Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SEATTLE – Now is the time to jot down, in your book of urgent addresses, that of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, on Colman Dock in Seattle.
You will find it indispensable. For example, suppose you were to find yourself in dire need of a whale louse. Where on earth would you find a whale louse? In Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, of course. One as big as your hand for 75 cents.
Or assume that you were caught in Jackson, Miss. Without a totem pole. Just wire Ye Olde Curiosity Shop – they’ll ship you an eight-foot one for $50.
Or you could order a calf-weaner, a five-inch grasshopper from Ecuador, or a stuffed chimpanzee with teeth bared. Practically anything you want, sir.
Ye Olde Curiosity Shop is an institution. It is known to thousands of sailors, and to scores of thousands of tourists. It has been a magnet for the curious for 43 years.
This odd business was established in 1899 by J. E. Standley, who went by the nickname of Daddy, and who always wore a skull cap during business hours. He died a year and a half ago, in his late 80s, and he must have been a character.
For 30 years or more he kept a combination grocery and butcher shop in Denver. But at heart he was a collector of freakish things.
After 30 years of this it got so bad that the customers couldn’t find the groceries. So Daddy Standley sold out, took down all his freakish mementoes, moved to Seattle, and set them up in business. They kept him in comfort the rest of his life.
Got old things from sailors
In those early days sailors would bring in nutsy things from the ends of the earth, and Daddy Standley would buy them.
I spent hours rummaging around the Curiosity Shop. It isn’t large, yet I’ll bet you could be there a week and on the eighth day find a hundred new things you’d never noticed before.
In Ye Olde Curiosity Shop you can buy shark eggs. You can buy a whole bear’s foot, or individual claws, as you wish. You can get an old mustache cup and saucer for $1.95. If you’re crazy for an African jungle marimba, it’s there. Maybe you’ve hunted all your life for a whale’s ear-drum.
There is a pass to the trial of Charles Guiteau in 1888. You can buy a narwhal tuck for $35.
After two hours I took off my hat and topcoat and decided to stay awhile. Mr. I. R. James laid them on a stool behind his counter. Mr. James is Daday Standley’s son-in-law. He and Ed Standley, a son, run the place now.
Sell stuff to lots of big people
Mr. James is a pleasant man who is very proud of the shop. He says they sell stuff to lots of big people. The duPonts of Wilmington frequently order giant clam shells. These monstrous things are five feet across, and the duPonts use them for bird baths. Robert Ripley ordered a 37-foot totem pole.
While I was there a class of small schoolgirls came in on a tour. “We have them all the time,” Mr. James said. “Twenty years from now they’ll be customers.”
One little girl came over to me.
“Have you got a picture of Buddha?” she asked.
“Little girl,” I said, “I am distressed beyond measure, but we disposed of our last picture of Buddha 10 minutes ago. However, and this is a bargain, I will furnish you a snapshot of myself for a mere five dollars.”
The little girl romped away to her teacher, pointed at me and said, “See that silly old man over there.” I suppose she will never think of the incident again, but I shall.
You’ve heard of the shrunken human heads from the Amazon jungles. Well, they’ve got them here.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
WASHINGTON – As President Roosevelt goes past the stands into his sixty-first lap, showing some strain but not pounding, it is written and said that he has been leading his nation with little pain and disorder through a great, home-talent revolution.
What revolution?
Where was I?
I heard him in Chicago the first time he was nominated and twice from positions on that blistered, chewing-gum pavement back of the Capitol as he accepted the heartaches and headaches of the most burdensome job on earth and I have heard or read almost every syllable of his since ‘32, but never once dig the word revolution fall from his lips or pen that I remember. True, many bleeding-hearts of the unofficial entourage wrote and spoke of a revolution, but generally only as though this were something that might happen. They seemed to hope it would and that angered many of us who thought a revolution unnecessary.
