Eye Opener
All the new President’s crew
In July 1933, after four hectic months as the 32nd President
of the United States, a family cruise on the breezy waters of
Maine must have felt like a blessed exhalation to Franklin D
Roosevelt. In this image, FDR is joined on boardAmberjack
IIby his enduringly popular wife Eleanor, three of their
sons, and friends including Marion Dickerman, behind the
President, and Nancy Cook, right of Eleanor.
Dickerman and Cook, lifelong partners both personally
and as champions of democratic causes, met the future First
Lady in 1922 on a visit to New York state. Common political
ideals forged a firm friendship between them and, a few years
later, the three split the construction costs of a property
in Dutchess County, New York, close to the Roosevelt family
residence. Val-Kill, named after a nearby stream, became
home to Dickerkman and Cook, and a retreat where Eleanor
could develop her ideas and projects.
Back at the house she shared with her husband, Eleanor’s
mother-in-law had been an overbearing influence for years,
running the couple’s household, which she could access
via sliding doors from her own property. Eleanor’s life here
was far from simple – she came across a bundle of letters
that revealed her husband’s afair with her own secretary,
Lucy Mercer. And, soon after this discovery, the paralytic
illness that would eventually lead to FDR needing to use
a wheelchair began to take hold. Val-Kill, by contrast, was
the place she considered her first real adult home. The
three women put it to work too, developing Val-Kill
Industries, a woodwork project to give agricultural workers
an income in the winter months.
By the mid-1930s Eleanor’s responsibilities as First Lady
had distanced her from her old friends and in 1938 a
serious argument – cause unknown – caused Dickerman and
Cook to sell their interests in Val-Kill and leave. But here in
1933, on the way to the Roosevelts’ summer home, an
inaugural shine still on the President, the Roosevelts still
seem like one happy, if complicated, extended family.
Words – Caroline White