A dime comes full circle
When I was a boy it was customary for students to take a dime to
class every Jan. 30. The March of Dimes gave children an
opportunity to join the fight against polio, better known then as
infantile paralysis. Most of its victims were children, and it
maimed or took many young lives.
A dime comes full circle
When I was a boy it was customary for students to take a dime to class every Jan. 30. The March of Dimes gave children an opportunity to join the fight against polio, better known then as infantile paralysis. Most of its victims were children, and it maimed or took many young lives.
But the man who inspired the drive was 39 when afflicted. The disease changed the course of his life, and many historians maintain the course of American and world events as well.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born into a family that was old in New York society. His ancestors had been prominent in the colony when it was still a Dutch domain called Nieuw Amsterdam. Each generation the Roosevelts contributed members to positions of influence and leadership.
Franklin was born at Hyde Park, N.Y. on Jan. 30, 1882. Like many of his ancestors, Franklin attended Groton, then Harvard, and was trained to carry on the responsibility of public office. He married a distant cousin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, who gave the bride away at their wedding in 1905.
FDR’s easy charm and social connections helped him along the path of advancement, and he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I. In 1920, the Democratic Party nominated him as vice president on the same ticket as James. M.Cox, but Warren G. Harding won.
He was stricken with polio the following summer. Family and friends said privately that it was the end of public life for him. But they had not reckoned on his determination. For months he went from being confined to bed, then a wheelchair, from crawling in his obsession to win back mobility to hobbling for a few steps in leg braces and with a cane. He never regained full mobility but the experience instilled in him something he had lacked before, a sense of humility.
By the end of the decade he had become governor of New York and was the keynote speaker in his party’s nomination of Al Smith. Smith lost to Herbert Hoover but fate had put Hoover in the White House the same year that the Great Depression fell across the land. Millions of jobless and homeless people blamed Hoover, and Roosevelt was nominated by his party in 1932 and swept the election.
In his first weeks in office he created many agencies to put people back to work and restore their dignity. They listened to his “fireside chats,” and took new heart as hope was reborn by the patrician telling them in Harvard-accented words that better days were ahead.
He was re-elected in 1936, then in 1940, when the Congress barely passed the country’s first peacetime draft, went for an unprecedented third term. A little more than a year later, the United States was impelled into World War II.
Roosevelt chose the best military commanders available, and listened to their counsel. From a defensive position the nation rallied to take the fight to the enemy, and by the spring of 1945, the same year he began his fourth term, everyone knew final victory was close.
On the evening of April 12, 1945, Vernon Heckman and I emerged from Toledo’s Rivoli Theater to see a newsboy shouting “Extra!” Vernon went over to read the headline, and returned, saying in an incredulous whisper, “The President’s dead!”
I sold the Toledo Blade after school each day, so hurried to its offices to get some newspapers to take downtown. Before the full impact of the words hit, I cried over and over, “Extra! Roosevelt Dies!” Passers-by, including many in uniform, wept openly.
The following year, with peace restored, his country honored him with a tribute he would have liked – his image stamped on a dime.
