From Phyllis Goldschmid, 11 March 1946, Shelton, Washington -- "you can loll in the sun all day"

Murray and Rosa were in Washington, D.C., finishing up Murray's Army duties.

Dear Murray and Rosa, 

We were very glad to get your letter and to hear that you are well and doing interesting things. We too had started many a letter to you, but now Johanna is at an age where she is worse than a household pest and is scampering all over everything, so that she requires a great deal of watching and so our firm vows turn to nothing.  Apparently I had you on my mind so much that I had a very interesting dream about you and Carmen and Bill. You

Bill Fett's fighters

were, in my dream, fighting a very uneven war on the side of the dark people of the world who were trying to get rid of their yoke…and somehow you received one of my frivolous letters after a horrible battle in which the opposition had thrown in some terrible professional troops and you were very hurt that under those conditions I should chide you for not writing a letter to us. Really, it was very sad and very real and it made me feel bad for days.

We were very interested in all your news… we would love to hear more of Howard’s travels in Europe… Did Leila go to the University of Chicago and do anything with her Soc.  I remember how worried I was about a girl who went to school without planning to use it…her training, you know…but now I see her point of view much more clearly.

We hope that you are planning to spend at least a month in Shelton when you get back. We can give your privacy so you can write and loaf…we are fixing up the backyard with that in mind… You can loll in the sun all day and Johanna will be trained to leave you alone…really.

Phyllis and Johanna, probably by Rosa Morgan

Our move is still in the dim dim future now the rumor is two or three years… and we are hoping by then they will have some sense.

We heard Paul Robeson talk a couple of weeks ago at a Spanish Refugee… African Affairs rally. He was wonderful. For my money he doesn’t have to sing. We looked up at home the Woolcott profile on him in While Rome Burns … if you haven’t read it or have forgotten it it’s worth reading again.

We are getting more and more unhappy at the anti-Russian talk. There may be things wrong there, but I don’t think that it’s anything that Mr. Churchill and his crowd can fix. 

This is not much of a letter, but I have to go to the dentist. We are looking forward to seeing you.

Very much

PG

from Phyllis Goldschmid, December 26, 1944 -- "Otto came home and made some DDT"

Rosa took this picture of Phyllis (Gallup) Goldschmid, her dearest friend.

Dear Murray, 

 

The temperature is between 30° and 40° and we are out of oil and there is a bit of snow on the ground so I feel that the time is at last propitious to write to you. We have enjoyed your letters so much that we have felt that an ordinary note would not be a proper answer, but with this physical conditions in which I am typing to keep my blue fingers from becoming completely stiff…we feel very close to you and will try to write you a letter. Part of our delay too has been due to the fact that I have been caught in some divinity fudge for the last week and have hardly been able to get away. Every time I touch this sticky mass to coax it into some form it reaches out and grabs me so that it is difficult to free myself. Perhaps you should send a request for the stuff so that I can bottle it and sent it you and you can pour it out on some iceberg and let it harden.

We tried to call Rosa yesterday when we were in Seattle, but not one, as we had feared, was at home. We are trying to get her to Shelton for New Years, but we are not sure yet whether she may come. We wish you could prevail on her to move down to Shelton. It’s so much nicer than Seattle and we would enjoy her so much. …

We received an impressive card from Mr. Luce which we at first thought was his gracious way of telling us that our renewal to Time had been accepted. On further examination, however, we learned that it was a subscription to Fortune from our esteemed friend in Alaska. Otto was so impressed that he wanted to order the Journal of the American Chemical Society for you …. We were both of course delighted….

Manuel would indeed make a good hero for a book. He has no doubt written that his wife is coming to San Fran and that he is to open a shop for Gump’s at Carmel in conjunction with the Lanz dress shop. At the time of our visit with him he was a little disturbed at the attitude of the Lanz management toward him, as a Mexican, but we hope they got over it. No doubt you have also heard of the involved pottery situation which we attempted to explain to Rosa although neither Otto nor Phyllis could agree on the details for we had a slight difficulty understanding everything he said, and he was so nice we didn’t like to make it difficult for him to explain. We hope that everything turned out well though.

