The Boston and Maine train out from Boston had crossed the Piscataqua and he had seen the familiar lights of Portsmouth. Soon the conductor called out they were passing the depot at Kennebunk and the Roosevelt family settled in for a long night’s ride to Eastport.

It was the summer of 1921 and the Roosevelt family was traveling to the family retreat on Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, just a mile across the bay from Maine.

Franklin and Eleanor had been fortunate that a summer neighbor had willed them her cottage at an absurdly low price. They added a wing and now their 34-room summer house had 18 bedrooms and six bathrooms, but this wasn’t one of those elegant Newport “cottages” or their Hyde Park mansion in the Hudson River Valley.

When we toured the Roosevelt house on Campobello, we were immediately struck by its no-frills interior. No electricity or central heat — wood stoves only, but the over-sized windows opened up stunning views of fields and woods and sunlight streamed in. The rooms conveyed warmth with all the exposed aged wood. When the Roosevelt family came to Campobello, they literally dropped out of their wealthy lives and became rusticators.

Eleanor had pushed her 39-year-old husband to join the family, because as the 1920 Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Franklin had campaigned vigorously throughout the country. He was still exhausted.

Just before they left to catch the Boston train, he kept a promise and spent a day at a New York Boy Scout camp. Some later generation doctors have concluded that his immune system had probably been severely weakened by the campaigning, he was at risk, and possibly became infected at the camp.

At Campobello, the family went sailing on a hot day and Franklin fell into the chilly waters of the Bay of Fundy. Later, he went on a long run and took another swim, this one planned. The following days he went from back and leg pains, to progressively weaker legs, and finally paralysis from the waist down.

Eleanor called the doctors and polio, because it rarely struck adults, was not part of the original diagnose, so they said, “Bring him back to New York.” Franklin boarded the train in Eastport horizontally prone.

At Hyde Park, he was determined he would walk again and began an extreme, almost non-stop regime of physical rehabilitation. This was a time when the disabled were hidden away upstairs or institutionalized. He wore specially designed full-leg braces which locked stiffly at the knees and designed his own more maneuverable wheelchair.

A friend told Franklin that a young boy had been cured of polio by the “healing powers” at Warm Springs, Georgia. He went there in 1924 for “the cure” in the pure spring-sourced, 88-degree, rich in mineral content, and buoyant waters.

When Warm Springs developed financial difficulties in 1926, Franklin bought it for $200,000. He then developed it as one of the country’s major therapy and rehabilitation centers for polio victims.

Back home at Hyde Park, a famous political partnership was about to be born. Eleanor, knowing her husband’s love of politics, encouraged him to write opinion pieces on New York issues. Shy Eleanor did speaking engagements to keep the Roosevelt name alive in New York politics. Soon, using a cane and leaning on his son’s arm, he could awkwardly walk to a speaker’s podium.

When his friend, New York Gov. Al Smith, ran for president in 1928, he convinced Franklin to run for governor. Though a Republican landslide year, Roosevelt won by 25,000 votes. Two years later, another Republican landslide, he won by 250,000 votes. The catastrophic 1929 Depression catapulted FDR into the White House.

Though now weighed with national responsibilities, FDR continued to travel down to Warm Springs, now on a presidential train with a Pullman car called “Marco Polo.” He had designed the car to accommodate his disability. It also had an open rear observation deck that was wired with microphones and speakers so he could easily speak to crowds.

While still governor, Roosevelt designed and built a “cottage,” which when he became president, became the “Summer White House.”

When we toured the cottage, its simplicity reminded us, on a much smaller scale, of the Campobello family retreat. In the woods out beyond the house, the foundation still maintains the small two-man buildings that were used by the Secret Service and then by sentry soldiers during World War II.

President Roosevelt in 1934 began hosting gala his own “Birthday Balls” as fundraisers to support the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation. The annual events were a smashing success as celebrities, movie stars, radio personalities, and sports figures lent their clout to FDR’s efforts.

In 1938, FDR founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and a fundraising arm; the March of Dimes was born. Donation canisters were set out on the counters of supporting business. At the movie theaters, local VIPs would give two-minute rah-rah speeches and the hat was passed before the main feature. Dimes became dollars which were now directed to new research for therapies and a possible polio vaccine.

Singing star Eddie Cantor wisecracked on the radio that everyone ought to send dimes to FDR at the White House. Soon, 2,680,000 dimes, $268,000, flooded the White House. In 1938, the March of Dimes established response teams which could quickly rush to polio outbreaks. In 1941, it funded and distributed a much improved iron lung, saving the lives of many polio victims. Thousands of local March of Dimes chapters raised substantial funds to pay the hospital bills of local polio victims.

FDR’s friends had written that his visits to Warm Springs were some of his happiest post-polio years. He had his 1938 Ford convertible modified so he could drive it with hand controls. The kids would pile in and he’d soon have them yelling and screaming as he sped through the Georgia hills. The president of the United States splashed water with “his kids” in the healing pools and roasted hot dogs with them at the evening campfires.

President Roosevelt died at his beloved Warm Springs in April, 1945. Tens of thousands lined the tracks as his funeral train slowly made its way back to Washington.

History remembers FDR as the charismatic, wide-grinning, good cheer president who guided the country through the Depression and led a world-coalition to defeat fascist Italy, Germany and Japan.

For untold millions whose lives were saved, he led another fight to eradicate polio through his March of Dimes. In 1949, four years after FDR’s death, Jonas Salk was put in charge of the foundation’s research labs with the specific mission of developing a polio vaccine.

When a commission met in 1946 to designate an American coin to honor FDR, the dime was appropriately chosen.

Today, as we struggle against COVID-19, we hope that new 21st century heroes can come forward and end this pandemic nightmare.

Tom Murphy is a former history teacher and state representative. He is a Kennebunk Landing resident and can be reached at tsmurphy@myfairpoint.net.

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