Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 10 December 1937 — Page 15

agabond|

From Indiana— Ernie Pyle

It Costs a Quarter to Get That Letter Delivered on Luxury Liner; # And There's a Blond on Board, Tdpo.

ABOARD S. S. LURLINE (Second day out), Dec. 10.—We have smart bellboys on this ship. They are all handsome fellows in tight-fitting white jackets, with three rows of big silver buttons running up the

front, They are all young, just out of high school. . This morning at breakfast one came up to me, bearing a letter on a silver tray. Seems it had come aboard at Los Angeles, but they had mulled over it a day or two before delivering it. I reached in my pocket for change, but had only a bill. The young man said he would get change. In a minute he was back, with a ‘half dollar and two quarters. He said: “Is that small enough?” So it cost me a quarter to get that letter which had been carried no more than 40 feet. ita Funny little incident ha pened , last night. I don’t know ether Me Byte | it’s too personal to tell or not, so I'll go ahead and tell it and find out. To begin with, my wife is with me again on this trip. I had it all arranged to put her in storage in San Francisco, but she broke out and yelled so I had fo let her ‘come along. : Well, our room steward comes in every night while we're at dinner and fills the water carafe and leaves fresh towels an empties the ash trays, and turns on the reading lights, and turns down the beds, and— lays out your pajamas on the beds. Now it hap that my wife had just bought herself two pairs of pajamas before we left San Francisco. ‘So when| we got back to the cabin after dinner last night, here was one pair of her new pajamas laid out on one | and the other new pair laid out on the other bed. | Neo es claogon i ihe suppose he| thought I was going to sleep ou nal on a palle jhe wife thought it was very, very funny, and said after all it was just a mistake on the steward’s part. = ot twas ut it wasn't any mistake. I know wha was. mh steward w Es me for those striped flannel pajamas he saw hanging in the closet.

Cadet Goes Unappreciated We struck up an acquaintance last night with

some naval avi ‘three-year stretch of flying in Hawaii. One of ‘our flying cadet friends put on his blue uniform and wandered about the ship a little. There is a peroxidish| blond aboard, whom you can always

hear talking, somewhere. ; Our cadet friend walked past her table in the men’s

ing lounge (she always sits in the men’s lounge), rt 21 remark, “Ooh! Look at the fire den! 3 | Pare it burned him up, but he had been taught in training school at Pensacola not to hit first-class . passengers on a luxury liner, so what could he do? Everybody on board seems to have from one to 75 steamer trunks with him. It has always been a great mystery to me what people carry in more than one

er trunk. : Bn haven't any at all We have four hand

1d .satchels land a typewriter. BY. the time I'm an ol man I believe I'll have the luggage situation down to

where I can get everything into my hip pocket. ere inenn

My Diary By Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt Visit Shows Greenbelt Residents Are Getting Down to Job of Living.

x 7 ASHINGTON, Thursday —This has been an interesting day. Dr. Will Alexander, administrator of the Farm Security Administration in. the Department of Agriculture, and I went out to inspect’ the Greenbelt, Maryland, project this morning. House after house is now occupied, a temporary cooperative store is open, a school is functioning and this place, which had only workmen when I was there before, is now a real community. I was amused to have the,young mayor tell me that everyone wanted to hold ‘meetings and start community activities, and that, though they had not grown up together, everyanted to know everybody else. Ls hn have had some of the usual vicissitudes which accompany new houses and new settlements. Two houses leaked, the bus company which had practically agreed to give the community transportation service, backed out. But these difficulties have been surmounted. The houses have been repain and the

being run on a co-operative . By the ES interesting stories was that of the establishment of the nursery for trees and shrubs. When the ground was being cleared, one of the men on WPA remarked that it was a shame to destroy so many good plants. Enough could be salvaged to landscape the entire community, he said.

