May 21, 1943
No. 32
Dear Folksies,
Last night there was an “All Negro Revue” put on out in our area. The master of ceremonies, a colored boy who used to perform at the Cotton Club in New York, was the best of the bunch with all his side-cracks. They had a couple of fellows who sang, one who played the harmonica, a couple of tap-dancers and a couple of supposedly dopey fellows who did their own very fancy and screwy manual of arms with their rifles. Then there was the one who chewed and swallowed razor blades and also fire. George Davis was skeptical, as were we all, so Wally Greene, Collie, Carroll Russell, Davis and a couple of the nurses, Lois and I, went into the fluoroscopic room and had him repeat his swallowing of the razor blade as we followed the course of the particles (about 10 pieces for one blade, each about 1/4″ in diameter) down into his stomach alright — so he was no fake!!
Gee, Lois gets some of the craziest patients. There was one who said that the flies come in the daytime, the mosquitoes relieve the flies at night, and the flies relieve the mosquitoes in the morning, “Gee, what a world, everyone’s on relief.” This same patient was discharged day before yesterday, but on his way to the Evacuation tent, a distance of some 50 yards, he got lost. He landed on a truck that took him to town, came back for supper, went out again, came back finally around 1A.M., feeling pretty high. Then when Mattie asked him in the morning what happened, he said he met a French girl and she wouldn’t show him the way back to the hospital.
Loads of love,
.
