E. B. White Tonight: Part 2 of "Afternoon of an American Boy"

The Palm Court of the old Plaza Hotel, possible setting for the famous tea dance to which young Elwyn White escorted his girl "of interest," Eileen


"I do not know now, and of course did not know then, just how great was the mental and physical torture Eileen went through that day, but the incident stacks up as a sort of unintentional un-American activity, for which I was solely responsible."

-- White, in "Afternoon of an American Boy"

by Ken

Last night in "E. B. White Tonight" we had Part 1 of this remarkable "memoir of a memorable afternoon from White's youth. When we left off last night, young Mount Vernon resident Elwyn Brooks White was preparing to carry out a mad scheme to ask a pretty Mount Vernon neighbor named Eileen, who happened to be the younger sister of future House Un-American Affairs Committee Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, and who unbeknownst to herself had become for him a girl "of special interest" to young Elwyn White, to go to Manhattan with him to a tea-dance at the Plaza Hotel.

[Eileen] was my age and she was a quiet, nice-looking girl. She never came over to my yard to play, and I never went over there, and, considering that we lived so near each other, we were remarkably uncommunicative; nevertheless, she was the girl I singled out, at one point, to be of special interest to me. Being of special interest to me involved practically nothing on a girl's part -- it simply meant that she was under constant surveillance. On my own part, it meant that I suffered an astonishing disintegration when I walked by her house, from embarrassment, fright, and the knowledge that I was in enchanted territory.

FOR MORE ON J. PARNELL THOMAS AND PART 2
OF "AFTERNOON OF AN AMERICAN BOY," CLICK HERE


TOMORROW in E. B. WHITE TONIGHT: The 1954 Foreword and 1984 Introduction to The Second Tree from the Corner


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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