Has 10 sons enrolled registered in draft
Chicago, Feb. 19 (INS) –
With ten sons registered under the Selective Service Act and eligible for military duty, Mrs. Thomas Connors, 63-year-old Chicago widow, claimed a national record today.
Four of the sons registered Monday, the other six at the time the age limits were 21 to 35. The sons are:
- Thomas Jr., 44
- George, 42
- Harry, 41
- Roy, 39
- Earl, 36
- Archibald, 34
- Frank, 32
- John, 25
- William, 24
- Frederick, 20.
All live in Chicago with the exception of Archibald, a resident of Cleveland, Ohio.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 19, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SAN FRANCISCO – I know of a man who had a rather odd experience the other day.
He was driving from Portland to Seattle, and on the way he picked up a tramp. The fellow was not one of your modern hitchhikers, but a plain, old-fashioned tramp.
However, he was pleasant and courteous, and thanked the driver when he got out. As he left the car he said mysteriously, “You’ll be carrying a corpse before you get to Seattle.”
And sure enough, a little farther on the fellow came upon an ambulance stalled by the roadside, so he took the sick passenger into his car and sped on toward Seattle with him. And the man died on the way.
But the main point of this strange occurrence is another prediction made by this authenticated seer. He stated flatly to this same motorist that the war would be over by July.
Well, he may be a mystic, and maybe he can predict corpses, but about the war I’ll betcha.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Hey, Ernie, you fell for something. This story about the corpse and the end of the war was circulating around Pittsburgh several weeks ago. It was reported to us at that time with the request that we print it, but nobody who told the story could actually identify the auto driver. Now it’s worked its way clear cut to the Pacific Coast.
I love to pick out odd signs as I drive along.
In Seattle the other day I saw one on a bank which said “Burglar, Fire and Mob-Proof Vaults.’’ The “mob-proof” was what struck me as funny.
And going into Portland, I noticed a small restaurant run by “Yonson & Yackson””
The girls in the coffee shop here at the Hotel Californian had read about me paying $1.94 for bacon and eggs in Tacoma, so they organized a joke to play on me when I came back to San Francisco.
All the girls know what I eat for breakfast, for I never vary. So whoever got me on my first morning back was going to make out my bill for $3 or more.
Well, I got wind of it, so I was all set. I was just going to look at the check, never crack a smile, sign the manager’s name to it, and walk out.
But the girls spoiled the whole thing by forgetting to do it.
My four-year-old god-daughter, Vondre Bush, who is so beautiful I get palpitations every time I look at her, was dining with me in considerable state at the Ritz French restaurant here the other day.
She was having filet of sole, and I had some kind of salad with maraschino cherries on top of it. Vondre studied my meal for quite a while, and then said, quite casually as though she were discussing the weather, “I eat cherries all the time!”
So you know where my cherries went. And quite willingly, too, we are raising Vondre to be very subtle and we like to reward all such delicate little about-the-bushs that.
In a restaurant up in northern California the other day I heard a fellow telling about having a small auto accident out in the country, which necessitated his hitchhiking to the nearest town to get repairs.
And when he got back to his car, some patriotic citizen had stolen the tires right off his wheels. I’m broadminded about murder and mayhem, but I’m not so sure I don’t favor capital punishment for tire thieves for the duration.
Here is a new war peril we must ail guard our children against.
A letter from an Albuquerque friend says her young son is staying home from school with a sore throat, which he attributes to the fact that his sergeant in high school military drill the day before wouldn’t let him spit!
I have another friend – quite a girl, too – who has just written me of a lifelong ambition, in case she ever gets rich. It’s to wear nothing but red shoes (oh, clothes, of course, but only shoes that are red) and have a boy follow her around constantly with a tray full of fresh celery, so she can nibble all day.
I’ve been trying to think what I’d like if I were rich. And all I’ve been able to think of is that I’d like to be the boy who carries the celery tray.
You remember when I was up at Timberline skiing, I told about my friend Annie Keezer skiing off the edge of a precipice and landing on her head in the snow.
