Eleanor Roosevelt

I read with interest your reprint of the Nov. 8, 1962, front page, wherein you note the election of Edward Roybal, a Mexican American, to the U.S. Congress. I wonder if you noticed something else interesting on that page. In your obituary of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, nowhere on Page 1 does her given name, Eleanor, appear. One hopes it's noted somewhere on the jump page--or didn't women have first names in those days? MARK KERNES Los Angeles

Re "Holocaust's children," Column One, Jan. 4 Doris Small's story, in which she escaped Nazi Germany before World War II thanks to the rescue mission Kindertransport, is indeed very moving and poignant. But let's not forget that there was an effort by a few Americans to actually try to do the same thing the British government was doing then. It was Eleanor Roosevelt who in 1939 urged her husband to support a bill in Congress to allow 20,000 Jewish children to come to America and be temporarily adopted by American parents for the duration of the hostility.

While reading Barbara Bush's remarks concerning Eleanor Roosevelt, it occurred to me that it was a shame Mrs. Bush had dropped out of college. It was obvious she would have benefited from a few U.S. history courses. DOROTHY FABRICANT Canoga Park

Today, it is practically mandatory for the wife of a presidential candidate to address her party's political convention. But it wasn't always so. Eleanor Roosevelt was the first candidate's wife to address a political convention. That was in 1940, when her husband was running for his third term and she'd already been first lady for more than seven years. In her brief address, she never mentioned family. She spoke extemporaneously, referring to a single page of typed notes. Mamie Eisenhower was the next candidate's wife to appear at a convention, but she didn't address the delegates.

I don't know whether Nancy Reagan has much time to read. So I don't know whether she ever looked into Eleanor Roosevelt's autobiography or into the many books written about Mrs. Roosevelt's efforts to cope with the responsibilities of being First Lady. Had she done so, she would have learned that one secret of an effective First Lady is concealment of her influence.

Lee Remick will star in the title role of "Eleanor Roosevelt--First Lady of the World," an hourlong special that is a co-production of KCET Channel 28 and Taper Media Enterprises, a subsidiary of the Mark Taper Forum. The work is drawn from Roosevelt's newspaper columns, her two autobiographies and answers to letters from the public requesting advice on a variety of subjects. The special will be taped in October at KCET.

Hillary Rodham Clinton made a pilgrimage Saturday to the home of her hero, Eleanor Roosevelt, a former first lady who declined a challenge the current one has taken on--a run for the U.S. Senate from New York. Clinton came to Val-Kill, Roosevelt's cottage home and a national historic site, to announce that $150,000 has been raised through private donations to help with preservation.

For more than a decade, Blanche Wiesen Cook has lived with Eleanor Roosevelt--an experience that might well have been disastrous, biographically speaking, given that two women could hardly differ more in background or personal style. The subject was an American aristocrat, a pragmatist, and a stately lady; the author is the daughter of German Jews, an intellectual street fighter, a radical, and a cut-up. The possibilities for mutual incomprehension would seem boundless.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph P. Lash, whose works include "Eleanor and Franklin," died last Saturday at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 77 and died of complications of a heart ailment, a hospital official said. Lash, a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, won a Pulitzer in 1971 for his book about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt. The book also won the National Book Award and the Francis Parkman Prize and was the basis of a nine-hour ABC television miniseries.

The years 1933 to 1938 witnessed the Depression, the New Deal, the threat of World War II, the Spanish Civil War, the awakening of the Civil Rights movement and the beginnings of the Red Scare. It was a remarkable time of change and challenge on both the international and domestic fronts. Yet the period is often called the Franklin Roosevelt era.

In the spring of 1949, Eleanor Roosevelt turned in the manuscript for her second memoir — this one on the White House years — to her editors at Ladies' Home Journal. "You have written this too hastily," came the reply, "as though you were composing it on a bicycle while pedaling your way to a fire." Roosevelt's editors asked her to revise the manuscript with the help of a ghostwriter, but she refused. "I would have felt the book wasn't mine," she said. She ended up selling her book's serial rights to the Journal's biggest rival, McCall's, for $150,000.

In crisis there usually is opportunity. Now, here's the opportunity if the latest global financial-market upheaval worsens: The U.S. government, still the borrower that never lacks for lenders, can launch a major economic-stimulus plan to be financed by yet more sales of Treasury securities. Frightened global investors would again be happy to shovel their money into Treasuries at low-single-digit interest rates. The U.S. would, in effect, then recycle those dollars back into the economy, preferably through business and personal tax cuts this time rather than another pork-barrel spending bill.

Earl Wild, the elder statesman of American piano virtuosos who was often called "the last of the great Romantic pianists," died Saturday at his home in Palm Springs. He was 94. He died of congestive heart failure after a long illness, his companion, Michael Rolland Davis, said on Wild's website. Wild had to be "the world's only pianist to have composed for Sid Caesar, toured with Eleanor Roosevelt and been ranked in dexterity with Vladimir Horowitz," the Washington Post pointed out in 1986.

William Turner Levy, an educator and author who wrote about his friendship with luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, T.S. Eliot and Frank Capra, and drew upon those extraordinary experiences to make his classroom lessons meaningful for younger generations, died Jan. 21 at Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills Medical Center. He was 85. Levy underwent abdominal surgery and died several days later from complications, said friend and colleague Robert J.

Eleanor Roosevelt hated it, and who could blame her? An Upper East Side townhouse that was a Christmas gift from her mother-in-law, Sara Roosevelt -- and which the elder woman also occupied -- is set for a $15-million renovation by the City University of New York, which plans to use it as the new site of Hunter College's public policy institute.

Re "Bob Hope Honored on His 99th Birthday," May 30: There is no way the American servicemen can thank Bob Hope enough for the many visits he made to entertain the GIs. I saw him in Panama in 1944, about the same time Eleanor Roosevelt was visiting military bases. Bob's opening remark was, "Well, I beat Eleanor to Panama." David S. Eicher Glendale

I respectfully suggest that the talk by First Lady Laura Bush ("Laura Bush Addresses State of Afghan Women," Nov. 18) may not have been the first solo radio broadcast ever given by a presidential wife. Several years ago my wife and I visited the Smithsonian in Washington to see the then-acclaimed exhibit on American women. At one booth we listened to a recording of a radio address given to the nation by Eleanor Roosevelt on the evening of Dec. 7, 1941. This talk was separate and apart from FDR's historic "date which will live in infamy" speech when he called on Congress to declare war on the Berlin-Tokyo Axis.

The Cold War has been over for 10 years, but there is no peace and there has been no victory. As we plan to militarize the heavens, it is almost an act of restorative justice to recall that the United Nations, founded by 50 nations in San Francisco on June 25, 1945, after three months of deliberation, promised peace not merely as the absence of violent conflict but in terms of human rights.