WPA Worker Is Landscaper He was an excellent gardener and was given the chance to salvage everything he could. Most of the things he salvaged have lived in the nursery and he has done every bit of the landscaping with ma-

terial out of the woods on the property. : We returned in time for an informal lunch with a group of executives, all of whom are interested in youth agencies and who have found it possible to get together to discuss how their various departments can function in co-operation with each other. If this can be done in Washington and carried down into the states, it will mean that more can be accomplished and there will be less duplication. I am particularly interested in this group, for I feel the Federal Government should take the lead in getting the maximum co-operation on all its projects for the good of the

people.

New Books Today

Public Library Presents—

NGLAND speaks again: Through her young men / and old men, through her scholars and statesmen, her voice is heard on many subjects. Among other things discussed are the recent crises of the Crown; the dark shadow of war that hangs over all Europe; the vast rearmament problem of .the nation; the Red Dream of Russia. ORDEAL IN ENGLAND, by Phillip Gibbs (Heinemann), deals with these current questions confronting not only England, but the world as well. Something of the unquenchable spirit of the England of the past reads and reflects on the ideas of her

abdicating as King and Emperor, and incidentally as Defender of the English Faith, King Edward did not resign the position he held in the hearts of millions.” For to these millions he was “someone to whom they could turn for inspiration, the Galahad of a new tion, of a revived Glory, a knight errant setting out on a long road, but well armed to quality that had suffered desperate losses in this prosaic modern world.” It is with “these high words” that Stanton B. Leeds, . a distant relative of the Duchess of Windsor, begins his book CARDS THE WINDSORS HOLD (Lippincott). In it he endeavors to give a true and unbiased opinion of the Edward-Simpson romance and the storm in Great Britain. He gives as the Duke’s that which Edward alone knows, the abdication, and among his other cards,

tion cadets who are od their way to a |

Telescope

To Explore

Far Space

(Second of a Series)

By David Dietz

Times Science Editor

(GREAT tongues of fire 80,000 miles high—10 times the diameter of the earth—spring outward

from the surface of the

sun. Swirling and gyrating, these clouds of hydrogen and helium gas, whose temperature is 10,0600 degrees Fahrenheit, reach out into space.

What would “happen,

~ some day, if they reached out across the 93 million ‘miles of space that sepa-

rate the earth from the sun? Well, the history of the human race would end about 2 thousandth of a

second later. And now you will ask, what are the chancss of that ever happening? That is one problem for the new 200-inch telescope, slowly nearing completion in California, to answer, For each year, at least one star ‘in the heavens blows up, hurling out billions of tons of heated gaseous material.

Such an exploding star is known to the astronomer as a “nova,” from the Latin word for “new.” Examining the sky some night; the astronomer discovers that a star has greatly increased in brilliance, perhaps a star formerly only visible with a telescope has become as bright as the brightest star in the heavens. . > » ” ”

HILE novae do not always grow to exceptional brilliance, unusually bright ones occurred in 1918, 1925. and 1934, while two occurred in 1936. These novae usually lose. their brilliance quickly but the big tele=

scopes reveal that they are “sub-_

sequently surrounded with great shell-like masses of gas. Now astronomers wish the knew more about exploding stars. Do they cll explode for the same reason, or are there several types of exploding stars? Is any star, including our own sun, susceptible to such explosions or do only particular stars under peculiar conditions blow up? The increased power of the 200inch telescope—for it will be 10 times as powerful as the 100-inch

telescope, the largest cosmic eye now in existence—should answer some of these questions. There are many other questions concerning our galaxy of stars which need to be answered. Great progress has been made to date, but many problems lie just beyond the power of the 100-inch tele-

scope. Perhaps the 200-inch will

turn the trick.

