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bookplates see will get what passes for assigned work in pandemic land and as the head of special collections at the state library of massachusetts she will say about her eleanor shrine and used to be here before the bookstore existed and i have no doubt this book will add to his list of works also a fellow alumnus the wall street journal calls this book superb the near time says it's a terrific resource for my own personal connection with the roosevelt is my mom was in

junior high in the late forties ms. owner came to visit her school in the bronx and my mom was chosen to escort her to the auditorium to the stage. and experience my mother talked about for the rest of her life. please without further ado join me to welcome margaret and beth and dave. >> thank you you just have to point i wanted to make to start this wonderful evening. thank you for having me. it turns out everybody has a connection to eleanor roosevelt. i grew up in cambridge you are aware george washington was that he slept here and you go around the country that was the joke of the thirties. eleanor slept here. eleanor registered deeply with every person she met.

just as your mother's memory was lifelong and stayed with people. i grew up in a household i thought she was related to me. that she was a relative. there was such a sense of the presence. my mother worked for eleanor roosevelt at wgbh and was in its infancy the national education television was the primitive version and where is is story one half generation or maybe four or five years away from anotr tall powerful woman arriving on levision would be julia child. for right now in 1959 eleanor roosevel decided she would have a one hour per mon seminar type shofilmed at brandeis which was a place she cared a great dealbout and was on the word the auditorium

was the perfect studio there were cables and plywood platform running in the theater part of the auditorium in my mother's b was to go down every month to new york to prepare the script for mrs. roosevelt and pick one of five broadway dresses bu washday dresses. she was very simple in her presentation. my mother'job was to pick the address to go where the script that was prepared with the other produce. in this. i was about four years old when i wento the studio and

amonthe very earliest memories the impression was and extremely in motion down the corridor and across cables and all i remember somehow i could set my foot in o spot and another in another spot movi to the figure and say two words. juy fruit. she looked down at me clearly fresh out the juicy fru. and had no stick of gum. but what she had for me, her eyes beamed out lit as if there were lights from within. for smile was bad.

and accepting that a chi is asking for stick of gum. she kindlyold me she didn't have gum. i rememberhat else she said with the memory is of a sse i was very close to goodness and it w pouring out of a human being in the form of light. this happened to be one or two other times in my life. one with nelson mandela came up broadway soon after his release and arrival in the ited state states. by chance i myself downtown an as i walked broadway realizing something was happening just as i arrived in pride way there was mandela in the bubble car in the parade his glance powell to the left of me but i could see there was e same phenomenon of goodness appearing as light i saw it once in an artist looking at something the same kind of attention of the

subject the same thing happen and then strangely and what connect me back to mrs. rooselt was an odd coincidence in 2001 i was given access to a sement on madison avenue and to give one - - and have access to have the records of 1950 of the beginning of the peanuts cartoon strip aoung cartoonist from minneso trying to get this started a united feature syndicate was the iernational syndicate that scholz was accepted by and his papers were down there. as i found him there was the

our bankers box on theirst day sought to my left was roosevelt / my day. i picked up the lid and magical dust flew into the air i remember the first description i was under the imession she had written a column i didn't know about it so as i began to read description of starlight from a fall morning and the gratefulnessss with this sit of morningstar from mrs. roosevelt broht into the first paragraph of the day e column i felt the same nse of wonder and attention and joy and love and i had a

lot do right there to discover scholz quite a very strong feeling this is something that needed be continued and i needed to look morearefully there and then strangely work on the same spot it turns out, i later learned come in the basement where i w that was franklin's motr's house in new york city. the how she had moved on one - movedhen the commercial things began to move their uptown. and that was her moment of escape. but that another story. back to cambridge i want to give a shout out to everyone

and davidthank you also to one of your neighbors into my grade assistant eleanor parker and also to my train commuting buddy we use to run at the train there and we were always on jumpi onto the train there was very few people those days that we were taking the train from porr square nobody else was doing that so was very vivid and that remains outer limits it s very far away as i knew it earlon and the in my teenage years very romantic and highly literary that i'm so proud to be at tonight.

