Master of His Fate by James Tobin (free ebooks for android txt) 📗

as we moved our limbs through it had a most stimulating effect.” It was as if his legs and arms were all being massaged at once, and he was free of gravity’s burden.

In the shallow end, about three feet deep, FDR got himself seated on the bottom with water up to his shoulders for support. One by one he had each “patient” sit on the edge of the pool with legs extended. He would gently grasp one of their legs and begin to move it. “Just hang on,” he would say, “and concentrate on kicking while I move your legs.” Up and down, up and down—“Move along with me, and before you know it, you’ll be moving by yourself—that’s the beauty of this water!” In a different spot there was a strong bar for swimmers to grab while moving their legs from side to side—a different motion for different muscles. FDR demonstrated. “Catch hold of the bar this way,” he would say. “Now … swing … in and out … Hard! Harder! That’s it … that’s fine! Now, again, this way…”

He was soon calling himself “Old Doctor Roosevelt.” He began to make charts recording the strength in the patients’ muscles so they could keep track of improvements over time. He said they had been sitting still for so long that even their good muscles had gone to sleep. This was the time and place to wake them up, in the sparkling waters of the Warm Springs pool.

Two of the patients, Thelma Steiger and Dorothy Weaver, were women of generous proportions. FDR was determined to help them place their feet on the bottom of the pool and keep them there. “One of these ladies,” he recalled later, “had great difficulty in getting both feet down to the bottom of the pool. Well, I would take one large knee and I would force this large knee down, then I would say, ‘Have you got it?’ and she would say, ‘Yes,’ and I would say, ‘Hold it, hold it.’ Then I would reach up and get hold of the other knee very quickly and start to put it down and then number one knee would pop up.” This would go on until the three of them were laughing so hard they had to take a break. The next day, and the next, they worked at it again. And by the time he left the resort a few weeks later, he recalled, “I could get both those knees down at the same time.”

None of them had ever laughed about polio. Now, with each other, they could laugh all they wanted, because they all knew the strange and funny frustrations of limbs that refused to obey their commands.

After a session of thirty minutes in the pool, FDR would call out, “All right now, everybody stay in the sun for an hour!” FDR would tell them tales about his own effort to recover. “You’ve got to know you’re going to improve,” one of the visitors remembered him saying. “Keep yourselves mentally alert. Don’t lose contact with the things you enjoyed before infantile paralysis.” Then—back into the pool for another half hour, followed by a final half hour of sunbathing.

Sometimes in the late afternoon they would gather on the creaking veranda of the inn to sip cool drinks and talk some more. What a luxury—since the disease had struck, who had they spoken to who really understood?

A young girl from the village named Ruth Stevens sometimes came to sit and listen, bringing wild violets for Fred Botts, whom she especially liked.

One day she heard Mr. Roosevelt say, “I hope my medical fraternity will allow me to come back and practice here. I feel I’m rather good at giving exercise in the water.”

Two weeks rolled by, then three and four. In the evenings, FDR invited guests for steak dinners. In the afternoons he took motor jaunts with Loyless to see the countryside around Warm Springs. They stopped to chat with farmers about crops and with politicians about campaigns—who might run for mayor of this town or prosecutor of that county.

He was getting a feel for the place. In so many ways it was different from his home territory in the Hudson Valley. Much of the farmland was exhausted. There was hardly a paved road anywhere. So many of the people, Black and white, were living in rough little shacks with no running water and no electricity. But that was part of what fascinated him—people living in poor circumstances who might thrive with a little of the right sort of help. Like the resort at Warm Springs, the countryside of southwest Georgia struck him as a challenge. “He always tended to believe that something could be done with apparently hopeless enterprises,” said a man who would come to know him well. “The more difficult the problem, it often seemed, the more the satisfaction in maneuvering for improvement.”

Eleanor said her husband hardly went anywhere new without conceiving a desire to buy land and start building something. He knew she was right. “I sometimes wish I could find some spot on the globe where it was not essential and necessary for me to start something new,” he wrote a friend. “A sand bar in the ocean might answer, but I would probably start building a sea wall around it and digging for pirate treasure in the middle.”

The new idea sprouting in his mind was grander than simply buying land.

He felt as if he had dropped by accident into the middle of a wildly successful medical experiment that no one else knew about. The results were right there in the pool. In just a few weeks, the people who had turned up at the train station were unquestionably doing better. FDR tallied the results. Elizabeth Retan, the young woman from Boston, had “improved remarkably.” The nineteen-year-old from Alabama had “improved much in 3 weeks.” Even without exercising every day, a rebellious boy from New York had “undoubtedly improved.” Mrs. Steiger reported movement in muscles