Syria flooded by propaganda
But Hitler as messiah leaves Arabs limp
By Richard D. McMillan, United Press staff writer
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Embarrassed U.S. Navy flier describes fight with 9 Japs
Excited, hero shouts into plane radio, fearing voice is gone
Pilot tells of facing bombers alone, downing 5, hitting other
By Frank Tremaine, United Press staff writer
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Heavy U.S. blows stall Jap attacks on Bataan
Corregidor’s dead-eye gunners drop Nippon bomber flying at 5-mile altitude
By Mack Johnson, United Press staff writer
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Allies rule air, Australian claims; Japs routed by floods in New Guinea
Tenth of foe’s cruisers now crippled
By Brydon Taves, United Press staff writer
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242 killed in first raid on Darwin
Canberra, March 30 –
Prime Minister John Curtin revealed today that 242 persons were killed in the first Jap air raid on Port Darwin last Feb. 19.
Mr. Curtin said damage to the town was small, and there was no reason to suspect espionage played any part in the raid.
Martin calls for more toil and less talk
Urges U.S. to draft most competent people to head war work
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Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. – This is the last of my pieces on Mrs. Nellie Coffman, the woman who mothered the bare deserts of the Southwest into a national haven for the tired and the vacation-hungry, and who made it pay handsomely.
This is probably the most that has ever been written about her. For, despite her friendly nature, Mother Coffman is very shy of publicity. (Of course, when I started working my cobra-like charms on her, she was helpless.)
She has good reason to be shy. For, some years ago, a national magazine wrote her up and pictured her as a sort of Klondike Annie, with a mule skinner’s tongue and knots on her fists.
Such a picture is very far from the truth. She could much more aptly be compared with my own mother. She has had a hard life, but there is nothing hard about her personality. As her son Earl says, “There has never been anything undignified about my mother.”
Mother Coffman is a medium heavy woman, wears a net over her hair, still has her own teeth, and wears gold-rimmed spectacles. She does not look like a city woman when she’s dressed up, nor does she look like a desert-rat, either. She looks like a Midwestern grandmother.
She has never gone in for the baubles that many well-to-do people amuse themselves with. Her work has been her amusement. She is no slave to her work, but her facile mind, always thinking up something new to accomplish, has kept her young.
She hopes her tires give out
She does indulge herself by having breakfast in bed, but she has it at the atrocious hour of 6:30 a.m. In fact, she has the bad habit of waking at 4 o’clock, and between then and breakfast time lying there and mulling over her business. There is an unwritten rule at the Desert Inn that any employee may come right into her room any time after 7 to discuss things with her.
Despite the vast grassy haven inside the grounds of the Inn, the Coffmans are still close to their greatest love – the desert. Walk a few blocks and you’re out on the sand, away from everything. One mile out on the desert and you can barely see the town.
Mrs. Coffman used to walk 20 miles a day, just because she loved to walk, but she goes mostly by car now. She says she’ll be glad when her tires run out so she’ll have to walk again. She feels better when she walks.
Because of the terrific heat (sometimes up to 120) Palm Springs becomes practically a ghost town in summertime, with everybody gone and stores and houses boarded up.
But for the first 16 years Mrs. Coffman stayed right here through the summer, because she was too poor to get out. Now she has a place up in the hills above Banning – not so very far away – where she goes for the summer. She calls the place “Lazy Acres.”
Sons also like the desert
Mrs. Coffman’s devotion to the desert has been transmitted to her sons. Earl was telling me the other day about something that happened to him. Shortly after he was out of school he went to New York and got a job on Wall Street. The last war ended that, and he never went back.
But last summer he took an auto trip across the continent, and looked up his old Wall Street friends. He found many of them pretty threadbare, but some had gone on up to riches and the permanent life of high finance.
“But good Lord, their outlook on life!” says Earl. “Worried and cynical and harassed. I never saw such gloom. You’d think nothing existed west of the Hudson. I had to drive clear to Tennessee before I could get it out of my system.”
As I said before, Mrs. Coffman loves to gab with the guests. Yet, oddly enough for one in her business, she can’t remember names. She has actually taken memory courses, and concentrated on the old connect-it-with-something-else system. But it was no go. She can’t remember anybody’s name until he has been here several weeks.
Before I arrived, some mail had come for me facetiously addressed to “Col. Pyle.” Apparently the clerks tipped her off, for Mrs. Coffman greeted me as “Col. Pyle,” and kept calling me that (she forgot my name later, however).
So, after a while I began to get self-conscious about the colonel business, and told her not to be too grave about it, me being just an honorary New Mexico colonel. Whereupon she laughed and said, “Why, I’m a New Mexico colonel, too!” So we saluted, and now I call her “Col. Coffman.”
She was, in addition, a Virginia colonel for a few months, until they sent her a bill for $25. So she “resigned” and sent her commission back.
Mrs. Coffman has not traveled a great deal, although she did take a trip to the Orient seven years ago. She was enchanted by Japan, and can’t quite conceive of how such seemingly nice people could turn out to be such bad people.
U.S. plans to seek new rubber fields
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