Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
TIMBERLINE LODGE, Oregon – Human memories are short. And also – although I am, of course, loath to admit it – not everybody in America reads this column.
So perhaps it would be wise to tell you just what Timberline Lodge really is, and why I am here instead of somewhere else to do my skiing (I insist on calling it skiing).
Two and a half years ago I did tell about Timberline in this column, but of course two and a years is 30 months, and a lot of memory goes over the dam in 30 months like these last 30.
Timberline Lodge is a beautiful mountain hotel built and still owned by the U.S. government. It was built by Oregon’s people on WPA. It cost a million dollars and has been open just four years.
After it was finished it was turned over to the U.S. Forest Service, which supervises it. It isn’t, however, run by the Forest Service. It is leased to a private company – a special company formed by Portland business men just to operate this Lodge.
Timberline Lodge is named that because it stands exactly at Timberline, half-way up 11,000-foot Mt. Hood. Below the Lodge, all is thick, green timber. Above it, all is empty, vast sweep of meadow and rock, clear to the jagged top. The Lodge is 65 miles from Portland.
I have been in most of the mountain resorts similar to this one. To me, Timberline is the loveliest thing of its kind in America. You can’t come here and not be impressed by the gigantic naturalness of the place. It seems to have grown here, like the trees.
Unbelievably immense crowds come here. Right now, through the week, there is only a handful of guests at the Lodge. That’s perfect for me, because it gives me more tumbling room on the snowy slopes.
Lodge crowded on weekends
But every weekend the population skyrockets to the fantastic figure of 2500 or 3000 skiers, up from Portland. The Lodge is overrun, in fact overwhelmed. It sometimes seems that the shouting, dripping, wind-bitten skiers flowing around the lodge could just lift the whole thing up and toss it down the mountain side.
I came here to do my skiing, first, because I have loved the place ever since my previous visit, and, second, because ever since when they have been badgering me to come back in winter and ski with them. I finally floored them by accepting.
The place somehow has mesmerized me. There is possibly better skiing in America than at Timberline – I wouldn’t know. But there are few places with finer views, greater wealth of taste, more comfort, more winter-woodsy atmosphere.
Timberline Lodge is the result of the imagination of a remarkable man, E. J. Griffith, director of WPA for Oregon. The Lodge is his idea; the spot is his idea; the design is his idea; the good taste in it is his. If ever a man had a right to be proud of something he has wrought, E. J. Griffith is entitled to his pride.
Mr. Griffith is a tall, slender, dignifiedly-handsome man of early middle age. There is calmness and culture in his voice. He knows the skiing slopes and the universities of Europe and he knows also the red-taped corridors of Washington, D.C.
But he knows best, and loves best, these mountains of Oregon. He is an executive, but a woodsman, too. He skied these mountain sides long before this Lodge was ever built.
Ten years ago he was lost all night in dead of winter on this very slope; had to keep moving all night to keep from freezing to death. They say now that he is the only man, traveling alone, whoever survived a night on the mountain in wintertime.
Mr. Griffith these days is so busy he doesn’t get to come up very often. He got up only once last year to ski. He has not even skied this winter. But he is coming up on my last day here, to ski with me. I must practice hard, for it would be base indeed to fall and scramble about in the snow in the presence of the man who created all this.
World’s longest ski-lift
When we were here, two and a half years ago, the ski-lift was just being built. Now it is finished and running. It is the longest ski-lift in the world (one mile).
You start near the Lodge, and ride the mile upward in 11 minutes. That simple, easy ride is what makes skiing tolerable. If you walked up it would take you hours, and you’d be too exhausted to ski back down. The downhill ski-trail is called “The Magic Mile.”
Today I rode up and back on the ski-lift. It is an odd sensation. The towers are high, and just as you start you’re whisked clear above the tops of the fir trees. Farther up, where there is nothing except snow beneath, the sensation is almost one of flying.
When they have the big weekend crowds, people stand in line all day to get onto the ski-lift. They say it isn’t unusual for the more rabid skiers to make 20 round trips in a day. The record, they say, is 30 trips in one day. It would take the finest of champion skiers, racing down from dawn to dark, to do that.
I asked if anybody ever had fallen out of his chair on the ski-lift. (You’re strapped in, but could loosen the belt). They said no, but one woman did jump out. She was slightly oiled at the time. She fell 22 feet, but she lived.
They have taken up one-legged men and old folks and babies. Even if you don’t ski at all, no one should come to Timberline without riding the ski-lift up and down. You get a view, and a sensation, that could come otherwise only from an airplane.
In fact it’s better than a plane, for you’re out in the open, and everything is so silent, and the whole big world lies out there beneath you just as if for the moment it was your private property.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
DETROIT – This will be the who-dun-it chapter of this little series, the chapter having to do with the fact that we came right down to Pear] Harbor with a motor industry still largely engaged in the production of passenger cars for individual use. Such vehicles still are often miscalled pleasure cars, a form dating from the time when the private car was a luxury of the well-to-do and was used for a Sunday ride or “spin” over lumpy, suburban roads, but experience and contemplation of the near future prove that it is an almost indispensable carrier.
