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2

[[underline]] 1927 [[/underline]]

[[underline]] Note [[/underline]]: My last diary entry for the year 1926 was made on December 14th. The next diary entry is dated January 2, 1927 and was written in Warren, Pennsylvania without explanation. As I attempt to reconstruct this, I'm quite sure that my diary as such was essentially given up for the time being on December 14th and not resumed until July 31, 1927 but this January 2nd passage was written not as diary but rather a philosophical musing while I was waiting for the evening Pennsylvania train to return me to Erie from Warren where I'd gone that morning by train to accompany Lenore Sterrett on her trip down there to enter nurses training at Warren State Hospital. I can remember absolutely nothing about the trip but presume I took it to help buck her up for this plunge although it was one she had chosen of her own free will. The Warren musing follows:

Warren Pa.,
Jan. 2, 1927.

On the threshold of the New Year! Here I am sitting in an ice cream parlor in a small town in northern Pennsylvania on an early evening in January, the 2nd. The new year is just commencing and I stopped to review the situation of my life, to review, to criticize, to plan for all that is to come. What a great drama Life is! How little we appreciate it. I feel I am living -– feeling all the hum and movement of the world, feeling all the drama that is taking place around me, hearing the music of Life, the symphonies of all the world. My success must be measured in what I have learned rather than what I have done. For Youth, success is perhaps in the preparation for what is to be done in maturer years. Sometimes I think that I am old indeed and the weight of Life is bearing too heavily upon me; ah, how young I am really, and yet how much I have learned. Only now to apply to my life lessons that through bitter experience sometimes, I have learned. And as I think of what I have learned these past years, the thing that above all stands out as a great admonition, a light to one who is groping toward happiness in the dark, the great realization that for happiness, one thing [[underline]] must [[/underline]] be and that is Rectitude in all things. There is no compromise -– the happy part of the vast tapestry of life is woven upon the loom of goodness and the patterns are developed upon a background of loyalty, reverence and devotion to ideals. And for life to achieve its fullness must be built upon a foundation of faith in God. To be able to live with that marvelous feeling that God is always with one, a friend, a confidant, a helper, ever by, ever sympathetic, ever ready to help -– ah, that is to live most fully and most well. We choose our channel in the River of Life; if it is through a dark and barren land, it is of our choosing.