Update on Eleanor

In my last post , I speculated as to the type of life Eleanor Roosevelt must have lived that led to her uncanny understanding of the nature of friendship and healthy relationships. In that post, I wished I could summon the history-loving knowledge base of my good friend, Susan Reyburn. And, voila! Susan responded, not only with information, but with photos! (Susan is amazing in lots of ways. Read her books, or give her a shout out next time you’re wandering through the Library of Congress, where she’s a writer and editor in the publishing office.) Let’s learn more about Eleanor Roosevelt through Susan’s words:

As it happens, I visited Eleanor’s Hyde Park homes this summer. A pal of mine who is a Civil War historian and I spent two weeks touring New York and New England on our 2010 Magical History Tour, spending most of our time in the colonial, transcendentalist, and Gilded Age eras. In addition to the FDR library and his estate, Springwood, we visited Eleanor’s Val Kill cottage. One of the most interesting things about it was that it has no front door — every entrance looks like your typical non-descript back door — she was that unpretentious. While at Hyde Park we learned one of the reasons why FDR had laughed out loud and then objected to her plans to take flying lessons from Amelia Earhart: apparently, she was an awful driver and so regularly bumped into a pillar at the end of the driveway that they finally got rid of it. A good thing to bear in mind while exiting the Jack-in-the-Box drive-through in reverse—you’re in good company!

Thanks, Susan! And now we get to enjoy the photos Susan took of the unpretentious, yet so inviting, Val Kill Cottage —the place ER said she went to “find herself and grow.” How I would have loved to eavesdrop on the conversations that took place on that screened porch on a summer’s evening. Here’s to finding our own sense of place for friends to gather, to find ourselves, and to grow.

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