Follow the Leader

Vacations are out for top-flight Washington officials this year; so are elaborate measures to keep physically fit. Some of the substitutes for long trips, extended holidays of sport:

> President Roosevelt plans a daily dip in the White House swimming pool.

> Henry Wallace still turns out at 6 o'clock to get in a few sets of tennis. On the courts of Washington's Wardman Park Hotel, he plays (lefthanded) a hard-plugging but ungraceful game with his sister or brother-in-law, Swiss Minister Charles Brugmann, occasionally matches strokes with other grade B-minus players like Nelson Rockefeller, Under Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal or Justice Hugo Black.

> Ruddy, cigar-chewing Frank Knox seldom gets time for golf, at which he is a better-than-average dub. His substitute: harder work in his 15-minute morning round of setting-up exercises. His routine as he approaches 70: arm thrashings, a four-minute lope around suite.

> To Cordell Hull, slightly stooped at 71, war has brought no athletic privation. He still plays a waspish game of croquet, still addresses his opponent's ball as Hitler or Mussolini before walloping it.

> Another vicious ball-swatter is short-tempered, tough Harold Ickes. His favorite game: table tennis (ping-pong, as Mr. Ickes plays it).

> One of the few Washington bigwigs who manages to find time for his prewar recreations is Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Fanatically vigorous for a 75-year-old, he carries out a daily program that would tax a man of 50. At "Woodley," his baronial estate in Washington, he tramps for an hour before breakfast, plays deck tennis for an hour before dinner, plays croquet with obvious condescension when oldsters like Secretary Hull are his guests. For pre-lunch exercise he keeps Indian clubs in his office. Twice a week he rides hired horses at Maryland's Meadowbrook Club, rides his own hunters weekends on his Long Island farm.

> Others who take their exercise on horseback are Secretary of the Treasury Henry L. Morgenthau and Justice Robert H. Jackson. But the rest--men like War Mobilization Chief James F. Byrnes, Manpower Boss Paul V. McNutt, OPAdministrator Prentiss Brown and WPBoss Donald Nelson--take the easiest way. Like top-flight Army & Navy men, they have rediscovered walking.

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