Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico – The greater portion of my time and energy during those recent three months of non-columning was taken up with my housework.
I carry today upon my person all the honorable badges of my profession. I have dishpan hands housemaid’s knee, and that Monday-morning look. I will be a disappointed man if Time Magazine doesn’t pick me as America’s Typical Mother of 1941.
But industry and diligence have their compensations, and in those three months of menial toll I developed into one of the finest all-around domestics in America.
A Vanderbilt would be proud to have me in his kitchen. The only trouble with me is that I’m slow. I can wash the breakfast dishes in an hour and a quarter, where anybody else could do them in 10 minutes. I’m thorough to a fault, efficiency is my destruction. I cleaned our little house so meticulously and so often this fall that I almost cleaned it out of existence. If I were to keep this up all winter we’d have to buy new furniture in the spring, and possibly a new floor.
But any moron can scrub and sweep. My cooking is what I wish to dwell upon.
There are a lot of men in this country who go around bragging about what wonderful cooks they are, when actually all they can do is fry an egg. But I can make pudding; I can roast fowl to a turn; I can baste and stew and skewer. Give me another month and I could fix you up some pate de fois gras meuniere a la mode that would make tears come to your eyes.
No, my cooking is not of that meager type indulged in by eccentric old hermits. My cooking is elite and many-faceted. It contains all the subtleties and surprises that the gourmet lives for. My cooking is classical.
Dinner for six, please, Ernie
Why, one night I served a full-course dinner for six people. The banquet was outstandingly successful. At least I assume it was, for that was Six weeks ago and nobody has filed suit yet.
I have learned that there is a lot of balderdash about cooking. It doesn’t require a mystic gift or “touch.” All it requires is a good stop-watch. Give me a cookbook and a watch and I can produce as tasty a morsel as any of your Vermont grandmothers.
The main thing in producing a meal, I’ve found, is simply to develop the ability to remain calm.
If you could have stood outside my kitchen window the first night I got a full meal, you would have thought somebody was thrashing wheat inside. You never heard such a commotion. Chicken grease was popping, kettles were hissing, asparagus was boiling over, skillet lids were sliding off, the oven door was whanging open and shut like a drop forge, pieces of chicken were falling on the floor, sugar was flying through the air, and I, covered with flour, was leaping from refrigerator to sink to stove to table in a grim frenzy. Panicky and glassy-eyed, I resembled nothing so much as a hysterical trap-drummer fighting a mongoose.
But experience has taught me to keep my head. Let me give you an example. One night I had invited five guests, and had the meal all ready to serve, when it dawned upon me that the potatoes had three-quarters of an hour yet to bake. But did I lose my head? I did not.
I simply walked into the living room, lit a cigarette, and announced in a quiet voice that there would be a slight delay on account of the delivery boy having fallen off his bicycle on the way over and broken his leg.
Dinner recipe No. 38
This upset the guests so that they didn’t realize the food was all cold when they finally got it. In fact the ruse wound up by the guests making up a pot of $3.65 to buy the delivery boy some flowers. Since there wasn’t any delivery boy. I took the money and bought whisky with it the next day. This is known as Dinner Recipe No. 38, but shouldn’t be used except in a crisis.
Yes, I am a cook of renown and agility. Yet in spite of this admitted prowess with the skillet and the roaster, I am not agog over cooking. In fact, if pinned down, I would say to hell with cooking. I say let somebody else do the cooking if at all possible.
To me the preparation of food is a curse, and I declaim that the human species cannot call itself civilized until everything comes in capsules and the word “kitchen” is stricken from the dictionary.
I’m proud of my cooking simply in an academic way, as one might be proud of developing a certain grace and finesse in the taking of castor oil. I wouldn’t cook for a living if you put me out in the snow.
