Milestones, Jun. 28, 1937

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Following winter, Franklin's sophomore year at Harvard, he and Ethel continued to play together up and down the Middle Atlantic seaboard with other rich young debutantes and collegians. Late in 1935 Ethel, aged 19, was packed off for a trip to Europe. At Harvard, Franklin devoted himself with unaccustomed energy to his studies. There were no additions to his list of undergraduate motor vehicle violations and there was a curtailment of his propensity for moodily beating up cameramen. Earlier, Franklin had caused lifted eyebrows even among the gilded youths of his own Fly Club by breaking up the Vincent Club Show, a debutante theatrical, with a rowdy beer party in the second balcony. These japes, while in the brawling tradition of the Harvard toff, had caused less spectacular classmates to view Franklin with some alarm. Under Ethel's influence, Franklin seemed to have toned down.

When Ethel came home from Europe in March 1936, eager Franklin lost no time getting to her side. Like a princeling of storybook royalty, he was picked up by a Coast Guard cutter and dashed out to the incoming Carinthia. Newshawks spotted him at once. "No pictures," he ordered. "I'm warning you." Later reporters found him in the ship's bar, wanted to know when the engagement would be announced. "I'm still in college." complained Franklin. "I can't be engaged. Don't be stupid about it." As if to substantiate the denial, that evening Ethel went to a prom at New Haven with a Yale boy—and next day unromantic House Republicans glumly wondered how much money the Carinthia rendezvous had cost the Government.

Week later Franklin and Ethel were back together in Cambridge at a Hasty Pudding Club ball. When asked if he and Ethel would permit their pictures to be taken together, Franklin demurred. "The Du Ponts would not like it, I guess," he said. Thus, on the eve of the Presidential campaign, the Montagu-Capulet angle entered the Roosevelt-Du Pont romance, giving it a new and piquant twist.

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