Representative

Mrs. Oswald B. Lord, Mrs. Roosevelt’s successor as United States representative on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, received us graciously the other afternoon in the U.N. delegates’ lounge, blue-eyed, blue-suited, candid of gaze, intense of manner, wavy of hair, luxuriant of eyebrow—all in all, a strikingly handsome and purposeful lady in her forties. And what a busy lady! She was born a Minneapolis Pillsbury, of the redoubtable flour-milling family (her grandfather founded the Pillsbury Mills, of which her brother Philip is now chairman of the board), she was a part-time social worker at a children’s home while acquiring a Phi Beta Kappa key at Smith, she went on to family-welfare work in Minneapolis, and then, after marrying Mr. Lord, a fifth-generation Manhattan textile manufacturer and first-generation game originator (Politics), she plunged into a regular vortex of local and national civic and welfare work. As a nine-to-six volunteer case worker for the Charity Organization Society, she helped rehabilitate many a family in Yorkville and Harlem and on the upper West Side. As president of the Junior League, she expanded its welfare work. As chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Women’s Participation in the World’s Fair, she touted that festival’s educational aspects in talks before women’s groups all over the country. During the Second World War, she chairmanned, co-chairmanned, honorary-chairmanned, directed, or assistant-directed a profusion of War Fund committees, Wac advisory committees, Civilian Defense committees, and so forth. She first met President Eisen hower in 1945, when she was inspecting Wac installations in England; in the recent campaign, she was co-chairman of the National Citizens for Eisenhower-Nixon. “Mother has been on boards all her life, and I grew up in that atmosphere,” she said. “My Civilian Defense job had to do with seeing that countries feeling the impact of war were able to take care of the children of working mothers. I love to talk about the U.N. International Children’s Emer gency Fund, of which I’m United States chairman. I have a Swedish godchild. My work with children started during the First World War, when I was a child myself. I began writing to French war orphans when I was ten. My sister and I, who had learned French at home, did this for several years. My mother later helped the girls among them with their dots; she still keeps in touch with them and their children.”

Mrs. Lord has two children herself—Winston, fifteen, at Hotchkiss, and Charles, nineteen, at Yale. “Charlie worked in the Eisenhower headquarters in Chicago all summer as a kind of handyman,” she said. “I’m going to Geneva next month, for six or eight weeks, but when I’m here I try not to let my work interfere with my family and social life. I avoid evening business engagements If I have to go to Washington during the day, I try to fly back in time for dinner. I get to our place in Stamford every weekend— well, nearly every weekend. I used to ski a lot, but I broke my ankle twice, so I don’t any more. My husband and I like to have U.N. people meet our old friends. I think there’s’ a tendency for people working at the United Nations just to meet other people working at the United Nations, and I’m trying to combat this— or, rather, supplement it. We’ve been mixing U.N. and non-U.N. people up at a series of dinner and cocktail parties. I love music and have a big collection of records, but I don’t have time to play them much nowadays. I don’t want to say anything about my new job, because I’m just a beginner at it, but I will say that I get eighty or a hundred letters a day, and try to answer all except the really crackpot ones.”

A secretary came up with a sheaf of presumably non-crackpot letters, and we left the lady to her dictation. ♦