THAT PELLET WOMAN!

Mrs. Pellet tells her life story so simply and unassumingly that once you are hooked by the opening chapters, you remain hooked. Mrs. Pellet is also Elizabeth Eyre, a Broadway and film star of many years past. On the stage she was leading lady to Robert Hilliard, a matinee idol, and in movies she played with William Farnum, a saddle idol, in The Flunderers. Though she knew nothing of riding horses, she found herself having to give trick performances for the camera, riding through burning saloons and so on. She gave up Broadway in her middle twenties to marry a mining engineer, Robert Pellet. They settled in Rico, Colorado, for the larger part of their married life, where she became something of a mining engineer herself as stand-in for her ailing husband. Later, like a full-blooming suffragette, she got into politics and has been there for two decades, once as Democratic floor leader in the State Senate. The courage she drew from her late husband is quite affecting as is this minor memoir.