Getting Ready for Inauguration

The clatter of hammers and the fresh smell of unpainted Virginia pine filled the White House grounds last week. Beyond the north lawn and across broad Pennsylvania Avenue, along Lafayette Park, workmen were knocking together grandstands. There on Jan. 20 the President and as many U. S. citizens as can be accommodated will watch the inaugural parade of Term III: a two-hour procession of the nation's armed forces, including a mechanized unit from Fort Knox.

For grave, critical 1941, Franklin Roosevelt wanted a simple, inexpensive inauguration. The parade stands his committee is building extend only four blocks, are designed to seat only 19,000 people. In 1937 they continued all the way to the Justice Department and had room for 40,000; the President sat in an $11,900 model of Andrew Jackson's house. The Hermitage. This year the President will sit in a reviewing stand which he designed himself: a plain Colonial doorway, covered with a single coat of cheap paint.

Even so, this year's parade stands were a big job, requiring 600,000 board feet of pine. With labor costs for such work in Washington up 20% from 1937 and materials up 33 to 50%, the stands will cost the inaugural committee $50,000 (of which $3,818 goes to Clark Griffith for bleachers brought from his Senators' ball park). Although seats sell for $2 to $10, the committee will do well to break even, expects to have nothing left over for Washington's community fund.* Other inauguration preparations last week:

> To care for parade and crowd casualties (Washington expects 300,000 visitors), the inaugural committee set up an organization big enough to cope with a major earthquake: eleven first-aid stations, 44 nurses, 25 ambulances, 154 aides and stretcher bearers, 200 men assigned to posts between the stations.

> The District of Columbia police department completed arrangements to borrow 65 detectives from other big cities (to discourage visits by out-of-town criminals).

> Columnist Dorothy Thompson's "National Participation Committee," a 1941 newcomer, was busy getting out letters to schools asking them to have their pupils listen to the broadcasts of the ceremonies.

Miss Thompson has invited a group of European refugees to the inauguration, and particularly wants the nation's school children to hear what the refugees have to say about it.

* Franklin Roosevelt's first inauguration netted $60,000. His second, almost washed out by rain, lost $23,000.

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