Well, here’s a later report on the case, just received by letter. Two days afterward she got to having violent headaches, finally went to a doctor, and found she had concussion of the brain! Moral – never trust a snowbank.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
CHICAGO – It is plain that our government wants to gentle the feelings of the Soviet government on the subject of Communism. Even old Judge Hatton Sumners, of Dallas, one of our truly wise congressmen, recently appealed to his colleagues to use “horse sense” and reject a little aggravating rider, offered by Martin Dies, which reiterated the standard American opinion of our domestic Communist element and the American Communist Party.
Judge Sumners held that this was an unnecessary offense to a proud and mighty ally and there was even that in his manner which suggested a fear that Joseph Stalin might pull out of the war and leave us flat if we didn’t mind our manners.
President Roosevelt later vetoed some routine measure, possibly the same one, in the interests of harmonious relations with our stoutest military and industrial ally and I have discovered in Joe Davies’ report of his mission to Moscow an implied appeal to his countrymen to have done with Red-baiting, lest we alienate a comrade in arms whom he deeply admires for qualities which all Americans must envy in the present hour. They are unified as we are not, apparently more efficient in industrial management and operation, and so much better soldiers that comparisons are painful and humiliating.
Russians are most practical patriots
But does this mean that Stalin and the Russians are fighting this war because they like us? I am willing to believe that they do like the American people better than they like the Germans, who are their natural enemies, but Davies, himself, gives no reason to believe that the Russians would fire a single rifle bullet in any other interest than their own.
They are the most practical patriots of all, fighting for Russia only, and it is inconceivable that they would prolong their war a single hour beyond some point at which they decided that a truce or peace would best serve the interests of Soviet Russia. Of course, this does not mean that they would refuse to create a diversion against the Germans to relieve pressure on us or the British, all other things being equal, because when nations team up in war, very often one of the allies loyally makes a bloody effort which cannot possibly show an independent military profit, just to draw the common enemy away from a distressed sector of my common front.
Davies puts it that the Russians can afford to feel kindly toward us and vice versa, because we have no designs on anything of theirs and they covet nothing of ours. In the first half of that proposition he is right, but I remember that during the period when this was an imperialistic war precipitated by the predatory plutodemocracies of the capitalistic bloc the American Communists were muttering that Alaska should by rights be Russian because the czar who made the sale had no right to dispose of the property of the Russian people.
But I agree that none of us should needlessly antagonize Russia and that we all should appreciate the vast, if incidental, benefit that we have received from the astonishing bravery, tenacity and military skill of their fighters and the foresight and adaptability of their industries. I mark the fact that the benefit to us, which may mean the saving of countless American lives through the sacrifice of countless Russian patriots, is purely incidental, because all the testimony shows that Russia is fighting for Russia first and only.
Soviet Communist is brave idealist
All authorities write of Russia’s magnificent patriotism, but, having done that, cross themselves up when they suggest that Russia would quit fighting before her own interests were secure, merely because some Americans had resisted efforts to substitute Communism for Americanism here.
Purely gratuitous jibes at Communism, as such, should be avoided in the interest of better sympathy between the two countries in this war. But the American Communist Party, by its own contention and by the terms of the basic treaty between our country and Russia, is not a Russian organization. It professes to be wholly American and absolutely independent of Moscow and, if that is so, it is a strictly domestic affair of ours. We, on our part, certainly would not think of cutting out of the war before our cause was won, merely because the Moscow government took firm, quick steps to efface some element which, in the midst of war and under cover of Russia’s sympathy with us, tried it disestablish Communism there.
The testimony from Russia begins to convince me that the Russian Communist and the American are no more alike than a genuine lieutenant commander of the U.S. Navy and one of the same rank who has won his commission in the heavy seas of Broadway and Hollywood.
The Russian Communist is a brave idealist and magnificent patriot, the American a misanthropic failure who profanes a political faith, sacred to the Russian, to justify licentious conduct and a traitor to his own country. The Russians must despise him as much as the Americans do.