Aunt Mamie runs for Congress 1949

Letter to Mama from Mamie November 12, 1949

….I thought that before I had some pictures made for campaign for U. S. Congress from this 13th district that I had better settle down to how I really should look all the time.

….I just hope that you will live to see the day that I am Congresswoman and earning about $15,000 a year.  The minute that I do--you are going off the old age pension and I will surely have something done to that house to make it more comfortable.

 Most everything else would stay as it is except that I would spend a greater part of the year in Washington D. C. every year.
 

Mamie was not elected to Congress from Los Angeles but we are proud of her for her ambition anyway.

letter from Mamie Hansen to her mother Margaret Atwood (mama) 1963

Dear Mama,

Didn't you think of me last Sunday night?  I went to the Billy Graham services.  When they sang all the old revival songs I thought of you.

My childhood and girlhood, especially the time when Dad brought a load of livestock to Fort Worth and instead of going to the Majestic (vaudeville show) I took him out to the Fat Stock Show Coliseum to hear Billy Sunday.

During the sermon he leaned down and whispered, "Couldn't you have taken me to a better show than this?"

John Manning Arthur 1946

John was in the US Navy during World War II.  He was stationed in Bremerton, Washington after he had broken his leg in 1946.  This letter is to his aunt Mamie Frances Hansen who lived in Los Angeles.  Mamie was the "big sister" to John's mother, Ernestine, and all of the children of Mama and Manning Atwood.  She had written John and suggested he was a "Country Boy."

John's reply:

…this country boy has spent two years in the Navy in this country.  I have been everywhere except Florida and California. I've seen the best and the worst of people.  I have waded in the reflection pool ini front of the Lincoln Memorial.  I have spit 518 feet from the top of the Washington monument.  I have been dead drunk;  I have danced with the best and the worst.

I have spent a weekend in New England and talked Texas and Texas A&M to an honor graduate of the Harvard class of '34; I rode through New York City with three days to spend, but kept right on going.
I've blacked Navy fliers' eyes and they have blacked mine.  I paid $5 for a steak I could have gotten in Texas for sixty cents; I've swam in the Atlantic Ocean, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, the Pacific Ocean, Puget Sound, and the goldfish pond in the Boston Commons.

John Manning is the toddler in the front row with his Daddy Hipp Arthur in 1928. 

I've danced in the Pump Room, the Empire Room, Marine Room in Chicago, and at the hotels in DC, Boston, Buffalo, and across the country to Seattle.  I've drunk beer in the dirtiest taverns in the same cities.  I've hitch-hiked from Buffalo to Boston; I've been under Niagara Falls, and I brought a pocketful of Ontario, Canada, back to the United States just for the hell of it.

I've done all sorts of things just for the hell of it.  And in spite of the fact that I may be a country boy, the people that I was with and I enjoyed every minute of it.  In short, I've been around and I'm damn proud of me, and I don't mind telling anybody.