Metropolitan Notes
JOURNALIST SELLMER '35 MEETS DISASTER AND FAME IN EUROPEAN TRAVELS
NEWS HAS JUST REACHED New York, at this writing, that Robert Sellmer, of the class of '35, has been beaten, arrested, and jailed in Memel, Lithuania. Sellmer, report the front-page stories carried by all the newspapers, is a free-lance American magazine writer. He was in Lithuania to observe the election battle between the Pro- and the Anti-Nazi groups of that little Baltic country. Sellmer, continue the reports, was walking down a Memel street shortly after midnight when he encount ered three Pro-Nazi police. The police gave him the "Heil, Hitler" salute, and he refused to return the greeting, whereupon he was attacked, pummelled, and led off to the local hoosegow. Here he showed his passport and explained he was an American citizen, but this seemed only to call for another beating. The Lithuanian protectors of the peace knocked him on the floor, kicked him in the face, and called him an "American Jew," and other names that Sellmer described as "unprintable."
The latest news received by the Associated Press is that, besides several bruised ribs, a cut-up face, and a closed eye, Sellmer is no worse for the encounter. He has been released, and has himself reported the incident to the United States Minister in Lithuania. Whether the U. S. State Department will follow with a formal complaint is not at this time known.
Bob Sellmer is a former roommate of your correspondent (the Bridgeman Block, two floors above John Piane's Co-Op) and I've mentioned him before in this column. Now that he's gaining some notice as a magazine writer, and in view of the fact that his bum-rushed entre into the international scene might possibly create an "Affair Sellmer," it seems that something more on his backround should be timely.
Sellmer was the son of an executive of the Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Company. His father and mother (Mrs. Sellmer is still living, in Milwaukee) were of German descent, and were Congregationalists, as the Nazi police might have learned, if they hadn't been in such a rush to attack him. He came to Dartmouth from Montclair, N. J., and in the first semester of his Freshman year was the only man to get 4.0 all A's. Curious classmates who inquired about this demon student were surprised to find that he was something of a horse of another color. They learned that Sellmer was big, roly-poly, carefree, and lazyall in all, a "funny-man." He studied about two hours a day, spent the rest of the time telling stories, laughing, and going to every movie at the Nugget.
He became managing editor of the Jack-O, wrote book reviews for The Dartmouth, and graduated cum laude. He probably had the most retentive memory, and was probably the most widely read member of his class. That he wasn't valedictorian can probably be explained by the fact that, better than studying, he liked to write pieces for the Metropolitan magazines, liked to read the dozen or so books he got -a week for doing his book column, and liked to play the marble game in the Wigwam.
After graduation Bob came down to New York. He wrote occasional articles for The New Yorker and Stage, and for a short time (until it folded) was managing editor of a fly-by-night publication called The Big Town. While here, however, he was hardly what one would call a fire-ball of energy. He never, so far as any of us could learn, went out looking for a job. He preferred to read, and cook spaghetti, in a Greenwich Village apartment; spend an occasional day at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and drink beer with friends at the Alpha Delta Phi Club. He is the only man I ever knew who could live well (well, pretty well) in New York City on $BO a month. He always kept close contact with Dartmouth affairs; he started this New York column for the ALUMNI MAGAZINE two years ago, and he wrote what were probably the funniest Alumni Fund letters that ever brought receipts into A 1 Dickerson's coffers.
A year ago last August Sellmer announced he was going to Europe. No one believed him, of course; in fact, most of his friends considered it even too much of a work-out for him to get over to the Hudson Riverfront. To everyone's surprise he did leave. Tom Lane '35 and I went over to Hoboken to see him depart on a nondescript freighter called the "Black Tern." After buying his passage and collecting a few visas he had about $275 left for the trip. He said he was going to Norway ("I've read all about England and France and I want to see some place I don't know about," was the explanation). To protect himself against the Artie winter he was taking two suits and one top-coat. We expected to see him back within two months, three at the most.
It's now been almost a year and a half, and the latest word from Bob is that he won't be back for another three or four years. He's going to work his way slowly around the world, he says, earning expenses by magazine writing. The first several months must have been fairly tough ones, even with Bob guarding his funds in the usual Sellmer fashion, for his pieces didn't click immediately. Three different times he's been totally and completely in hock—suitcases, typewriter, top-coat and all. One day last spring, when he had an interview with the Danish Prime Minister in Copenhagan, he had to put his trousers under his mattress for pressing, and stuff cardboard into his worn-through shoes. Only a few months ago, when American magazines stopped buying articles on the European situation because of the unpredictable future of the Czech question, Sellmer was living in Tallinn, Estonia, on less than a dollar a day. As he himself writes: "You, you Sybarite, sitting in luxurious ease and dangling hot-house grapes over your head, may be interested to know my daily eating schedule. It goes like this. Breakfast: glass of coffee and two huge buns, 6<j:-, lunch: meat, potatoes, vegetable and glass of milk, <)<£; supper: one washtub full of soup and all the black bread I can eat, incidental: yi} worth of apples and chocolate; total a day, and rigidly adhered to. My room costs me ten bucks a month. I smoke a foul brand of cigarettes that cost five for a cent, and by making similar humiliating economies I get along quite well."
Whatever the hardships, Bob seems to be getting in a lot of things that many of us here in New York would definitely prefer to the daily ordeal of breaking through the Shuttle formations under Grand Central. And more and more of his articles are being taken by the magazines. He took a trip far up into the Arctic Circle, and at some little town there ferreted out a man who has successfully sued the United States Government for $60,000,000. It's a fantastic tale, and a news scoop; the article has been sold, and will probably appear soon. Coming down through the fjords Bob found evidence of Russian invasion into Norway. He wrote a story (which has appeared in Ken) revealing the flights of Russian planes over Norway, the mapping out of airports, and the other plans Russia is carrying out to have a ready outlet to the North Sea in case of war.
