BATTLE OF EUROPE: The Man Who Paved the Way

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Most of the House family gather in Sally's room before dinner to gossip about the day's events, then they move on to Spaatz's office for drinks around the big table with guests. Sally serves the first round, then guests do their own pouring. The General, who is usually cutting someone's throat at cribbage beside the fire, sets up a hungry cry: "Sally, bring the anchovies!" and Sally reaches for a can opener. Mrs. Spaatz keeps a steady flow of ingenious crackers, biscuits, anchovies, kippers, sardines, smoked cheese and the like crossing the Atlantic for X-House; as a gift on his 53rd birthday (June 28) Tooey will get a Smithfield ham.

Home Family. Spaatz's strong feeling for the family relationship in his official life is a reflection of his happy and notably informal family life at home. He is devoted as only an inarticulate, hard-shelled Pennsylvania Dutchman could be to his spritely family of women, fondly known as the "harem." Tooey may be tough on the troops, but with his three daughters he is "weak in the head"—this from no less an authority than his wife, dark-haired, good-looking Ruth Harrison Spaatz.

Spaatz has not yet seen the youngest member of the harem—his five-month-old, redheaded granddaughter—but he was "pleased sick" over the addition, especially because it had turned out to be a girl. His eldest daughter, Katherine ("Tatty"), is in England with a Red Cross club-mobile crew; the rest of the family is living in the big old Spaatz home in Alexandria, Va., near Washington.

Letters from Tatty and Sally Bagby helped Mrs. Spaatz to fill in the picture of life in England which grew grimmer as the greatest test of the war approached. Tooey temporarily forsook the guitar (on which he is a fair hand) and, with a gesture to the fates worthy of an old ballplayer, he has refused to wear any headgear save a battered, villainous cap of the smartly sloppy Air Forces type.

But he still indulges his passion for gambling. X-House has the finest poker table in London, and at it Tooey works off any brashness or overoptimism that might be yeasting within him. He bets with a heavy hand, bluffs outrageously.

But his occasional loyalty to such mild holdings as two jacks or three treys, and his reformist zeal for keeping all the other players honest, can cost him dear when such scientific pokerists as Ira Eaker are present. Says Mrs. Spaatz, philosophically: "That's where the flying pay goes. It's an old Air Force custom. They all have that feeling: 'What the hell, let's take a chance.' "