U.S. History lesson and a most unusual photo

Today, class, before 2020 passes into history, let's take a glimpse back in time to the America of a hundred years ago, to the year 1920.

I can hear some of you saying "Let's not" but I am going to forge ahead anyhow. Stick with me. You may learn something.

World War I had ended with the armistice in November 1918. American women had just received the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and everyone was looking forward to the election in the fall of 1920. The deadly Spanish flu had lasted from February 1918 to April 1920, infecting 500 million people – about a third of the world's population at the time – in four successive waves. The death toll worldwide is estimated to have been somewhere between 17 million and 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million.

On the American political scene, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, wanted to serve a third term but his failing health made that unlikely. In the Republican Party, former president Theodore Roosevelt had been the favorite for another run at the presidency, but that hope ended when he died in January 1919. Whom to pick, whom to pick? Both parties were in a quandary.

At the Democratic Party's National Convention in San Francisco, on the 44th ballot (repeat, 44th ballot -- Donald Trump would have been apoplectic), James M. Cox, the governor of Ohio, was chosen to head the ticket and he picked the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York, as his Vice-Presidential running mate. Here they are at a campaign stop in Washington D.C. in 1920:

Do you notice anything unusual or surprising about that photo? The answer is revealed before the end of this post.

The Republicans chose Senator Warren G. Harding, also of Ohio, to be their candidate. He became the 29th president of the United States. His Vice-Presidential running mate, Calvin Coolidge, then became the 30th president when Harding died in office in 1923.

Here is what the electoral map ended up looking like in 1920:

The "big three" states in electoral votes that year were New York (45), Pennsylvania (38), and Illinois(29). Not California, Not Texas. Not Florida. The North and West voted Republican and there was an almost solidly Democratic south except for the state of Tennessee. The nation's political map has changed a great desl in the last hundred years, mainly because the political stances of the Democrats and Republicans have changed as well.

About that photograph, it is the only one I have ever seen of Franklin D. Roosevelt standing tall and erect, unassisted by crutches or canes, or not sitting in a wheelchair. It made me wonder just when he contracted polio, and I have learned that it happened the very next year, in 1921. He became very ill while his family was on vacation at Campobello in Maine. He became permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Although he was diagnosed with poliomyelitis at the time, some now think his symptoms were more consistent with Guillain–Barré syndrome.

The Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, World War II were all yet to come.

Roosevelt probably thought his career was ended and that his life was ruined.

He could not have been more wrong.

He went on to become Governor of New York, and then the longest-serving president of the United States, from 1933 until 1945.

Remembrance of things past (part the first)

It occurs to me that I keep showing you odd bits of stuff like that film of San Francisco in 1906 but never tell you much about myself.

Today I will tell you a whole lot a little about myself.

Of average height and average weight, I am a 72-year-old man who spent the last week in September in a hospital where a great deal of poking and prodding and sticking with needles and photographing of my innards and receiving a couple of pints of blood and a few other things too horrible to think about took place. And that was just at the admissions desk.

I was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, (it’s the smallest state in the union, and it’s in New England) because I wanted to be near my mother, and she happened to be there at the time.

We lived in a third-floor apartment of a house at 61 Larch Street and my pediatrician was a Dr. Kachichian. I attended the Pawtucket Day Nursery while my mother, who had received a teaching certificate from West Chester State College in Pennsylvania, worked at the Coats & Clark Thread Factory. My teachers were Miss Irma Chisholm and Mrs. Yvonne Schack. A Portuguese woman in the neighborhood would sometimes take care of me as well and give me apple pie and pastrami for breakfast.

One day at recess, while two children were playing on a seesaw, one jumped off and the other, a black boy named Peter, fell and hurt himself. His arm was bleeding, and I noticed that his blood was red just like mine. I decided on the spot that people are alike on the inside and it is only on the outside that we are different.

When I was about four or five, a man wearing a white sailor uniform began visiting my mother occasionally. My mother called him “Ted” and so did I. Eventually he moved in permanently and my mother told me to call him “Daddy” from then on.

I went to Hancock Street Elementary School to Mrs. Mullins’s kindergarten class, but after four days she took me to first grade. Apparently Pawtucket Day Nursery had done its job well, because I was answering all the questions and telling all the other children the answers. My teacher in first grade was Miss Edith Wildegoose.

(Here I am in the spring of 1947 as a student in Miss Edith Wildegoose’s first grade class. I was six.)







In August 1947 we moved from Rhode Island to Fort Worth, Texas,
on a train. It took three days. We arrived on one of the hottest days in the history of Fort Worth, Texas, and walked several blocks from the Texas & Pacific Railroad Station to the Majestic Hotel, which was inaptly named, carrying our luggage. One day, while leaving the hotel to get something to eat, I saw a hotel employee whose skin was so black it was almost blue, who had the whitest teeth and the whitest jacket I had ever seen, sweeping little black things off the sidewalk into little piles in the gutter and setting them on fire. The little black things turned out to be live crickets, and the smell was beyond awful. I was scarred for life in that instant.

A few days later we moved to a boarding house in the Arlington Heights section of Fort Worth. Mrs. Cash, who owned the boarding house, spent her days telling everyone who would listen that her close relative, actress Faye Emerson, was married to Elliott Roosevelt, the son of the President. The phrase “six degrees of separation” had not yet been invented, and actor Kevin Bacon was not born until 1958, but Mrs. Cash was eager for all to know that she was associated with the rich and famous.

My parents eventually rented a small post-war bungalow on a horseshoe-shaped street (2332 Chandler Drive East, on the other end of the horseshoe from Chandler Drive West) and I was enrolled into Mrs. Wolfe’s second-grade class at Oakhurst Elementary School.

I was not to experience urban life for long. In the spring of 1948, we moved again to a three-acre plot two miles from a little town that boasted a one-block-long business district with a traffic signal at both ends. I was to live there for the next ten years.

Hyde Park, Mon Amour?

The lovely home in the preceding post was the residence of this happy couple:


Here they are in another location with some friends who dropped in for a visit. Unfortunately, I have no idea who the gentleman resplendent in white in the center of the picture is.


Without straining your eyes to read the photo caption, can you identify the husband and wife who are serving as bookends or hazard a guess as to what year the photo was taken?

When I said the mystery home was “very close to a place that has been in the news lately” I was referring to the Hudson River, not the Gaza Strip as one person guessed, but he is more to be pitied than censured as he makes his home in Utah. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Home and Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, is indeed quite near the Hudson River, about 75 miles north of where a passenger on a ferry bound from Manhattan for New Jersey snapped this photo with his mobile phone a few few days ago:

(Photo by Janis Krums of Sarasota, Florida)

Who lived here?

I have a black-and-white snapshot of this house taken around 1967 or 1968 and another snapshot, taken closer up, that shows my two oldest children and their two cousins from Florida sitting on the front steps.

I will give you two hints.

Hint #1: The person who lived here is also buried here.
Hint #2: When I took my snapshots, I worked for IBM in Pough-keepsie, New York.

I will throw in two more hints for good measure.

Hint #3: At one time this was one of the most photographed homes in the world.
Hint #4: It is very close to something that has been in the news lately.

Anybody want to take a crack at answering?