Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 23 June 1937 — Page 13

Vagabond

From Indiana—Ernie Pyle

Hospitalized in a Remote Village Roving Reporter Has a Dand§ Time Learning About Alaskan Hospitality.

ETERSBURG, Alaska, June 23.—The lazy streak in me has always made me enjoy lying in hospitals. Get me in a hospital and you can hardly get me out. I like hospitals. The one in this fishing village is no exception. I like it here, too. We people down in the States imagine that if we get sick in a faraway place like this we just crawl off land die, or at most get pretty crude treatment.

But no such thing. In this community of 1500 people, on an island 900 miles from Seattle, with the nearest town 50 miles away by boat, there are two doctors, two dentists, a wellequipped little hospital and three trained nurses. They're all the same kind of people you'll. find in the States. The hospital is a two-story frame building, sitting in a big lawn. It was once somebody's home. . There are nine beds altogether. In our “ward” are four beds. Paul Boordutovsky (they call him “Russian Paul”) is in one of them. I'm in the next one. The other two are empty. Russian Paul is-a native of Sitka, the old Russian capital of Alaska before we bought it. Paul's father was once provincial governor under the Czars. But times have changed. Russian Paul is a sort of knockabout, and he's on the city now. He's been in here a month, with an infected leg. ‘He is 69. We have a bed lamp over each bed, and a little bell with a plunger on the table at the bedside. We wear long nightgowns. Not hospital gowns, but old-fashioned flannel nightgowns. We look pretty funny.

Service With Smiles

We have two nurses. They are nice girls, and they treat us fine. One is Josephine Hegland, who has been up here a year from Saskatchewan, and the" other is Myrtle Nelson, who came just three months ago from Wisconsin. She says she’s having a better time already than she ever had in the States. Goes* to all the dances, and she has a “feller” who is a fisherman. Miss Nelson was telling me about an awful boner she pulled yesterday. It seems Doc Benson told her that he and I were old schoolmates, whereupon she said, “Why, Dr. Benson, he doesn't look old enough to have been in school with you!” Hiya, Doc. I'm reaily four years older than he is. It's my pure, simple thoughts that keep me so young. On Sunday morning Mina Olson, the head nurse, came up and said I had visitors. I said, “Nurse, vou're bugs. I don't know a soul in this town.” But even as I spoke there came the sound of many feet on the stairs, and into the room walked a bevy of females. They were four of the Eastern Stars from Wrangell with whom I came over on the cannery tender. They said they'd heard I was in the hospital, and just dropped in before starting back to Wrangell. How's that for Alaskan hospitality?

More Visitors Arrive

Well, the Eastern Stars stayed and talked a while, and then about a half hour after they left the nurse came up and said I had another visitor. This time it was Frank Barnes. the cannery man who brought us over. He just dropped by to see if 1 was all right.

Then in the afternoon Earl Ohmer of Petersburg came by and talked with Russian Paul and me for an hour or two. He had heard I wanted to see him before leaving Petersburg, so he just came up to the hospital. : And in the evening a man named Bert Cornelius, who is a@ local merchant, wandered in and introduced himself and sat and talked a while. He stayed half an hour and told- me how he came up here from Ft. Worth on a three-month vacation 16 years "ago, and hasn't got back to Ft. Worth yet.

Mrs.Roosevelt's Day

By Eleanor Roosevelt

First Lady Makes Acquaintance of Blind Pewter Worker at Benefit Sale

YDE PARK, N. Y., Tuesday.—We have to leave here today after lunch, and I find that even after four days you can have the same feeling of having to do innumerable little things before you go. There is a cord on a lamp which needs to be lengthened, some hooks I want to put up in a closet, and the list goes on indefinitely. But, at a quarter before 11 I had to stop, and I got into my car. 1 had promised my mother-in-law, Mrs. James Roosevelt, to go up to the library in the village where the Albany Association for the Blind was holding a sale. Miss Cook also had promised to go, and . Mrs. Scheider came, too, so we would add to the association's sales as much as our combined purses could stand. ‘I drove over to the big house first to make sure my mother-in-law was starting on time. Then we drove un to Hyde Park and arrived just after she did, to find Mr. Wilson, our rector, and one or two of my ‘friends in the village already there helping the Albany representatives cf the association. : I was so glad to see some of my cld friends, and I was much interested in meeting an old man, with a long white beard, who is almost totally biind. He does pewter work and had some pewter ash trays on sale, some of which I bought. I had a httlz chat with him, for Mr. Wilson: was showing him the book which the American Red Cross gave me of “Bobby and Betty's Trip to Washington.” in Braille. He seemed interested and I explaincd I had given it to the library

