FDR in Rapid City, South Dakota

We were in the same hotel and our fourth-floor room looked right down upon the hotel entrance–a sort of grandstand seat for the President’s arrivals and departures.  It was Sunday and a large crowd of Rapid Citians cheered as the President drove off to church.  And after a while I was awakened from a nap by clapping in the street.  The President was returning from church.  The crowd was still there, and I watched from my grandstand window.

There had been, out of what I always felt to be a fine sense of consideration, few mentions in the press of the President’s partial paralysis.  But it seems to me there can be no violation of good taste in relating what happened at Rapid City that day.  The crowd stopped clapping and stood silently watching as the car stopped at the hotel.  It was a seven-passenger touring car with the top down.  Two of the President’s sons and a daughter-in-law got out ahead of him.  While everybody waited the President reached for the spare seat and pulled it down in front of him.  Then he reached to the robe rail, and with his powerful arms slid himself forward onto the spare seat.  He turned a little and put his legs out the door and over the running boards with his feet almost to the curb.  Gus Gennerich, his bodyguard, stood ready to help, but he was not needed.  You could almost have heard a pin drop.  The President put both hands on one leg and pushed downward, locking the jointed steel brace at his knee.  He slowly did the same thing with the other leg.  Then he put his hands on the side of the car and with his arms lifted his body out and up and onto his legs.  He straightened up.  I have never seen a man so straight.  And at that moment the tenseness broke, and the crowd applauded.  The President’s back was to the crowd, and he did not look around.  It was brief and restrained applause.

     I don’t know, but I doubt if that had ever happened to the President before.  It was the tenderest, most admiring tribute to courage I have ever seen.  It was such a poignant thing, so surprising, so spontaneous.  It was as though they were saying with their hands, “We know we shouldn’t, but we’ve got to.”  When I turned from the window there was a lump in my throat.

From a collection of newspaper columns from 1935-1940 by Ernie Pyle entitled Home Country (New York: William Sloane Associates, Inc., 1947).  I thought we all needed a break from our present condition.