Sunday, March 20, 2016

WHEN THE REAL ELEANOR ROOSEVELT VISITED CHS

If you plan to attend the Eleanor Roosevelt "appearance" today at The Woodland, you may want to know that the real first lady visited Maplewood once before in 1953, when she met some Columbia High School students.

In her then-regular syndicated column, Mrs. Roosevelt noted her visit on March 11, 1953.

Read that portion below:
After spending a short time at the office of the American Association for the United Nations on Monday, I went out to Maplewood, N.J., to speak at the Columbia High School.
The group of young people who invited me had been inspired to study our international situation by an editorial they had read in their school paper. This was written by a pessimistic young author, who felt that life wasn't really very much worth living unless we learned how to get rid of war. His feelings are shared by other young people, so they had prepared rather carefully the questions which they wished to ask me after my talk. The time was too short really to feel that I had given them what they needed, but I hope I started them thinking along new lines. 
I had a brief meeting there with the New Jersey state chairman of the AAUN and some of the Maplewood chapter members. A local lawyer is soon to hold a meeting and talk against the Covenant on Human Rights, so they wanted to know how I saw the situation at present. I have no way of knowing, of course, whether the State Department will change the positions taken up to now on these Covenants nor what their efforts are going to be in this next session, but I hope we will hear more about it very soon from Mrs. Lord.

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