men and his Secretary Marvin Mclntyre. At the station were his son James and Jacksonville's Mayor Alsop. Buttoning his overcoat against the breeze the President got into an automobile with Florida's plump Governor Sholtz and drove five miles to the docks on the St. Johns River. There lay Vincent Astor's white and orange Nourmahal. At the foot of the gangplank Owner Astor met him, grasped his hand and exclaimed: "It's a great thing to have you aboard again, Mr. President."

For the benefit of photographers the ceremony was repeated. Then the President went up the gangplank, putting Governor, Mayor, secretary, photographers, newsmen behind. With Vincent Astor on the bridge beside his cheerful, ruddy-faced skipper Captain Gustav Klang, the Nourmahal nosed carefully down the 18-mile reach of river toward the open sea. Behind her like a vigilant watchdog for the fortnight's cruise glided the U. S. destroyer Ellis.

For Mr. Roosevelt that cruise among friends on a fine yacht was to be as thoroughgoing a vacation as any modern U. S. President has dared to take with Congress in session. Not one political adviser accompanied him. For company he had his fishing cronies, practically the same group who went with him on the same vessel into the Gulf Stream a month before his inaugural last year. Nearest among them to a politician was Manhattan's Frederic Kernochan whom Mayor Walker continued in office as Special Sessions Justice. He has always frequented polite society as few Tammanyites are privileged to do. When in 1932 he sent a check for $50 to Tammany's campaign chest, Tammany returned it to him as "too cheap." Last year he ran for election to the Court of General Sessions on Mayor LaGuardia's Fusion ticket but Tammany managed to beat him.

Another of the President's fishing friends was a distant cousin. Kermit Roosevelt, son of T. R., friend and partner of Vincent Astor in the shipping business. The rest were, with two exceptions, socialites: William Rhinelander Stewart, Mr. Astor's best friend; Lyle Hull who last spring was Mr. Stewart's bicycling companion in Bermuda; George St. George, young, round-faced, rosy-cheeked, English-bred member of Tuxedo's horsy set. Mrs. George St. George was the onetime Katharine Price Collier, stepsister of the President's cousin Warren Delano Robbins, U. S. Minister to Canada. The two exceptions to the socialite group were Dr. Leslie W. Heiter of Mobile, Ala., friend of

Vincent Astor. present in a professional as well as a social capacity, and Captain Herman Gray, famed master of Gulf Stream fishing, who used to pilot President Hoover to good fishing grounds and who remarked : "Fish don't bite any faster for a President than they do for a plumber."

Few companies could have provided more change for an overworked President. That night they anchored off Sandy Cay, north of Miami, and next morning began their fishing. By radio Mr. Astor reported to the world that the fishing was good. About midday after an exchange of radio messages with Nassau, the Nourmahal upped anchor and sailed off for the capital of the British Bahamas.

Early next morning the lookouts in Nassau reported the yacht and the destroyer Ellis coming up over the horizon. As they approached the harbor. H. M. S. Danae broke out the U. S. flag and saluted with 21 guns. The President received it standing on the quarterdeck as the Nourmahal ran up in acknowledgment the President's flag, a bronze seal and four white stars on a blue field. Soon official visits were in full swing. The Captain of the Port, His Majesty's Governor Sir Bede E. H. Clifford and his lady (the onetime Alice Gundry of Cleveland) went out in a launch and formally greeted the guests who had called on them last year. Then a dirty sponge barge with patched sails came alongside. An ancient sailor named Pete the Sponger clambered up the Nourmahal's white side, greeted the President and his party and presented a scroll to Frederic Kernochan. It named him "Honorary Commissioner of the Mud." The President roared with laughter. After Host Astor had paid a return courtesy call upon Sir Bede ashore, the Nourmahal sailed away.

A few minutes later a seaplane from Miami alighted on Nassau Harbor bearing a cargo of newshawks hungry for any tidbit of news about the President. Sir Bede gave them cocktails, told them chuckling tales about Justice Kernochan's commission. Then they had to wait two hours until the island's censor passed their innocuous cable dispatches.

