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Show DP WIMP CORNELIUS 1 VANDERBILT. JR. ii;elcascd by Writern Newspaper Union.) Points to the Northwest Sun Valley is the only resort I ever visited that really looks like you expected it would. It's a movie set in real life, from the spacious, expensive Lodge, to the quaint Ty-rolese Ty-rolese village with its wide-eaved roofs and its statues of sculptured ice. The surrounding mountains, caked in hundreds of feet of snow, resemble the Alps. The thermometer thermom-eter hovers around 10 degrees above by day, drops 20 degrees at night; and the air is crisp and exhilarating. exhilarat-ing. There is a ski-shop run by a Swiss' refugee, who works Indian patterns into twentieth-century practicalities. There is a night club called "The Ram," which looks like a Tyrolese drinking place. There are Austrian ski instructors, Bavarian skaters, Prussian waiters, Czechoslovakian hangers-on! Noted several well-known persons including young Studebaker in wheel-chairs being pushed about by nurses. These invalids are the guests who've cracked up coming down! One of the importations from Europe pioneered in Sun Valley is the chair type of ski-lift. It is known as the Chairway to the Stars, and is a little over two miles long. It ascends a vertical height of 3,200 feet, on 9,200-foot Baldy mountain. This lift (160 chairs) cost a quarter million dollars to build. Off at noon for Twin Falls, Idaho.-Dined Idaho.-Dined en route at a Japanese lunch counter in Shoshone, 33 miles south. The waitress was a dainty little Jap, not quite five feet tall, called Susie Nakata. She had been born 24 summers sum-mers previously on a nearby ranch, and had lived all this time in and around Shoshone, a town of not over 1,500 Inhabitants. Susie had never been to Sun Valley, or Twin Falls; once to Salt Lake City! Left next noon and drove 200 miles to Idaho Falls, to address the Knife and Fork club there. Was followed by MaJ. George Fielding Eliot Afterwards Aft-erwards on to Publisher J. F. Mc-Dermott's Mc-Dermott's delightfully comfortable house, and his charming guests. Caught a midnight day-coach for Pocatello. Chatted en route with brilliant J. A. Nelson, traveling freight adjustment agent of a railroad rail-road in the West. Changed trains in Idaho's metropolis, where Idaho potatoes are now selling at 40 cents a hundred pounds, to the Portland Rose. Ten hours' sleep in a Pullman. Pull-man. Off next afternoon at Pendleton, Pen-dleton, Ore., the city made famous by the roundups. My car met me here and we left immediately. Three hours later pulled into Lewiston, for the night. Earlier in the afternoon the hotel basement had been afire. Interested in press report that Idaho tops U. S. in healthiest recruits at army camps. Only 3.2 per cent of its draftees have been rejected! Then on to Moscow, and the Idaho State university. Twenty-four per cent of the students here are women. wom-en. Men study chiefly forestry, mines, law. Learned Moscow is not named for the Russian city, but is an Indian derivative, such as Bosco, Wasco, Tako, etc. Received the following letter from Bill Parker, written in Cannes, AIpes-Maritimes, Occupied France: "Having been a Reuter's correspondent corre-spondent in the Sino-Japanese war and a civilian observer in this war of Europe, I don't think much of wars or the people who conduct them ... I came over here at the outbreak, on the first American freighter to go through the British contraband control, and with the determination de-termination of enlisting in an American Ameri-can volunteer regiment, believing that it represented a Great Cause. The American regiment did not materialize, ma-terialize, and I was a volunteer with an American ambulance unit. Unquestionably Un-questionably I saw more of the war than many other American writers. And I debunk war as much as you debunked American society in your 'Farewell to Fifth Avenue.' I was brought before a summary court martial as a German spy-suspect in a French village where nobody spoke English, and was saved by German shells falling on the root of the peasant's house where I was being tried. I was the only American Ameri-can eye-witness of an actual big battle bat-tle between the French and the Germans, Ger-mans, as far as I can determine. I was trapped by the Germans in another little village and was among them for six weeks. A great many humorous as well as tragic things happened. I was in the exodus from Paris, which I still think was the silliest and most inexcusable Sight in all history. SEEING THINGS: In Walla Walla, Wal-la, Wash., passed a "Pantorium" which presses, cleans, sponges pants. In Pueblo, Colo., saw a "Locketeria" which specialized in fitting keys to odd types of locks. In Mount Vernon, Wash., saw a Norwegian Nor-wegian farmer with a 1918 Model T drawing a plow across a field. Upon questioning found he came from Narvik in the 'nineties Puget Sound climate more comparable to it than any other be knew. Imagine current European history-in-the-making has greatly changed his homeland. |