My Day

I hadn’t made the left off Route 9 into the Franklin D. Roosevelt estate, for many years.  And though Franklin is certainly in the air, I am heading towards a ceremony that honors his wife.  Notably, Eleanor gets nearly equal billing to FDR as we crest the hill and enter Hyde Park.  There are banners on the street lamps, showing a silhouette of Franklin and then one Eleanor, one of Franklin, one of Eleanor.  What other presidential estate does that?  None, I’m sure.

My older daughter has spent the last nine days in the Girls Leadership Worldwide program that is run in conjunction with Eleanor’s Val Kill estate.   But today’s ceremony is at Frank’s spot. 

I can remember working here one summer.  I must have been around fourteen.  I volunteered, certainly, as it was before I began a series of dead end jobs in pursuit of record shopping money.  I can remember FDR’s model ship collection, and the story of when there was a fugitive on the loose when his father stayed up at night with a gun, just in case.  And I recall a cartoon from a magazine cover where a child had written “Roosevelt” on the sidewalk and the caption was “Mom, Billy wrote a bad word!”  That summer I was there the park rangers found a copperhead in a garbage can, which I thought was pretty cool.  The only poisonous snake we had in upstate New York. 

The program afforded each of the thirty or so young ladies a chance to step up on the stage and summarize their experience.  Each one spoke of the quality of the connections they’d enjoyed with one another.  It’s one thing to expose kids to lofty ideas and arrange for talks with powerful women but facilitating them to trust one another and befriend one another seems a much tougher undertaking.  It was all my daughter and all these daughters could talk about.

And nearly everyone had an Eleanor quote:  “A woman is like a teabag.  You don’t know how strong she is until you put her in hot water.”  Nice.  And I was reacquainted with the idea that she wrote "My Day" her column every day of her life except Sunday’s from 1936 till 1962.  I’m coming up on a three-year anniversary of just such an exercise, albeit with a much more modest readership.  Clearly, that is where all her quotes must come from.  And I’m awed and inspired that the great lady kept it up for as long as she did.  I’ll have to dig a few up and see what it was she tended to communicate to the world, every day. 

I skimmed a few and I'm thrilled to see they were somewhat informal and notably approachable.  Here is one I found from my birthday, in 1941  . . . 

https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1941&_f=md055866