Mr. Pyle

knowing that though we fortunately had no blind | children in the village, I hoped our library might be |

able to lend it to other libraries. The picture in the paper this morning showing the devastation in a. suburb of Bilbao gives me a sense of horror. Why must peoble go on stupidly destroying what it has taken human hands so long to build? Are we never going to reach a point where a vote will be a substitute for cutting each other's throats or hlowing each other up with guns? Among other things, I noticed yesterday that the Basque children taken to England were not very happy. It makes me feel more strongly than ever that our own contribution should be in money and these children: should be kept as near their own country as possible. Children lose all sense of security when their surroundings are not familiar. It is probably easier to stand constant shelling when the room you are in is a room you have known all your life. If it falls about your ears, you are probably killed and know nothing about it. But you cannot imagine that such fa thing will happen because you have known the roo and can visualize it no other way.

Walter O'Kee

HERE'S talk around that the Duchess of Windsor formerly Wallis Warfield, may be dropped from the next issue of the social register. She should worry. Some may rate higher in the social batting averages now, but a thousand years from today they'll be as far behind Wally as War Admirai’s compatition. She may not make the blue book, but she’ll be all over the history books—and with her pictures in tech-

nicelor, too. : She can't be called “Her Royal Highness” because

she hasn't got the same social standing as Edward. |

Sn if she and ire Duke should attend a party she has

to walk 12 paces to the rear of her spouse. Many an

American husband would love a deal like that.

i

damaged it. " the younger Rockefeller reflect a

The Indianapolis

TE Td Nl. TO —————————

Imes

Second Section

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23, 1937

Entered as Second-Class Matter Indianapolis,

at Postoffice,

PAGE 13!

Ind:

John D. Jr.

(Second of a Series)

By Willis Thornton

NEA Staff Correspondent

OGETHER the Rockefellers, father and son, have probably given away 750 million dollars. The present head of the clan has actively continued the work of his father in adding perhaps 175 million dollars to former benefactions which he continues to help

administer.

In the gifts of young Rockefeller there is a strain of warmth, of personal interest, of imagination, and of cosmopolitanism that was not apparent in the vast “general purpose” contributions of the father. The older man would never have thought, for instance,

of the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, Va, with which the son has produced an unique memorial

of pre-Revolutionary times, buying and restoring. an entire town at a cost of 15 million dollars for the pleasure and inspiration of 300,000 visitors a year. The first-generation Rockefeller would probably never have been interested in putting $500,000 into rebuilding the Shakespeare Memorial Theater at Stratford after it burned down, or in contributing $1,500,000 toward rebuilding the Imperial University Library in Tokyo after an earthquake had The benefactions of

mind that is at home in all the world and in every field. The Rockefeller contributions to purely Baptist causes have virtually ceased. While the keen interest in religion and in religious causes remains, it is now expressed in interdenominational movements. Rockefeller Jr. poured two million dollars into the abortive Inter-Church World Movement of 15 years ago, but his faith in such work was never shaken by its notable failure. The magnificent Riverside Church, with its famous carillon, which dominates New York's upper Hudson River skyline, but is entirely nondenominational in its services and work. New York's Cathedral

- of St. John the Divine has re-

ceived $500,000, the ColgateRochester Seminary $1,250,000, and the Yale Divinity School one million dollars from the Rockefeller coffers, and he is a large supporter of the Institute of Social and Religious Research. Traveling in France, Rockefeller noted the shabby and generally rundown condition of the palaces at Versailles and Fontainebleau, saw the wartime ravages at Louvain and Rheims. The result was three million dollars for repairs at Versailles and Fontainbleau, restoration at Rheims, and $100,000 toward the rehabilitation of the Louvain Library. 3 £ 2 BSERVING the difficulties ot poor students abroad led to establishment of a chain of International Student Houses in several countries to provide cheap and good living quarters for students in strange lands. In each there is a proportion of native students so that international understanding may be promoted. Nearly 11 million dollars has gone into this project. Traveling more widely than his father ever did, Rockefeller has _become interested in parks and forestry. It is due to his Save-the-Redwood League (two million dollars) that many of the giant sequoias of the West still stand. Acadia National Park is ehtirely a Rockefeller gift, the land having

John D. Rockefeller Jr.

ives Away Millions

Even Foreign Countries Benefit by His Reconstruction Work

#5 23 “A

The magnificent $1,500,000 Riverside Church, whose tower and carillon dominate the Hudson River Drive section of New York, is nondenominational, and receives members of all faiths, typifying the Rockefeller dream of a strong nondenominational united Protestant

movement,

been acquired and improved for four million dollars and presented to the Government. Rockefeller loves the Palisades of the Hudson, and he bought seven million dollars’ land, including the most sightly cliffs, thus preserving them as a scenic feature of New York.