Last spring in an Oslo bar he bumped into a publicity man for the Norwegian Coast Guard Service. The publicity man, highly impressed by Sellmer's stories of his influence with the American reading public, invited him to come on a month's cruise in one of the Coast Guard cutters. The cutter put in at all the Norwegian ports, and with the crew members Sellmer helped to entertain the local Women Sewing Club groups, whose donations, it seems, provided for the upkeep of the Royal Coast Guard. On the trip he helped capture several whales, and assisted in a sea rescue off one of the southern fjords.
Next he popped up in Warsaw. He'd gone there to look up some far, far distant relative his grandmother had told him about. The relative turned out to be one of Warsaw's most affluent citizens; he introduced Bob to the local debs, and drove him down to see the military preparations on the Czech border. In a Warsaw night club Bob made some subtle American passes at a sloe-eyed Arabic dancer, and the local cops had to be called out to stop the uproar that started between him and the girl's suitor. Then he went up to Finland, where he did an article on the 1940 Olympics, and reveled in the Finnish baths. "These baths are called saunas," he writes, "and are followed religiously by every last Finn. First you go into a steam room, and lie down on a shelf way up by the ceiling By dropping water on red-hot rocks they soon get the temperature up to 150-160 degrees Fahrenheit (honest to God!) and you sit there for twenty minutes, sweating gallons, and watching your past life swim before your eyes. Then an Amazonian damsel comes lumbering in and beats the living hell out of you with a bunch of fresh birch branches, leaves and all—after which she leads you to the scrubbing room. Here you lie down on a marble slab, with the fragrant birch twigs for a pillow, while she scrubs you with a granite-like sponge, and, free at last, you go downstairs and dive into a magnificent swimming pool. All this for thirty cents, and you never felt so clean in your life. And diving into the ice-cold swimming pool is said to be good for the circulation, provided you have the heart of a musk-ox."
From Finland Bob came down to spend a week in Estonia, then another week or so in Latvia, and it was from here that he crossed into Lithuania, where he ran into his troubles with the Nazi police. The recent events in Europe seem to have sobered his outlook tremendously. In the first articles he returned he was still interested in primarily humorous subjectssuch as the reaction of Norwegian audiences to the various American movie stars, and a personality sketch of the Dane who translates English movie titles into Danish. Now his articles are on subjects such as the Nazi Drive into Denmark, and the Future of Poland. As he writes himself: "After fourteen months of knocking around Europe my eyes have been opened a mile, and what I have seen has changed me from your old friend Buoyant Bob, that incurable Pollyanna, into Wry Robert, the most sour-faced pessimist this side of the Republican Party."
For Sellmer believes that Democracy in Europe—and probably in America, too—is definitely doomed. In a nineteen-page, typewriten letter I've just received from him he backs this conclusion not only with his own close-to-the-scene observations, but likewise with a host of figures and facts. Many of his arguments compare, very closely with those offered by Dartmouth Professor Frank Maloy Anderson in the lecture on "What Germany Gained at Munich" which he gave before the Dartmouth Club of New York on the 6th of last month. Professor Anderson, who accompanied Wilson to Versailles as a technical expert, and who is recognized as one of the outstanding American authorities on European diplomacy, read this letter of Sellmer's, and observed that "His analysis
... .of the Munich Agreement is remarkably penetrating, and, I think, correct."
Sellmer's argument is that the Democracies were squarely behind the eight-ball at Munich, that they will find themselves in exactly the same position at every succeeding crisis which the Totalitarian governments begin. England and France could have gone to war, but even had they won, he points out, the conflict would have blown European civilization off the face of the globe. Their submission before the Dictators at Munich brought a temporary peace, but he sees this as only a postponement of the death of Democracy in Europe. He thinks it only a matter of time before Hitler's realm will stretch from Alsace, through Central Europe and the Ukraine, to the Black Sea, and from Finland right down to the Aegean. "Democracy in Europe is dead," he writes, "don't think I'm just trying to be a bogeyman; a doornail is a symbol of bubbling vitality besides it."
And will the losses of Democracy stop here? Sellmer thinks not. "The Totalitarian theory, carried by the most powerful propaganda machine the world has ever known, will soon penetrate France, then England and Latin America, and I see no very good reasons why it will stop on the western shores of the North Atlantic The most practical expression I can give to these conclusions is through a piece of honest and disagreeable advice: drop whatever you are doing and run around to the nearest recruiting station for the German-American Bund, the Silver Shirts, or whatever the leading Nazi party happens to be at the moment. I'm not telling you to do this because of any change in your political convictions or mine; but for the security of yourselves and any family you might have produced since your last letter. I'm just giving you a chance to be on the safe side of the fence when the blow does fall."
This is the latest news from Sellmer, outside the press associations' stories of the Lithuania beating, and a postcard just received by Bud Fraser '35 Alumni Fund Secretary. The message to Fraser was as follows: "Xmas Greetings to yourself and all my other lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing friends who never write me. Also, Fund leader Fraser, you are hereby notified that I resign from all '35 Alumni Fund activities during the coming Spring season."
SELLMER IN THE ARCTIC Somewhat hazy, but the most recent likeness of Robt. Sellmer '55 on the NorwegianCoast Guard ship kept up by Women'sSewing Clubs.
