The Wilmington morning star., 1947-03-08
As Pegler Sees 1t
BY WESTBROOK PEGLER

you may have to live in a tent or a trailer,
never me to stand in the path OF progress
with an appraised hand.
Maybe you won't come, but others will and
a couple of hundred thousand have already.
There is work to be done and adding and l
recall that when the Florida boomS were 60
ing I W as one of those who thought they
were artificial and hysterical and that thous-
ands Of pretty homes along both coasts in
land would go to ruin in a few years. Prob
ably there were some who thought the same
about the modern California booms, too, but
look at Florida and California now.
This is a new land, a frontier for sure,
and pioneers do not plan exactly how their
lives shall go, nor many other human beings
either.
In a discussion with Prof. Ernest Hopkins,
then president of Dartmouth, a few years
ago, I suggested that too few college stu
dents had a definite objective and that the
boy was fortunate who had a bent and was
aiming at a career. Doctor Hopkins said that
when he Was a student he had no ambition to
be a college president nor any idea that he
ever would be one. He just followed his nose,
and fate happened to him.
Jack Lynch, the managing editor Of the
Republic and Gazette in Phoenix, walked into
the office one day rs years ago on a tip that
they needed a copyreader. He knew absolute
ly nothing about the newspaper business but
he urgently needed to establish relations with
| a payroll for eating purposes after 10 days
in town, and when the boss asked him if he
could ready copy he said, you are in luck"
When he had balled up some country cor
respondence from Mesa, the boss took him
into his office and, pointing to a pile On his
desk, said: Look, these are cuts. We use
them to reproduce pictures in newspapers,
and these are mats. By a slightly different
process we use them for the same thing.
Now do you think you could successfully put
these in individual envelopes and write the
correct names On the envelopes which we
will then store in a file that we call the
morgue in the newspaper business?"
Mr.. Lynch said: why, that is my special
ty.'' and he has never worked in any other
shop these Is years.
That is the way careers and futures hap
pen and I certainly don't compare the incon-
venience of the modern covered wagoneers
who live in the trailer courts, most of them
only temporarily. to the hardships of the peo-
pie who pushed into Kansas IS years ago. 1
know people in New York whose parents were
born in sod huts in Kansas. and Marquis
James book about his childhood in the Cher
okee strip, published last year, tells some
what the same story.
Some of the trailer people complain that
there are no recreational facilities for their
children in some camps. but that is a modern
affectation of people who think children can't
play except in public Fairgrounds. equipped
with ball yards laid out by engineers and
with gymnasium apparatus. A string and
yarn ball covered with black tire tape and
a nickel bat were in the minimum essential
playground facilities for the boys not so long
ago and the bases were measured with the
naked eye and consisted Of rocks or the play
ers' caps. The girls got along with no more
than a skipping rope or some jacks and a
rubber ball.
A young reporter whose child had asthma
had to come out to Phoenix a couple of
years ago. He did have some money and
bought a trailer in a camp for s., 700 and,
after a year or so, sold it for 81. 500 and got
a house. On the other hand. 1 know of a
young fellow who also had some soldier
money and a wife and baby but tossed the
money away helling around the jukes and
thought that because he put in a couple of
years on MP duty in the United States the
government ought to hold his hand and
change the baby and all like that. A great
deal depends On the individual. Perhaps it is
all up to him.
The trailer people do live a little apart
and some of them settle and some drift
along, but, whether settling or drifting, they
are all kinds, including ambitious young re-
spectables, old people c~oasting to the end and
working as they may and, OF course, the IN
evitable and uncertain proportion of ne'er-do-
wells.
Nowhere else in the United States have l
seen so much new housing as in the regions
of Phoenix and Tucson in these last two
years. The prices are very high for what
you. get, but SO were they in Florida during
the booms and Florida has not gone back
to palmettos and weeds, although, of course,
some subdivisions were terrible turkeys and
many individual buyers lost money. Many
middie-aged buyers died. Families grew up
or broke up. Homes changed hands. Anyway
a new beautiful state was made.
You may have heard of Del E. Webb, who
bought into the New York Yankees with Dan
Topping and Larry MacPhail. He is quite a
man around Arizona. During the war he built
Fort Huachuca, a very big job, and %altogeth-
err about half of the government war con-
s~truction projects in the state. Twelve years
ago this man had his office in a little build
ing that was not much more than a shack,
with his living quarters upstairs, and Mrs.
Webb was keeping the books. Now his name
is plastered over most of the big building
jobs in town. Way back about the time OF the
First World War he pitched a little for Salt
Lake and Oakland. but l hear he wasn't
much better than fair. At that. though. he
could have been better than Branch Hickey,
the general manager Of the Brooklyn firm,
who did some catching for the old Highland
ers in New York, and Webb sums up his
career by saying, 81 still can't understand
how l ever thought l was a ballplayer or
made anyone else think so.'
But those are big construction jobs. Other
builders have put up how many small homes
l wouldn't try to guess, but, anyway, rows
of them, and in some areas there is no Off
cial count because the law doesn't require
any registration, SO some new houses are
f~ugitives from the tax rolls.
Where do they work? Where does who
work? One works for Smith in a store. an
other for Jones in a service station, others
in the aluminium factory where they are
making metal sash TO supply the demand for
new housing. They work all around. Last
year you could hardly find metal sash and