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Show Ka Lli Icon Norris Says: To Live Is to Change Hell Hyncllc nlo. WNU B'Btiire. M '111 ml m. I Now Elinor wears oily slacks and a checked shirt and disappears every ev9-nng ev9-nng half-past six to return exhausted after midnight and sleep until noon. TOM SMITH AND THE WAR Tom Smith is stubborn. lie lenmvs there's a tear on, but he can't see why it should make any difference to him or to his family. Why should his daughter work to the point of exhaustion in a defense plant? Why should his wife give four days a week to the hospital wards? Instead, why don't they do their housework, and take care of their routine work? But his wife and daughter know the ansiver. They know that "if everybody gets into this thing, and shoves ahead, our war effort will be the most titanic thing that has ever happened in this world." By KATHLEEN NORRIS THE trouble with Tom Smith is that he won't change. With the whole world changing chang-ing around him, with every day bringing its staggering new responsibilities and sweeping away the old ways of living and thinking, Tom has set himself against the current and is making his family miserable because he simply won't change. A few years ago Tom and his wife lived peacefully in a pretty home, with a nice Japanese Jap-anese maid to keep everything every-thing comfortable, with a son in college and a daughter just going into her pretty, happy late teens. They had a car and a club and neighbors and everything they wanted. But the day after Pearl Harbor the son, Bruce, enlisted in the marines; ma-rines; they don't know where he is now. Then the small maid disappeared, disap-peared, and there was nobody to take her place. So Emily Smith began be-gan to serve meals in the kitchen, and Tom hated that. Then Elinor, his daughter, took a course in something some-thing somewhere, and now Elinor wears oily slacks and a checked shirt and disappears every evening at half-past six, to return exhausted exhaust-ed after midnight and sleep until noon. Elinor is making patterns for the parts of some complicated piece of armament, and she cares for nothing in the world but that the maximum quota shall go out of the factory every week. Emily, Tom's wife, gives four days a week to hospital wards. She does the hardest, grimiest work in the world faithfully, and loves it. War Conditions Anger Tom Also, she and Elinor work continually continu-ally for the canteens, make sandwiches, sand-wiches, paste up scrap books; they buy bonds, go to Red Cross rallies; they both wear the silver button that means they have given their own blood to save the lives of unknown un-known men. All of this makes Tom mad. He grumbles and threatens; if the women in his house don't come to their senses pretty soon he'll go off somewhere and find some other women who have sense enough to know when they're well off. What do they expect of him? Didn't he always take good care of his wife and family? "On Sunday Elinor and I always make a real fuss over housekeeping," housekeep-ing," Emily Smith writes. "I have a good breakfast, put the whole house in order, wash my hair, write letters, and at three o'clock have a real Sunday dinner; chicken and biscuits and dessert. But even that doesn't please Tom, because he scolds all through everything. 'Now, this is something like! Why can't we have this sort of thing every day. House in order, nice dinner, and you two looking the way you used to!' We get so tired of it. If we say 'But there's a war,' he says, 'I know there's a war.' 'And there's food rationing.' 'I know there's food rationing.' 'And everybody EVERYBODY EV-ERYBODY has got to get into this tiling, and shove ahead, so that our war effort will be the most titanic thing that has ever happened in this world, so that our victory will be pressed down and running over three times, four times bigger than it need be, so that aggressive nations na-tions won't raise their heads for a thousand years!' 'Oh, that's just talk,' he says. "There are lots of other oth-er women better suited to nursing and engineering than you two are.' " Now, there are lots of Toms in America, and I think it's about time that they waked up to the fact that nothing has ever happened in the world before like what is happening now. We are going to hold firm to the fundamental, impalpable things that make us Americans, the divine right we have to freedom and security, se-curity, but we are going to pay away everything else we have; time, money, effort, to end the war and solidify the peace. To have your daughter idling around the house now, with a little pretense at schooling, school-ing, and a good deal of dancing and going about, would mean that our great war factories were short one Invaluable engineer. To have your son at home finishing college would mean that there was a gap in the line between two other men's sons, far out on the fighting frontiers; sons just as dear as yours. To have Emily always at home, chopping spinach and answering the telephone and putting your clothes-closet in order would mean that in some far away hospital some boy, whose life could be saved, died for lack of care. What are you made of, Tom Smith, that you don't see this? That you don't make a great adventure of it, as your wife and daughter are doing? That you don't cheer the women up when they get home tired; don't pick up an occasional dishtowel? Win the undying gratitude- and affection af-fection of those two women by suddenly sud-denly coming to your senses. Praise them for the patriotism that is making mak-ing them pour their full devotion into the country's need. Talk over dinner plans with them, ask them what you can bring home; reassure them that the heated up beans, and tea, and the bakery cookies, and the salad bowl will be plenty for you. America's Saving Spirit "Let's not overlook the good side of this time of deep anxiety," a man writes me "from Terre Haute, Ind. "God knows we would have given our lives, we older folk, to keep our boys at. home. But the change, the discipline, the broadening broaden-ing they are getting aren't all bad. And on the home front let me tell you what one woman has done. "The woman is my wife. Our three boys have been in the service for more than a year; our girl went to a coast city and is working in a defense plant. Minna was left without with-out a child, in a big empty house. "She's taken in six small boys, ages four to eight. Their working mothers pay her $10 a week for them; we have a big yard, a big attic, at-tic, and now thanks to my wonderful wonder-ful wife a big family. She is busy all day long, and laughing most of it. Our meals aren't formal; no tablecloths ta-blecloths on the long table, paper napkins, lots of peanut butter sandwiches, sand-wiches, apples and milk. But we're too busy to worry, and for the duration, dura-tion, if we can't have our own children, chil-dren, we'll have children, anyway. |
