LADY BOUNTIFUL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21688, 5 July 1932, Page 8

LADY BOUNTIFUL

MILLIONS TO SPEND AMERICA’S WEALTHIEST WOMAN. Mrs Pindar Hemmerde, reputed to be the wealthiest woman in America, has renounced society and is living at the May Fair Hotel, Hyde Park, London, learning how to give money to the needy, and how best to dispose of ehaiity to Americans when she returns to the United States. Interviewed at her hotel she said: “I suppose the kidnapping of the Lindberg baby is responsible for°ray actions. It needed something like that to bring home to the gilded classes how bad America has really become. . “ Money is all powerful in America, Everybody scrambles for the dollars and the devil take the hindmost. And those that have money seem to think that to be happy ope must be continually dancing, drinking, going to parties, travelling round the world. Heavens! All around me I see them —chasing their own tails, getting nowhere, just animals caged in the circus of so-called civilisation. “ I intend to be myself in future—not a weak imitation of a thousand other women who have more money than they know what to do with. When I askqd my lawyer at home what to do about charity work, he said, ‘ Give me a cheque and I’ll send it to the Charity Commission.’ “ I could have given him a cheque for £1,000,000 and not felt the loss. But what good would it have done The newspapers would have ‘ written me up ’ and some puffed-up officials would have ordered new mahogany for their offices and perhaps a hundred poor devils on the bread line might have got a pair of new boots or a suit of clothes.

“ This is the biggest thing in my life. 1 was to be married again in June—to an Italian marquis. But I have told him I cannot go on with it. What years left to me I shall devote to the poor. That is why lam over here. In England you know how to do things, and I have already learned that making out fat cheques does little good. “ I intend to ask the New York Board of Aldermen to let me pull down the whole of the East Side, the gangsterinfested part of the city below 34th Street, With the aid of friends, who I know will help with money, I could build a decent quarter where there is a chance for respectable people to live. Here in London, too, I have seen slums which ought to be pulled down. It seems to me the only way to end the corruption which breeds in those spots.’ 1