WEEK-END IN AMERICA

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 January 1930, Page 12

WEEK-END IN AMERICA

HOW IT IS SPENT.

The week-end is only beginning to come into its own in America (states a correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian”). A generation ago it was little practised except along the Atlantic seaboard, and even to-day it is regarded as an innovation in most parts of the Middle West, though with the growing attention in recent years to outdoor sports and the increasing number of country homes it has become much more popular. It has been helped enormously, of course, by the universal use of the automobile, which has done away with the long and dreary ride on an uncomfortable suburban train which formerly gave a melancholy beginning and end to even the pleasantest party in a country house.

Habits vary from one part of America to another, but, generally speaking the week-end house party usually begins not earlier than Saturday noon, and is more likely to end Sunday night than Monday morning, since every American male no matter what his wealth or social position, feels he must be at his desk bright and early Monday, if only to set an example to his office mates. There is a small group of the very wealthy who conscientiously imitate the week-end practices of the English county families, and their house parties have no features which are not thoroughly familiar. Lower in the social scale, or at least in the scale of wealth and ostentation, come the professional class and the business man of less important position. In the past decade, especially, these persons have been going in for country homes in addition to their flats in town, and no Sunday at one’s rural residence would be imaginable which did not include as many guests as can be packed into the house. On the whole, these week-ends are still likely to have an indoor rather than an outdoor character, although an increasing amount of attention is being given to tennis and golf. Walking, once a popular pastime, has been ruined by the automobile; the highways are almost the only place where one may indulge in pedestrianism, and since there are usually no footpaths at the side of the road one may walk only at the risk of sudden and violent death.

THE SUNDAY TOUR. Around New York at any rate, the country week-end party is likely to do a good deal of drinking. Bridge is popular; and at every country club or shore resort there is a Saturday night dance throughout the summer months. Until recently a customary feature of the average house party would be an ample Sunday morning breakfast at which the guests would be expected to appear in unison and fully clothed. To-day' the more civilised custom of trays in the bedrooms, or of special service for each guest in the breakfast room whenever he appears, is growing in popularity. The chief American substitute for the week-end out of town is, of course, the Sunday motor tour. Six-sevenths of all the world’s automobiles are in the United States, and at least sixsevenths of these would seem to be employed for recreational purposes on the Sabbath, if one may judge by

the congested highways in a hundred mile circle about every city and town. Nearly every American working man has a car, and a universal custom in summer is to drive out into the country -and have a picnic lunch under the trees. These picnickers do not always respect private property, and a feud is constantly in progress between

them and the farmers, who object to the litter they leave behind them —to say nothing of fruit stolen and flowers taken without ever a by-your-leave. The habit of going fifty or a hundred miles from home for a Sunday al fresco lunch is by no means confined to the poor. It is practised by all social ranks; one of its devotees, before he became the prisoner in the White House, was President Hoover, for whom it was a favourite recreation, and, indeed, almost his only one.

Among the most earnest devotees of the week-end are college undergraduates, both men and women. If

a young man at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton is looking- forward to a career in finance, as so many of them are nowadays, he regards the weekends of his college years as an invaluable means of making the golden con-

tacts on which his success is to be founded. A well-dressed and unattached young male, who can dance, play bridge, and remain unaffected after imbibing large quantities of rank, bootleg whisky or gin, is made welcome by the rich Long Island coun-try-house set, and if such a youth fails to appear at his classes on Monday, or turns up half-asleep he consoles himself by reflecting that ten years latei’ he can compensate for his temporary disloyalty to Alma Mater by a handsome contribution to the endowment fund.

Other young people of both sexes, who are less materially minded, find the week-end equally alluring. They visit the nearest large city for an innocent bout of theatre-going, or young men drive over in hordes to the nearest college for girls, and stay at the village inn while they indulge in concentrated social activities —dances, tea-dances, dinner-dances, and even luncheon-dances. So extensivie has this practice of deserting one’s own campus become among the young men that president Angell, of Yale, recently found it necessary to issue a public broadside against it. He declared that the habit of going away for the week-end was interfering sadly with scholastic work, and he appealed to the students themselves to discipline

those too ardently devoted to the Friday-to-Monday habit. Some other institutions have recently found it necessary to put into effect a rule forbidding departure for more than one week-end in three or four. However, the motto of the American student continues to be: “Don’t let your studies interfere with your education,” and it is safe to say that most of them won’t.