Our own sun is one of 100 billion stars that compose our galaxy of stars. What is the size and shape of the galaxy? How are the stars distributed? What are their motions? 2 2 2

S nearly as..ean be determined our galaxy of stars is arranged in space like a great grindstone or a gigantic watch. When we look at the Milky Way we see so great a concentration of stars because we are looking into the depths of the galaxy. We are looking along the hands of the watch, as it were. When we look at right angles to the Milky Way, we see so few staxs because we are looking out through the face of the watch. The diameter of our galaxy the long way, that is along the hands of the watch, appears to be about 120,000 light years. (A light year is six trillion miles.) The diameter the short way, from the front to the back of the watch, is about 10,000 light years. Recent work has established that all space within the galaxy is occupied by a cosmic cloud. In most places, it is millions of times thinner than the atmosphere of our own earth. But in other places it is condensed info great masses of obscuring matter.

Side Glances—By Clark.

R10

1 \

"Quick! Put that stuff back into the boxes! Here comes Jubior

up the walk now!"

It is now believed there is almost as much of this cloud stuff in the galaxy as there is material in stars. ’ . Its presence not only makes it difficult to determine the size of the galaxy but also makes it diffi cult to determine the structure. For the stars are not distributed uniformly throughout the galaxy. They are gathered into great swarms, sometimes spoken of as “clouds of stars.” The one which contains our own sun is known to astronomers as the “local cloud.” The center of the galaxy is in a dense star cloud .in the constellation of Sagitarius but this. region seems so full of the gaseous cloud stuff previously mentioned that little is known about its structure. Individual stars also will come in for closer scrutiny with the 200inch telescope. This information again will tell us a great deal about our own sun as well as about the galaxy of stars. Our sun seems to be an average star as size goes but some astronomers think that it is below par in its

light-giving qualities.

2 5 =

HE sun has a diameter of 864,000 miles. Stars range from giants like Antares with a diameter of 415 million miles, to dwarfs which are not much larger than the earth itself. The stars vary in color from red, through orange, yellow, and white, to blue-white. It is well established that this is a measure of the star’s temperature. The red stars are only red-hot, the white stars are white-hot. (Our own sun . by comparison with the hottest stars, is a yellow star.)

A WOMAN'S VIEW By Mrs. Walter Ferguson PT HIS column pleads guilty to 4 previous assault and battery upon that form of sentimentalism

commonly known as “mother love.” | ;

There have been times when we were thoroughly sick of ‘the gush which seems ready to spout forth at the merest mention of the words# Today, however, we're going into reverse because we are equally tired at the moment of tirades against mothers. Frankly we wish the educators and psychologists, who make it a point to lump all mother love together and then refer to it as a deplorable instinct bred in a hotbed of selfishness, would go back and

sit down.

Admitting that many women hide their subconscious desires under the mantle of maternal solicitude, we

know there does exist a love which |.

is above all others and which ‘is to be found only in the heart of the good mother. - This love is real. It doesn’t ask for rewards becatise it. springs spontaneously from the deepest wellsprings of the human spirit.

It isn't getting much attention |

nowadays ‘because we're on such ‘a hunt for complexes. The professors

have got us scared with their hints

and warnings abeut neuroses and

‘behaviorism and unified and split _personalities.

As a matter of fact, the truly ex-.

cellent mother is with -us still in large numbers, and she doesn’t re-| gard her children either as saints |

or geniuses. While the psychologists have helped her to plant her feet on the solid ground of common sense, she still has stars in her eyes,

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1937

te: ed zs Second-Class Matter In Postot ice, Indianapolis, Ind.

8

The photo at the: top, made at Mt. Wilson, shows the edge of the sun with great tongues of fire, 80,000 miles high, emerging from it. The artist has drawn in the earth upon the same scale as the phov )

tograph. ¥

~The photo at the left shows a portion of the Milky Way with great streamers of nebulous cloud-like stuff appearing ‘among the

stars,

Directly above is a view of the back of the 200-inch mirror. The back has been hollowed out as shown to reduce the weight of the mire ror. The two men in the picture are Dr. G. V. McCauley and Dr. J. C. Hostetter, who were in cparge of the casting of the mirror.

Astronomers are hoping that the 200-inch telescope will enable them to put together the life history of a star. Are all the stars the same age or do the giant stars represent young stars and the dwarf stars old ones?

