Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin, at Yalta in 1945.

L-R: Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin, at Yalta in 1945. See the CIA's story about how Stalin's NKVD bugged the other two leaders during this conference.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Home in New York

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York, on January 30, 1882.

He served as a New York State Senator (1911-1913), Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913-1920), Governor of New York (1929-1932), and U.S. President (1932-1945).

U.S. $0.10 coins, oddly named "dimes", with Franklin D Roosevelt on the face. The name comes from the Old French word disme, meaning "tithe" or "tenth part", in turn from the Latin decima. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis had urged everyone to donate "one dime" and was already known as "the March of Dimes" by Roosevelt's death in 1945.

Roosevelt contracted a paralytic illness in August 1921. It was thought at the time to be poliomyelitis. He refused to accept a diagnosis of permanent paralysis, and worked at a wide range of therapies. After his election to the presidency, he helped to found the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now known as the March of Dimes.

For other pages mentioning polio and iron lungs, see my page about Robert F Kennedy's home water fluoridation system, and my page about scanning X-ray films and historical radiological hardware.

Now that polio is (thankfully) mostly a disease of the past, the March of Dimes fights birth defects in general, premature birth, and infant mortality. And now it's thought that Roosevelt really had Guillain-Barré syndrome instead of polio, the conclusion of a study in 2003, "What was the cause of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's paralytic illness?", Goldman AS, Schmalstieg EJ, Freeman DH, Goldman DA, Schmalstieg FC, J. Med. Biogr. 11(4) [2003]: 232-40.

U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his mother Sara Delano Roosevelt, at Hyde Park in 1933.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his mother Sara, at Hyde Park in 1933.

Roosevelt's mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, seems to have been, well, rather strange. As described on the National Park Service's description of Hyde Park, she was the son of a wealthy merchant who made his fortune in the tea and opium trade in China. Franklin was her only child and she "became absorbed in raising her only son, reading to him, giving him baths", and "After the death of her husband in 1900, she became still more single-mindedly focused on her son and his welfare."

Franklin went to Harvard, so she moved to Boston to be near him.

Then he proposed marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt, his cousin (!!), but Sara insisted that the engagement be kept secret for a year.

Franklin and Eleanor were married in 1905 despite her machinations. Within two years Sara was building a double townhouse in Manhattan, the left half for her and the right half for the closely surveilled couple. They lived there until he was elected President in 1932.

The Sara Delano Roosevelt and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt houses in New York, at #47-49 65th Street on the Upper East Side.

Plaque on the Sara Delano Roosevelt and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt houses in New York.

At left is the double townhouse on 65th Street.

Sara lived in the left half, #47.

Franklin and Eleanor lived in the right half, #49.

According to the historical plaque beside the shared entrance:

The Roosevelt houses were designed in 1907-08 by Charles A. Platt as English Georgian double townhouses. Behind the central entrance are two units, each with its own entry in the vestibule. The brick and limestone facade features a boldly rusticated arched entry with decorative wrought iron doors, a delicate wrought iron balcony at the second floor, and a stone cartouche on the fourth floor. Sara Delano Roosevelt, who commissioned the buildings, lived in No. 47 and gave No. 49 to her son Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor. In this house FDR recovered from polio in 1921-22 and learned of his election as governor of New York in 1928, and as president of the United States in 1932. Eleanor Roosevelt held meetings here for civic and political groups as she began her public career. The houses are owned by Hunter College of the City University of New York and have been used by the college since 1943.