I Had Thought That with Our Acquirement of a House at Pinehurst We Would See Quite a Bit

47.09.10B(505w)

TO EDMUND P. COLES1September 10, 1947

[Washington, DC]

Dear Edmund: Katherine, who is down at Leesburg while I am here in the city, sent me your note of September 6 written in Meredith, New Hampshire. I was glad to learn something of you and Sadie.

I had thought that with our acquirement of a house at Pinehurst we would see quite a bit of each other, and I hoped a good bit of this would be in the shooting and fishing field. However matters have worked out quite the other way and I seem to grow more and more remote from carrying out my own desires.

Katherine returned from Rio in much better shape than when she went down. She was pretty tired and worn down when she left for Rio but had a delightful time there, very comfortable rest and not many engagements.

I leave for New York Friday evening and she will follow me on Wednesday. I hope we can spend most of our time down at Locust Valley on Long Island where we have been offered a house for our convenience. However much of my time is bound to be spent in New York and I have an apartment at the Pennsylvania Hotel.2

The unfortunate phase of the business is that with all of the complications developing in Washington and the necessity for my being in New York I will have to go from there practically straight to London for the Council of Foreign Ministers in November. And then on my return, I suppose around the early part of December, I will be due again to leave the country for Bogota on January 16th.

Incidentally on our flight to Rio we stopped for gas at four in the morning at Belem. I had been there before to spend the night and get breakfast for an early departure for Natal, Brazil and the crossing of the South Atlantic. In the earlier days there was a very busy military installation but it has now sunk back into the minimum personnel required to service a civilian airfield. Flying over the jungle and looking at the dead city of Para I thought of your days at Manaos.

Flying back from Rio we made our first and only stop in Trinidad and did the entire trip between 10 in the evening and 3:30, arriving in Washington the next afternoon.

With affectionate regards to Sadie and you, Faithfully yours,

GCMRL/G. C. Marshall Papers (Secretary of State, Categorical, Conferences, Rio de Janeiro)

1. Coles, a businessman in Charlotte, North Carolina, was brother to Marshall’s first wife, Elizabeth Carter Coles.

2. Marshall was departing on September 12 to attend the UN General Assembly meeting at the City Building at Flushing Meadow on Long Island, seven miles east of Manhattan. (The UN Secretariat was established at Lake Success, about eight miles farther east.) The Robert Lovetts had lent Marshall their “small cottage, not very comfortable, but two story” in Locust Valley, an unincorporated hamlet of the Town of Oyster Bay about twenty miles northeast of Flushing Meadow. (Robert A. Lovett interview with Forrest C. Pogue, August 28, 1973, p. 22, GCMRL/Oral Histories.)