Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [58]
From Manhattan/Albany/New Jersey: Take the New York State Thruway to exit 18 at New Paltz. Follow Route 299 East to Route 9W South. Cross the Mid-Hudson Bridge to Route 9 North. The Library is on the left, four miles north of Poughkeepsie.
From Long Island: Take the Long Island Expressway to the Cross Island Parkway. Cross the Whitestone Bridge. Follow the Hutchinson River Parkway to Route 684 North, then Route 84 West to Route 9 North. The library is on the left, four miles north of Poughkeepsie.
From Connecticut: Take Route 84 West to Route 9 North. The library is on the left side of Route 9, four miles north of Poughkeepsie.
To reach the tomb from the ticket booth, walk toward the west end of the parking lot leading into the site. Follow the signs to the FDR Rose Garden. The gravesite is located in the middle of the Rose Garden.
For additional information
The Museum of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
4079 Albany Post Road
Hyde Park, NY 12538
Phone: 1-800-FDR-VISIT or (845) 486-7770
Fax: (845) 486-1147
www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu
“In Berlin, Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, called for champagne on learning of Roosevelt’s death.”
—Richard Norton Smith
On the final morning of his life, surrounded by newspaper accounts of the steady advances being made by Allied armies in Europe and Asia, Franklin D. Roosevelt chatted with Lizzie McDuffie, a two-hundred-pound housekeeper who interrupted her dusting of the “Little White House” at Warm Springs to discuss theories of reincarnation. If there were such a thing, said Lizzie, she hoped to come back to life as a canary bird—an image whose very improbability caused FDR to roar with laughter. It was a perfect sendoff for the Happy Warrior of whom Churchill once said that meeting him was like opening a bottle of champagne.
In Berlin, Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, called for champagne on learning of Roosevelt’s death. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin asked Averell Harriman what the Soviet Union could do to show its admiration for the late president. “Send Molotov to the San Francisco Conference,” replied Harriman. The conference was called by Roosevelt to organize the postwar United Nations.
Stalin nodded. “The Foreign Minister will go.”
At the New York Times an editorial writer composing a tribute for the next day’s editions tapped out, “Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House.” At Warm Springs, an Atlanta mortician named Fred W. Patterson struggled to embalm the president’s arteriosclerotic body. Patterson and his co-workers finally resorted to individual injections by hypodermic syringe.
Mrs. Roosevelt asked Grace Tully, FDR’s secretary, if he had left instructions regarding his burial. As it turned out he had, but they would not be found until after the Hyde Park funeral. (The local selectmen had to be tracked down at their homes, since a special permit was required to allow the president to be buried on his own estate.) According to Tully, Roosevelt had asked to be buried at sea in the event of his death while on the water. The sea had always seemed like home, he remarked.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s gravesite. FDR’s dog Fala is also buried there.
Otherwise, FDR expressed his preference for a service “of utmost simplicity” in the East Room of the White House. No lying in state. A simple ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, with two hymns and “no speaking.” A funeral train to arrive in Hyde Park at 8:00 p.m.,