Holiday Routine

The weather at Virginia Beach, Va. was too cool and blustery for the Prime Minister. A few times, William Lyon Mackenzie King bundled himself up and went out for a short walk along the shore or tackled the piney woods bordering the golf course. But mostly he stayed close to his sixth-floor suite in the Cavalier Hotel, in constant touch by telephone with Ottawa.

The Cavalier's famed sunken gardens were not yet in bloom, but every day the hotel management sent up baskets of spring flowers, mainly King Alfred jonquils. The P.M. ate in the hotel dining room, and Chef Gene Gualko successfully stimulated his appetite with all sorts of southern dishes and sea food. At almost every meal, Mackenzie King ordered Virginia bacon. Once he got away with two whole broiled lobsters and was "crazy about them."

Other guests paid the P.M. little heed; he called on no one, had no callers. Hotel employees thought him "very democratic" because he went out of his way to speak to them.

Reading for Pleasure. In his suite the P.M. sometimes played checkers with his personal secretary, James Handy. He read light fiction, and he leafed through a pre-publication copy of a new book about Canada's Russian spy conspiracy, which devoted considerable space to the Prime Minister. He liked it. He took time for some writing, too. He got letters out of the way (one thank-you note to the hotel owner apologized for his poor handwriting), and he worked a few hours every day on a new book on labor relations, a pet King subject.

So it went, for six days. The Prime Minister, on holiday for the first time since 1938 (when he went to the West Indies), was getting precisely what he wanted--a "real change" and a rest, on doctor's orders. At the end of the week he was off to historic, colonial Williamsburg, Va., and Friend John D. Rockefeller's restored "Bassett Hall," for more of the same.

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