>> that was scinating. i loved your connection to boston you very much in your person now i understanthat the camp one - - the cambridge diehd and all of us, it's fascinating to hear i h appreciated your thorough connection t wh a partner of our series and as i said we do have a lot of partners but one of my favorites porter square books it is a real tonight and as many of you know we run the series. i cannot think of a better persono be a part of the series than eleanor roosevelt her an roosevelt are such seemingly large figures and elear in particular are such an inspiration particularly at

this time for inclusion and diversity, she is such a role model one fan is my partner so tell us about you and him and ask your qstion. >> i'm apologize to be late. i'm the head of special collecons at the state library from the stateouse in downtown boston with the depository and relating the things of massachusetts history. margaret and i have written some queions for david and also compiled questions tha came from people when they registered and we wi be

watching for questions that come iduring the talk. i am auge fan of eleanor it alsoncludes questions for other people. here is my first question. my favorite line in th whole book and there were many favorite lines was right after the dedication page but bore the table of contents a quotation that says i felt oblid to notice everything. to me, that sentence can apply to everything that happens to her in the book anshapes her life. can you give us some context for the quote and tell us if you agree with my thoughts? >> them so you're on - - am so

toucd because as an epigraph what i hoped would sound as an overture to her life. aaron copeland appellations spng that is of eleanor's grade expanon from her own personal life of the countr country, her abity to notice begawhen she was very young and something of a survival mechanism and became something i was almost shocked how many people left records feeling her almost staring are looking so carefully when she didn't think someone was noticing her she would look very carefully at them. i don't think she missed a thing. and in one the democracies great principl which is

reciprocity that everybody counts that life and rights are to be equally judged and taken into aount, i ink her noticing was extremely democratic and equal opportunity one of thehings everyone who d meet her felt about her they felt seen they felt seen the sce as someone who comes from the center was an unusual expience in those days and even more unusu now. and to be glimpsed like someone like eleanor roosevelt to feel as if the humanity was taken into account in that was one of her gifts that was

automatic and natural one --dash it was authentic wish to understand others. she falters anybody she couldn learn from so if e understood them carefully on their own terms she would take it back back to the government and back to her own coln which she used to reflect those thoughts. so the noticing i have an tire file that is labeled noticing as part of the job description changing my first lady was her job was to notice people and what they wer going tough. >> great.

the phrase even means more now than when i started. >> also partf that sentence is the wordblige. i was very struck how obligated she felt to so many people in her life starting with her father developed being a fundamental capacity to oblige in her teen years or her boarding school she lk after the girls that were there and looked after her young brother paul and looked after fdr in a very hard mother-in-law there was a lot of stepping back and obliging that she did what she just born like this? that's amazing.

used to think of eleanor roosevelt when i was younger as the greatest do-gooder of all time. will begin to appear the wish to do good and to be good had a great deal to do with needing toeshape people's ideas out her father that died in disgrace as a drunk and a junkie dragged through theud ultimately in his final years and afterwards by people in his o world and people she came across. her wish to do good became something that tnslated into a need to be useful and if she could she thoug she could be loved andomeone would take

the care she was giving them and give back to her. it was a mission to be the kind of person whose usefulness words illuminating or lightning that became her trsaction and the way she connected. >> did she have feelings. and the service that you talk abou, doest come with that capacity to forbear? >> thawillingness to become tolerant is something she rst worked on to accept the parts of hself she knew she cannot fulfill with others is the acceptance to allow her to be terant of herself first.

it was a battle in the struggle she conquered. sure to conquer one of her feelings she wasn't allowed to express anger as a child she was shut down a had a resentment with a mild peak let alone the right to full-blown angry she would have to go into her bathroo and hang her head over the bathtub and y it out by herself and into the tub please. she was very constrained and learning how to respond to people who had hurt her she only knew toeturn to the wall with that self immolation was part of her early

responses. and thtranscendence of that allows her to become the independent woman she later became. e of the reasons i felt the roosevelt marriage did work out in the long run as a partnership, she learned early how to befrid someone not lucy mercer who was a rival the later, people who came to help franklin and became a part of their lives. and replaced her almost as a surrogate with franklin. she became part of the family and theirarallel lives. >> thank you. >> so ny of the people who attend our author talks are interested in how authors do

their work so this elnor roosevelt biographies seemed like ihad a cast of thousandsith many similar names and thank you by the way the list of characterin the beginning of the book that was very helpf especially the nicknames. so could you tell us how you manage your research andeep so many details so well documented? and also asking as a librarian. >> a couple of tricks and big fails but the trick was i learned it and have continued ever since the idea to ge each person a color franklin was always blew every blue index card is franklin every green is eleanor every r is mama red is roosevelt, yellow

is any woman or man eleanor fell in love with. i love interest. white is quotaons from other sources that needed to be saved. those are miraculously useful to keep thgs straight in the beginning and you can expand the cors and the eleanor surrogate with franklin and proposer people betwee the two. and folders all in chronological order. the main principle i learned years ago come every single

thing that came into his life he thought globally in althe information the internet, he realized the only way to keep things straight w to file everything chronologically so i realized every time you get a piec of information if you do put chronologically into a file of where it came into your own life you remember a better also a chronological file of eleanor's but every year of her life and also them in their life where they ppen and in that way when you go back tthat year you discover the two things you put nt to each other reveal something it is t case surprises popping