Were a being from another

world to be given a picture of the earth representing one second of time, he would note that it contained infants, childreh, young people, and old people. From that he might piece together some notion of the life history of man. We feel that in the heavens we see young stars, middle-aged stars, and old stars. : The fundamental fact about a star is that it is radiating away energy in the form of heat and light. Any theory of stellar evolution, therefore, must account for the production of energy and explain the changes which take place with the loss of this energy by radiation. It is for this reason that we do not always look at the stars when we study them. Sometimes, we replace the eyepiece of the telescope with an electric thermocouple. In this way we are able to take the temperature of the distant stars. ar s 2 , T other times, we replace the eyepiece with a collection of prisms known as a spectroscope. This divides the light of the star

into a rainbow of eolors, the s0-.

. called spectrum, and enables us to analyze the constitution of the star’s light. This-tells us many things about the behavior of the gases in the star.since we can compare the specrum of the star with spectra created in the labor-

Jasper—By Frank

NZ ES

atory with the aid of tubes filled with various: gases.

‘Spectroscopy is now the maine.

stay of astronomical study. Spectrum analysis has made possible the answer to such questions as the distance of stars, their weights and speed as well as their composition. An adequate spectrum is said by scientists to be all that is necessary to determine the major facts about any body in the heavens. -It is considered one of the most accurate of all

astronomical tools. : One of the world’s biggest telescopes, the 72-inch telescope at Victoria, Canada, is Used almost exclusively for this type of spectrum study. This telescope, ex-

‘ceeded in size at present only by-

the 100-inch telescope at Mt. Wil-

son, is maintained by the Cana-

dian Government. : Studies. of this sort will be

‘greatly accelerated by the use of

the 200-inch telescope. Many unusual pictures have been incorporated into the 200-inch telescope to facilitate this type of study. The telescope mounting is so huge that large rooms in which astronomers can work have been incorporated in the supporting framework of the telescope. Auxiliary lenses: will make if possible to reflect star images from _the 200-inch . mirror into

‘these - rooms where - the spectro-

scopic equipment will be used to analyze the starlight.

NEXT—Is the*universe expanding? Why this question may find its solution in the 200-inch telescope.

| | flinching,

Second Section

$

PAGE 15

By Anton Scherrer

Serenade and Kisses Played Part In 1894 Patti Performance. Hers, But. a Fan Threw Tenor Off Time.

EGEND has it that Adelina Patti made “ her first appearance in Indianapolis in 1855 when she was 12 years old; that she performed with Madame Strakosch, and that she sang “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” (a

river, not a grain field). I don’t know anything about it. All I know is that I heard her the last time she was here in 1894. She was over 50 years old at the time. Figure it out for yourself if you don’t believe me. . As a matter of fact, Madame Patti started the year 1894 in Indianapolis. She arrived on New Year's Eve, and registered at the Denison. So did her husband, Ernesto Nicolini, and her musical director, Ar=diti. The 50 musicians she brought along had to find beds as best they could. I ‘guess they founds them within walking distance of the Denison, because that night they % all got together and serenaded Ms, Scherrer Madame Patti. The musicians met in a store room of the Denison around 11 o'clock that night, and ime mediately started tuning up. Toward midnight - they carried their instruments up stairs to the halle way opposite the suite of parlors occupied by Madame Patti and her husband. I don’t know what was the matter with the elevator that night. When everys. thing was ready, Arditi gave the signal to start the Zampa overture. : : , Mr. Nicolini was the first to appear, and when he caught on what it was all about, he went back to get his fiddle. By that time, Madame Patti also got wise

-came back with his fiddle, his wife rushed out and threw her arms around Arditi offering him her cheek, Apparently Mr, Arditi knew how to handle the situ« ation, because he kissed it with fervor, repeating the performance on the other cheek. Madame Patti must have liked it, because after that she went around and let everybody kiss her. I'll bet she let a hundred people kiss her that night. Even now ii isn’t anything out of the ordinary to run across men in Indianapolis who boast they kissed Adelina that night. The truth is she invited them.

