Pop writes about the icebox of Connecticut and his distaste for FDR.
St. Patrick’s Day
In the “mornin”
[1963]
Mr. Harold Lufkin, V.P.
Newton Mfg. Co.
Newton, Iowa.
Dear Mr. Lufkin:
Thanks for your nice letter and before I forget I will send you Pete’s address, it’s—Mr. Pete Sinclair, 719 Grand, Laramie, Wyoming. Don’t know where he got all his brains. From his Ma I guess, but he sure is well supplied with them. I never heard of a President’s Honor Roll, but I understand that there are darned few in the Country that ever make a “perfect score”. It just don’t seem possible not to make SOME mistakes. God knows I make enough of them.
We have had a real rough winter this year. I am sending along a resume of it that was in the Hartford Courant about a month ago and since then we have had plenty more. In fact the long range forecast on our Radio last night was for lower than average temperatures another month.
I have been all over the World and in Hurricanes, Typhoons, Monsoons and what have you, but I think New Years Eve was just about the worst night (weather wise) that I ever remember in my life. The wind was blowing a 70 mile an hour gale and it was 20 below here, which according to the weather man in Hartford made it the equivalent of 50 below zero. We sat up all night as we were actually afraid that this old house was going to blow away, or at least the windows blow in and the chimney “take off”. We kept the thermostat at 80 but could not get the house above 55 to 60 to save us, and of course we were worried about the furnace getting overheated or giving out completely. It did not then, but a couple of days later the blower gave up the ghost, but that was a small matter. Our man had it fixed and a new one installed in a couple of hours. Of course we can always keep from freezing here as when I bought my stove, knowing the capriciousness of our electric power here in the “icebox of Conn” I bought a gas stove with a heater on the side of it, and several times we have had to lock ourselves in the kitchen and turn it on while the furnace was out, so it was a good investment.
In fact a couple of times since we have had it, the neighbors have been glad also as they have sent over their supper to be cooked or warmed up on our gas.
The car (now 100,000 miles) gave up several times. This week I was without any for a couple of days. We have no garage and I just guess the “old girl” gets “teed off” at being left outdoors all the time in such weather. Being a very small town, of course when the weather predictions come in, everyone rushes to get their cars in one of our TWO garages here, and since I live quite far away from them, by the time I get there the space is all gone.
However, we are quite proud of our record for being the coldest spot in Connecticut and when Bob Steele of WTIC in Hartford, tells how cold it is in Litchfield for instance and leaves us out, he gets a lot of wrathful calls from some of our “old timers” informing him that Litchfield was an “oven compared with Norfolk”.
Well, St. Patrick’s Day. What a time I used to have when I was “young and carefree” in a New York that was far different than today. Used to “whoop” it up all night with the Irish, as I was going with an Irish Girl by the name of Mary Gerrighty, guess that is the way it was spelled, and her sister’s husband was the Chauffeur for Joe Kennedy, the father of our president. I have as a matter of fact walked him by the hand. Too bad I didn’t strangle the “bum”. No, I don’t mean that. They were a very nice family, and were very democratic towards all the servants, and of course that used to be what the majority of the Irish were. Mary came to this country from County Galloway in Ireland, immediately went to night school and at the time I went with her was a nurse in The Hospital for Joint Diseases at 125th and Madison.
Some change in that district now. I sure would not dare to hang around there waiting even in the daytime, let alone night time. The Kennedys had plenty of money even then. That of course (one man’s opinion) is what the trouble is. This chap was born not with a silver spoon, but a gold one in his mouth. I just wish that he would stop harping on “depression and recession”, it’s rather like a salesman going into a place and saying “you don’t need anything do you” or at any rate I think it is a negative approach and I really think you can talk even a whole country into a fit of despondency if you keep at it long enough. However, all he cares about is getting his own way. He is F.D.R. all over again. I was in Bar Harbor at the beginning of the Roosevelt Dynasty, and his (F.D.R.’s mother) old Sara used to tell the story at the dinner parties there, how headstrong Franklin was “why he always used to lie down on the floor and kick and scream until I just had to give him his way” she used to tell the “400 of Bar Harbor”. This guy is just a second edition.
Wouldn’t you think that the American people would refresh their memories, and remember that it is now a proven fact that at the time this “sly, soft, silky, lying voice was coming over the radio saying “I promise you your sons will never fight on foreign soil” that WE WERE IN IT ALREADY. That he was just as responsible for the 6000 sailors dying at Pearl Harbor as if he had put a gun to their heads and personally murdered them, that the Yalta sellout to Stalin was so complete that they have not even dared to publish the Yalta papers in their entirety.
I ate “chow” in Frazier Barracks in Boston Navy Yard on Dec. 16th, 1941 with some 500 sailors who had beards as long as Castro, and where had they been? They were off the Destroyers Humbolt and Roe which ran aground off Newfoundland in a storm and they were and HAD been for SIX MONTHS escorting British convoys in the Atlantic. How stupid can the people of this country get. And F.D.R. Jr. who is now up for confirmation of office used to be carried out of the Napoleon Club in Boston “dead drunk nightly”. I know because Dr. Silas and Dr. Ernest (Janet’s brothers) who were attending B.U. Medical used to take me there for a drink. It was an after hours club and nightly three or four secret service men had to drag one or other of both of the Roosevelt boys, I think the other one was Elliot out of the club and get them back to their homes. They were and are to my mind a “despicable family”. You only have to read between the lines in Ma Roosevelt’s memoirs in McCall’s I think it was to see that old Sara “ruled the roost” and that the mother (Eleanor) could do absolutely nothing with her sons.
Your little piece on The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Pacific Gas and Electric could not come at a more appropriate time, but I am afraid the “decay is too deep”. If I were younger, I would just take my brood and start over in a Free country if there is such a thing left in this old world of ours. David was asked to join the Peace Corps. I told him that if he did, I would disown him, that it was just another organization to “buy votes for the Kennedy Dynasty” Pete was also asked a year ago. Some Jewish boy that he went to Dartmouth wanted him to come to Washington immediately, said he had a fine position for him in the Peace Corps. I think he would have gone, as Pete (and I wonder if he DOES have brains) is the only Democrat in the Sinclair family. That is he was the last time he was home, but of course there is a phase that all these College boys go through, influenced no doubt by their professors.
Bobby came home from school in his Senior year in High School and the history teacher had been teaching the class what a “bum” Hoover was and how he was personally responsible for the depression Etc. Boy was I mad. I just took Bobby up to the library and dug up the facts which were that the “RESPONSIBLE” legislation which was eventually passed had been organized and proposed by Hoover, but that Mr. pigheaded Roosevelt would not even discuss it or even see Hoover and talk to him in any effort whatsoever to head off the Bank closures and depression. I told Bobby to tell him that as a teacher he was supposed to teach facts and if not that at least to give both sides of the story. Bobby presented him a paper with the FACTS and when I asked Bob what he said, he told me that he just said “well anyway Sinclair, you have showed some interest in the subject which is more than the rest of the class have done” and he did not try to make a Democrat out of Bobby anymore. I just won’t have any damn teachers corrupting any of my sons, if I know about it anyway, believe you me.
I am an old Yankee from “way back” and darned proud of it and I was taught to “hoe out my row” and to “paddle my own canoe”. I don’t propose to take any THEORIES from teachers or anyone else.
(Some inflammatory comments at the end of the letter are omitted).
Tags: Pop's Letters
