Description
2632 Woodley Place Monday 9:45 p.m. Dearest, I'm awfully glad I called awhile ago. I just had a feeling you might be low tonight. From now on in perhaps it'll be easier. On the way back from dinner Hugh, Toni and I stopped in for a courtesy chat with Aunt Kate; we talked about real estate; tick bites; a boy across the way who got shot in the neck a day or two ago while playing with another boy and a gun (he had been similarly shot 5 years ago); that led to the subject of suicides from the two beautiful viaducts over Rock Creek Park near here; I brought down a sample D ration (which I got from Lucille and will eventually give to Jim) and we all had a taste; and Betty, her little French Bull, sat on my lap and licked every exposed part of me. Coming upstairs I decided it was about time I paid a neighborly call, for which I've had previous invitations, on Mr. B[?], a short, cheery man of about 50 (a grandfather several times, whose small room must have two dozen family photographs in it) - he is a consulting engineer who spends [pg 2] most of his spare time working on a formula for railroad rates; it appears to be immensely complicated. He pressed a 14 page mimeographed paper (“Copy:-To see Interested parties of Record in I.C.C. Docket 28, 300, etc. Subject: - A Proposed Check Test of Dr. Edwards’ Cost [?] By a New Formula and Procedure”) upon me and would be glad to have my considered opinion of it. There was nothing in it which the average intelligent layman could not grasp; indeed (he assured me) it was written with the same close reasoning, not talking down but just explaining carefully and in detail, as he recalled using when his 13-year-old son asked him why he smoked cigars. Mr. [B?] is a quiet, unobtrusive man (though, as I said before, cheery - in greeting and in manner); he appears to be particularly [devot?] or beguiling himself, on his own time and without recompense (in the absence of his scattered family and presumably departed wife), to instructing the Interstate Commerce Commission on that puzzling matter of railroad rates which has been a bone of contention between state and railroad for two or three generations, and to the solution of which a committee endowed with an appropriation [pg 3] of $200,000 spent five years of research, ended recently - doing this, he seemed to imply. In the same tolerant spirit in which he explained to his son just why he enjoyed smoking even though it was a foolish habit. Therefore I must not jump to false conclusions as to the articles’ obscurity by glancing first of all at the complicated tables for computing rates by the Edwards method. The [B?] method, etc., which appears in the middle of it; I need only start at the beginning and it will all be clear. I thanked Mr. [B?] for his hospitality - I had declined the cigar, but had sat on his bed during the visit - and perhaps a little prematurely, but explaining that I had letters to write, retired to be alone with you. I suppose I must be prepared for a reply sometime in the next few days. He would never ask for it, nor fix me with a zealot's eye like the Ancient Mariner, but I suspect he might be a little disappointed. At any rate, I am sure he will remain as cheery as ever, and pleasant to encounter on the street or in the house, for he appears [pg 4] to be one of those lonely people who are in reality happy in spite of it; he is full of schemes for doing things. “I'm a great one for inventing….” He says, with an amiable twinkle in his eyes and a comfortable puff on his cigar. This hasn't been a very newsy letter, honey, but I guess there's no news o consequence today. Tomorrow night - I meant to tell you on the phone - I'm going to Lucille's for dinner; I'll take care to leave the number at the telephone here so that any message can be relayed. -Have just reread your Thursday and Friday letters for something pleasant to sleep on. Goodnight darling. I love you very much. Warren.
