WOMEN: Mother-of-the-Year

When circuses play little towns in Kansas and go away leaving their 'tanbark rings stamped on the prairie, the town youngsters bring in their ponies and try to duplicate the Daring Feats of Horsemanship they have just witnessed. At least that is what they did in the early 1880s and among the girls of small Oswego, Kans. who would try backflips and pick-up-the-handkerchief was an extremely pretty, darkhaired girl named Harriette Flora.

Just before Christmas in 1886, Harriette Flora, aged 17, married a steady-going 19-year-old Arkansas country boy named Carl Raymond Gray. In that year he had won a promotion with the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad, from telegrapher & station agent to chief clerk in the general western agent's office. He took his bride to live in Wichita and there in the third spring the first of three sons was born to them.

Carl Gray got ahead fast. By the turn of the Century he was superintendent of transportation of the St. Louis & San Francisco. In 1911 he got a railroad presidency (Spokane, Portland & Seattle), first of a series of top offices which culminated in the presidency of the Union Pacific in 1920 and which ends with his retirement when he reaches 70 next autumn (TIME, April 26).

Last year in Omaha, just before Christmas, the U. P. gave Carl Gray a Golden Wedding party and beside him sat Harriette Flora of Oswego, Kans. still pretty, still brightly energetic, and quite as much a personage in her sphere as Carl Gray is in his. He made that very clear in his speech of thanks to his colleagues and to her. And last week in Manhattan, just after her eldest son's 48th birthday, the Golden Rule Foundation made it still clearer by hailing her as the " American Mother of 1937," announcing a fete for her on Mother's Day (May 9) with luncheon, silver medal and national broadcast.