“COME RIGHT IN.”

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 388, 20 March 1937, Page 2

“COME RIGHT IN.”

American Home Life. America as a country, its habits, and its pec pie, is the butt for a great deal of criticism an.l comparatively few people have written in praise of it. states a writer in the 1 Cape Times. Most of the articles published about America, and Americans are written by journalists and travellers who have only spent a biieff while, perhaps merely in New York, and who gather their impressions from the certain .section of the public they happen to have met, which, in a town as cosmopolitia.ii as New York, is absurd.

The Americans' as I know them!— and I have lived among them and beside them for many years—are very different people from the cocktaildrinking squanders of money, or from the rough-tongued, uneducated crook, Gr_ glib, slick business men we are supposed to recognise as American types. They say there are no homes in America, but I found homes there. There are families living in Boston, Massachusetts, that are every bit as circumspect and birth-conscious as old English families. Families where things are “done,” and are “not done”—'Where life is graceful and there is an appreciation of beautiful things and intellectual pursuits; where are passed sitting round the fire and the spending of much money on lavish display is considered bad taste and ostentatious. Even in New York there are homes where the solid business people live uneventful lives with their wives and children, to whom they are devoted —people who he idly know what cocktails are and have never been in a night cluib. Out in the- We.rt and down in the South of America are graceful white homes, where the family gathers together on Sunday afternoons to sit on the stoep. Where neighbours drop in for a chat and a corn roast or barn dance Is the height of excitement. Hospitality Genuine and Simple. There are log cabins where I have spent long summer evenings sitting on the rough stoeps, yarning and driking coffee; there are summer '.louses out along the lake shores where the hospitality is genuine and simple, and where you just feel at home. The password in America and particularly in the West, is “Come right in.” The great mass of Americans live simply, although comfortably, and they spend their two or three weeks’ leave in taking the family for a motor trip. Even the moneyed Americans, and there are still a few of them left* if they are of good family and intellect, do not. behave as the popular articles; films and books would have us believe. A millionaire friend of my own, a widower, would leave a dinner party' immediately after the coffee, to see that his kiddies were in bed and to say good-night to them. This pre sents a. very different picture from the millionaire of fiction, whd fills hi?j house with noisy parties, while his children fret, unnoticed, upstairs. There is a lot of bunk talked about

America and the American people. The few who travel noticeably—the loud-voiced, ignorant type and those featured in the magazines and newspapers, are doomed to bo the recognised American type—just as the affected Englishman, who went to America years ago as a remittance man, is doomed to represent England as a type in the minds of many Americans.