Concert Was Gala Occasion

After that Madame Patti had sufficient time to collect herself, because it. wasn’t until the second day of January that she gave her concert in Tomlinson Hall. It was the biggest audience the old hall ever had. I don’t mind saying, too, that Tomlinson Hall never looked prettier, It was because the stage was fixed up to represent the second act of “Martha,” the one that allowed her to sing “The Last Rose of Sume mer.” That was the second part of her entertaine

ment. The first part was a regular concert full of Rossini trills and the like. That’s when she hit high C. ~The only other thing I remember about Madame Patti's entertainment was the tenor, she carried around with her. He was:a chap by the name of Lely, and I suspect he was-an Englishman. Anyway, he sang Sullivan’s ballad “The Distant Shore,” and got through it all right. He didn’t do so well in the second act of “Martha,” because right from the start. it was evident that he had trouble keeping time with the orchestra. Next day it was whispered around town that an Indianapolis dowager, sitting in the front row, got his goet. She didn’t know enough to keep the beat with her big ostrich fan. :

Jane. Jordan—

Is Test of Courage, Jane Advises.

EAR JANE JORDAN-—I've been engaged, with no ring, to a grand boy for the past year, but we can see no possibility of marriage. My parents are well off, but his father makes only $25 a week for a family of seven and his mother is sick. We spend most of our dates at my house; my parents always kick about this. The real trouble is that he can’t find a half-way decent job and is now emplbyed for two days a week at $2 per day. Even $4 isn’t very much «for a young couple to go out on; but his folks want it all. I know they need it, and I would just as soon stay at home, but Mom and Dad are always getting on me. Whenever I ask for new clothes they always

say that I dress as well as my fiance does. I've been trying to save enough of his money, even adding some of my own, so that he could have a new suit, but every time we get a little ahead, his folks need it and we're

little home of our own we would be content. I've decided that next summer I'll quit college and try to get work, : MARY LOU, » ” » Answer—Young people find waiting for what they want one of the hardest tasks of life. It is easy and even pleasurable to wait for something when one ‘is making steady progress toward a givef®goal. Despair arises when one can see no hope ahead. That is your situation. The‘young man’s parents, instead of being a source of strength and encouragement to him, have become a dire responsibility. The fact that if he did earn,any money they would get the most of it, is in itself a discouraging aspect. Your parents, instead of sympathizing with your dilemma, make the hours you could spend with your fiance unhappy by their complaints. It is not the actual frustration which is hardest for you, but the | complete absence of sympathetic support from your elders. Well, you will have to get along without the help of your elders. Lots of people have succeeded in spite of- discouraging family situations. You should not quit school if you are getting any thing out of it: in the way of equipment for the future. It is fine to work in the summer, but in the fall your education should continue, for the demand for college graduates in business is increasing instéad of dimine ishing. If the impasse of the present makes you more enterprising in earning money than the young man, your success will act as a further damper on his already depressed spirits. Let him be the one to find a way out.. In every person’s life there may come a time when the test of courage is to hang on-one moment longer. The way your young man meets the emergency is a test of his mettle. If his distress spurs him on and generates energies, .then he is: fortified against failure and you havea partner who can face life without . JANE JORDAN.

— — Put_your problems in a letter to Jane Jordan, who will answer your questions in this column daily. :

Walter O'Keefe—

YEA, Dec. .10—One of the professors from Columbia. University complained that President

1 “Roosevelt used bad grammar. It’s enough to make

Franklin D.’s tooth start aching again. What if he does? Abe Lincoln may have split a few infinitives, but he never split hairs over an issue. Coming from a Columbia professor, it looks like the build-up for a

Wall Street wouldnt care what kind of English

act like this no more,

the President used if he'd just say, “I ain't going to.

ur Town

to what was going on. Anyway, when Mr. Nicolini

Hanging on in Face of Disfress

back in the same old boat. If we could only have a-

grudge baitle between Lou Little's eleven and Har- : | vard next fall.

2