“One thing life has taught me: if you are
interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. ... All
you need to do is to be curious, receptive, eager for experience. And there's
one strange thing: when you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will
always lead to something else.”—Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (1960)
Born on this day 130 years ago in New York City, Eleanor Roosevelt—partly by education,
partly by acting as the indispensable partner to her polio-stricken
husband—proved receptive to as extraordinary a range of experience as perhaps
any First Lady has ever encountered. In the process, she forever redefined the
role and limits of America’s First Ladies. Ken Burns’ great documentary series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History detailed just how wide-ranging her
influence came to be (including becoming the first First Lady to address a
political convention, in 1940).
A post on the Web site of the National Archives gives just a hint of her interests by
examining, from its holdings, the contents of her wallet: “a license from the
state of New York to carry a pistol, an expired card to the Newspaper Guild’s
Press Club in New York City, a Diner’s Club Credit Card, a health insurance
card, a Bell System Credit Card with instructions on how to make a collect
call, a St. Christopher card for the patron saint of travel, and an air travel
card"—all indications of an astonishingly active life, maintained all the way to
its end, at age 78.
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