Hills Found 15 Be

By Science Service ALEIGH, N. C., June 23—A vast 10-mile-long deposit of soapstone, including solid hills of the mineral, have been located in Wake County, North Carolina, in a WPA project directed by Edgar B. Ward, North Carolina geologist. Millions of tons of the mineral,

.| formed millions of years ago by

volcanic eruption, will form a great reserve which some day will supply material for a profitable industry. Anyone who has ever studied chemistry in school will remember soapstone as the material used in the tops of their experiment tables. The layman comes in contact with

of Soapstone

soapstone through its uses in fireless cookers, hearths and mantles, flooring, laundry tubs, kitchen sinks and finally (if he had lived in earlier generations) as his tombstone. Characteristic of soapstone is the ease with which it is cut and Geologist Ward, in fact, discovered larger stones which apparently had had chunks sawed off of them. A later search showed these stones were used in graveyards nearby. A softer variety of soapstone is a talc-like material that goes into talcum powder and is used as a nonadhesive in the roofing and rubber trade.

Side Glances

PR 77 .

"By Clark

worth of ¢

|

Ft. Tryon Park, historic scene of Washington's last stand in the retreat from Manhattan Island, has been bought at a cost of more

Restoration and rebuilding of a complete pre-Revolutionary town, historic Williamsburg, Va., cost Rockefeller 15 million dollars, and

300,000 Americans visit it- yearly.

Here Colonial-costumed men and

women do a stately dance on the green before the Governor's Palace

at Williamsburg.

than six million dollars, and will not only become a park but the site of George Gray Barnard's collection of medieval sculpture, which will be housed in the new Cloisters Museum. 8 2 8" HE timberlands of Yosemite National Park have been preserved to the tune of $1,650,000; and Rockefeller has spent $1,725,000 on land in the Jackson Hole region of Wyoming in an effort to establish a national park in this scenic country. Objections of local government units and taxpayers there, who like the $10,000 annual taxes which Rockefeller still pays, have temporarily halted this benefaction. Half a million for the New York Botanical Gardens, a million for the New York Zoological Society, and two million dollars for New York’s Metropolitan Museum are matched by the $700,000 given to the Library of Congress for its new union catalog, and more than three million dollars for the magnificent New York Public Library. When the League of Nations at Geneva needed a library, it was able to turn to Rockefeller for two million dollars, half for a building, half for books. Most of the newer Rockefeller benefactions are now self-liqui-dating, in order to prevent the influence of the “dead hand” which often guides the use of donated money long after both benefactor and the original need have vanished. Such was the International Education Board, which has spent 21 million dollars, income and

"principal, on various scientific and

educational projects all over the world, and whose remaining projects are consolidated with the General Education Board.

OREMOST among college heneficiaries, after the University of Chicago, has been Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, which have received $3,500,000 for the education of Negroes. Rockefeller’s own alma mater, Brown University, with Princeton and Harvard, have shared Rockefellers millions, and far-away Palestine can look on its Museum of Archeology at Jerusalem with twg million dollars worth of thankfulness to the Rockefellers. A passion for building and construction, notable in most of the recent Rockefeller projects, is also seen in several housing experiments totaling $13,500,000 in and around Naw York City. But to list even the fields into. which the present Rockefeller has sent his millions, let alone the individual projects, would be impossible. He is besieged at all times by hundreds of daily requests for money, either for personal use cor for “pet causes.” 8 a2 8 UCH requests run up to 20,000 a year, and require quite an organization merely to handle them. To purely personal requests a form letter is usually returned. To those suggesting a social objective, personal letters almost always go, explaining why the request does not conform with the Rockefeller ideas. With his father, Rockefeller long ago arrived at a philosophy of giving, to which he adheres as consistently as possible. “Our endeavor,” he said, “has not been so much to relieve poverty, but to prevent poverty through making it possible for the largest possible number of people to live in healthful surroundings and to obtain educational opportunities fitting them to earn their own livelihood.”

NEXT—How the present Rockefeller was trained for his job, and how “his father’s example” meant something different to him than yor: might suppose. :

Few Municipally Owned Electric Plants

In U.S. Provide All Cash City Needs

By L. A.