I don’t know whether we have written to you since the nice Mexican, Miguel Arce, visited in Shelton as a chemist from the rayon plant in Mexico. He was very charming and nice, but quite different in many respects from Carmen and Manuel in that he was about thirty years behind the times in his political philosophy. His family had apparently lost part of their land in the revolution and while he was eager for Mexican development he had a very paternalistic attitude toward the Indians. Otto found him much more like a European than almost anyone he had met on this continent.

Visiting her at the same time was a wonderful Frenchman who is the South American representative for Rayonier. He had been a French liaison officer with the British Army before Dunkirk and told marvelous stories of his experiences. As a point of great pride he pointed out that it had been the French Army which had made the evacuation possible. He was very much impressed by the British officers’ habit of maintaining full dress dinners during the entire retreat.
 

We may also not have written to your about our nice vacation to Berkeley to see Helen and Fred and their two nice children. Otto spent a lot of time at the University and came home and made some DDT. From what I can understand it is not difficult to make, but due to the war uses of Freon and the stuff that DDT is generally suspended in, he had to use ether. It is certainly effective, but Otto made just a bit…enough to line a glass and spent days catching mosquitoes in the glass to then watch them become paralyzed and die. From this example I am convinced that it is not a very efficient method to catch insects.

I have been reading one of your books … one of the best I have read since War and Peace… Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I won’t rest until Otto takes me to Yugoslavia… it sounds marvelous and she writes so well with just the right mixture of ideas and activity in her material and structure and charm in her style. 

Otto has given me a book, Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, written by a theoretical physicist, Ganow, in the hope that I may learn something about science. The book is dedicated to Lewis Carroll and follows somewhat in his patter with Alice and the writer is obviously trying to make quantum theory and the theory of relativity as simple as possible for people like me. The pictures are very pretty though.

 

Tonight James Thurber’s “Private Life of Walter Mitty” was done on the “This is My Best” show…I hope you heard it. Last week Corwin’s “The Plot to Get Santa Claus” was done on the same program with Orson Welles as Nero….

…..

Yours,

Otto and Phyllis

to Otto Goldschmid, December 31, 1941

Murray was getting his Masters at the Columbia School of Journalism when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. With the exodus of journalists to the army, he was hired within days at CBS Radio, and soon after by both Time Magazine and the New York Herald Tribune. He was 25. He kept all three jobs, with Rosa attending his Columbia lectures and taking notes, until he collapsed from exhaustion.

Dear Otto—

The book [I Had a Dog and a Cat, by Czech playwright Karel Čapek, who later wrote R.U.R., from whence came the word “robot.”] came last night and it almost made us late to the University of Washington – NYU basketball game in Madison Square Garden. …

The card wasn’t half bad either. Isn’t it a reserve print of one of the pictures you had in your folio? It certainly looks familiar. But how did you manage to get the light effect around the bell? … Your mother’s card with the picture of the mountain [to Tacoma natives, “the mountain” always means Mt. Rainier] is another beaut. We have been showing it to the New York natives so they can get an idea of what good scenery really is. 

Now, before asking some more questions, here is a bit of dope about us. About three weeks ago I was in Brooklyn, giving a talk to a high school journalism class. The Columbia school of journalism sent me to pinch-hit for a prof who didn’t want to have to make the talk. While I was out I received word from the school that a fellow named Paul White wanted to see me right away. They gave me the address. It turned out to be the Columbia Broadcasting Studio and Paul White was the head of the Columbia news service. He asked me if I’d like to try out for the staff. I said sure. So I worked eight hours that night and I’ve been working there ever since. 

