WITH A MODEL OF THE FRIENDSHIP PRESENTED BY A BOSTON SCHOOLBOY
It happens that I don’t—it just never seemed worth while. Anyway, the incident struck some journalistic sparks. Amusing among them is this from the “New Yorker”:
One of the greatest personal sacrifices of all times, as we look at it, was the sacrifice Miss Earhart made in endorsing a brand of cigarettes so she could earn fifteen hundred dollars to contribute to Commander Byrd’s South Pole flight. She admitted in her letter that she “made the endorsement deliberately.” Commander Byrd, replying, said that it seemed to him “an act of astonishing generosity.” Pioneering must go on, whatever the toll; the waste places must be conquered. Since, however, the faculty of Reed University, in Oregon, declares that it is impossible for a person blindfolded to tell one cigarette from another, it seems to us that the only honorable course left for Commander Byrd, in order to vindicate science and validate Miss Earhart’s gift, is to fly to the South Pole blindfolded.
Photographers, too, are innocent (sometimes) instruments of a critical fate. (I’ve never fathomed why photographers always want “a-great-big-smile-please”; and prefer their victims waving.) I did contrive to resist the blandishments of one who would have had me pictured blowing a kiss to Pittsburgh. But in Chicago, when the boys and girls of the Hyde Park High School turned out to see their Atlantic-flying Alumna, the picture men asked me to step forward from the stage upon a grand piano backed up to its edge, so as to include the youngsters as well as myself. Picture taken, picture published.
Promptly arrived an acid letter from a friend: “How did you get on the piano?”
Doubtless she visualized me in scandalizing progress through the west, leaping from piano to piano.
The school incident reminds me of my peripatetic education. My father was a railroad claim agent and attorney, his work seldom keeping him long in one place. As a result I graced the high schools of six different communities, and happened to be in Chicago when graduation day rolled around. During the first turmoil after our London arrival, cablegrams came from at least four communities, each one doing me the honor of claiming me as its very own. Beyond proclaiming the fact that I spent more time in Atchison, Kansas, than anywhere else, discretion, it seems to me, dictates silence as to other comparative allegiances.
A considerable crop of poetry, verse, and rhyme is chargeable to our flight, some of it far more meritorious than the subject sung. From the direct-by-mail offering, with which friendly souls seem wont to deluge those whose names appear in print, I garner the following excerpts: