U.S. At War: At the White House Steinway

Private Hardie Robbins, U.S.A., in civilian life a California high-school music teacher, was playing the piano in the White House. The piano was a beautiful thing—a Steinway concert grand with gilded eagle legs. He could bang it just as hard as he liked, play anything on it from Brahms, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to When You and I Were Young, Maggie. If he wanted Mrs. Roosevelt to listen, he had only to say so.

If this was a music teacher’s dream, for Hardie Robbins last week it was not a dream at all, but complete, three-dimensional, here-&-now reality. Private Hardie Robbins had lain last Christmas in Washington’s Walter Reed General Hospital, his hands healing from the fearful burns they suffered when the Army transport U.S.S. Bliss was torpedoed off North Africa. The President’s wife, on one of her numerous hospital rounds, had stopped to chat with him. What would he like best to do, she asked, once his bandages came off? Hardie Robbins guessed he would rather play the piano than anything else—once his stiff, raw, skingrafted hands were well enough.

Later, by letter, the First Lady invited him, when he was ready, to drop in for practice at the White House. Last week Hardie Robbins, now a regular caller, was flexing his hands at the gilded Steinway and looking forward to the time when they would once again be practiced enough so that Mrs. Roosevelt might listen.