PRESIDENT LOSES GUIDE OF HIS YOUTH

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 212, 8 September 1941, Page 6

PRESIDENT LOSES GUIDE OF HIS YOUTH

/~VNE of America's grand old ladies, Sara Delano Roosevelt, mother of the President, has passed away at Hyde Park, her country home on the Hudson, at the age of 86. Throughout her life she exercised a profound influence on the President, sheltering and encouraging him in his somewhat lonely boyhood, giving him hope in the dark years when he fought a serious illness, and providing a background of quiet strength during his political career.

Roosevelt was born in a comfortable mansion, on a wooded estate near the Hudson. He lived closely with his parents, almost only with them. Yet they did not look like mother and father—rather like mother and grandfather. The beautiful woman of 30 playing: with her son could easily be the daughter of this man, who was nearly 30 years older.

One biographer 'said: "When mother goes out riding with father, she takes care not to "gallop the way she does with the boy, because father may be strong and active, but his hair is white just the same. When you look at a photograph of\ these three living people you think you see three generations."

Frank Roosevelt's mother was a Delano, and the Delanos went to America nearly 300 years ago. For many years they were seafaring men, ana for the last 100 years were landed squires. Her father had gone as his own captain on a sailing ship to China to buy tea; and when a child she was on board when there was a big storm and almost a shipwreck.

In the seventeenth century a forefather of hers had one of the first inns near the Hudson. Afterwards the family worked themselves up to wealth and fame, became richer than the Roosevelts. Franklin's mother had been invited to the French Court when she was still a young woman,

and had put on grand clothes and had been presented to the Emperor Napoleon 111. and the lovely Empress Eugenie. Widowed at Thirty Mrs. Sara Roosevelt became a widow in her thirties, and she was then a beautiful woman. Until then the young Franklin had lived under her wing. She followed her only child to the university and lived for some years in Boston in order to have the boy near her. Thus, seeking to make things easier for him in every conceivable way, she also provided him with a home during his studies, and in the summer and during the vacations they had only to change this for their country home.

As Franklin travelled along the road to his destiny his mother was ever in the background, a counsellor, confidante and comrade. When at the age of 40 he was suddenly stricken down with infantile paralysis she was terrified. Moved only by the desire to protect her child, she invited him to settle down in her old country home and take up a life of reading and writing, sheltered by money, nature and the family. But he refused to disappear. How he fought and conquered his disability is an epic of American history.

When Franklin was five years of age his father had taken him to the White House, and the stern President Cleveland said to him:— "I'll give you a wish to remember for the rest of your life: Pray to God that He never lets you become President of the United States." These words, which his mother had often repeated to him in his youth, became more and more incomprehensible to him with the passing of the years.

It was his mother who was the first to greet him as he entered the highest office in the land, to find therein' a greater range and broader field of effectiveness. Rut in his old home at Hyde Park life did not change. In this country house of his fathers, which did not belong to the President but to his mother, he was still the son, she the hostess.