Relict's Recompense

While he lived, the nation hardly knew that Louis McHenry Howe had a wife. Quartered like a bachelor in Abraham Lincoln's White House room, Franklin Roosevelt's gnarled and gnomish No. 1 Secretary was a member of the private as well as the official Presidential family, spent more time in Washington than he did at home in Fall River, Mass.

Last week it was revealed that, while her famed husband devoted himself to Franklin Roosevelt's affairs, plump, grey-eyed Grace Hartley Howe has done more than sit at home rearing his son and daughter. She is a director of Fall River's Family Welfare Association, Historical Society, Ninth Street Day Nursery and of the League of Nations Association; advisory board member of the Consumers' League of Massachusetts and of various local WPA projects; trustee of the Bristol County Agricultural School and Fall River Public Library; secretary of Massachusetts' Democratic State Committee and vice chairman of Fall River's Democratic City Committee; member of the Fall River Women's Club, American Association of University Women, Massachusetts Horticultural Society, New England Farm and Garden Club, English-Speaking Union. League of Women Voters. D. A. R., Fall River Vassar Club and the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiques.

None of these activities, however, has made her rich, and Louis Howe left "less than $20,000." Last week President Roosevelt recompensed his most devoted and intimate friend's relict for virtual widowhood during her husband's later life by appointing her acting postmaster of Fall River, at $4,000 per year.

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