Word: grandpas
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...people die on the march. There are great simple moments like the burial of Grandpa (Charley Grapewin). Wisely Nunnally Johnson has retained only the bare bones of dialogue from the novel. So the burial scene is terser, more moving in picture than in book. High point is still Tom Joad's quiet rebuke when the irreligious Preacher (John Carradine) does not want to speak at the grave: "Ain't none of our folks ever been buried without a few words." There is the note Tom Joad writes to bury with the body: "This here is William James Joad...
Ready were the traditional red stockings that every Roosevelt, child and grownup, hangs over the fireplace in the President's second-floor bedroom. On Christmas Eve, after the children have kissed "Grandpa" good night, the elder Roosevelts stuff the stockings. Into each toe goes a toothbrush, a nailfile, a gaily wrapped bar of soap-vestiges of a custom that Mrs. Roosevelt began, as a sugar-coated reminder of cleanliness, when her six-footer sons were little tads...
...soon after dawn as is seemly, the pajama-clad small fry whoop into "Grandpa's" bedroom, bounce on his bed, shout "Merry Christmas," and dive for the bulging red stockings hanging from the mantelpiece. After breakfast (smoked sausages and scrambled eggs) the President and the immediate family motor around old Lafayette Square to the grey granite St. Thomas Episcopal Church...
After church and the mammoth noonday Christmas dinner-when "Grandpa" carves a 40-pound turkey-the fun really begins. Seated by the tree, and giving advice on horn-blowing technique to the jumping urchins, the President and the family attack the gift piles with cries of genuine or simulated delight, get lost in the billows of wrapping paper, like many another American family...
...Susan Ertz's One Fight More (Appleton-Century, $2.50), her eleventh, is one novel more in which a foxy grandpa pulls together a big, bickering family...