Nobody has yet explained how we are going to do without it and the anxiety is nowhere more acute than in Detroit, where so many millions of cars have been made; but today the best minds of the community are wondering how 100,000 workers will be shifted from home to the job and back in three great mass movements daily, some of them as far as 100 miles a day, when the inconceivably vast Ford bomber plant goes into total operation next July.
Tires will give out before vehicles
This is not the entire problem in Detroit, to say nothing of similar problems in practically all other centers, but it will do as an illustration. True, the tires will give out before the vehicles, which then, presumably, will be put away for duration, but those new tires will give much priceless mileage in getting people about on necessary errands who otherwise would be immobilized much sooner; and it is the rather wounded contention of the motor makers of Detroit that their rubber consumption last year did not reduce by as much as an ounce the supply available for war today.
At the source, there was unlimited rubber and the Federal Government, which was buying for war, has itself to blame for its own failure to buy and store more on its own account. That millions of miles of tire service will be wasted on frivolous and uneconomical errands is inevitable and just too bad, but a problem of public opinion and possibly of regulation. Most Americans apparently are using cars today as though there were still, as always before, plenty more where their present tires came from.
But why didn’t the industry take the initiative, warn the nation resoundingly that the cars and tires in service would have to last indefinitely, shut down last year and save time and material by total conversion of its plants for war work.
Well, the auto industry is not the Government, for one reason, and any such assumption of a duty of the Government to anticipate war and create war-consciousness certainly would have been denounced as warmongering with an eye to profits. Moreover, the unemployment might have created another of those great revolutionary crises such as the Government smirkingly encouraged within the recent painful memory of the motor builders. And, finally, the big companies lacked orders from the Government for the performance of specific war tasks.
Such orders as the Government had placed were being executed and there are several huge new works built from the ground up which argue the industry’s contention that its men of strange genius were not lagging when tasks were definitely assigned. If it were granted that idle machine capacity above the requirements of the auto production schedule could have been put to war use, and the industry denies that such was a feasible plan, the fact still would remain that there were no assigned jobs for these machines.
There has been a slight stimulation
There is still some surliness and stalling, a hangover from the bitter days of the sit-down, and the picket-line riots, but, on those war jobs which were in progress before Pearl Harbor, there has been a perceptible change of demeanor among the workers.
Not even the necessity of mother Russia, whose sudden danger last June changed the war from a predatory adventure of capitalist imperialism to a fight for freedom in the minds of the Communist unioneers and strike leaders of the CIO, could quite overcome the sullenness of many men at the machines. But the attack on the United States by Japan caused a noticeable change and the great tank arsenal is bedecked with many home-made slogans and drawings bearing the insignia of the auto workers union, exhorting the patriots to buy bonds.
It would compromise a sacred union principle, briefly stated as “the least work for the most money,” to flaunt CIO signs urging speed on the job, but there has been a slight stimulation, nevertheless. The few who still sulk and gossip on the job would seem to be beyond reach of any appeal save, perhaps, that of Leon Trotsky, whose disciples still insist that the war is nothing but a capitalist, imperialist, Nazi, Fascist, Stalinist conspiracy against their little company of righteous men in a wicked world.
Did the manufacturers refuse or evade specific orders offered them, lest they lose private auto business to competitors still turning out cars and uncommitted to war tasks? That I do not know, but Congress could find out if the question is worth asking, now that the whole industry is working in the war.
Clapper: Public scandal
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – I hope Westbrook Pegler will come down here and do one of his justly celebrated scalping jobs on the Office of Civilian Defense. I mean on Mrs. Roosevelt, too, because half the trouble around there could be got rid of if the President would haul her out of the place.
Most of the remaining trouble would be eased if the erratic and irascible activities of Mayor LaGuardia were removed from the scene.
Do that and give James M. Landis, the present executive of the OCD, real authority to run the show and I believe you would get something worthwhile. The Office of Civilian Defense has done a vast amount of work that is indispensable and has done it well. But its effectiveness has been undermined by the misused talents of Mayor LaGuardia and Mrs. Roosevelt.
If some of the responsible persons around OCD and some of the other responsible officials around town could say what they thought, I think they would agree with the foregoing. But they cannot do it. There is hesitation in Congress about saying much because nobody wants to criticize the wife of the President.
Parking lot for First Lady’s pets
But this is public business and very important public business. The work of the Office of Civilian Defense concerns the safety and welfare of the people of this nation. Yet it has become a kind of personal parking lot for the pets and proteges of Mrs. Roosevelt, some of them at salaries larger than a brigadier general or a rear admiral gets.
Recently Mrs. Roosevelt’s dancer protege, Mayris Chaney, was appointed at $4600 a year, which is more than a major in the Army gets. Her job is to encourage rhythmic dancing for children. When I asked how she got there, I was told through Mrs. Roosevelt. Melvyn Douglas, the motion picture star, will run a kind of service exchange for actors, writers and musicians who want to do something for defense. He got there through Mrs. Roosevelt. The three new sub-executives who will direct the volunteer participation work are selections of Mrs. Roosevelt. The place is filled with them.
