In the Dutchess County Spotlight
Daytripper: Hyde Park and the FDR Museum
By Mike Walker
My wife Bonnie and I took advantage of a rare warm day Saturday and went to Hyde Park, NY, to see the FDR Presidential Library and Museum. The drive is a little under 2 hours from Manhattan, it’s not a beautiful ride, but pleasant enough. The museum is at the site of FDR’s childhood home, the library was built during his presidency, and the visitors center is of 2000s vintage.
For $14, you get a guided tour of FDR’s home and entrance to the library and museum. As entertainment value for your dollar, the museum can’t compete with Avatar, but I never mind giving the Park Service money.
The Roosevelt home is very nice but not ostentatious. I’d say it looked Georgian-style if I knew anything about architecture. Inside, the home has that classic Yankee look of well-heeled austerity with some unusual touches that make Roosevelt appear very likable. As a boy, he had a large collection of birds which he killed on the grounds of the estate and stuffed. For educational purposes, his father allowed him to kill two birds (one male and one female) of every type. A shelf of a couple dozen are here, the rest are at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Imagine the time it took the find, shoot and mount those birds. (Amazing what kids were capable of before television.) Roosevelt also liked to collect anti-British newspaper cartoons from the War of 1812 and hang them in the entrance hall, which caused a mild stir when the King and Queen of England came to visit.
Outside the house is a stable and a rose garden. Later in life, Roosevelt built separate cottages on the vast grounds for himself and his wife, Eleanor. (The Roosevelt property stretched from the Hudson River to about 6 miles west, according to our tour guide.)
After touring the home, Bonnie and I went into the museum. The exhibits are roughly divided into three parts: FDR’s childhood and pre-White House career (assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New York), and his role as president during World War II, and the heart of the museum is the section devoted to the Great Depression. One of the exhibits is a room decorated like a 1930s-era country kitchen with a radio that plays the first “fireside chat,” you know, the “only thing to fear…” one. Roosevelt’s address was successful because he spoke in plain language about problems that average Americans were facing and he described exactly how he planned to address them. It would be just as startling today. After you leave the fireside chat room, the next room shows all the letters FDR received afterward from regular Americans, saying mainly “thank you for caring about us.”
The letters made me think of my grandmother, who lived through the Depression and had fond memories of it. Not the privation and the unemployment of course, but she’d say that “it was the only time people ever helped each other.”
Other things that caught my eye: video footage of FDR’s sailing trip to Campobello Island in Canada after the first 100 days in office, and his golf clubs. (FDR was a good golfer and when polio robbed him of the use of his legs in 1921, he kept up his playing membership at his club for two years in hopes he’d recover). As a writer, I appreciated FDR’s penciled-in edits to his Pearl Harbor address. Whoever wrote the first draft said that Dec. 7 was “a day that will live in ‘world history,’” which FDR crossed out and scribbled “infamy” above. He also changed “contained a statement” to “stated,” which will warm any copy editor’s heart.
Another nice thing about Hyde Park is that it’s the home of the Culinary Institute of America and has some first-rate restaurants. We had a beer and watched football at the Hyde Park Brewing Company, a cheerful brew pub almost right across the street from the museum. For dinner, we drove about a mile farther to Twist, one of the best restaurants ever hidden away in a small-town strip mall. For starters we had chicken liver pate and apple-and-bacon bruschetta. Best entree was roast duck with red onion marmalade. Twist is not cheap, but it’s worth the one-nice-dinner-a-month splurge.
All this and back in the city by 9:30 p.m.
Reprinted by permission of Mike Walekr: http://freemikewalker.wordpress.com