F the approximately 2000 municipally owned electric plants in the United States, about 100, either alone or in combination with other publicly owned utilities, pro-

vide enough cash profits to pay all

the expenses of municipal operation. These communities, in other words, are “tax free” so far as purely municipal costs are concerned, although residents still must pay

state and county taxes, and they

usually must pay school taxes. There is, however, much contro-

versy as to whether this apparently

ideal status is an unalloyed blessing. Obviously it is fine to pay no taxes, but do the residents of these communities actually pay no taxes? Public administration experts assert that the claim of “tax freedom” is sheer naivete; that such communities are taxed—and taxed heavily, albeit invisibly and fairly painlessly. * ‘Such towns and cities, say the ex-

perts, are operating, true, without

o property tax, but their expenses are derived from a direct sales tax levied on every user of electricity, gas or water, some of whom may be fairly presumed to be less able to pay than the property owner. To this argument, boosters for public ownership retort that such taxation—if it is taxation—is eminently more fair than property taxation, because it “spreads” the cost of government over the entire citizenry, all of whom supposedly benefit from such city services as police and fire protection, public sanitation,

etc n 2 n

N Ponca City, Okla. to select a “tax-free” town at customers of the water and light plants outnumber real property owners three-to-one, and all of them help support the government. Most of the “tax-free” towns, are in the population class below 5000. Only five—Chanute, Kas.; Logansport, Ind.; Lubbock, Tex. and Ponca City and Seminole, Okla., have more than 10,000 residents; only nine—Altus, Anadarko, Blackwell, Cushing, Duncan, Norman, and Pawhuska, Okla.; Three Rivers, Mich.,, and Winfield, Kas.

—have between 5000 and 10,000

inhabitants.

Whatever the ultimate justice of

random, |

pally owned plants usually are higher than the rates charged by private plants, if the consumer needs 100 kilowatt hours or more a month. ” 2 ”

HE “tax-free” status also reveals one of the basic factors in the oft-repeated charge that cities which operate publicly owned light plants have not passed on to the consumer the potential savings inherent in public ownership under most conditions. Exact financial methods to be employed in connection with public ownership are vastly important, because more and more municipalities are operating their own plants. Some 140 cities voted for municipal

electric plants in 1936, and all but

227 approved the necessary bond

issues. No city owning its own electric utility went back to private ownership in 1936. There 'were municipally owned light plants in 1775 cities in 1935, and the number now is near 2000. No complete census is available. of the so-called “tax-free” towns. The Public Ownership League of America listed 84 in its last survey in 1935, of which 56 were in Oklzhoma, 7 in Kansas, . 4 in Indiana, 3 in Michigan, 2 each in Towa, Minnesota and Nebraska, 1 each in Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, New York, Texas, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

SPEAKING OF SAFETY i!

LP

— Tod

THE INSPIRATION FOR MANY SENTIMENTAL BALLADS

— AND THE THEME OF MANY FAMOUS PAINTINGS

USK-- WHOA HERE, BETSY!

———

En

thought in Madrid.

Qur Town

By Anton Scherrer

' New York's Stage Costumes of Gold Paint Declared to Have Nothing on Indianapolis’ ‘Living Statues’ of 1858.

GUESS it’s up to me to tell you something about an article written by Epes W. Sargent which appeared in a recent number of Variety. It’s a grand piece of writing entitled “History of Nudity on the Stage— From ‘Mazeppa’ to the Minksy Era.” I would have missed it, too, had not William George Sullivan clipped it, and sent it to me, postpaid. Mr, Sullivan, I don’t mind saying, is one of my most alert

informers. Mr. Sargent, it turns out, has a mighty good memory, but every once in a while it goes back on - him. For example, in the course of his article he says that “about 1892 there came to the Casino (New York) roof garden a presentation of golden statues in which the costuming was chiefly gold paint.” Shucks! We had that sort of thing in Indianapolis as far back as 1858. I'm sure of it, because that was the year Valentine Butsch opened his theae ter at the northeast corner of Washington and Tene nessee ts. (Capitol Ave.). It was opened under the management of E. T. Sherlock with “tableaux vivants by the Keller troupe,” which, of course, was just an advertising man’s fancy way of saying that it opened with “living pictures.”

Arrived Via L.éndon

Living pictures, says Mr. Sargent, were brought to America by way of London to bolster Ed E. Rice's “1462” at the Garden Theater in the old Madison Square Garden. Well, I won't quarrel with Mr. Sar~ gent about that, but it strikes me that we had living pictures at the Park Theater long before “1492” came to English’s. Apparently Mr. Sullivan thinks so, too, because in a revealing little note to me he says: “My recollection of the first living pictures to hit town is that they were brought to the Park Theater as an adjunct of the performances of ‘Fra Diavolo’ and ‘The Mascotte’ and its very middle-aged leading lady, Miss Susie Kerwin.” _ Mr. Sullivan says that his family kept such a close watch over him when he was a kid that ne never got to see a good show of living pictures. He remembears enough, however, to know that the living pictures were always added to the regular performances as “erowd jerkers,” and included Millets “Angelus” as a sop to the Victerian element, the rest of the show

consistigg of “The Birth of the Pearl” and similar subjects.

