Evening Star Newspaper, January 12, 1930, Page 96

SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, 7J;\NUARY 12, 1930: In This Article Miss Hurst Takes Up the Subject of Our Scurrying American Life and She Seeks a Reason for It All—The Amusements of Main Street and the General Pell-Mell Life of a Modern City—An- other Article by This Writer in the Magazine of Next Sunday’s Star. HE most appalling aspect of the rusk and crush of American life lies not in the fact that we are indubitably the most energetic, nervous and highest-geared people in the world. Much, it is true, has been written and spoken on that score. Visiting foreigners com- ment, gape at our speed, the nervous energy of our methods and the general pell-mell, make-haste, step-lively, watch-your-step tenure of American life as it is lived today. All true enough, but in themselves neither meretricious nor damning. The great joke on us is not that we make haste, but where are we rushing? What do we do with this leisure for which we so fran- tically scurry through the days? Once we have it, then what? For what do we scramble for trains, hurry for appointments, rush for ferries, strain through the day’s work, bolt luncheons, waggle frantically at the hooks of telephones, send messengers scurrying, keep the cables and the telegraph wires humming? Whither why? Wherefore? TAKE any fair-sized American community— gaze upon it from a plane’s-eye view; walk through its turbulent streets, talk with its nervously keyed business men; see its scurry- ing automobiles and taxicabs, observe the rush for trains and boats, feel the hurry, the scurry, the haste, the waste, and then watch this city complete its hurried workaday. See its nervous men and women pour from out office buildings, shops, subways, trams or motors and turn their tense faces toward home and the relaxation for which they have so hurriedly toiled all day. Think of how they have strained for this moment. The girls in offices; men on big or little business deals; truck drivers stepping on the gas; men, women, children, rushing through the day; rushing toward their chores, young Two Lady Continued from Fourteenth Page but a fortunate gust of wind blew her away just in time. It didn’'t help matters -much, though, for it carried her directly towards the high tension wires that stretched above a rail- road. Suddenly the course changed and she swayed above an apple orchard and then floated down. “I've never jumped since, and probably I never shall,” she says now. “That ended it. Some day I would like to pilot a plane. But I don't know whether or not I'll be able to do it.” Mrs. McFarland was the forty-fourth member of the famous club. She is slender and fair, graceful and fem- inine, but admits that she was a youthful tom- boy. Now her only interest in sports centers in aviation. She is employed as a bookkeeper in a business firm at Canton, Ohio, but admits that once in a while the rows and rows of numbers develop wings. And when she looks from the window she sees a slender figure swaying high in the air while thousands of people watch below. “MY work is interesting,” she adds, speaking of the prosaic task which is hers now. “And, anyway, that's the way it goes!” Fay Gillis’ career didn’t end when she jumped to save her life. Rather, it was merely be- ginning, and it’s been going forward merrily ever since, When she became a member of the sales or- ganization of the Curtiss Flying Service re- cently, she had the distinction of being the first airplane saleswoman to be employed by a na- tional firm. Miss Gillis is extremely matter-of-fact on the subject of her descent from an airplane on September 1, 1929, while flying with Lieut. John L. H. Trunk over Curtiss Field, Long Island. She and the test pilot had taken up an ex- perimental plane, which “flew to pieces” whu.e they were in it. “My sensations as I was coming down? ~You ®ee, I really didn't have time to go having sen- Apanead syt “Everybody in America rushes. Foreigners stop to gape at us.” annie Hurst This drawing by Hanson Booth was made especially for this article, and it gives the artist’s impression of scurrying American life. girls and bdys eager to be free of the restraint of workaway, and out into the world of leisure and recreation. Watch them. What then? THE kind of recreation for which the vast majority has strained through the long exacting day is of a brand to make your heart ache for the waste of vitality. Rushing Amer- ica uses its leisure in one third-rate fashion after another. Rushing America struggles for recreation that is not worth the candle in its tawdry, temporary surcease from the rushing reality of another day. Amusement, variety, gayety, fun and plenty of it, are as essential to youth as nourishi food, but rushing young America seems know neither discrimination nor temperance in the pursuit of these essentials. The result is that the third-rate forms of amusement and diversion thrive, and palaces of cheap enter- tainment, gaudy dance halls line the main streets of sizeable towns all over the country. Leisure is something you cram with these indigestible, cheap and unintelligent hours of so-called entertainment. Even that new and popular indoor-sport known as the radio does not help the dilemma of young America trying to use its leisure. So much that comes on the astonishing wings of this new device is in key with the cheap and tawdry entertainment of the dance and music hall. And young America does not seem Flyers Join sations,” Miss Gillis admits. *“I knew what was happening to me, and I knew there was nothing to worry about. We had been flying upside down; and when our plane went into a nose dive, I knew something was wrong. I just loosened the belt which strapped me in and sort of fell out of the plane. “The next thing I knew I was pulling on a rip cord, and before I had time to analyze my feelings I had landed between the tops of two trees that were very close together. I swung myself over to one of them. And .. .” She paused and shrugged her shoulders at that part of the story. “Well, there I was, much to my embarrassment, with one foot caught in some twigs and what looked like a couple of thousand people milling about under the tree below me. “After a bit an old man climbed up and re- leased my shoe, and then somebody found a stepladder, and I climbed down. A policeman just sort of cleared the way, and we made a grand dash for the car.” 5 ND that is all there is to it, the second feminine, blue-eyed member of the Cater- pillar Club insists, except that she was back in a plane a half hour later acting as her own pilot. The next day she was on the field at her regular class, for she was a student at the gul;tlss Flying Service School located on the eld. Miss Gillis received her ground and flying training in the Curtiss schools at New York University and at Valley Stream, Long Island. She went into aviation because her father, John H. Gillis, a consulting and designing en- gineer, insisted that she decide between going