Meantime the President. Host Astor and socialite friends sailed blissfully on under cloudless skies to the fishing grounds off Andros Islands for sport with bonefish and barracuda. There on his fourth day at sea. the President received his first consignment of letters and dispatches, delivered by a Navy amphibian. He took four hours off from fishing to peruse them. His son James flew back to Miami on the amphibian carrying instructions to Secretary Mclntyre about answering the correspondence.

Next day again the President took time to perform an official duty. As Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, and hence as senior officer aboard the Nourmahal, he performed Easter services in the absence of a chaplain. Standing on the quarterdeck of the Nourmahal under a turquoise sky, the President, from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, read to his fellow funmakers, to the officers and crews of Nourmahal and the Ellis.

If there is any puzzle about Vincent Astor and Franklin Roosevelt it is how close they have always been together and how far apart. In the U. S. when men speak of "the county" they mean a few square miles of land governed, usually none too well, as a local unit. In England when men speak of "the county'' they refer collectively to the landed gentry in a given shire. Few U. S. counties are more like British counties than New York's Dutchess on the Hudson river. There, for decades, the Astors and the Roosevelts have been part of ''The County.''

The 2,000-acre Astor estate, Ferncliffe, is only about ten miles up the river from the 500-acre Roosevelt estate, Hyde Park. As "county families" they were long and well acquainted. The late James Roosevelt, older half-brother of Franklin, married Helen Astor, and her nephew, Vincent, knew James as "Uncle Rosie." Vincent, born in 1891, was nearly ten years younger than Franklin so that, although they knew each other from childhood, they were not at that time good friends. From 1907 on, while Vincent, an ungainly boy, was still in school at Newport, Franklin Roosevelt was already a budding young lawyer, working for the Manhattan firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn. In that capacity he helped look after many legal details connected with the huge real estate holdings of Vincent's father, John Jacob Astor.

In 1912 Vincent was at Harvard--where Franklin Roosevelt had been before him --when John Jacob Astor escorted his wife (Vincent's stepmother) to a life boat on the deck of the Titanic, tipped his cap and stepped back among the crowd to meet his Maker. Vincent went to Halifax to claim his father's body, returning, not to Harvard, but to Manhattan. Then & there he graduated to man's estate, although it was several months before his 21st birthday. It became his job to manage the $63,000,000 worth of real estate which his father left, mostly to him.

Franklin Roosevelt was at that time a not particularly hard working lawyer, with no personal fortune but an amazing ability to make friends. And he was setting out on the polite career of being a county squire in politics. Vincent Astor, working in his real estate office on 26th Street just west of Broadway, had no such gift for making friends; he was in fact a thoroughly serious-minded and, save for his money, socially unequipped young man.

But Vincent Astor was, in his way, as socially progressive as the young upstate legislator from Hyde Park who was fighting Tammany at Albany. He gave--and still gives--boating excursions up the Hudson to poor women & children. He even ventured far enough into politics to hold down a desk in New York City's Fusion campaign headquarters when John Purroy Mitchel successfully ran for mayor in 1913. But he soon discovered that he had no flair for politics. He married Helen Dinsmore Huntington--a member of another county family--and settled down to his real estate business.

He built a public market on upper Broadway but it was not a financial success. The Astor policy with real estate had always been to buy, hold for a rise and sell at a profit but put up no improvements. Vincent Astor, during the booming '20s, sold a great deal of property. On onetime Astor land now stands Manhattan's Paramount Building, its Longacre Building, half of its Empire State Building and many another. But Vincent Astor broke family tradition by improving Astor property. He put up $10,000,000 worth of buildings, modernized many old ones, became proud of his name as a landlord. Whereas in 1914 7% of the gross income of his properties was spent on management and operation, in 1922 the amount was 13 1/2%, in 1932, 23%.

