Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
TIMBERLINE LODGE, Oregon – Skiing is hard work. The altitude is high and the exercise violent. You use a great many muscles you never knew you had. Long-unused muscles get mighty sore.
Skiing consists about as much in being in good physical condition as it does in skill. My skill at the present writing is hidden under some obscure bushel. And my physical perfection would undoubtedly take the booby prize of Oregon. Why, if I happen to walk swiftly across the room after a cigarette, I have lumbago the next day.
So you can imagine what a pitiful, broken thing all this violent skiing exercise has made of me. Even standing real still in the lobby the first few days was a bodily agony.
But fortunately I kept right at it, and didn’t let my tortured muscles get “set.” I kept them working. And now at last I’m beginning to get conditioned. Finally the aches have begun to abate; my wobbly ankles have strength in them now; I throb with such new inner energy that I stand before a mirror and twitch my arms, admiring myself.
A soft fellow really does begin to feel strong after a few days of this. Skiing would add years to the health of any office-sitter. I’m aware again that I’ve got something in my Wrists and shoulders besides soup. Even my shiny scalp feels muscular.
I believe today I could knock the average woman down with ease.
He earns his ski clothes
It’s funny how your feeling about yourself changes as you progress with your skiing.
Most people stay in their ski-clothes all day; eat in them and sit around the lounge in them. But I was so self-conscious about mine I’d go change before coming back to eat.
I felt this way – here’s a guy who falls down while standing perfectly still on skis, so isn’t he a fine spectacle parading around the hotel in ski clothes?
But on the third day I thought to myself, “Well, now I’ve been out there trying and working as hard as anybody, and not falling down any more than some others I could mention. I guess I’ve earned my ski clothes now, so I’ll just wear them all the time, too.” So I’m doing it, and I feel as nonchalant as a man lighting a Murad.
You see some of the oddest skiing outfits up here. As in golf, the snazziest outfits usually don’t belong to the best skiers. You can ski in almost anything.
This morning I saw one boy (a good one, too) skiing around bareheaded and in a grotesquely long overcoat. And a girl skiing in shorts, her legs bare.
I rented my ski-pants from the Lodge’s ski-shop, in the hip pocket I found the slip made out to the fellow who had them before. His name was Dick Rathbun.
St. Bernards just ornaments
The slip didn’t say what success Dick had in the struggle to remain perpendicular. When I turn in my clothes I’m leaving a note in the hip pocket, warning the next innocent renter to demand a different pair of pants. It’s impossible to stand up in these.
Practically everybody who skis wears dark glasses or goggles, or a cap with a dark isinglass shield suspended from the bill – for the glare of the sun on the snow is often blinding.
Also, friends had warned me to put on lots of sunburn lotion, for the reflection of the sun on the snow is a treacherous thing, and people actually get so badly sunburned in one day they have to go to a doctor.
But I was anxious to get sunburned, for I’ve lost all my good New Mexico cowboy color. So I skied with my sock-cap pushed way back on my head, in order to get lots of sun. And so far I haven’t burned even faintly. I still look like a hothouse flower.
I’ve been hoping I might get lost in the snow, so they’d have to send a St. Bernard after me, with a keg of rum strapped under his neck.
The Lodge has two St. Bernards, named Bruhl and Lady. They are the most stupendous dogs I ever saw. Somebody gave them to the Lodge when they were pups, about four years ago.
But even if I did get lost, the St. Bernards probably wouldn’t come after me. For they are merely ornaments. They love to be fed and petted. They just lie around all day. The ski instructors say they’re so lazy they wouldn’t get up out of the snow themselves. I’d sure like to have one, though.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
DETROIT – Discussing a shortage of skilled men for the war trades, the personnel man of one of the big motor companies, who deals in workers by the thousand head, remarked that a smaller company had appealed to hum for help.
The little company needed machinists and without them could not deliver on time the mechanism which was its allotted task in the whole armament scheme.
“They begged me,” he said, “to lend them 300 of my men.”
A half hour later, the personnel man’s boss, discussing another phase of production, remarked with a note of reproach, that the big unions claim men for their own as though the men were property.