Furthermore, I lost five pounds eating my own grub. What I need most in my career as a housekeeper is a good restaurant.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
NEW YORK – The loneliest people in the United States these last nine years have been those whose resentment against the greed and folly of the immediate past could not shake their solid faith in the right end who would not advocate equal violence by way of compensation and revenge.
The country was swept by a gale of enthusiasm for the new regime which, in a vague way, tempting was, was seen as a people’s government opposed to government by business. Many opportunists, their American principles addled by poisonous vapors blown here from Europe, offered the thought that as much as business had thrived before the great panic of 1929 and had “run” the Government, then business must be the enemy of the common man and therefore should be punished, even destroyed.
Meanwhile, the Government would take over the personal problems and responsibilities of the common man, which never was the duty or proper function of the American form of Government and, after a period of rearrangement, the common man would be discharged from this civic receivership and returned to work but under Government protection. The receivership never has ended and it seems very improbable now that it ever will end. for a great change has occurred in the relationship of the citizen to his Government and the war precludes any serious effort to beat back.
Liberals ignorant of principles
As I look back, I realize now that many of those who were known as liberals or radicals, aggressive, intolerant and often truculent men and women, were either ignorant of American principles or intelligently opposed to them. Names were raised before us which stood for liberalism or radicalism merely by the power of suggestion and ballyhoo and propositions were foisted upon us in the name of democracy which were not merely un-American but anti-American.
If people could be made comfortable and reasonably content this would be good Americanism. even though it would require that all men and women be averaged. The dullard and sluggard would be averaged with the intelligent and ambitious citizen. employment would be rotated and brakes would be applied to the energetic worker lest he disrupt the value of the standardization work-hour by superior diligence and skill. All this and much more was proposed and actually imposed and was defended by intellectuals who denounced as Fascists and enemies of labor all who had the temerity and voice to disagree.
It has been said that but for this change there might have been a revolution, which may be so. Nobody can say. But if we have achieved by subtle and bloodless methods the same result that would have been wrought by revolution, we still have lost.
Under the old regime, people were exploited by employers and robbed by financiers, and politicians sold them out, and it might have been expected that the new system would try to cure those evils, punish the offenders and restore the rights which had been flouted. But exploitation did not end.
Temporary material gain seen
The right of exploitation was merely transferred to other hands and the millions of money which the common man has invested in American industry, in his own small business, were threatened from a new quarter by a Governmental policy that industry and the worker were natural enemies and the worker a ward of the state. The morals of politicians could not have deteriorated since 1929, but there has been no visible reform, only a change of side.
Personalities aside, and without bitterness, but with true regret, I perceive no improvement, except a doubtful and temporary material gain for the common man under the new system. Indeed, having observed cynical and flippant attitudes and mocking evasions, he may have concluded that the real American way is not what he thought it was but the smart and tricky and changeable way and preferably the easy way, with a government to see to his minimum comforts and slap him down if, by his superior intelligence and efforts, he threatens to rise above the average.
If, during the first eight years of change, it was un-American to hold to the old principles of Americanism, recognizing that hard times and suffering might be unavoidable even in the life of the United States, and opposing compromise with those principles, it is almost treason to do so now. Even most of those who most vigorously resisted the tendency of Europeanism are now accepting the change so as to close ranks and fight to defend the land, itself, against the outer enemy. Perhaps it won’t hurt much when a whole generation has grown used to it, but it won’t be the Americanism we used to know.
Clapper: American spirit
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – If it is the spirit of America that breathed through every phrase in President Roosevelt’s address to Congress, then this war will be won. The peace will be won. The United Nations will have a chance then, if they are intelligent enough to seize it, to shape the post-war world to democratic ideals of freedom and with respect for the dignity of the human being.
That is possible. It is the vista that President Roosevelt opened up for the years to come.
Mr. Roosevelt was cool and bold. He stood on the foundation rock of the mighty resources of America and challenged us to do a heroic job of a size fitting to a nation of our inherent strength. All we need is the audacity, the courage, the will to follow hum up the path he pointed out.
