SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 1942

Last night I made a speech at Palo Alto for my friend "Chuck" Bush, head of Leland Stanford's School of Journalism.  The regular session of the California Press Association was being held there.

One of the pleasures of the visit was meeting Arthur W. McBride, who shocked me by looking like an old man.  He has a little weekly newspaper some 30 miles from L. A.  We were reporters together in Sioux City 35 years ago.  He is 58 now.  That is not far beyond my 53, yet it seems incredible that I might be considered in the same decade with McBride, and that I am definitely on the museum piece list to the average adolescent in his thirties.

Most of these editors still run true to form - more concerned with the petty details of making a dollar to keep in black ink than in waging total war against the Axis.  They are not really editors - they are men who were civic minded who now have property to protect.  The old story of the penniless social reformer who died a rich standpatter.

It was so beautiful and quiet on the sprawling campus that I stayed all night in the Union and drank deep of Sunday's thick, hot sunshine.

Doc Griffith, now a Navy Lieutenant, has been transferred from the Alameda base to Moffet Field, which is near Sunnyvale and only 5 miles from Palo Alto.  He was Oklahoma Publishing Company's dentist, remember?

He has a little empire all his own at Moffet.  He's the only tooth carpenter.  The station complement is about 400.  It is a blimp base.  The small lighter-than-air, which patrol beyond the heads, are housed in the big dirigible shed.  Twelve can nest there inflated.  One couple lives there now, the children having all trudged their lumbering way eastward to help spot submarines in the crucial Atlantic costal waters.

Rolled past an orchard of Bing cherries - every limb crutched up under a burden of purplish red fruit - a luscious, fragrant sight for an Oklahoman whose aspiring fruit is always frost bitten before it ripens into glory.