Arrived at one-party condition
True, the President spoke of a New Deal, and within the past two years some who sympathize with Jim and presume, without warrant, to speak his mind, have mentioned a new order, which is a European term, but the official record shows no mention of a revolution. Reform, yes. Relief during the devising of the reforms, yes. But revolution? Never heard of it.
However, let us see.
The Republican Party has preserved only enough strength, imitative and form to preserve the franchise and today offers no man who, by any stretch of the imagination, could be regarded as a real contestant in a presidential campaign. The President’s party, on the other hand, could beat the best man the Republicans could offer with Joe Gustey, or Claude Pepper. And the reason is that the opposition would be compelled either to oppose the enactments and tendencies of the New Deal or to adopt them in the “me, too” manner of Wendell Willkie in 1940, in which latter case there would be no reason to change parties in Washington. It would be futile to oppose them because they are now a habit of national life and a Republican Party which promised merely to take over the President’s stuff and do it better would be wasting time and money.
So I think we have arrived at a one-party condition now which certainly is a strange state of affairs for us hidebound traditionalists and it appears that the only real contest next time will occur within the President’s party, which is now big and old enough to have within it many strong political and personal rivalries. All the political strong men are in the President’s party and there will certainly be some who will want to reform the reforms, particularly those which, like the Wagner Act, have created their own abuses no less dangerous than the evils which they were intended to correct.
I don’t mean a Jim Farley, who is a fine man, personally, but not presidential, or a Paul McNutt, whose ambitions, though legitimate and Constitutional, nevertheless, were presumptuous.
Been out of step for eight years
I mean a thoughtful Democrat with a grasp of problems and an aversion to that unmistakable Europeanism which has marked the great, unwieldy improvisations of this—shall I say revolution? Why have we cribbed from Europe, anyway, when the American system is so truly of this country and no other and when all Europe, including the free countries, was making such a horrible mess of self-government?
We yearned for something slightly Scandinavian, well known that the methods which worked so well in small, homogeneous nations were hopelessly unsuited to our own. We have even, unconsciously, pawed over the goods on Hitler’s shelves and the silly little Duce’s in search of something that would serve us here, such as labor camps for young girls, state philanthropy and state regulation of business and the farm under humanly fallible and too-powerful bureaucrats which certainly are not American things but European and we have looked with favor on some things Russian. Perhaps we have not finally adopted anything Russian, but we certainly have tried some on for size.
I strongly disbelieve in the sharing of family responsibility and integrity with the state and favor opportunity and individual responsibility over state philanthropy, but I have been out of step for eight years and expect to be for sometime still.
Persons so-minded sometimes are called Tories or Roosevelt-haters, but that is a chance you take. You can’t howl them down all the time.
Well, revolution, reform, or you-give-it-a-name, we got into this war under the strongest, toughest public men in the country who knew it was inescapable and did all any man could have done to be ready for it and I prophesy that Adolf Hitler, who thinks himself so tough, will beg Mr. Roosevelt to pull Stalin and Churchill off him when the end comes.
Clapper: Auto industry
By Raymond Clapper
DETROIT – Some months ago it was being said that the auto industry could not be turned into war work. But today it is being done. I have spent all day in auto plants seeing it happen. What is going on here in Detroit today is bad news for Hitler, for this mighty mass-production center has gone to war.
Today I saw the last autos being made in the half-mile-long Plymouth plant. They will be finished tomorrow. The 25 miles of overhead conveyors were still carrying engines and huge car bodies and swinging them into place. But already the earlier parts of the assembly lines have been ripped out and in some places new machines for war work have been set in place. Within 24 hours, the entire plant will be in process of changeover. A huge wall diagram of the plant shows more than half of it marked out for certain war work already scheduled. The remainder of the plant will be utilized in time.
At the Dodge plant, the last car was finished 24 hours before. The superintendent said the workmen became very sentimental and clustered around patting the last car with their hands.
