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typed letter Chicago, May 19, '73 Dear Jack: underlined WATERGATE HEARING: How much Senator Talmadge
reminds me of Will Rogers. Likeable reactionary, Talmadge.
Your letter of May 15 with clippings received today. Thanks for everything and the reading matter you mention. I still get much pleasure re-reading books you've sent in past years. I trust you and family are well, and I am my usual self, though I think I'll go to NW Univ. clinics soon for a check-up, as I could feel a bit more energetic.
To repeat, my acquaintance with Ellen Hire started in 1961, upon the occasion of my
first visit to England after 37 years. When I visited Dave Tullman at his lodgings - where Ellen had the lease on a number of rooms (then Mrs. Cleaver), Dave insisted I come and stop at those lodgings during my stay in London, which I did for a few days before leaving for a visit to Paris. Of course, I paid Ellen, and while I knew she was no angel, she began a corr- espondence with Mabel and myself. We made the long written in blue ink 1965 trip to visit her at Southampton, so she knew where we were when we established ourselves at Maidstone. Previously I had arranged for her to meet you and Mrs. Conroy when you first came to England, paying her expenses, but until she and her husband (?) and another man came who was an ex railroad man and a good electri- cian, I never really knew how common and vulgar she could be, though I suppose this is what happens to people exposed to poverty and degradation over a long period. She imposed on Mabel and myself, though her electrician friend did us some favors by rewiring our almost new vacuum cleaner that had to be changed to conform to the higher voltage over there, and with her husband (?) put in a face bowel upstairs in our tear-ass (terrace) flat, all paid for. The three stayed eight days, and Ellen tried to run the house, which my wife accepted in good humor. While at the house she used to bawl her husband out loudly (I think he suffered from a permanent erection condition, as he liked to veer conversations around to sexual topics). And when my wife went with Ellen shopping, Ellen thought nothing of calling out to men on the street. After paying the men for doing the work, I called the electrician in and told him to be sure never to bring THAT WOMAN back, yet, while I was over here awaiting Mabel's return, he did come back with her. Ellen wrote to us later, but I never replied and by that time my wife could hardly work up the energy for a letter. The old goat she lives with is a merchant seaman, or was, working on ships in the passenger trade between Southampton and South Africa. He owns the house where they live, high up on possibly the highest hill in Southampton, where I got my one and only view of Winchester Cathedral.
Yes, I admire Shirley McLaine (also Jane Fonda) for her humanity, remember how she denounced Daley's cops
during the 1968 Democratic convention here. When I first saw her emerging from one of those Hollywood premieres, I told Mabel that here was a comer, as Shirley had just made her first movie after having fallen heir to a stage part, The Pajama Game, I think it was. I remember how, after that convention night, Mayor Daley tried to convince Walter Cronkite that his cops had been fighting communists, but Walter (and later the FBI) was unconvinced. Lying in bed one night about two weeks ago, I heard one of those re-hash, fill-in Cronkite comments CBS uses for continuity in the wee hours. Cronkite told of a letter he had received just then from a Muncie, Ind. supporter of Nixon, who said that the Watergate matter was being blown-up out of reason. I couldn't resist telling Cronkite (no supporter of Nixon) that the Muncie man was like the kid who asked the White Sox pitcher to say it wasn't so - during the Black Sox scan- dal of 1919 here in Chicago. I also told Cronkite about the brakeman from Muncie, who came back from working at the far end of his railroad a month or so, and was met at Muncie station to be told by a brakeman pal that the returning brakeman's wife had been in bed with every man in Muncie during his absence. "Oh, well, " said the cuckolded one, "after all, Muncie ain't such a BIG town." Those wanting to hear the last of Nixon's bungling band of buggers (imagine how funny that word sounds to the British/Irish), refusing to believe (as did the Germans re Adolph) Nixon, the great pay-triot could do such things. As much as I can I follow the whole Watergate business, knowing Dick was behind the whole business; old stuff to him. And while it was to have been foreseen that Nixon would give much to the financial interests who run the nation, few would have believed we could have such inflation. Imagine, the poorest grade of hot dogs selling at a dollar a pound! The success of the meat abstainers is being played down by the meat packers and farm groups, but the consumer is slowly getting wise to his own power, and many are having meatless days now - no problem to the pensioners, of course. In California the boycott was a great success, and here also. The way the profiteers have acted is a sure sign they think their friend Nixon will permit this gouging. Occasional TV film shots of the trading in various commodities in Chicago, give the lie to the old crap about the law of supply and demand. People who never handle anything but paper make fortunes on necessities, with no govt protection for the consumers. Two oldtime Evanston grain traders,
OVER
written in blue ink in left-hand margin (-Did you know that Hollywood got its name from a N.W. side Chgo area?)
(Beverly Hills was here first also.)