![]() Eat cherry pie and think about the lilacs in bloom along the railway tracks carrying Lincoln's body back to Illinois, but my heart will be with FDR's Fireside Chats of yesteryear. I will celebrate President's Day with the rest of you. Washington and Lincoln could only be found in the history books. I listened to President Roosevelt talk directly to me. I am not knocking George Washington or Abe Lincoln. Oh, I later learned in college that he had another side to him, but he encouraged me when I needed a kind word. Yes, and maybe because I really felt he was talking directly to me. Maybe because times were hard and we needed assurance. No president since has commanded my respect and attention as did FDR. He began his talk with “My Friends” and ended with the Star Spangled Banner being played. I was only eight or nine, but he spoke directly to me. Using simple, positive language with understandable examples, we easily related to him. All my family, well, Dad, Mom and me, sat around the radio in the living room and listened to President Roosevelt's Fireside Chats. I remember when we had a store-bought radio, not just the homemade kit Dad had sent away for a few years earlier. Times were not as hard and a welfare net was in place. He wasn't a bad person, he just never had to pick up milk on the way home from work like my dad did. Bush didn't know how to buy a carton of milk at the grocery store. He came from wealth and social position, but understood our plight. Our president through those lean years was Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). I knew how hard it was to put food on the table and pay the rent. thus making the contents of his Chats national news before and not merely after. He lost the use of his legs for the rest of his life, though the public was largely unaware of his disability. At age thirty-nine, Roosevelt contracted polio. He served as the nation’s 32nd president from Mato his death in 1945. I would hear them talking in bed when I was supposed to be asleep. America Responds to FDR During the Great Depression Lawrence W. Known as FDR, Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in 1932, 1936, 19. My folks tried to shelter my brothers and me from the problems they were facing. We thought everyone else was suffering like we were. My dad was too proud to accept welfare as were many men of that era. No food stamps, Medicaid or Medicare, and minimal welfare. Born in 1928, my early years were through the Great Depression.
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