Keeping F.D.R.’s Memory Alive : It’s Still April 12, 1945, at the Little White House

The six-room cottage is as it was 43 years ago--same furniture, same rugs and linoleum on the floor, same paintings and wallpaper on the walls, the same old-fashioned icebox in the kitchen. Nothing has changed.

An artist was in the living room of the house that fateful day, April 12, 1945, finishing a portrait. The man she was painting sat 10 feet away in his favorite brown leather chair.

“Another 15 minutes and that will be it for today,” he said to the artist, lighting a cigarette. He was working on a speech he was to deliver the next day.

Suddenly his hand went to his head. He uttered: “I have a terrific headache.” Then he slumped unconscious in the chair. It was 1:15 in the afternoon.

Elizabeth Shoumatoff put down her paint brush. Two men standing close by ran to the leather chair, lifted the limp form of the man and carried him to an adjoining bedroom.

He had been stricken by a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He breathed his last breath 2 hours 20 minutes later.

And, before the sun set that day, the whole world knew.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 63, the nation’s 32nd President, died in the unpretentious, six-room, white clapboard Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga.

Roosevelt was the only person re-elected President three times. He was also America’s only crippled President. A victim of polio, he was unable to walk without the use of braces.

He was 39 and a New York attorney when he contracted the disease in 1921. Three years later he discovered his weakened knees were strengthened by the constant 88-degree spring water bubbling to the surface of pools in this small Georgia piney-woods town.

For the next 21 years until his death, President Roosevelt retreated here at every opportunity. During that time, historians have calculated he spent a total of two years and two months in Warm Springs enjoying the therapeutic relief of the warm spring water.

His Warm Springs home--the Little White House--was completed in 1932 at a cost of $8,713.14. The home is now the centerpiece of 4,000-acre Georgia State Park.

Time has stood still in this shrine to F.D.R., as he was known.

When F.D.R. was here, a ship’s lantern glowed at the front entrance every night. Now the same lantern is always on from sundown to sunrise.

In the house, every effort has been made to keep things as they were the day he died, down to the same roll of faded toilet paper in the bathroom.

The same galvanized iron garbage can stands at the back door. A hand-cranked ice-cream freezer is in the pantry. The same pots and pans, dishes and silverware are in the kitchen, where penciled on the wall is a poignant note left that day by the President’s cook:

“Daisy Bonner Cook the first meal and the last one in this cottage for President Roosevelt.”

Since Roosevelt served as undersecretary of the Navy and had a lifelong love of the sea, the house is filled with his models and paintings of famous ships.

In the fireplace are the same partially burned logs that warmed the living room that day so long ago. Scores of the President’s books, unopened all these years, line shelves in the room.

And Elizabeth Shoumatoff’s haunting “Unfinished Portrait” stands on the same easel in the same place where she laid down her paintbrush for the final time.

His wheelchair sits in a hallway, his Panama hat on a rack. Nearby is the chain for his Scotty, Fala. In the garage, never driven in 43 years, is the President’s favorite car, a 1938 Ford convertible especially fitted for him with hand controls; the 1945 Georgia license plate, F.D.R. 1.

This year, about 120,000 persons will visit the house, 60% of them over 60, those who remember the Roosevelt years. F.D.R. was America’s Gorbachev in the ‘30s and ‘40s, many say. He revolutionized this country.

“For the older people visiting this house it’s a spiritual experience,” said receptionist Louise Harris, 50, who was 7 when F.D.R. died. “They all remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when he died. Many leave the Little White House in tears.”

Each August there is an “I Remember F.D.R.” weekend here that attracts those who had a personal relationship with the President during his stay in Warm Springs.