UMW to submit pay demands tomorrow
Policy committee meets in ‘rehearsal’
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WLB decision provides for wage boosts
Way opened to set 55-cent hourly basis
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Marjorie’s things show Calcutta cloth for work and play
Fabric is texture of chintz in bright print or plain color
By Maxine Garrison
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – The B-29 squadron that my nephew is with is commanded by Lt. Col. John H. Griffith of Plymouth, Pennsylvania.
He walked into our Quonset hut the first night I was here and grinned sort of knowing-like as we were introduced. I felt our paths had crossed somewhere in the dim past, but I couldn’t recall it.
Finally, he said “remember the Rangitiki?”
“Of course,” I said. The Rangitiki was the ship that took us from England to Africa in the fall of 1942, Col. Griffith was in a nearby can ca that trip and we became well acquainted. But the war is big and time flies, and you do forget.
Col. Griffith flew combat missions both out of England and Africa. And now on this side of the world he has made 11 missions to Japan. But from now on, being an executive, he is restricted to four missions a month.
On one mission Col. Griffith’s bombardier had his leg blown almost off. As Col. Griffith was dragging him back into the pilot’s compartment, he thoughtlessly took off his oxygen mask. In a moment he passed out and fell over. But he freakishly fell with his face right in the mask, and it revived him.
Although still young, Col. Griffith has been in the Army eight years, and will stay in after the war. His wife and baby and dog are waiting for him at LaGrange Park, Illinois.
Illusion of big house
Until recently Col. Griffith lived with the pilots in the same Quonset hut I’m in. But a few days ago, they finished his new house. You should see it.
It’s a skeleton framework of two-by-fours about 30 feet square roofed with canvas and walled only with screen wire, tropical fashion. The roof overhangs about six feet all around to keep out the almost horizontal rain.
Inside, they’ve given it the semblance of a many-roomed house by putting up little nip-high partitions of brown burlap. This makes it seem that you have a living room, bedroom, bath, kitchen and sun porch, although it’s actually just one big room.
Shower too
The place is wonderfully comfortable. It has four desks, two cots and 10 chairs, and yet there’s lots of room left. It has a big clothes closet, and a wash bowl and shower, the water coming from two 50-gallon barrels up the hillside.
It has an icebox, a radio and a field telephone, Incidentally, Col. Griffith still has the same alarm clock he took with him when he went to England three years ago.
If you had this house in America, it would cost you $200 a month rent, yet the whole thing was built of packing boxes and metal bomb crates and army leftovers.
The wooden floor is painted battleship gray. Col. Griffith likes to keep his floor clean. Consequently, he has a big sign on his screen door saying “please remove shoes before entering.”
He isn’t joking either. He even makes his own commanding officer take off his shoes when he comes to visit. He furnishes his guests extra socks is case their feet get cold, which of course they don’t.
Built on stilts
The house is built on stilts and sits amidst laurel and other green shrubbery, wildly native, only 50 feet from the sea. You come down the slope to it over a path cut out of the laurel, and once in the house you are utterly away from everything.
Before you is only the curve of the lagoon, and the pounding of incessant rollers on the reef a hundred yards out, and the white clouds in the far blue sky. Several times a day sudden tropical snowers drench and cool the place.
It’s on Col. Griffith’s porch that I’m writing these columns. My only excuse for them not being better columns is that I can’t seem to keep away from that low deck chair at the far end of the porch. And also I keep looking up the path to see if Sadie Thompson isn’t strolling down with her umbrella.
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
I certainly got a fright when I picked up a newspaper and saw the headline, “Hair Pulling in Congress.” I thought that long-awaited tiff between the women members there had happened at last.
Thank goodness, it turned out the fighters were men. But having seen some of the scalp arrangements on congressmen, a Gracie “hair-pulling” match didn’t seem possible,
Right now, it seems there’s also a scuffle in Congress because the Rules Committee says all members must be addressed as “gentlemen.” A member stood up and said lady members should be called “ladies.” Another member said he didn’t think they should be called “ladies,” and that got some of the chivalrous Southern congressmen mad.
But the worst thing was that not one of the nine lady members of Congress even opened her mouth during the argument, and I was beginning to lose faith in my sex. Then it turned out that none of them was present.