Homeless Explorers

On a wall of the Explorers Club in upper Manhattan is a painting, done in the 'Arctic, of the late Rear Admiral Robert Edwin Peary (1856-1920) examining a meteorite. The canvas came from a pair of the North Pole discoverer's brown pants. The artist was Albert Operti, a Peary companion on two Polar trips. Particularly interested in that painting is Josephine Diebitsch Peary, the widow, first white woman to winter with an Arctic expedition. She lives at South Harpswell, Me. Next month her daughter, Mrs. Marie Ahnighito ("Snow Baby") Stafford, who was born "farther north than any other white person," and Mrs. Stafford's two sons are going sailing with Capt. Robert Abram ("Bob") Bartlett to Cape York on the Baffin Bay side of Greenland and there watch the construction of a monument to Peary.

When they return to the U. S. the picture-on-the-pants will not be in its present location. The proud Explorers Club last week concluded that mortgages on their new eight-story building were too heavy to tote through Depression. The late James Bishop Ford, vice president of the U. S. Rubber Co., who assembled most of the money to begin construction of the clubhouse, died aged 84 (TIME, April 9, 1928) without arranging for funds to complete it. The clubhouse carries a $225,000 6% first mortgage which must be repaid May 24, 1933. A second mortgage of $200,000 at 6%, mostly held by Explorers, will be forfeited when the Manhattan Life Insurance Co., first mortgage holder, takes over.

New quarters of the club will probably be in the Hotel Majestic (7 2nd Street & Central Park West). Thither will be moved paintings, photographs, maps, instruments, weapons, mounted animal heads--trophies from the six Continents, the Seven Seas, the air. Most precious is the Explorers' library valued at $100,000. From the Club's books, atlases and journals an explorer can get full information for a trip to any part of the world.

Club members now abroad include Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews who sailed for inner Mongolia fortnight ago; Gene Lamb in Tibet; Dr. Herbert Spencer Dickey leading his "dude" expedition down the Amazon. Lincoln Ellsworth was last week preparing a 1932 flight with Bernt Bal-chen across Antarctica. Sir George Hubert Wilkins sailed from Manhattan last week for, it was said, a conference with Premier Benito Mussolini concerning another submarine trip toward the North Pole.

No longer a member or a visitor to the Explorers Club is Dr. Frederick Albert Cook, from whose Arctic Club the Explorers Club evolved.* A venerable member is Major General Adolphus Washington Greely, 88, whose expedition to set up a U. S. meteorological base for the first (1881) Polar Year was lost and, save for seven men, destroyed by the Arctic.

*Last week Dr. Cook who, since his 1909 disgrace, spent five years in Leavenworth Prison for stock swindling, was working for the Boys Brotherhood Republic in Chicago as its physical instructor.

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