A hard and rugged path
It is a hard and rugged path. I am glad Mr. Roosevelt told us frankly about that. This was no time to deceive us into the comforting belief that it would be an easy journey. That speech to Congress could have been made only by a man with great courage, with great confidence in the strength of America, and with complete faith in the stamina of the American people.
This is a speech that needs to be read and read again so that the full weight of its challenge sinks in.
The figures in planes, tanks and ships are breathtaking. But this is a nation that makes more than four million autos a year. This is a nation that makes more steel than all of Europe. This is the nation that taught Hitler mass production. It is our own game that we must beat him at.
If we had now the 60,000 planes, the 45,000 tanks, the eight million additional tons of shipping that Mr. Roosevelt asks this year, we would be reading victory news from every battlefront right now. The United Nations are shackled only because they lack the arms.
We intend not only to match the Axis but to be overwhelmingly superior. Mr. Roosevelt has set up a goal that the Axis cannot possibly approach, as he said. Next year he wants 125,000 planes, 75,000 tanks and 10 million tons of shipping.
There will be head-shaking. We will be told it cannot be done. Mr. Roosevelt is going to try. We are going to try to put half of our national effort into war production. I’m glad he set his sights high. We have always had them too low. When a sales manager calls in his crew he always gives them quotas which they think are impossible. A hard-driving sales manager will drive his salesmen into outdoing themselves. That is what Mr. Roosevelt is trying to do now. That is what he ought to do. Who would keep a sales manager who asked his men to sell only What they thought they could sell.
Referred often to United Nations
Mr. Roosevelt did not flinch from telling the nation that the fight would have to be carried to the enemy wherever he might be found. He said we intend to keep the enemy from our shores by fighting him on his home grounds. He said American armed forces would go all over the world to track the enemy down, in the Far East, in the British Isles, all over the oceans. Mr. Roosevelt made no attempt to mark down the price to make a sale.
Mr. Roosevelt referred frequently to the United Nations, and to the hope of establishing security after the war. With the military strength that the United Nations will possess after this war, with American military strength alone unmatched in all history on the basis of the program just outlined, the United Nations will have in hand the force with which to establish security, and to ensure that no butcher regimes can ever get started again.
This time, maybe we won’t be so stupid as to throw it away as we did before. This time, maybe, even the Senate will be smart enough to see that it is better to keep the United Nations together and have peace than to fall apart and have another world war.
The road Mr. Roosevelt shows us is hard. But at its end is offered, for a second time, the great opportunity which is ours for the taking.
Maj. Williams: Radio hazard
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
Hard-headed, realistic, fearless thinking in terms of defending our nation is our only salvation. Silencing the airways radio direction beams is a necessary move during this emergency. An airways radio direction beam can guide any enemy airman to a big city just as effectively as it guides the pilots of our invaluable air transports. So much for that, but what about the commercial radio broadcasting stations?
Do you know that aircraft homing radios can be tuned on to a broadcasting radio station and lead an airman directly to that station just as surely and effectively as an airways radio directional beam leads a transport pilot to the city and the city’s airport?
Remember how the Nazi dive bombers sought out and found every Polish field army control post behind the front during that campaign? The field command posts were sending out their orders to the Polish Army ground units, tanks, artillery and infantry via radio. The Nazis had provided suitable or tunable radio receivers that readily picked up the wave lengths being used by the Polish field control posts and flew toward them as truly as our transports fly toward a city’s airport. The result, of course, was the immediate location of the command posts, despite camouflage, and their consequent and immediate destruction by the bombers. Someone hadn’t been thinking in the Polish General Staff and someone had been thinking on the German General Staff.
All radio should close
When we shut down airways radio beams we should shut down the commercial radio broadcasting stations. All together, or none at all. This is what I call hard-headed thinking.
