Reporter's Round

Manawatu Times, Volume 60, Issue 100, 1 May 1935, Page 6

Reporter's Round

A Day With The Factory Managers AND THE LADIES Give a boy a lolly and if he is goodmannered he will thank you, pop it into his mouth and be satislied with your generosity and the sweetness of your gift. But give it to a research worker, and there is a different story to tell. AVill he smack his lips and enjoy himsei'f for a few minutes? Not a bit of it! To him a sweet is not to be disposed of so easily and quickly. He will weigh it, smell it, record its temperature, calculate its solubility in water, work out its cubic content, put a microscope on to the sugar grains, estimate its iibru content, and the effect on your digestion. At the end of a year he will be able to bore you for an hour with a dissertation on the subject until' you wish you had not been so affable or that he had eaten the lolly. But. that is like a research worker, and he cannot help himself. You must have pity on him. Reporters attending in the course of their duties the conference of factory managers at Massey College, are having something of this boredom to put up with. The managers themselves, of course, would not admit of any such lack of enthusiasm. As a matter of fact they are lapping up every word of it as a cat would lap up the very milk they handle, or a mouse demolish the cheese of their very own making. The reporters, by the way, would have thought more of tho cheese. Take yesterday, for instance. A lecturer dealt with refrigeration. He might just as easily have told his ‘‘class” that when a gas is compressed it generates heat, and if cooled when in the compressed state, and then released, tho result is a sudden drop in temperature, even below freezing point. But no. He had a paper to read of 20 pages and more, and in the hour allotted him had disposed of seven or eight only. He was not satisfied with the elementary principle of refrigeration. He had to delve into a hundred and one other factors that appeared like so many cogs in a vast machine, without one of which the whole concern was out of gear. He talked of thermal units, the temperature of this, that, and the other, and the effect of this on that. Causes and effects were interwoven like ancient tapestry, but the design was always a freezing chamber. And always liquids and gases were mentioned —no wonder the lecturer did not dry up!—and frost and ice. It was a chilly atmosphere for a warm-blooded scribe, but the contrast was the warmth with which a vote of thanks was accorded the speaker.

WHEN WOMEN CLAN TOGETHER. A MAN’S IMPRESSIONS OE THEIR CONFERENCE. A “Times” reporter had his education furthered yesterday. It was not that he went back to school, or had a day off work to sit like an eagerheart at the foot of a benign sage. Just the reverse. The lesson was not sought of his own volition; it was meted out by some 250 tutors. The hapless one, supported only by two diffident colleagues, trod wearily the courts of women.

This alone was not (professionally) a now experience, but never before just sucli an assemblage of feminine talents as the conference of the North Wellington Federation of Women’s Institutes. Here was a veritable witenagemot; an unchartcrcd legislature whose decisions would echo across many shires. Of course, there was a lot of talking done, but it was justified by an elastic agenda. On one who, like many another male unbeliever, had long cherished an illusion of the apron string philosophy that must undoubtedly sway such a concourse, there impinged impressions of vividness, alertness, capacity, inclusiveness of interest, that caused a speedy revision of opinions. The gathering was a revelation of institute characteristics and attributes. From the platform radiated to the attentive ones (there were, of course, none others) an intelligent and well co-ordinated, if somewhat bewildering, miscellany of dietetics, folk dances, information on kindred bodies, exhortation to musical expression, ‘cufe little tips’ about the latest (baud') craft, and other topics of equal moment. And erstwhile a sheaf of business was dispatched like a row of hapless politiqucs on an autumn day when the guillotine was sparking at its best. Occasionally, of course, a pencil that should have been travelling unerringly across the “flimsy,” made a quite excusable stumble, and while it paused roving male optics meandered round the hall, just “taking it all in.” Noticeable was the fact that, even when the interest was most consuming, the knitting needles flashed unceasingly, like a home edition of perpetual motion, until one wondered whether auditory and optic senses would not become confused, and the image of an overgrown vitamin, a music festival, or a group of sworddancers be woven into hubby’s winter cardigan. But gradually, as the legion seconds of the hours marched away, the glow of enthusiasm, though noi, the emotion itself, paled from the upturned faces, and was only restored m ,ts smiling entirety when the mundane an nouncement of a belated afternoon tea finally broke up the gathering. But it was all very educating.