Stood on Their Merits

Be that as it may, living pictures were good enough to stand on their merits. At any rate, I remembar that they started off in grand style and in silk tights. ‘They became a craze over night. Next season, every burlesque show in the country presented them with the girls in cotton, which wasn’t so good. Most of the shows dropped living pictures after two years, but Sam T. Jack thought well enough of the idea to keep on showing them until 1898, and maybe later. I know it was as late as 1898, because I distinctly recall that it was in Sam T. Jack's theater on Broadway (New York), when I was a SOpho-

more, that I saw living pictures for ‘the last time, The girls were in silk tights, too.

Mr. Scherrer

New Books Today

Public Library Presents—

VWEEE she has written fiction, autobiography, or a social document, Jenny Ballou has embodied in SPANISH PRELUDE (Houghton Mifflin) an elusive, shifting, yet strangely vivid and intimate picture ‘of Spain—and especially of Madrid—during the years immediately preceding the downfall of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship. Rosa—and is she Jenny Ballou, or only an imaginary person?—is living in Spain in order to get material for a novel. Affected perhaps by the bright Spanish sun, or perhaps by the weary frustration of

the circle in which she moves, she forgets her purpose and drifts into the little eddies of would-be advanced The very aimlessness of her associations, her involuntary status of perpetual spectator, the tortuousness of her relationships with others, are symptoms of the Spain which she is describing. The time of revolution is drawing near. And yet

Rosa and her friends are preoccupied with their own

vague yearnings for “service,” for freedom, for soe cial reform to be prettily managed with the propriety of a tea party. They are affected by the post-war fever of unrest, and yet, since they were not involved in the war, their disillusionment lacks the sharp reality of that found in other countries. _. The men and women who people the pages of this book appear and disappear, unrelated in time and space to anything. Yet they furnish us moments of revelation, and they epitomize the vague liberalism, the sentimental social ideals, and the involved and barren cultural raovements of their period. ® 2 s “THREE years’ imprisonment term for burglary offered Mark Benney the time needed for write ing his autobiography, ANGELS IN UNDRESS (Rane dom House). Degras, for that is his real name, is the illegitiemate son of a Jewish bookmaker and a Cockney prostitute. Although his highly impulsive mother was deeply devoted to him, she exerted a poor influence on her son, who fell in only too readily with the demands of his underworld environment. On many nights the boy ‘was roused from his sleep by his “mother’s horsy friends at the bottle.” As Mark grew older, thieving became a natural part. of his life. His increasingly long intervals away from the ‘underworld of Soho were spent in reformatories, where he had an opportunity to read and gain an informal education; yet he continued to go back to that underworld with an insatiable ap petite for burglary and low life. The character sketches, especially of his impetuous mother, are well done because the standards of a better society are brought to bear on them. The

author’s descriptions of the underworld reveal a group unused to remorse or conscience. Jir 2 » 2 LTHOUGH Emily Bronte failed at one time to win the acclaim as author that was achieved by her sister Charlotte, her oné novel and handful of Loo were sufficient to guarantee her immorality. DIVIDE THE DESOLATION, by Kathryn Jean MacFarlane (Simon & Schuster), is a novel based on the life of Emily Bronte. The author has traced chronologically the facts of Emily’s life from her seventh year to her death at the age of 30. Though the interpretation of these facts is the author’s own, shé has succeeded in blending the real and the Imaginary with sufficient skill to make the resulting compound convincing. It should be regretted that in her admiration for Emily, the author seems less

fair to Charlotte, whom she portrays as a prying busybody. The moors over which Emily loved to walk daily form the background for this first novel by Miss MacFarlane, : j >

TTS THE ZERO HOUR FOR AUTO CRASHES. SO SLOW DROWN AT SUNDOWN !/

municipal financing through public ownership, the “tax-free” status of these towns throws a significant : light on the fact that rates for elec- { tric current purchased from municj-

COPR. 1937 BY NEA SERVICE, INC. T.M. REG. U. S, PAT. OFF. J

"The trouble with these dresses is that only women can appreciate them."

Friends of tie couple say they may come to Amer- A L222

ica. If they're locking for »rivacv—a quiet, deserted little house-- now «al» ut the Republican clubhouse in Washington? IM se will ever disturb them there. .

" National Safety Council.

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