up ainst each other of information that wasn't there in the first pla. >> there is the fit answer to the question is index cards. >> i have to have in my hand the beginning going into the great digital sp i have a sce in auburn because of my mother but i know i will end up in thdigital rolling stones concert. >> that sounds like fun. [laughter] >> but that is fun. >> i was fortunaten my the publishing career to work wit pat in his carr he kept a

chronology of everything and asked his administrative person every letter he wrote to out chronological wh years and years all of the peoplend he would go back to them and say please give me 90. >> every person gets a file at has its own subfile it's very important to keep them each of them separate and very clear. >> one thing i a delightednd horrified in doing reading your book was trying to keep all the gilded age families in order. the roosevelt you talk about, their marriage with fdr and eleanor emergin and the hyde park roosevelt's the

families on the hudson valley with a remarkable collection d eleanor's mother and other gh society, its an amazing collection in many ways i think eleanor roosevelt. she is in your girl. and is much as she tries to get away from that gilded age and then the vanderbilts keep talking.

it was the library that he shipped home from europe. with names and history come back into their lives. >> and then a slhtly older version of great wealth. >> it is the portrait of a city and tnk you again. let the city polize the unimaginable wealth and poverty because each new wave of immigrants arrive they

would finally transnd to be very cmitted to resping and sang and so many of the things those reforms of the new deal help to save people who were sick in the city and dn't have representation and the guy from tammany hall came over and bring services so you would do their bidding politically. and felt the way they told you to vote becse they brought you i.c.e. for your icebox timately they came to represent the government that replaced the city of boston and people giving special favors to give everybody equal measure in the american dream

but the prosperity created with all the wealtthat it overtook family and the roosevelthe was from old new york and actually kept pleased on - - bits and pieces of the her whole le is strange and sad to me that we saw the statue of eleanor roosevelt and the great monument in washington dc next to the tidal basin and the new roosevelt monument from the late nineties and eleanor was deliberately shown without first. t she wore hers everywhere she carried her handb she always had something for you the crtesies was a civilized woman of her class in time she

never gave those up and never worried i'd to be identified or label accordingly and that freedom was a triumph for her and allod her to be rself in ways i think other people were uncomfortable with that she never became uncomfortable to be a wan of her time and place. >> the question that i have so in the section that covers the first year after the fdr election of the presidency i s struck by how many of the

conditions we go through right now with the financial crisis limited federal aid, presidential election, imate disaster, th are very similar to what we're going through rig now. how to use what you learned om eleanor and how she reacted to help us through these times we go through now? >> tre's two good answers off the top. she certainly made lisning as part of the job description it was always deep and sincere and found and how that might affect the other people in their life she was like a doctor in the old days ese to make diagrams of the rest

of theamily to understand what kind of illnesses you might have inheritedhe was a diagnostician and wide open to what you had to say. without question, the ability is the most imrtant thing today. patriot is upon us and has been for a while in public way unleashed and it takes people by surprise. it took me by surprise and shock toe to find the hatred she was subjected to in her public life as a woman but in particular is a first lady. sh was reviled because in the south where jim crow was in

the ascendancy and the kkk put a bounty on r head at one point she experienced the hatred that you heard about during the oma years but now out in the street. her ability to let that go, to never react directly to find a way around or over or unde under, sometimes through, but she wasever committed to making her point to be the point that stuck she was always moving past that and letting go and moving forward with a two things she did most often. and you don't see enough of now.

>> thank you. we will turn to some questions who me in from our viewers. >> i gathered three of them togeer and who influenced elear the most? i would love you to talk about her remarkable experience of education. and was clearly haunted by the doctor and got to in school and in a good way. formed by their education, tell us more. >> she was told that she goes

to college she would never attract a man thinking the point was get your degree. a fine tuning of a debunte. this woman did not g to college. veryew did and women did go to colle but not the when she came of age with. she went to boarding school in england her roosevelt aunt and then madame was a fnch woman who is progressive and her politics but emphasized that a

woman needs to think for herself. and then it will be harmful to potential health. she might li that idea will be influenced order to send her away. but this is almost rical in the sense and we are not being told him to think for themselves or say much of anything. not only what we were how we carrthe argument toug through, skills that today that are natural to her six greater were denied and

disapproved ofhen for a young woman 15 and over paraaph 15 she stayed with theadam's favorite she became which was like gradua student or assistant profsor rule she had responsibilities. she was going beten the authority and others and s took education so that is a high standard but then coming