Not all of his property has been modernized for he still owns many a stinking old tenement in Manhattan's slums. Last month when New York City's Fusion Administration began to dig into slum housing conditions, Vincent Astor promptly marched to the City Hall and offered to sell the city his worst tenement holdings at their assessed valuation, $800,000 (TIME, April 2). And last week while the Nourmahal was off the Bahamas, Mr. Astor's real estate manager notified the city that he had voluntarily ordered evicted tenants in 15 tenements unfit for habitation, offering direct aid to those who might find a hardship in moving. Such a liberal act for a slum-owning landlord gave a good indication of the degree of social kinship between Vincent Astor and President Roosevelt.

Vincent Astor's occupations have not been all by land. In 1930 he put up in the neighborhood of $500,000 to buy an interest in Kermit Roosevelt's shipping line (Roosevelt Lines). Kermit was also an Astor guest aboard the present Nourmahal (second of its name, 264 ft. overall, and costing some $2,000,000 when completed at Kiel in 1928) on a scientific expedition to the Galapagos Islands for giant tortoises, iguanas, dwarf penguins, spineless cactus and rare fish. Farther back in 1917 when Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt was organizing a flotilla of yachts to serve as patrol vessels overseas, Vincent Astor was prompt to enlist himself and his old yacht Noma.

That incident was significant in the strange and distant parallelism between the careers of Vincent Astor and the President. Each has changed a great deal from the young man he then was. Four years later disease laid Franklin Roosevelt low and made him into a different and abler man. Vincent Astor's change, less dreadful and dramatic, began with the War. When he went overseas as an ensign on the Noma he was still very much the serious, rather dull, young man. In French waters he became a practical mariner, laid cables with a donkey engine, came home on a terrifically tough voyage aboard the surrendered German submarine, U-117. He also came home less the callow and ungainly boy, more the bronzed and competent man he is today.

The change in Vincent Astor gave him self-confidence, but not social confidence. There is still as wide a gulf between Franklin Roosevelt's social flair and Vincent Astor's social modesty as there was between young Attorney Roosevelt's good-natured sociability and young Mr. Astor's awkwardness. There is no doubt that the consciousness that Franklin Roosevelt has exactly what Vincent Astor can never hope to gain contributes to the latter's warm admiration for the former. That and the consciousness that Franklin Roosevelt, like himself, belonged to "the county" was what led Vincent Astor to go to Albany with John Jacob Raskob one day in August 1932 and say publicly and feelingly:

"It has been my good fortune to know Franklin Roosevelt as a friend for very many years and throughout that time I have learned increasingly to recognize his ability. . . . In recent weeks he has been described--by people, I suspect, who know him not at all--as an irresponsible radical. . . . Such statements could not be more stupid nor more untrue."

That feeling was responsible for Mr. Astor's taking a place on the finance committee for the Roosevelt campaign. His cash contributions to the cause of a man who was suspected of wanting to undo all rich men exceeded $25,000. Soon after the election of his friend he started talking with Raymond Moley about founding a magazine to propound the Roosevelt philosophy, which appealed to the liberal side of his own nature. The same feeling was responsible nearly a year later, when Professor Moley had talked himself out of the Brain Trust, for the founding of Today. At that time Mr. Astor said, "Optimistically, perhaps, we hope to make money," but he went loyally ahead. (Today, although hardly a profitable venture yet, has now just over 50,000 circulation.) It was Editor Moley, writing to the President at that time, who uttered words which would fit perfectly in Publisher Astor's mouth: "Friendship for you as a great warrior and chief and a deep sharing of political ideals are precious."

Because of that feeling, the owner of the Nourmahal is always glad and proud when Franklin Roosevelt comes aboard. It was so last September when for a few brief days the President found time to cruise from Hyde Park to Washington. It was so the February before when the Nourmahal carried Franklin Roosevelt through the fish-filled waters of the Gulf Stream to give him rest before taking up his duties in Washington. After that cruise, when the party returned to Miami, Madman Joe Zangara emptied his revolver at the President-Elect, mortally felled Mayor Cermak of Chicago who stood beside his car. In the car behind sat Vincent Astor, Raymond Moley and Frederic Kernochan. A few moments before as the cars crept through the throng Mr. Astor had said to the others of his great and good friend: "Any crank might take a shot at him. I don't like this. It's too dangerous."

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