Machinery usable on war goods
“I didn’t know I was going to be sentimental about it,” he said, “but I felt just like I was seeing my best friend off to the Army. I didn’t know when I would see him again.”
One felt as if he was witnessing the end of one era and the beginning of another. Here in these jungles of machines, the manufacture of pleasure autos has reached a point of efficiency and low cost and volume that has astonished the whole world. Now for an indefinite period all of this machinery and all of the labor and scientific and executive ability will go into making weapons of slaughter. If we don’t in the end get rubber and other imported materials again, we may find it difficult ever to resume auto manufacture on the previous scale, which had given us enough autos in which to seat at one time the whole population of the nation.
One rebels in rage at the forces which have made it necessary to change from making goods for convenience and better living to making the weapons of death. But it has to be done. And the men who once thought it couldn’t be done, or didn’t think it was necessary to do it, are now going to do it.
One cannot generalize accurately as to the amount of existing machinery which can be changed over. But most of those with whom we talked today said that from half to three-quarters of their machinery would be usable on war goods. Some of it will not be as efficient. as if time were taken out to build new special machinery. But it will do. Time is more important than full efficiency. At the Dodge plant, machinists already were grinding out old auto machines so that they would take the larger parts needed for trucks and tanks.
The production genius of the auto industry is being applied to war manufacture now and some things are going to happen. At the Pontiac plant I saw an old discarded machine for rifling anti-aircraft guns. It took an hour and three-quarters to rifle a gun barrel. The machine originally had been made for the French and was brought back from the dock when the Germans took Paris. But it is no good now, because the automobile people have machines here which can rifle the barrel in 10 minutes instead of an hour and three-quarters. I saw lathes turning gun barrels. They now do it in 12 minutes, Next week they will be using new cutters that will do it in three minutes, which means that the same machines with new cutters will be able to produce four times as many barrels as before. That is typical of the efficiency methods being introduced into war production.
Everyone talks of new trick devices
One thing Donald Nelson and the Army and Navy could get onto. Production men here say they are being held, on some operations, to needlessly fine tolerances. They are the kid-glove specifications drawn up under the easygoing hand days. By changing an elliptical cooling hole to a round one, six operations were eliminated. By loosening requirements a little now, engineers here say, production could be speeded enormously without interfering with the quality of the weapons. They have broken down these super-delicate specifications in some cases. But they need more leeway in many others. It will be up to Donald Nelson and his men to talk the Army and Navy into relaxing where it is possible in order to get the volume that is needed.
I have talked with executives of the chief auto companies and I haven’t heard a defeatist word. Every one is talking of new tricks, new devices, new methods which are speeding up the time required in various processes. They have had a good deal of public criticism for making record numbers of cars in the last year when defense production was lagging so badly. Now thew have their chance to show what they can do in war work. Now they are making it a matter of personal and firm pride to demonstrate that in war production they can astonish the world just as they did in auto production. And, by golly, they are just the kind of tough guys who know their business well enough to be able to do it.
Maj. Williams: The aeromodeler
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
“Out of the mind and from the hands of children…” Would that I could finish that sentence in an inspiring tone of peacetime. But we are at war, grim war, the worst and most perplexing war this planet’s inhabitants ever staged. This thought of the children is prompted by a recent news release detailing that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics has employed youngsters who are expert in the scale-building of model aircraft. Seems rather inconsequential, does it? Well, it isn’t.
The NACA wind tunnel magicians must have vast quantities of wing sections, fuselages, tail surfaces, and the various sections of aircraft built in small scale models for testing in the wind tunnels. And the only people in the whole country who are trained in this exacting work and ready to turn out the desired products right away are the youngsters who have been engaged in such hobbies during the past five and seven years.
About seven years ago, the Scripps-Howard newspapers inaugurated an air youth movement known as the Junior Aviators, with an enrollment of about 460,000 youngsters. This was newspapers at their best, sponsoring youth encouragement in a new and limitless industry, aviation. In each city served by this newspaper chain, the Junior Aviator clubs were given individual designations, and they selected their own squadron names. And what hair-raising names: “The Bloody Dragon,” “A Lot of Hell-Divers,” etc.
