Just Running Around

Last week the White House, all torn up for alterations, was deserted. Even Kentucky Colonel Louis McHenry Howe had gone off to Massachusetts for a vacation. None of the Roosevelts would be back at least until the elevator had been repaired.

President Roosevelt was scarcely well out to sea aboard the Houston before Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt, Marion Dickerman (Todhunter School) and Nancy Cook (Val-Kill furniture) rolled out of Washington on the four wheels of the First Lady's tan Buick coupe. On an "off the record'' vacation they were setting out to add more thousands to 35,000 miles the President's wife has travelled since March 4, 1933. First they scuttled westward into the mountains of West Virginia to inspect the work being done by the American Friends' Service Committee of Philadelphia among half starved children of mine families. The rich proceeds of Mrs. Roosevelt's radio appearances for Johns-Manville roofing and Simmons beds go to this feeding and fattening cause.

Next morning startled Kentuckians saw the ladies roll across the toll bridge over the Tug River at Williamson. "I'm just running around," Mrs. Roosevelt assured them. For a morning's amusement she drove down to see Henry Ford's coal mines at Pond Creek, then ran across into Virginia, lunched at a roadside stand near Norton and from her running board made a little speech thanking the crowd which gathered to gape at her. By nightfall the ladies had crossed through eastern Tennessee and were at Asheville, N. C.

Up bright and early in the morning the three adventurers swam in the country club pool, visited local homespun weavers, motored 40 miles down over the mountains to visit their confreres, Misses Vance and Vale (Tryon Toy Makers) who for a generation have been teaching wood carving to the hillbillies of Polk County.

Next afternoon. 200 miles from Asheville, the three ladies hung in a wooden cage 400 ft. in air looking down on the Clinch River. With them was Dr. Arthur Ernest Morgan, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, pointing out the foundations of the 253 ft.. $34,000,000 Norris dam. "It is most thrilling!' Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed, "a great deal like riding in an airplane.'' After a two hour inspection of a dozen electric-gadgeted brick and frame houses in the new town of Norris, she went to one of the construction camps and made a speech: ''The Government is doing a great job here."

When she was finished she asked for questions.

Silence.

"Isn't anyone going to ask me anything?"

Silence.

"How is the President's health?" called a voice. "

Perfectly grand! When you have infantile paralysis you are not very strong for a few years. The Lord, I imagine, knows when he gives us things and why. . . . Many times I have thought that the very qualities that the President had to acquire as the result of infantile paralysis made it possible for him to go through the last 15 months. ... I don't exactly recommend it, but it's a grand thing to have behind you."

"Will the President run again?"

"I haven't the slightest idea. He has to be asked and he may not want to, even if he is asked."

Next noon the three ladies reached Crossville, Tenn., drove to the top of Cumberland Mountain Plateau to inspect a subsistence homestead project. There indefatigable Mrs. Roosevelt declined an invitation from the Mayor of Rockwood to climb the Cumberland's Mt. Roosevelt.* Instead she drove until 8 p.m. to reach Berea, Ky., and a social project dear to her heart. She dined with Berea College's president, kindly, 63-year-old William James Hutchins, father of University of Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins. The elder Hutchins gives mountain boys and girls a higher education, helps them to earn their living while getting it, makes them take baths and brush their teeth.

Next day the First Lady drove on to Lexington to be the guest of another college president, Dr. Frank L. McVey of the University of Kentucky. Dr. McVey took her to the University's Memorial Hall, presented her to Governor Laffoon and 1,500 auditors as ''Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt." The lady and audience laughed heartily and she explained that she "didn't really mind being tied up with the other side of the family." Then she addressed the gathering on Education: "If we are to go forward, we must have dreams."

That night she and her fellow wanderers slept in Madison, Ind., next night in the Blackstone at Chicago. There she delivered a Simmons Bed broadcast, lunched with Rufus Dawes & wife, went to the Fair, smiled her broadest at newshawks when she told them: "Please don't feel badly if I have to evade you, because that's what I'm going to do from now on. This is not an official visit. When I'm with the President it's different." Bobbing up five hours later in front of the Fair's Administration Building, Mrs. Roosevelt was asked by reporters for the rest of her itinerary. "From now on," the First Lady twitted them, "it's a game of hide-&-seek."

*Technically still a nameless peak. A resolution to call it Mt. Roosevelt failed of passage before Congress adjourned--supposedly because Congressmen discovered that the mountain was only 2,000 ft. high, felt that it was unworthy of so great a name.

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