I observed with Air Raid Precautions projects in England, France, Germany and Italy long before the phrase was even used or understood over here. Generally speaking, we Americans are acting like a bunch of emotional morons about this air raid stuff. We have too many grandstand managers behaving just as they ordinarily behave in the bleachers.
If you are assigned a job in the ARP, do that job. Let’s not make fools of ourselves with such statements as, “If there’s a raid, I will be with my family.” That’s silly and decidedly unpatriotic. As a member of the ARP, you have no more moral license to leave your post than your soldiers, sailors, and airmen on the firing line have to desert to see how their folks are getting along. We must do the job assigned to us. And if we all do that, we will serve the country.
Make suggestions
Make suggestions if you can think of anything worthwhile. But learn to take orders. There undoubtedly will be some appointed to air raid jobs for which they are not qualified. But your husbands and fathers and mothers are solid folks. They have carried the burdens of earning the roof over your heads, the clothes on your backs and the food you eat. These solid folks will prevail.
Of course, there is bound to be some fumbling. But this country has fumbled its way into being the greatest country the world has ever known. Danger? Certainly there’s danger. There’s danger on your highways every day. And there are more people killed there every year in peacetime than can be injured in any air raid you can dream of on the United States proper.
Gossiping about one another and soapboxing contains more danger than any enemy can deal out. If you haven’t contributed any of your spare time learning this air raid precautions business, pay attention to those who have and executive their orders like hard-headed solid Americans. We can’t all be generals, and don’t lose the war finding this out. Steadiness, obedience, discipline, and work will win this war for us.
Lack of rubber to have little effect on footwear
WASHINGTON (UP) – Many forms of civilian transportation will be curtailed because of the war but the government has no plans to restrict “noiseless” walking.
There are plenty of shoes, plenty of leather for more shoes and nearly 125 million rubber heels in reserve if the old ones wear down.
Only one restriction has been imposed on foot gear and OPM officials say that adequate supplies will continue to be available for production of black and brown colored heels. Production of rubber heels has been restricted to high November levels.
But production of red, white, green and other colored soles and heels – including crepe – is out for the duration.
The order which halted production of civilian tires and tubes provides for production of sneakers, tennis shoes, rubber boots, golashes and overshoes at amounts not in excess of November production. Production then was “very high” and the order will have no effect on civilian purchases, officials said.
Use of ethyl alcohol ordered cut 15 percent
WASHINGTON (UP) – Use of ethyl alcohol in toilet soaps, mouth washes, rubbing alcohol, bay rum, candy glazes and similar items has been restricted by OPM during January to 85 percent of the amount used in the same month of 1941.
After January, the restriction will be 70 percent of the amount used in each corresponding month preceding June 30, 1941.
The order issued by Priorities Director Donald M. Nelson, however, allows deliveries of ethyl alcohol without limitation for military explosives, acetic acid, ethyl acetate, ethyl chloride, resins and plastics, ethyl ether, health supplies, dies and intermediates, nitrocellulose and similar products.
Use or delivery for manufacture of methyl alcohol as an antifreeze agent also was prohibited in another order by Mr. Nelson. Manufacture, however, was not restricted for military use.
Taft blocks daylight bill
Objects to prompt action by Senate
WASHINGTON (AP) – Sen. Robert Taft, R-Ohio, blocked Senate action today on legislation granting the President authority to establish Daylight Savings Time during the war, asserting that Congress should fix any time changes.
The Ohio Republican senator said, “Congress is just as competent as the President in this,” as he objected to a request by Sen. Wheeler, D-Montana, for immediate consideration and passage of the Daylight Savings legislation approved earlier in the day by the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee.
Knox hopes to use Marines of last war
Secretary of the Navy Knox hopes the U.S. again will use the Marines who served in the last war, he said today in a telegram to H. W. Dice of 7050 Bennett St., Homewood, thanking the ex-Marine for volunteering.
“I don’t know whether we can make use of many of the men who served n 1918 with the Marines but I hope we can,” he told Mr. Dice.
