WITH the recent celebration of Lillian D. Wald’s sixty-seventh birthday still fresh in the memory of newspaper readers and the publication of her book, “Windows on Henry Street,” fresh in the minds of the literati, it does not seem inappropriate at this time to tell in print the story which Alexander Woollcott gave so throbbingly over the radio some weeks ago, If I tell his story somewhat differently than Mr. Woollcott did, the explanation lies in the fact that I am not Mr. Woollcott, which may be the cause of mixed feelings.
Miss Wald was giving a dinner party. She had put mushrooms on the menu but her cautious housekeeper wasn’t too sure of the mushrooms the grocer had sent. When they had been prepared, they decided to make sure by trying them on Ramsay MacDonald, the Wald Scottie. MacDonald chewed his mushrooms like a man and preparations for the dinner went forward gaily. At this point it is proper to insert three dots… to indicate the passage of time.
Miss Wald was at the head of her table, dispensing gracious hospitality to her twelve guests–making thirteen in all. Mushrooms and soup and meat courses and even dessert had been consumed, when she was startled by the white and frightened face of her housekeeper peering in at the door. She excused herself and went white with fear herself when she heard–“Miss Wald: Scottie is dead!” Without waiting to hear another word, she telephoned to the nearest hospital and in little more than two shakes of a lamb’s tail, stomach pumps and surgeons had arrived at the Wald home. In the meantime, Miss Wald had informed the guests of the ordeal facing them and the danger to be averted, Like the good hostess she was, she gave every guest precedence at the stomach pumps, sent them home in taxicabs–this was before the taxi strike–and then submitted herself to the pump.
FOR A GLIMPSE OF SCOTTIE
When it was all over, when surgeons and pumps had gone their way and the debris had been cleared up, Miss Wald, still broken but strong in will, went into the kitchen and said to her housekeeper: “Let me see poor Ramsay MacDonald before you bury him.” “Oh, Miss Wald!” sobbed the grief-stricken servant, “I couldn’t do that: the automobile cut his poor little body right in half.”
But dry your tears for poor Ramsay, for there is an anti-climax to this story. When reporters, “reliably informed” of the events above outlined by friends of those ## guests who were supposed to have had the pleasure of stomach pump applications, telephoned Miss Wald for verification, she replied that although she had a dog, she hadn’t had mushrooms in a long time, nor had she given a dinner party, nor had she entertained guests, nor had her dog been run over, nor anything. But it’s still a good story.
ABOUT A GATE-CRASHER
Mrs. Ernest Schelling, wife of the composer, pianist and conductor, comes from that exclusive Philadelphia family known as the Drexels. The other party to this anecdote is the music critic on one of the Yiddish papers; him we shall call Mr. Baruch. Now Mr. Baruch as the reputation of being a gatecrasher and of going wherever it pleases him to go, whether or not he has been invited. One evening Mrs. Schelling gave a party, and Mr. Baruch decided he would attend it, although he had not been invited. He crashed all right, but Mrs. Schelling, never having seen him before, asked one of her guests who the stranger was. “Oh, that’s Mr. Baruch; he’s a music critic.” Instead of asking Mr. Baruch to leave, as she might have, she smiled her most charming and said: “Oh, Mr. Baruch, I’m so glad you came. You know, I think your criticism are very fine.”
“Indeed,” replied the person whom we are calling Mr. Baruch, “I didn’t know you could read Yiddish.”
And Mrs. Schelling, in telling this story on herself, explains: “I did it all for Ernie.”
ABOUT COMMUNISTS
Now that I’ve told you these, I’ll fill your cup to overflowing by giving you two more stories, two of a kind, or, as Herbert Bayard Swope used to say on The World, “cognate stories.”
No. 1. A Communist was hitting himself over the head with a club in the vicinity of Union Square. A friend asked, “Why are you doing that?” “I missed the May Day riots,” he replied.
No. 2. It was three in the morning and the party was in full swing. “You look dred, you ought to go home, you’ve got a job to go to tomorrow,” a friend solicitously reminded a Communist who was enjoying himself. “Heh, it isn’t enough I work for my boss, I should come yet fresh to the shop! No, I’ll come tired, just for spite.”
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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.
