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Erie, Pa.,
Monday, Dec. 26 '38.
Today was an anti-climax of X-mas, playing with the children's new things, cleaning up.  The Colonel wanted to see the Peninsula so I drove him out there in the afternoon and on the way home, I stopped at the new Baldwin house on Kahkwa to show it to him.  When we got home, he kidded Willie about the downstairs bedroom being "way off in another part of the house so if you ever have a fight, one of you can take it and get away from the other".  That set Mother off.  Within a few minutes she got me alone and said, "So, you've decided to get a house now where you can stick your old people way off by themselves somewhere on the [[underlined]] first [[/underlined]] floor."  And the argument was on and a very unpleasant one it was.  Ben and Tony came in in the evening to hear the new records and see the movie of themselves I took recently, and Mother sat there, frequently with the most woebegone expression and it almost seemed she was trying to have them see her that way.  It put tension into the whole visit as I expected it would but in spite of it, I got quite a thrill out of playing the records for them, knowing they and especially Ben was getting a tremendous kick out of it.  But there was that constant shadow hanging over the entire evening, dulling its best moments.  Again I say, it's too bad.