Ronda Rich

Syndicated Columnist

Most admire Franklin D. Roosevelt, a crafty, pleasant, get-it-done type of President.

He had been raised as an only child to his mother and father, though he had step-siblings. He was tremendously spoiled but not in the way that turned him mean. He lived in the grandest of homes, had servants at his beck and call, and enjoyed a full staff of housekeepers, chefs, drivers, lawn and flower people. And a mother who was known for being in charge and not to be denied.

FDR was about 30 and had sired several children with his wife – and cousin — Eleanor. They were spending the summer at their upstate New York house when he contracted polio, a fear as great as AIDS was in the 1980s, while he was swimming at Campobello Island in New Brunswick. His cousin, Theodore, had become President when President McKinley was killed by an assassin’s bullet. The younger Theodore preferred wildlife hunting to the White House but he was ready to serve.

To him, we owe remarkable gratitude for saving incalculable of acres of land for conservation and controlled hunting. The Roosevelts were among the top five or so families of great wealth to inhabit the White House. They lived with luxurious pool houses and not the outhouses known to the rural South.

It’s impossible to list Franklin Roosevelt’s many achievements under his unprecedented – never again to be repeated due to a Constitutional amendment – 16 years as President. Had it not been for a town near Atlanta, on a bumpy ride toward Columbus, Georgia, he might not have been remembered so mightily.

Roosevelt, to the manor born, received a call from a Wall Street buddy named George Foster Peabody, who, in contrast to Roosevelt, had been born into humble conditions near the Georgia-Alabama line.

“Franklin, I own about 1,500 acres in the midst of the piney woods of Georgia. The streams there heat themselves to about 90 degrees and, it is said, that the therapeutic warmth of the springs is effective in treating polio. Why don’t you go down there, spend a few weeks, and see if it helps?”

By this point, FDR, not yet a President, had seen every specialist in America. To demonstrate his open-mindedness, he traveled to Warm Springs, taking a train, winding down from the far North, edging the Carolinas, heading straight across Georgia He fell in love with the rural South and her people.

One visit to the Little White House, during his presidential years, coincided with the 1936 tornado that had laid to waste a mill town. Roosevelt ordered the train to stop near the town square. Standing on crutches at the train’s platform, he spoke eloquently to Gainesville’s devastated people. Hundreds of lives had been lost including those of workers, in a pants factory, where no one escaped.

That square, upon its rebuilding, was renamed Roosevelt Square and aided in turning the voters of that time into “Yellow Dog Democrats.”

“Roosevelt saved our people when no one else cared,” Daddy said, explaining that the term meant that a true Democrat would vote for a “yellow dog” rather than a Republican. That lasted until 1988 when Bush Senior came in amidst a changing political environment.

When Daddy voted for Bush was a glum but necessary time in his electoral life. That night, he hung his hat on the nail that held the local funeral home calendar with the signs of the moon.

Quizzically, I asked. “I thought you said you’d never Republican.”

He turned his sad, green eyes toward me. “I wouldn’t have, but they deserted me.”

But before his party of old had disappeared completely, Daddy came home one night toting a big, wax-coated, round hoop of cheese — a good source of calcium and protein.

“What’s that?” I asked, looking up from TV.

“‘Govenmint’ cheese. Roosevelt kept us alive with it during Hoover days. This is probably the last you’ll ever see of any such. Take a good look.”

I did and I have never forgotten it. Ronda Rich is the best-selling author of “Sapelo Island: A Stella Bankwell Mystery.” Please visit www.rondarich.com to sign up for her newsletter.