It is incredible that President Roosevelt will allow this situation to continue much longer. It has become a public scandal.
The worst thing about all this is that, more than any other Government agency, the Office of Civilian Defense is concerned with maintaining civilian morale. That is one of its important duties set out in the executive order.
How can you have any kind of morale with a subordinate employee, who happens to be the wife of the President of the United States, flitting in and out between lecture engagements to toss a few more pets into nice jobs? What does the school-teacher who has to stand watch at the school building all night for civilian defense think about that? How is the morale of thousands of people, who are giving up evenings to prepare for possible emergencies, going to be maintained with such a situation at the top?
OCD a disgrace to its serious mission
The Office of Civilian Defense is charged with the most serious responsibilities. On the fire-protection side it has worked faithfully at them. Fortunately most of that work was handled by Army and Navy officers and experienced firemen and technicians. Here it is only fair to say that Mayor LaGuardia, through his interest in protecting New York City, did some most valuable pioneering.
On the other side of the civilian defense work, where the children’s rhythmic dancing comes in, a whole clutter of stuff has grown up, largely through Mrs. Roosevelt. Landis, who ought to be running the show, is finding constantly that new orders are being issued without clearing through his office. The place is full of people who look not to him but to Mrs. Roosevelt as the boss.
Duties and authority are poorly defined. The executive order means almost nothing as it stands. OCD needs the same kind of shaking up that war production had the other day. A new executive order is needed which will give Landis authority such as Donald Nelson has and make it clear who is boss. The agency never can be run well until that is cleared up. Until Mr. Roosevelt does that, the place will disgrace the serious mission to which it is dedicated.
Maj. Williams: Our lesson
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
The big lesson of the Roberts Board of Inquiry report on the Pearl Harbor tragedy is that, left to themselves to work it out, the Army and the Navy failed to achieve co-ordination of forces. For many years they have consistently failed through inter-service jealousy and for a host of other reasons. The natural conclusion is that, if left to themselves, they will continue to fail to achieve co-ordination.
This has always been so. The obvious thing to do is to take the co-ordination job out of their hands and place the responsibility for achieving it in the hands of a supreme high command. That’s a good, old American custom.
In addition to the usual point of hottest controversy – a separate air force – the Army and Navy have been fighting among themselves about jurisdiction of the function of coast defense.
Generally speaking, the Navy is built and maintained to meet and defeat the enemy as far from our shores as possible. For this purpose, it is necessarily authorized to maintain bases for the repair and supply of the fleet and the training of personnel to man the fleet. But it’s darn near impossible – and it has been, too, for years – to keep the U.S. Fleet at sea.
One flier’s answer
In bygone years, when these seapower people would attack us aviators, I knew one airman who coined and used a pithy baseball retort which has since become critically factual. “All right, you warship people,” he would say, “when and if another war comes, we know just where the enemy will find you – tied up in some harbor – week-ending.” Just think that over, with memories of Pearl Harbor.
But getting back to the controversy between the Army and Navy about the coast defense priority. Long years since, the extra-heavy and long-range guns mounted in land fortifications were deemed to be more than a match for any fleet. Any kind of big gun can be mounted on the earth, but only special mountings for which the ship is designed can accommodate guns on board warships. Therefore, within range of shore-based, big guns, it was conceded that the Army Coast Defense was top dog. But sea fleets might escort and protect an invasion force away beyond the range of such big guns. What then? Well, they both puzzled over that for generations. But when aviation began to make itself felt as a potential weapon for coast defense, the old row was invigorated, dunked in a veritable Fountain of Youth, and became fiercer than ever.
The Army claimed that airpower based on shore was basically the weapon of the Army Coast Defense. The Navy, designed for off-shore sea duty, claimed that units of aircraft working from carriers and warship catapults and such flying boats as were based on mother ship tenders were necessarily under the jurisdiction of the Navy and were the prime weapons for coast defense. And these two services have been fighting bitterly for the past 20 years about this matter.
Just a sample
That’s a sample of Army and Navy co-ordination in peacetime. They have fought politically in and out of Congress, each to maintain and grab greater control of our coast defense functions. The only time these two jealous services ever co-ordinated or agreed on any one point has been when the airpower enthusiasts, headed by Gen. Billy Mitchell, sought the organization of an air force comparable in authority and jurisdiction over the air defense of the United States to that of the Army and Navy in land and sea defense matters. Then they were united to present their one-time full and solid front against the interloping new air arm.
As soon as they won or squelched each battle on that point, back they went to their old-time controversy with one another. And that’s where they were when the Navy tricked through a regulation prohibiting the Army from flying more than 100 miles off shore without first obtaining permission from the Navy (and the Army’s Flying Fortresses are good for many thousands of miles non-stop range – with a bomb load). And that’s where these two jealous old services were when Pearl Harbor burst upon them.
Dies’ son joins Navy
WASHINGTON – Rep. Martin Dies, D-Texas, said today that his son, Martin III, had enlisted in the Navy and applied for duty aboard a motor torpedo boat.
