Ambassador Hotel
Washington, D.C.
Sat. 9/3/35
Dear thing,
From the address you will see I am holidaying today. I have had a very wearing week, culminating yesterday in a continuous 18 hour day. I started at 7 am, spent an exhausting day tramping round the Carpenter Steel Works, Reading, desperately trying to memorise all I saw and heard. At times I could make a cabalistic sign on the back of a railway ticket in the palm of my hand when not observed. In the train back to Philadelphia I wrote a rapid "aide memoire" in my note book, so that I need not bother with it until I get a stenog[rapher]. Back to Phila. at 9 pm, and found telegrams there which demanded action, so had to write until after midnight.
Bad night, and up at 7 today, and caught train here. All lines I have used so far are electrified, with monstrous electric locos. which makes a clean train but oh how I suffer from the overheating of everything here.
Arrived here at 12 noon, and after a hasty lunch of salad and apple pie, set off with 5 others on a conducted tour in a 7-seater car, very select. The driver was an extraordinarily widely read guide, and appeared really interested in what he told us. I sat by him so could ask questions. Out for 4 hours, in which we saw the main public buildings (outsides only), then Lincoln and Washington monuments, then Arlington National Cemetery, Alexandria (Washington's home town) and lastly Mount Vernon, Geo. Wash's home and burial place.
The latter is a spacious Georgian house, with wing buildings connected to it by arcaded loggias, and all sorts of outbuildings. Everything is preserved as he left it – the 4 poster beds, the Chippendale furniture, the harpsichord, the spinning wheels, and the archaic kitchen with its huge open fire and spits.
But 4 hours of George and Abe has about cloyed me with the subject – I think they run them to death a bit. Back to my hotel and had a swim by way of exercise, in the very warm pool in the basement, and in company of multitudes of plump cuties. Now writing to you to the rotten jazz and toothpaste advertisements of the radio – there is one built into the writing desk of my room. In the metaphor of our leading politicians these Yanks leave no stone unturned, no bridge uncrossed, no avenue unexplored. My room at each hotel has been full of cards and notices, exhorting me to have my suit pressed in 10 minutes, my laundry done in 6 hours, my face massaged and lifted, and so forth.
The greatest trouble I have, outside of my gammy arm, is to predict where I shall be in 3 days ahead. So far I haven't been able to do it, and have therefore got no mail (if there be any).
Well, enough of this pen-pushing for the day. Blessings on you,
Robert.