The more men they control through their closed shop and check-off agreements, the greater the power of the boss unioneers over both the men and industry. If they call them out on strike they can be impersonal toward the privations of families because the individuals are not men to them in the human sense but just so many critters, with no voice in the matter.
The successful organizing strike, a common device, called for the purpose of driving into the union X-thousand more men employed at an unorganized plant, who desperately don’t want to join, increases the power of the union boss and the strikers go hungry with their families and obey orders with little complaint.
Think of workers by the herd
When the boss had explored this thought I said the personnel man’s talk of lending the machinists had revealed a similar impersonality and sense of property in men, although not the same brutality. I believe we all agreed that the industry did think of workers by the drove or herd, subject to loan.
The boss of the great corporation, an old-time shopworker, himself, then said the downrightest feudalism in this country existed in the baseball business where the man is, frankly, just property on the hoof. He did not say, but I often did when I was doing sport, that this serfdom was the very foundation of the amusement which for more than 40 years has been regarded as the national game of the freest country on earth.
Twenty years ago the standard baseball contract was attacked in court, but it must have been upheld because it still is the standard form. Briefly once a player signs, he becomes property and may be sold and must work for his next owner at the owner’s terms but, growing old or being hurt, may be fired on 10 days’ notice.
He is scheduled as property of a certain value in his owner’s assets and tax reports. The owner can claim depreciation on the player as his talent and sinews decline but the player, being, for his own tax purposes, a man, can claim no such depreciation.
The player can’t solicit a better job and the owners have a written conspiracy, with penalties provided, whereby no owner may approach another owner’s player with an offer of a better job.
A few years ago cases were reported from the low minors in which one player was taken in trade for a bird dog and another for a satchel of new and used baseballs.
Same plan for civilian consumption
Some employers using masses of men prefer to do business with the unioneers. They agree on wages, hours and conditions and the union very efficiently delivers the labor at the gates on time, of a fair average skill and reasonably sound of wind and limb.
Dave Beck, the Seattle teamsters’ unioneer, startled me once by exclaiming angrily of the brewery drivers “those men belong to me.” He meant that his union claimed jurisdiction but he said, “Those men belong to me,” and he meant that, too.
Last Saturday, the Chicago Daily News, which belongs to Col. Frank Knox, discussed national conscription of civilians for work and soothingly remarked that a Gallup Poll “shows that a majority of our citizens are willing, in the war emergency, to let the government tell the worker ‘what job, where and how much’.”
What do you think of that?
Clapper: Boondoggling
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – For a year we were told that the auto industry could not be converted to war work, yet that is being done now. Which leads one to think that maybe if an effort were made we could convert a lot of the Government to war work.
This is not so much a matter of dollar economy. All the dollars that could be saved by non-defense economies would hardly be noticed among the billions that must be spent on the war. The point is in other kinds of economy.
As it is going now, thousands of new people are coming into Washington every week. The War Department is trying to add 40,000 civilians, mostly clerical. Mr. Roosevelt has spoken of possibly a quarter-million additional employees coming here during the war. I don’t know what there is for so many to do, and employees are coming in faster than they can be digested and put at a full day’s work.
But even on the assumption that most of the additional help will be needed, the question arises whether some of this influx might not be eliminated by converting employees from old non-war agencies to emergency work.
The Government is moving some agencies out of town. Clerical forces, which form the largest percentage of the number, are to go along. Why shouldn’t these non-defense agencies moving away take only the key and specialized personnel and leave the routine employees here to be transferred to war agencies? Routine help can be picked up in the new location. Why move clerks out of Washington and bring in others?
Why not reduce paper work
Furthermore there is no reason why some of the personnel in non-war agencies could not be detailed to war work. There has been a considerable amount of that in the higher ranks and among the specialized personnel.
In line with the spirit of the times when all non-war activities are being curtailed, it might be possible to reduce the amount of paper work that goes on in tine regular Government agency. The life-long effort of the average supervisory employee in Washington is to get as large a staff as he can.
Over the years most of these agencies have more people than are really needed to do the work if it is handled at a wartime pace instead of the traditional Government-office space.
Milo Perkins, director of the Board of Economic Warfare, has made good use of the conversion method. He has borrowed expert assistance from the Department of Commerce, the Tariff Commission and the Nelson Rockefeller organization, instead of setting up duplicate staffs of his own to do the same work.
