IMAGINATION 397George de Mestrel went hunting one day with his dog. When they got home,
he realized that they were both covered with burrs. The burrs were a real nuisance
to remove and, curious, de Mestrel put them under a magnifying glass to see why.
They were covered with tiny hooks that attached themselves to fur and fabric.
De Mestrel began to wonder what else could be attached with tiny hooks, and the
result of his wondering was Velcro.
In each of these examples an existing concept was given a new application.Theodore Roosevelt engraved his name on the tablets of time by one
single act during his tenure of office as President of the United States;
after all else that he did while in that office will have been forgotten, this
one transaction will record him in history as a person of Imagination:
He started the steam shovels to work on the Panama Canal.
Every president, from Washington on up to Roosevelt, could have
started the canal and it would have been completed, but it seemed
such a colossal undertaking that it required not only Imagination but
daring courage as well. Theodore Roosevelt had both, and the people
of the United States have the canal.
COMMENTARY
Many years later, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president of the United
States through one of the most difficult times in its history, he used his imagination
to strengthen his self-confidence. FOR had been a vigorous and active man until
polio cost him the use of his legs. For a leader who guided the country through the
Great Depression and World War II, paralysis was a terrible specter and it would
have been disastrous if he had let the limitations of his legs affect his spirit.
Often, when he was troubled and unable to sleep, Roosevelt would imagine
himself on a hillside near his boyhood home, standing in the snow with his sled.
He would push off on his sled and imagine himself skimming across the snow,
negotiating sharp turns, avoiding obstacles, until he reached the bottom and stood
up, ready to race back up the hill and do it again. As his biographer, Doris Kearns
Goodwin, writes, it was "an imaginative act of will. II