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typed letter information for him by 'phoning the Milwaukee R.R. yards. Nowadays one can get from here to there as quickly as one would on a passenger train, if you get on one of those trains in special piggyback service. Passenger trains often take siding for fast freights (time freights), I had that experience on the Sou. Pac. last year in the Sierras.

  I am now trying to develop a short story about the Polish cleaning women who used

to ride the Milwaukee Avenue streetcar line years ago - wearing what the English call "mob caps," boudoir caps. It used to be amusing to see them coming into the loop from various parts of town and outside, wearing those caps in the milder weather. Babushkas, popular for many years amongst all classes of women in America for many years, were first worn by the cleaning women at a time when Chicago had the distinction of a city where most women were hatless much of the year. I must visit the offices of a Polish newspaper to get more information as to language levels in Poland, whether, like in Germany and even England, there are different classes of Slavic speech - workingclass, middle and upper classes. This short story will be one of several that I intend to put into a book concerning Chicago people, largely in Depression time. The hot weather and asthma have held me back lately, previous to that it was something like inertia, really inability to see how certain fabrications or plots could be realized.

 My son was to have been here around Aug. 3, has been touring Northern California

with his wife and family last week. No notice of any change in plans, which is just about the way kids act nowadays, though I think his useless wife may have had some- thing to do with the change, and he hates to write. When I think of what he and his sister had to do without during the Depression, I can forive them everything, and if I succeed in writing anything worthwhile, you'll read a story that will equal anything you may have read about human misery during that awful time, and another reason holding me back is that I realize people don't just want to read a lot about human misery, also, that anyone attacking the system is not really popular with publishers.

                                                                                                              Lotsa Luck, written in blue ink Mead

written in blue ink P.S. underlined The Pennsylvania R.R. now has taken over N.Y.C. - closed the Englewood yard recently.