If the effort were made, it probably would be found that every agency, except in its sections devoted to war work, could if pressed release supervisory and clerical personnel to be detailed to war agencies.
Something of this kind will have to be done. The budget director, Harold Smith, estimates that 85,000 new employees will come to Washington this year. Neither office space nor living space is available. A project is up to build 85 blocks in the southwest section of Washington on land now covered by slums. Other projects are for 22,000 units in low-cost housing.
Immortality via U.S. bureau
For office space, they are digging up the beautiful mall between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. So it would look as it the deeply entrenched bureau chiefs could properly be called upon to cut down and allow some of their forces to be converted.
In fact, Government departments are full of boondoggling work that now could come under the head of non-essential activity. Jimmy Byrnes, long before he went on the Supreme Court, once said that the nearest thing to immortality on this earth was a Government bureau. Much of this has grown up over a long period of years. More of it developed during the depression when there was some excuse for it.
Sen. Byrd of Virginia has been crusading to reduce non-essential expenditures. But there isn’t much appeal in trying to save a few million dollars when you are spending 50 billion in one year.
However, there is a case to be made about the number of people, the amount of office space, and the living quarters that this non-essential work is eating up.
It is just as bad to use up labor and precious space here in non-essential work as to eat up labor and precious materials in non-essential industry.
Maj. Williams: Heroic stand
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
The complacency of commentators brushing off the failure to send relief to the heroic Marines at Wake Island and to the gallant MacArthur, who is fighting a Custer’s last stand, fires me to anger.
While MacArthur and our American blood is staging the thin, red line of heroic resistance, came news of an AEF being landed in Ireland to help England.
If we’ve got the men and guns and planes for England, what about MacArthur and his boys?
It’s near enough to the beginning of this year to be still casting resolutions. One that we should make right away would be to stop making the very same mistakes the British have made during the past deadly years of the war. Let’s help them – but do it our way – the American, direct-method way.
The British were losing this war. Let’s keep that fact before them and before ourselves. We imitated their farce of collecting all aluminum pots and pans around the country.
The British in their panic of about a year ago put labor in the aircraft industry on a seven-day basis. Results? Well, the British medical authorities eventually told the British government and people that the health and morale of the workers in the aircraft industry deteriorated to such a degree that production eventually fell off.
Production lags
And if that isn’t sufficient, please note that the complaint is rising from high places in England, “British production could easily be increased 40 percent.” This tells us that their production must be “off” 40 percent. But all hands seem to forget that British doctors told everyone that the seven-day week, the no-rest labor schedule, was depreciating the health of the workers. Our aircraft industry is now working on the seven-day week schedule. And I predict that within a few months we shall have to alter that schedule and come back to the ways of God. When He prescribed the Sabbath as a day of rest, He was telling us something for our own human good.
Three shifts, 24 hours a day, can and will be worked. But workmen who string right along without pause for a day of rest are actually spurting and working beyond their safe and economical cruising speed.
The courage and daring of our American soldiers, sailors, and airmen in the Far Eastern Combat Zone stands out like a bright, gleaming light. Take the attacks of those Navy junior officers commanding the torpedo boats speeding into surprise attacks against Jap warships – daring and laughing off the shore batteries and warship guns raining shells all around them, the spray of shells hitting the water and mingling with the bow waves of their speedy craft – and driving straight ahead to launch their torpedoes. Can you see their grimy faces light up and hear their yells of triumph as the torps tear the guts out of some Jap transport or wartub?
Picture the scene
Just try to realize what it means to dare a dash entry into a harbor guarded by ships and guns that are able to blow you and your tiny, fast craft into smithereens, if they can hit you and outguess your next dodge, of course. All alone – thousands of miles from home – and then the try. Think this over and think of your concern about taking trips in motor boats, the anxiety about rough weather blowing up, or running out of gas in the peaceful waters of our homeland. And then set again the stage of a distant harbor, and your job is to go in and get a Jap warship.
The spirit of combat and adventure is bright in American youth. Our real pioneering heritage, the days when our forefathers fought and plowed, is nearer to the Americans of this age than to the men of any other nation except perhaps Australian. And note the similarity in daring and behavior between our fighting men and the brave Australians.
