A Letter Written on May 16, 1940

[Some paragraph breaks added for ease of reading.]

Bessie B. Nesbit
Mount Holyoke College
South Hadley, Mass.

Thurs. May 16, 1940

Dear Mama & Papa,

Received your welcome letter yesterday. I will be thinking about you both while Papa is taking his place in the ministerial horde. If we should move I'll be home to do my part. Don't hesitate to tell me any news.

Yesterday was the big day for Lisa and me for we had Mr. and Mrs. Bailey to dinner. It went off swell. They are a very homey sort of people. They entered right into the conversation & we all had a swell time. Mr. Bailey asked us what we thought the student opinion toward the war was and if it had changed. We told him that we thought it had changed a lot, etc. He asked me how I thought the kids reacted to the C. I. O. organizer that we heard a couple of weeks ago and I told him that of course the kids who had employers as fathers didn't like to have their fathers called wily. He said that he hadn't wanted to have the man & thought that he would have that kind of effect.

We had a lot of fun talking about Methodists because he, Lisa, & I were in a brotherhood as one might say.

One bad faux pas was made which I didn't realize till afterward when Sylvia De Santis (she's the Italian girl) said she hadn't liked Mr. Bailey so much. When Mr. Bailey found that I had been in Europe, he asked me my frank opinion of the Italians as I saw them and I told him the incident of the gendarme. He matched it with a couple of even worse stories & said that he had gone to Italy especially to see if his opinion of Italians wasn't exaggerated but found them even worse. He practically called them damned guineys (?) (you know what I mean).

The Baileys went to Europe last summer. Mrs. Bailey & the two children stayed in Paris while Mr. Bailey tramped over central Europe. Mrs. Bailey told us all about the new house they have must moved into. We got to talking about pets and Mr. Bailey said that they had a dog a cat and a canary & that they were going to get a Siamese cat in Springfield after dinner. He said he thought that a fancy cat like that would probably turn out to be so dumb it would fall out of a tree but Mrs. Bailey had her heart set on having one and he thought they were kind of cute looking. It really was a swell evening & I'll tell you more about it when I see you.

Wed. night I waited in the private dining room. Some of The Great celebrities were there including Mr. & Mrs. Ham, Mr. & Mrs. Skinner (the Skinners) etc. They had clear soup and Ritz crackers; whole lobsters, split with F. F. potatoes & asparagus; mixed salad with either Fr or Roquefort dressing, home made cheeze [sic] crackers; and vanilla ice cream with strawberry sauce and cookies. They had quite a bit of trouble with the lobster claws because no nut crackers were to be had. They were all in evening dress and the dinner was served with éclat including place plates cigaretts etc. It was given for a Mr. Macbeth who was going to give deliver an art lecture that evening. I will probably get from 30-40 cents out of it plus the desert [sic] which the cook saved for us. There were two waitresses.

Lisa is going to ask the Adamses to dinner on Sun. I hope they can come.

The only other piece of news I have to add now is that a no. of people have been fined for damage to their rooms. I haven't but one girl I was talking to was fined $4.25. I think that's a lot. Don't you?

About the financial situation; I will probably need from $35-$40 to pay the book store laundry, Chem. breakage etc.

I haven't heard anything about the fine for not signing out yet but I probably will in a couple of day[s], Worse Luck! I sent a card to Dan on Mon. Oh a dollar or two would kind of tide me over till my next N. Y. A. check.

I started menstruating yesterday & felt kind of bad before the dinner but took Dr. Reade's medicine & felt fine. Today I feel sort of under the weather but that's all. My cold seems to have disappeared. I think it might have been a touch of Hay Fever or some thing similar because I sneezed a lot & so did Sally. I think that caused my head ache last Sat.

Take care of yourselves & please don't worry about my room.

Lots of love,
Bessie

P.S.
Sally gave me a picture of herself.