Las Vegas Age

WOMEN GEOGRAPHERS TELL OF EXPERIENCES IN FAR-FLUNG OUTPOSTS. MODEST? OF COURSE

NEW YORK, Feb. 8. (U.P.) - The Society of Women Geographers is no place for a woman who likes to knit.

They had their annual dinner tonight at the Museum of Natural History-about eighty of them -and then swapped stories of their experiences climbing mountains, deep sea diving and pioneering in aviation.

One charming lady in an alice blue evening gown, sparkling earrings and jet black hair even went so far as to show the ladies present a "particularly beautiful specimen" of a miniature human head she had obtained from the Ecuadorian head hunters.

She stroked the head fondly as she told the story of how the man to whom it once belonged had been put to death for stealing a wife and how she had seen the head shrunk by a process of dehydration until it became the size of a baseball.

As Mrs. Elizabeth Dickey of Tiffin, Ohio, (five expeditions to South America: a trip up the Orinoco to visit the previously unrecorded Guiapo-Pihibi tribe to collect burial urns) told her story some of those present shuddered a little but, remembering they were lady geographers, immediately regained their composure.

Amelia Earhart (first woman to cross the Atlantic by air: first woman to solo an airplane across the continent; first woman to solo an autogiro, etc.) told of her flying experiences.

Deep sea diving with the William Beebe expedition was the subject of Miss Gloria Hollister, who looks more like one of Ziegfeld's glories than a scientist. She holds the diving record for women-410 feet below the surface-and told how she got it.

It was all very informal. The women who spoke even cracked jokes at the expense of their sex and in spite of their imposing scientific records did not take themselves too seriously.

The dinner was full of celebrities. There was Bernt Balchen, who flew over both poles. General Rafael D'Nogales, soldier of fortune and general in the Turkish army during the World war and George Palmer Putnam, who publishes books and things. But they were only there on sufferance and to provide foil for the ladies who wanted to brag a little, in a most charming manner, of course, of their scientific exploits. The men were most gallant and fell in at once with the idea. The ladies talked; the men listened. But then that isn't news.

There was Miss Annie Peck, 81, famous mountain climber. She flew 20,000 miles last year over the South American mountains and came back to Manhattan to get three ribs broken in a trolley car accident. She is just recovering.

Even the waitresses were naturalists. Dinner was served in the bird hall which has a very realistic exhibition of birds in full flight overhead.

"What are those?" asked one waitress of another, pointing upward.

The second waitress cocked an experienced eye toward the ceiling.

"Them's Mallards," she said.