Leisure School

By the time that Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt had bought a fireless cooker in the basement of R. H. Macy & Co.'s big Manhattan department store last week, 300 wide-eyed women were swimming in her wake. Six private detectives kept them at a respectful distance as they trailed her up to the fifth floor. There they made hardly a dent in the crowd already on hand at Macy's leisure school. Purpose of this school was to show some 30.000 New Yorkers per day what to do with the spare time that was supposedly theirs under NRA codes of shorter hours and higher pay. The Advisory Board of Macy's show included President Butler of Columbia and Chancellor Chase of New York University. Presidents Dodds of Princeton and Angell of Yale sent solemn letters of endorsement.

In a 600-seat auditorium Macy visitors could see & hear, among others, the following experts, in demonstration-talks: Ellsworth Vines, tennis; Lou Gehrig, baseball; Margaret Bourke-White, photography; Tony Sarg, puppets; Russell Patterson, illustrating; Arthur Murray, ballroom dancing. Instructors from Heckscher Foundation gave lessons in clay modeling, crayon and charcoal drawing, woodworking, metalworking, painting. Chosen to demonstrate the art of knitting were five Ziegfeld chorus girls. Last week Mrs. Roosevelt was brought to an abrupt halt by the sight of World's Champion Joe Pasco turning a punching bag into a rat-ta-tat-tatting blur with his fists, head, elbows, feet. ''My goodness!" she remarked. "Isn't he rapid!"

President Percy Hampton Johnston of Manhattan's Chemical Bank & Trust Co. gets his mind off money by collecting canes. Among his trophies on show at Macy's were sticks once carried by Charlie

Chaplin, Admiral Byrd and Rasputin; a cane made from a log of Abraham Lincoln's cabin birthplace; a cane on which are carved the faces of all Hungary's kings from Attila to Franz Josef. The Earl of Gosford displayed himself and pipes. Authoress Joan Lowell lent some 50 quarter-inch Central American dolls. Others volunteered their stamps, coins, needlepoint pictures, ship models, salt cellars, decoy ducks, penny banks.

All possible displays lived & moved.

There were live dogs, live chickens, live pheasants, live tap-dancers. Mrs. Roosevelt stopped at a booth labeled "Consider the Poor Fish" where tropical fish swam inside bookends, lamp bases and cases hung like pictures on walls.

But what interested her most was furniture-making, her own hobby at her Val-Kil shop near her Hyde Park home.

Other women were anxious to learn how to make artificial flowers and hooked rugs, how to mount butterflies, leaves and flowers. Men flocked to boat-building and carpentry displays. Intellectuals shouted answers at a beauteous young woman who read questions from a book. And everyone liked soap-carving, cheapest hobby in the show.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.