Page 7 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 1 Fall 2013

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MEMORIES
Getting to St. Paul’s had been a challenge
for Eleanor Roosevelt. First, as she drove
from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., she faced a long
detour due to the flooding that had washed
out the bridge spanning the Connecticut
River near Brattleboro. Then, perhaps
because she was distracted by the devasta-
tion she’d witnessed – breached dams,
flooded homes and businesses, homeless
men, women, and children – she initially
missed the entrance to the School. But
finally, on April 27, 1936, the first lady
arrived at St. Paul’s.
Mrs. Roosevelt had been invited by
Fourth Rector Samuel Drury and the
School’s “head boy,” her own nephew,
Daniel Roosevelt of the Form of 1936.
Daniel was not her only relative who
attended St. Paul’s; his brother Henry
had graduated in 1934, and her cousin,
Douglas Robinson Jr., was a member of
the Form of 1872. Her father, Elliott Roose-
velt, had also attended briefly in 1875.
The first lady toured the Chapel,
watched the Lower School students
rowing on Long Pond, and admired
the swans preening themselves
on the still waters. She was
suitably impressed by the
beauty of the campus.
“The grounds and the trees and so much
water make the place most attractive, and
because the buildings are widely scattered,
you are not really as conscious of a great
many boys around you,” she said.
Later she was invited to address the stu-
dents in a crowded study hall. The boys
sat on “any place they could find to perch
themselves” – benches, atop desks, bal-
anced on radiators. Mrs. Roosevelt talked
to them about personal and national
challenges, encouraging the young men
to “learn to take your chances.” When she
opened the floor to questions, there was
no shortage. “Instead of the usual long
pause in which you wonder if anyone will
ever get up the courage to say anything,”
she later reported, “this group jumped in
almost immediately.”
Several of the students asked about the
unemployed. This was a frequent topic
for the first lady, who worked hard to try
to convey the desperation of Americans
devastated by the Great Depression.
She explained, “I often wonder how we
can make the more fortunate in this country
fully aware of the fact that the problem of
the unemployed is not a mechanical one.
It is a problem alive and throbbing with
human pain.” She urged the boys in the
audience to remember “how easily we our-
selves might be unemployed, given a dif-
ferent turn of fortune’s wheel.”
Though she worried about the nation,
Mrs. Roosevelt found promise in the boys’
bright faces on that spring day in 1936.
She later recalled her visit, noting, “There
is something very touching in the contact
with these youngsters, so full of fire and
promise and curiosity about life.”
The first lady believed firmly that the
future was in the hands of these young men
on the cusp of adulthood. “Youth has cour-
age and the sprit of adventure,” she advised,
“and we should give it our confidence.”
Michele Albion is the editor of The
Quotable Eleanor Roosevelt ,The Quot-
able Henry Ford, The Quotable Edison
and The Florida Life of Thomas Edison.
She lives in New Hampshire.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1936 Visit to St. Paul’s
By Michele Albion