back to school and learning to fly. She had been a student at Michigan State College last year, but left because she found college dull. Her father’s proposition sounded good, for she didn't want to be a co-ed and she did want to be an aviatrix! Miss Gillis started flying on August 6 and received her license two months and three days after she started instruction. She was born in Minneapolis, but has lived in a number of sufficiently on to itself to realize to what extent, and in some ways how comically, as well as how tragically, it is rushing its way into pre- mature tiredness and old age for something that is not worth rushing for. How long must it take the young mind to begin to realize that it is not missing any- thing by passing up the usual rounds of pleas- ure as they are doled out by the usual methods. A GOOD book is apt to contain infinitely more adventure, amusement, delight, ex- citement, beauty, wisdom and entertainment than most of the dreary rounds of the streets. There is no limit to the adventure of delving into a good book. There are such pathetically defined limitations to the delights of Main street. Such evenings usually add up to zero. Ever try and look back and remember what you did on one or another of the Saturday nights? ‘They stick together in a heavy lump of unde- fined memory in the mind. Not worth cata- loguing. Not sufficiently differentiated to mat- ter. One evening like another and still youth goes rushing along in the frenzied fear that it is missing something. . A cruel way to cieck up on the futility is to indulge in we<kly stock taking. Nothing to show for evening after evening of leisure. Nothing to show for those hours of rush except leisure hours of third-rate pastime. It is a sorry inventory—enough to drive a mind to work! Indeed, recreation has driven many a good mind to so-called work. If you can call work the lubricating process of feeding the mind Lectures are supposed to have been driven from the platform by the radio, the movie and the automobile. That is no doubt largely true, but there are still men and women of international reputation for achievement in one field or another whose informative talks upon their specialtics can make “The Woes of Tottie Coughdrop” as they move across the screen look pretty cheap. It is true that symphony concerts are be- ~ ginning to arrive grandly into the home via radio, but the great difficulty about the radio is that for every worthwhile form of enter- tainment there are atrocities in the way of leisure-wasters coming along the air to pester the silence and riddle solitude. The waste of leisure is like the waste of water power, sun power, electric power. It is waste of brain power. It is as if a man, rushing to an ocean pier, were to let his ship sail away without him, while he remained back to sail a toy boat in the harbor. All “het” up and no place to go. That's us! All speeded up and no place to go when we get the time for going, ‘There must be more second-rate entertain- ment consumed in America during its leisure hours of evening than there are miles of unread books lying on dusty shelves; mol- dering while we abuse, instead of use, our leisure. (Copyright, 1930.) the Caterpillar Club States. New York City has been her home for the last six years. “Flying has always held a strong appeal, and it will forever more,” she insists. “I like swimming, tennis, basket ball and track, too . . . anything but golf! And I'm interested in art. I've kept house too long to be violently interested in domestic art, though.” Miss Gillis keeps house for her father, sister and brother. She rides gayly through the clouds by day and then goes home to bake a chersy pie and wash the cups and saucers. Life is loads of fun, no matter what she is doing! JUST now Miss Gillis is tremendously inter- ested in marketing her salesmanship. “I see no reason why a woman, particularly @ woman who is herself a pilot, should not be a good aid to other women in choosing a plane,” she says. Miss Gillis is going to assist in putting the feminine touch in aircraft. She has discovered that women are especially interested in in- teriors and color schemes of planes, just as they are in automobiles. And some day, maybe not so far away, when they fly to tea parties and luncheon engage- ments as easily as to business, and the adven- ture element will he lessened when airplanes seek the clouds, women will want crimson or blue or orchid ships. And if they want them, they should have them, according to those who are pioneering in aircraft salesmanship. They are convinced that the commercial side of avia- tion is growing steadily. And if a woman wants to sell a combination of speed and com- fort, and maybe thrills, aeronautic salescraft will answer her purpose. DURING the four years that have elapsed between Mrs. McFarland’s sensational parachute jump and the leap to safety which Miss Gillis made, aviation has taken a serious turn, away from the spectacular, as is demon- strated by the experiences of the two woman members of the Caterpillar Club themselves. One had gone into the clouds in the gay, buccaneering days of old when aerial acrobatics AV CERR A were at their height. The other is entering it on a purely business basis—although the thrills do help, of course—and her predecessor in the Caterpillar Club admits that she, too, would like to enter the sky as a pilot the next time. Aviation has grown up. Fay Gillis is going right along with it, and Irene McFarland would like to do so, too. They stand in a class alone, the only two women who have jumped with parachutes to save their lives . ., , very slim and straight and fearless and . . . feminine! “One doesn’t have to be masculine to enter aviation,” they insist. “Nor to join the Cater- pillar Club, either!” (Copyright, 1930.) Success With Tested Herds OCK COUNTY, WIS, stands as one of the most striking examples of the economic advantages to the farmer of tuberculosis eradi- cation work among the dairy herds. When the first test work was undertaken in 1925 the herds of this country were found to b2 14 per cent infected. Singce that time more than 8,000 head of cattle have been slaughtered, bringing the infection down to less than half of 1 per cent, yet the farmers are receiving half a million dollars a year more in revenue than they did in 1925. With the removal of the reactors careful restocking was undertaken with a 20 per cent gain in production the first year and a continued increase up to the 50 p:r cent figure now prevailing. The increased income received by the farmers is largely due to a better price for their better milk and higher returns from the sal: of sur- plus cattle. Poultry and swine raisers have acted upon the results of the cattle tests and are breeding only from tuberculin tests hogs and chickens with a corresponding better price for their products. The swine raisers receive a flat 10 per cent premium above regular prices because of the fact that their stock comes from a modi- fled accreditdd area. vadhte o