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BEST BROADCASTS OF 1939-40
scrimped along — scrimped along on $37.50 a week which my father earned as foreman at a factory in Boston. The arrival of that wedding invitation caused great excitement, but the fact had to be faced that my father had no dress suit ; and so after quite a little talk and figuring, my parents decided to send a cut-glass water pitcher as our present and with it our regrets. That water pitcher cost just under $4. You see, going or not going, either way, set us back financially.
On the evening of the wedding my father was in a taciturn mood all through supper. Perhaps he was remembering the days when he and mother had first come to Wollaston, a young couple, full of high hopes. He knew that mother was pining for that reception, and to conceal his own disappoint¬ ment he was good and cross.
After supper I drifted out, ostensibly to play, but once out¬ side I rushed headlong to the scene of the great event. There I stood humbly gawking until well after 9 o’clock. As I wandered dreamily into our front hall, my father’s voice brought me back to my senses. “Where have you been?” he demanded. “Only up watching the wedding,” I answered, innocent of class pride, for the last time in my life. “Why, you old goat!” my father shouted at me. “You old goat!” he kept on shouting, and, grabbing me by the ear, he thumped my head down on our golden-oak dining table, while my mother made faces over his shoulder that I wasn’t to mind or get upset. “You got no earthly pride. You’re yellow! You’re as yellow as an old goat!”
Now, Mr. Weeks, how, at seventeen, could I ever have written down all that humiliation into my diary ?
Weeks. — In other words, it is only today, a good many years later, that you are able to fill in that diary without evasion ?
Gordon. — Yes, that’s quite true. It wasn’t until I reread the old diary years later that I felt the impulse to tell the whole story concealed behind those short, cryptic phrases. So you see, I have really had to write a second diary.
For example, on January 22, 1914, I wrote this sentence: “Father has bronchitis and is at home.” Packed away in those few words is the whole story of his fresh-air fad.
You see, father had been a sailor for a good many years, and he liked exercise. He joined a gymnasium class in the Y.M.C.A., and eventually we received an invitation to go to
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