Summer Studies

By last week teachers and students of all nations were off on summer junkets in the name of fun, study, international goodwill. The following made news:

P: On the passenger list of the Normandie, just before it sailed from Manhattan, a purser spied the name of Acee Blue Eagle. Publicity-wise, that official hunted down a tall, husky Amerindian, persuaded him to exchange his grey business suit for a red blanket and a headdress of blue-&-white feathers. To newshawks, Acee Blue Eagle explained that he was not only a great-grandson of famed Creek Chief William Mclntosh but newly elected head of the art department at Bacone College near Muskogee, Okla. A first-rate tribal artist. Blue Eagle won fourth place in the 1932 Olympic exhibition for his water colors and drawings of Indian athletes. When his well-to-do family lost its money he went on the Redpath Lyceum circuit as a dancer. Last week Blue Eagle was on his way to Oxford to lecture and dance at the International Federation of Education.

P: At Portland, Ore., Japanese girls strutted about the campus of Reed College, chuckling over a great private joke. As delegates to the second annual Japan-U. S. Student Conference, they had been asked to appear in kimonos. Since most of them wear Western dresses at home, they had spent a good part of their trip across the Pacific learning, for the first time in their lives, to tie the big, brocaded sashes which traditionally girdle Japanese kimonos.

One of their male companions, however, was more traditional. Clutched tightly in the hand of Masashi Kato was a poem of guidance for the journey given him by his father. Admiral Kanji Kato, onetime Chief of the Naval Staff and naval delegate to the Washington Arms Conference. The poem:

It is better to be a jewel

Wrapped in rags

Than a brick

Clothed in silk.

Jewel Kato was clothed in natty grey cheviot.

On the first day of the conference 46 Japanese and 76 U. S. and Canadian students met in the Reed College chapel, squirmed in the pews while the speakers talked of nothing but war. Japanese Consul Ken Tsurumi tried to strike an optimistic note: "I do not consider a U. S.-Japanese war inevitable." Glad when the assembly was over, the Japanese delegates wanted first to see the unemployed. Back on the campus they settled down to talk of foreign trade, Manchuria, Communism, dictatorship, missionaries.

P: Among the crowd of summer visitors which watched the Council of the League of Nations convene at Geneva none were more excited than 15 eager, earnest U. S. collegians. Members of the Students' International Union, they had been waiting all summer for such a chance. Almost as excited as her charges was the Union's founder and angel, Mrs. Alexander Murray Hadden. A statuesque Manhattan socialite with white hair and blue saucer eyes, Mrs. Hadden every year invites a select group of U. S. colleges to give one or more of their students a $300 scholarship at the Union. To furnish contacts she then corrals an equal number of foreign students. Ostensibly the Union is devoted to a serious eight-week study of international relations. But Mrs. Hadden, who is thought frivolous by many of her serious-minded charges, provides a breath less round of teas, receptions, dinners, mountain climbs, trips to Italy or Ger many. This year she has raised enough money to house her Union in a new villa in the shadow of the League's new Palais des Nations.

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