I’m still going to school—right now it’s vacation—but this seems to be a permanent job. I’ll probably keep working on here in June. Now I’m working 36 hours a week (basic beginners pay is $50 for a 40-hour week) and most of my hours come in the early morning. My duties are simple. I rewrite news from the AP, UP and INS tickets and put it in shape to be broadcast. Four days a week I do five minute “shows” for 6 a.m., 6:55 a.m. and the opening news summary and closing news summary on the morning “News of the World” program, in which Columbia calls in its correspondents. It is transcribed for the Pacific Coast and I don’t know what time the stations at home use it. But it is the morning stuff that you hear on the CBS stations. On Mondays, I write a full fifteen minute network show. It is fun to write that one as there is room for all sorts of background.

The staff here is really wonderful. There is quite a bit of pressure on the boys as they prepare the news shows, so they have developed a real esprit. (Actually, however, there isn’t as much real pressure here as there sometimes was on the Washingtonian on nights of big sports events when the phone just went crazy.)

Elmer Davis--an all-grey man

If I recall, you are great admirer of Elmer Davis. He is really a remarkable fellow. The first couple days I was here I talked to him quite a bit—that was before I found out who he was—and then I was a bit scared to butt in. But he hasn’t any airs and now I chin with him the same as the rest of the guys. He’s a walking encyclopedia. I never saw such a memory for dates and place names, and his dry humor is just as good off the air as on. He’s an all-grey man—grey hair, grey suits, grey spats—except for the black horn rimmed glasses which look remarkably out of place. William Shirer [author of Berlin Diary] was around here the first few days but is taking some time off. He doesn’t seem to have half the depth of Davis. Ed Murrow, formerly of London, is a real boy. He definitely knows what’s playing. 

Murrow and Shirer, before the rift that ended their friendship

One thing around here keeps bothering me. It’s hearing some familiar radio voice and, looking up, discovering that it belongs to a human being and not a loudspeaker. I get a jar from that everytime it happens, which is often—for the boys wander around practicing all the time.

Rosa has been keeping very busy, too. Now she’s going to be more so. She’s sending in her credits to City College of New York and will soon be starting school there. She’s tickled pink at the prospect. She is also down as a blood donor for defense, but I don’t know when the doctors plan to drain her, and neither does she. 

School work for me hasn’t been terribly tough. Most of the class is without real newspaper experience, and I have quite an edge—even if my work was on nothing better than the Washie. In addition, I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing for small magazines with Howard Daniel, our Australian friend. We have an article on Reinhard Heydrick coming up (under Howard’s byline) in the February edition of Who, and have had a lot of stuff published in the Dutch publicity magazine, Knickerbocker. 

Most of the articles we wrote before the war were based on the interesting thesis that Anglo-American air power in the Pacific would keep the Japanese from trying anything fancy! They make most interesting reading today. I hope that Knickerbocker readers are not in the habit of saving their old magazines. But the editor has forgiven us for our mistakes and is still accepting stuff from $20 to $30 an article. 

Now that I have a job and there is more money coming into the Morgan coffers, we are getting around a bit more. Rosa and I went to see a play, Angel Street, on Monday night and it was really good. ["Angel Street" was the American name for the the British play "Gaslight," later made into the eponymous film. Vincent Price played the devious Mr. Manningham the night Murray and Rosa saw it.] A couple of weeks back we saw the Ballet Theatre. Next in line for us will probably be Macbeth and Watch on the Rhine. We are also contemplating an opera, but just which one we’re not sure.

…

And that brings us back to you. How is the war affecting your activities? If I remember, you have an Austrian passport, so you haven’t had to turn in your cameras. Right? Is Shelton blacked out, and if so, does that effect your hours of work? And what effect will the war have on pulp anyway. Are you a war product? (Lord, I sound like I was conducting an interview.)

We had a nice letter from Phyllis a couple days after the war started. She sounded slightly shell-shocked, but seemed to think it all very interesting. It is hard to realize out here in New York. It seems as far away as it was in Europe—until I see in the Washie about kids I knew who were killed at Pearl Harbor or read flashes from here about subs just off the coast.

…

Well, Otto, I guess that I had better bring this rather incoherent set of questions and answers to a close. … We both send love to your mother and hello to everyone,

Murray and Rosa