1938 TRIP TO FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND February 10, 2004 The ultimate day arrived when Daddy and the Queen Mary would be sailing into the New York harbor on December 15, 1938. I doubt that Mother could have made any sort of arrangements for getting the three of us to the pier in time and getting us past Customs and so once again I'm assuming the that company provided us with the transportation and taking care of all of the details. After all, it was Mother's thirty-fifth birthday that day and she still had to keep her 12-year old daughter Norma and her 7-year-old daughter Vee in tow. And the next thing I knew I was standing in the middle of a massive milling crowd at the pier waiting for the Queen Mary to sail the last few moments to tie up at the pier. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the ship. It was surrounded by many tugboats that were guiding it into port. The ship was so huge it made the tugboats look like little toy boats alongside it. It looked like a gigantic floating hotel. I bet it was three times bigger than Hotel Niagara in Niagara Falls. Not only that but it was longer then three and a half football fields. I couldn't believe that anything that big could actually float on the water. As it came closer and closer I had to crane my neck up higher and higher to see the top of it. Starting where the ship was floating on the water, it had a black hull about four stories high. You could see rows and rows of portholes in them. Then there were several more stories higher up that were painted white. They also had portholes in them. Then above that was a deck all enclosed in glass. I suppose that was the Promenade Deck. Above that was row after row of lifeboats and higher up was another deck which is probably the deck used for the passengers to step into the lifeboats in an emergency. And at the very top of the ship were three HUGE smokestacks painted bright red with a big black stripe around the top of them. Although not as spectacular to look at, there were two masts fore and aft which were even taller than the smokestacks. It's a wonder the top of the masts didn't just disappear into the clouds! When the Queen Mary finally docked and the passengers started to disembark, it was almost pandemonium while hundreds of passengers made their way down the gangplank and family members urged their way forward to get the first glimpse of their loved one. Frankly I can't remember the first sighting of my father nor of the wonderful hugs we exchanged at dockside, but I do remember that later in the day Daddy took all of us aboard the Queen Mary and showed us the sights. He showed us where his cabin was and it's only from the baggage tag that's in his scrapbook that I now realize that he was traveling as a First Class passenger and that his cabin number was S-17. In his trip souvenirs is a large chart showing where all of the cabins were and all of the other spaces aboard ship that were for the passengers' pleasure. And WOW, did he go First Class! He had an outside cabin on the Sun Deck where he could just walk out of his door and step right onto the Promenade Deck. He gave us an eye-opening tour, showing us the magnificent dining room where he ate and all of the other magnificent spaces. Frankly, I can't quite remember what they looked like but there is one thing that has stuck in my mind ever since 1938. It was the ship's huge indoor swimming pool. What made it so spectacular was that it was two decks high and when you looked down at it from an overhead walk, the sides of it went down, down, down before you could see the water in the pool. I asked Daddy why the sides were so high. He explained that when the ocean was a bit rough the high sides prevented the water from splashing out. I remember that we eventually returned to the Roosevelt Hotel and I remember vividly how we had celebrated that evening. The four of us had a memorable dinner in the grand dining room at the Roosevelt Hotel. Only Daddy had experienced such an elegant dining experience prior to that occasion. He had just returned from sailing aboard the Ile de France and the Quean Mary during the past month. And with Guy Lombardo's Orchestra playing gently in the background Mother and Daddy and Norma and I had a dinner that our family had never experienced before together in our lives. However, there came a tense moment for Mother when the elegant waiter brought around finger bowls for all of us. Floating in the lovely clear bowls of water were slices of lemons. Although I don't recall the moment, Mother told me about it years afterward. She said that she had to hold her breath in fear that I would pick up the bowl and drink out of it. But then she also told me that she was so proud of me when I checked on how Mother and Daddy were using their finger bowls and I followed suit. I daintily dipped my fing! ers into my bowl and dabbed them properly on the napkin in my lap and behaved like a proper little lady! Neither she nor Daddy could believe it!