Mary McTamaney

My father once told me about an exciting day in his Newburgh life. He was a Newburgh city firefighter and was stationed at the Washington Steamer firehouse on a pleasant day in October of 1953. He saw a small coupe pull up the curb in front of Saint John’s Church. The tall woman who got out of the driver’s seat looked familiar. She was dressed in a plain coat with hat and purse and stepped toward the rear of her car looking up and down Broadway. “Oh, wow! It’s Mrs. Roosevelt!” dad told me he realized. Eleanor Roosevelt had driven into Newburgh on her own, arriving without any entourage.

Dad hurried across the brick pavement of lower Broadway to welcome her to town and ask if he could be of assistance. She was, he said, just as gracious as her long-time reputation described. She thanked him kindly and asked if he could point her to the Hotel Newburgh Green Room. She was in Newburgh for a speaking engagement. Naturally, he walked the former first lady to the door of the hotel just a block west where a staff member had been waiting to greet her. She was ushered downstairs to the famous catering venue and welcomed by a large crowd of public officials and guests. Newburgh had recently been named an All-America City by the National Municipal League, co-sponsored by Look Magazine, for having one of the best governed communities in the nation. We had won the award based on the activities of a new volunteer citizens tax commission that successfully looked for ways to avoid a proposed city sales tax. In their work, they came up with several progressive ideas that did save Newburgh money and made it more efficient, more trusted and more engaged.

The former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, was invited to be a guest speaker at a celebratory luncheon. In the picture of that event, shown here, she is checking her notes while being introduced by Mayor Herbert Warden. Notice how close the luncheon audience is to her head table. That reflects the comfort of those times just eight years after World War II when all the folks gathered had clear memories of what it was like to pull together as Americans. While the Newburghers in that room voted for different candidates in every level of election, and many had not supported FDR, Eleanor’s late husband, they were glad for her attendance and support.

There is another Eleanor Roosevelt revelation I have carried in my mind through the years. In the 1990’s, I was talking with a colleague in the FDR archives in Hyde Park. He urged me to come over that season and look at what had just been declassified after the requisite number of years had passed. They had notes from the Manhattan Project, the top-secret federal research project into potential nuclear weapons that had been carried out during World War II (a story we learned more about in last year’s blockbuster film, Oppenheimer). Who had been at the table at some of the Manhattan Project’s secret sessions? Eleanor Roosevelt. She was often called FDR’s “eyes and ears,” going on fact-finding missions he could not manage with his handicapping paralysis from polio. Popular history has documented Eleanor in coal mines and children’s hospitals but she was more far-ranging in her missions than that.

So here, on the lowest block of Broadway in Newburgh, NY, a modest woman drove in and parked at the curb without escort -certainly without Secret Service. It was only eight years since she had been walking in the halls of the White House and other corridors of power. She knew so much as she walked with my dad that day and as she commuted on the train from Hyde Park into Manhattan to record her weekly radio show. Many local folks have related encounters and conversations with her on those train rides. America was naïve about her value.

The world was less aggressive about seizing “assets,” including human ones.

We just witnessed a second assassination attempt this season on someone who walked those corridors of power. Can we ever get back to a level of safety my dad (a World War II infantry vet) and his famous visitor had as they walked up the Broadway sidewalk?