Franklin Delano Roosevelt
In early April 1945, I was planning my sixth birthday party for May 10, the day my grandmother said I would become a man. I had a “girl friend” I had invited to my party. Sadly, that birthday party never happened.
On the morning of April 13, my mother woke me as usual, “ Wake up and get ready for breakfast!”
I got dressed and went into the breakfast room. The table was not set; no one was there. My mother was not preparing my eggs and toast. Something was wrong.
Daddy called, “We’re in the living room, son.”
My mother, still in her nightgown, sat in her favorite rocking chair crying and holding my two-year old sister, Mimi, in her arms. Daddy turned down the radio as Momma looked up at me and gasped, “He’s… dead… President Roosevelt is … dead.”
In 1921, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) contracted polio and found that physical exercise in warm water eased his pain. In 1924, FDR went to a ramshackle resort in Bullochville, Georgia, hoping to find a cure for the polio that had struck him in 1921. Swimming in the 88-degree waters was not a miracle cure but did bring Roosevelt some improvement. He was a constant visitor for two decades and renamed the town “ Warm Springs.” Just before being inaugurated as president in 1932, FDR built the “Little White House” in Warm Springs.
Warm Springs has become a well-known spa town because of 90-degree mineral springs which flow constantly. Visitors spent vacations there to escape yellow fever and to get away from the heat and congestion of Atlanta. The Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, is a world-renowned rehabilitation center and is now a public bath/spa resort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected the 32nd U.S. president in 1933 and was reelected three more times. He led the U.S. through the Great Depression and World War II and expanded the powers of the federal government through a series of reforms known as the New Deal. While posing for a portrait on April 12, 1945, FDR suffered a stroke and died a short while later.
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