Youths are eager
Scale-model building was the primary stage, with the older lads going in strong for rubber-band-driven models and consequent flying model performance competitions. The highest grade was, of course, the gasoline-engine-driven models. Each stage of this program involved an intimate knowledge of the elementary principles of aeronautical engineering.
The flying model field events were staged on airports throughout the country. These events had to be rounded out with the aid of local pilots staging flight demonstrations in life-sized aircraft. Finally, they became full-out air shows, attracting as high as a hundred and more thousands of spectators at each show.
Sundays and holidays, for years – each summer. Hot, dusty work, with 15 minutes of wide-open aerobatics in my ship. Our army of air-minded youngsters was growing continually. At the end of each Junior Aviator air show was a full-out dive-bombing demonstration in my ship. We used imitation forts made of beaver board, 20 by 20 feet, and loaded with as many kegs of black gunpowder and as many sticks of dynamite as the local city authorities would permit.
Thousands of air-minded youngsters dragged thousands of mothers and fathers to these air shows. The best year we ever had for Junior Aviator air show attendance totaled over 700,000 Americans, young and old, who viewed their progeny building the new air age and taking a close-up view and estimate of what dive bombing actually amounted to – and what it meant.
Sermon without words
Those were the days of peace, when we airmen feared we saw what was coming in the shape of a new type of warfare – a war in the skies – an air war. The merest mention of such a thing, or the suggestion that we prepare for it would have brought all the mothers and fathers of America down on our heads. So we carried out the truly educational training of the Junior Aviators in things aeronautical and in the trade of scale-model building – plus a dash of realism in the form of the dive-bombing demonstration. The latter was a deadly sermon without words.
In addition to the employment of Junior Aviator trained scale-model builders by the NACA, a Government aeronautical research agency, there’s a constant reminder of that entire air youth movement, i.e., the Junior Aviator, in the form of informed youngsters who are now enlisted in the Army Air Corps, the Naval Air Arm and in technical positions having to do with the development of our American airpower. They come to see me, and there’s a steady line of enthusiastic correspondence. The little hands that once molded model aircraft are now running slide rules, juggling big formulae, and, in many cases, holding control sticks of life-sized combat planes.
All these hands, the one-time eager little hands that carved and fashioned tiny model airplanes, taught and trained to stick to specifications where a split thousandths of an inch was the leeway allowance – and no more – are now the hands of our budding airpower – the hands of one-time Junior Aviators who dragged willing but tired, hot, and dusty parents out to our Junior Aviator air shows. The happiest days of my flying life – those days.
AEF marches and Irish smile
Americans toughen up for days to come
WITH THE AEF IN NORTHERN IRELAND – Uncle Sam’s doughboys took their first march in force yesterday and were greeted by smiling Irish eyes all over the Ulster countryside.
They slogged along in battle equipment to toughen them up for sterner days to come. And as they marched, they sang songs strange to this land of brogues and banshees.
The march carried them through a countryside which, with its whitewashed cottages and rambling farms, must have reminded many of them of their own homes on Midwest prairies.
The natives in this land that “must be heaven” were surprised by the Americans – they just can’t get over the fact that these khaki-clad youths are really fine fellows.
“They are nice chaps after all,” an elderly farmer said:
“We were a bit frightened by fears of an invasion of smart guys but they are just modest fellows who seem earnest about their jobs. There is a seriousness about their ways which we never expected.”
The boys have made such a hit that many of them have already been invited into Irish homes for something few of them ever encountered before – afternoon tea.
But the boys are still having trouble with British money and the situation has been complicated by the introduction of coins from nearby Eire.
But the boys are trusting souls – they merely hand over an American dollar or a British pound and ask for whatever change they have coming.