back with at later in the conversation as if she knew better or more than she did. is not exactly bs seeing as we would callt today. but she also learned later to curtail anthen said i will learn from the ground up and not just take this diplomatic version and with the whole

range debutante coming out because the rituals of writing. in large part his parents had died, he mother and sially among the new york society. she lost her father in a and then eleor was a less attractive daughter. she was ashamed and how to use play the game of so now the

great theme of do a belong and where am i connected? so she discovered another outsider because although he came from the hudson river and had a equally magnificent ildhood it was isolated he was an only child he lt three years his peers had already h bonding at the il school. and the world he had to catch up but he was considered an outsider. when they met i thought it was the meeting of the oddballs. they were cousins but both odd

because all those in thworld at the time they were both the outsider and that was part of the earliest attractio i think. >> thank you. so for her influence, and she was an orpn, if you never seen the magnificent emersons about a family but then write out and falling down and

astonishingly tennis champions of the day and and those dazzling beauties. >> they were called valentine? >> and uncle valley was t amateur actor. when elke - - uncle valley and uncle eddie won the doubles championship of the eascoast in 1880 they moved on to the national championship several years later. but the house was fullf their trophie, old but passing glory.

and then tbe alcoholic and out of control and and the proxy trustee and showed up in cour court, she is the one that showed up in e police station when he had gone on a nder one last time in the tenderloin district and and then to say someone has to come get him out of here. but even the he still carried on.

they were not displaced peop that they were displaced people. they had nowhere to go ultimately. it was eleanor's job ttake care of them. she buried each of them. she saw th through terrible tragedies. she paid tuition. the numbers of people and things they are writing checks r and their adult life in the christmas list and the individuals to have a sense of reonsibility was extraordinary. that's personal jot those apply to in th political world. >> now that were getting close

to the end ask a questio >> go ahead with one more. actually have to look for this really quickly. >> you may be surprised to many people made tt comment when they registered. >> i am ned because of eleanor. >> hd on. >> a keep almanacs.

i began to keep an almanac of the things that were named for her or after here. he goes. rose. midseason pne, amber tipped lily, clock, cake, strawberry, a bowl in a wild west rodeo. a phantom conspirac , spaghetti strap wedding gown, and in colle and university of california san diego. kappa delta pi. colleg buildings including the derogatory for women , world war ii warplanes, new

rents and the americas pop music senior on oober 23rd, 1940, writer of the movie dirty dancing of female basset hound, wordsnd fellowships , 200-acre tract of land but the sun downtown and golf course hazards including bunkers and holes includi

the 16th the latter country club. and thclock because it is always on the go. >> let's do the last question. >> was eleanor appreciated by the public during her lifetime or was the great intent only realized after heard deaeath?

there is so much and the pain in the world rht now. eleanor is greaterhan ever because she is a person who sa this in others and to try to heait and could. i think she had the ability to do that. her legacy and wanted to connect to her and her spirit which is global and became global aut seeing the humanity and somebody else but i think when she was alive,wo things happened thathe was nominated ashe

children and her sisterut her life is so full of honors it didt matter to her at all. i think or her to carry out her huand's policies. in her lifetime she felt loved.

but she always gave it over to franklin, her husband he did not see the end of the war , and . but then to say sh was carrying her husband's legacy. that is not true. she would deflect when she needed to but what she wanted always was a connection and belongin and then to see

herself whole, manifest at the very endf her life. where she aepted what she had done was enough and that she had done what she was put on earth tdo. she expressed that there are o stones a husband and wife.

histone says somhing a beloved and her ys she tried. i think elear tried. i thin she succeeded and finally loved and did love and find that for herself was the greatest struge but i do think that tay even just rifling through the digital world of her quotes and iniration she brings to people even by saying nobody can make you inferior without your consent the future belongs to those that believe in the beauty their dreams. those quotes and ideas are brought for a bike times where authoritys confused as to help and bring people into the

process. eleanos main goal and her legacy is to say government does belg to you is not just giving to and to step up please a vote. >> thank you. i loved elear roosevelt my entire lifefter reading your book i look for more. thank you for that. >> that was a pleasure. >> thank you so much. >> i want to extend my thanks to all three of y for coming up the questions and i'm sorry i get to the ones we didn't get to tal about andavid

thank you for giving us this tremenus work of scholarship and archival work. any of us ound our age, she is the quintessential first lady when you think whether presidents spouse should be like and what yomeasure up against is eleanor roosevelt. and this book makes clear why she got to that place. and i appreciate your insight what history can tell us for the times we are in now 100 years after her husband's presidency reminder to click on the bottom of the book will be signed by david. sorry some we had a problem with platform. thank you