Undisturbed by the death threat letter she had received Sunday night when she sang at the anti-Nazi rally at Carnegie Hall, Mme. Ernestine Schumann-Heink, seventy-three-year-old matriarch of the opera, departed from the Pennsylvania Station yesterday afternoon for Chicago, accompanied by friends and professional assistants.
Unknown to Mme. Schumann-Heink, two detectives from the regular group covering the Pennsylvania Station were close by her until the train left.
Her friends apparently were more worried than she herself, despite the fact that the letter which a crank had handed in at the stage door at Carnegle Hall was the fourth or fifth of a series she had been mysteriously receiving in the last two months.
At the office of Harold Peat, her manager, the seriousness of the death threat letters was minimized. “By and large the German people in this country love Mme. Schumann-Heink as much as the Jews, the Catholics and everybody else,” it was stated.
“Me have a bodyguard?” Mme. Schumann-Heink said after she had received the letter Sunday night. “Not at my age!”
With this the singer closed the proceedings, except to remark that she would be in New York on Mother’s Day, at which time she and Mrs. James Roosevelt, mother of the President, will share honors at the annual Mother’s Day luncheon in the Hotel Astor.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
