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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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a sizeable dinner. When I first came to Washington, I proceeded to do what we always used to do in New York when we had dinner parties--we tried to bring interesting people together, people who would interest each other, and I invite them to the same dinner without regard to social protocol. Later it became obvious that I had to do a lot of protocol entertaining, and that you just didn't get the time to work in the others. You asked twenty people who were all protocol, and by the time you had asked them all around, you had pretty nearly used up your energies for entertaining anybody. In the early years here, I did non-protocol entertaining.

I remember on one occasion I asked Mr. Lewis to dinner when we lived over in Georgetown. That must have been in '33 or '34, and I had asked a lot of Washington people, among them Mrs. William Eustis, whom I'd known a long time. She was a great lady of Washington of the resident population, non-political.

Interviewer:

“Cave-dweller.”

Perkins:

What? Well, sometimes called cave-dwellers, not quite that, I think. Anyway, she was a very nice person, very, but intelligent, and had been an old friend of the President's, you see, in a personal way many years before. I was always fond of her, and she was invited.

In the shuffling of the cards, regulating where people sat at dinner, she sat next to Mr. Lewis. It was a big dinner--





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