Forest Delano Roosevelt Ferguson was 8 years old in 1941 when he settled down on the stone hearth in his family’s farmhouse on Blockade Hill in Augusta, picked up a black ink pen and a piece of paper and began his fireside chat with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the
president of the United States.
The boy, who had listened to the president’s
radio broadcasts, known as “fireside chats,”
with his family, told the president he was named for him and signed his letter “F.D.R.
Ferguson.” Never in his wildest dreams did he expect to receive a response from the White House.
But he did.
On March 7, 1941, Roosevelt’s private secretary M.A. (Missy) LeHand typed a letter from Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington and mailed it to Ferguson at Rural Route No. 1, Augusta, Ark .:
My dear Franklin,
The President was delighted to receive your little letter of March third and wants you to know that he does indeed appreciate your friendliness in writing to
him. It gives him much pleasure to send
you the enclosed memento and his very
best wishes for a happy, active and
useful life.
Very sincerely yours, M.A. LeHand, Private Secretary
The memento was a black and white photograph of the president. Ferguson signed his name as F.D.R.
Ferguson, not revealing that his first name was actually Forest, not Franklin, prompting LeHand to refer to him in her letter as Franklin.
LeHand’s letter became a treasured keepsake for Ferguson, now 79 and living in Lakeland, Tenn., near Memphis. He framed it with the president’s
photo and proudly displayed them in his home
beginning in 1957. For as long as his daughter, Sherri
DeCoursey, 46, of Martinsville, Ind., can remember,
the framed yellowed letter and sepia-toned photo hung in her parents’ den.
“As familiar as that letter and the President’s photograph were to me, what I had never even pondered until last year was what my father wrote in his letter to F.D.R.,” DeCoursey recounted recently in sharing her father’s story in a guest post on Prologue, the National Archives’ “Pieces of History” blog.
“While visiting my parents in the fall of 2012, I looked at the framed letter and photograph and asked Dad what he included in his letter to the President. He couldn’t recall the details.” She wondered if he’d written about school, the
farm, his family, friends, the war, or maybe what it was like to grow up in Arkansas.
Would any parts of her dad’s personality that she knew so well as an adult be emerging or evident when he was child? What did his handwriting look like?
“Wouldn’t it be amazing, I thought, to have a glimpse of my father at such a young age,” DeCoursey says.
With a little research and help from another Arkansan, 72 years after her father wrote to the president, DeCoursey would receive the answers to her questions.
During an Internet search, DeCoursey found the website for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. She sent an e-mail to the archival contact listed on the website and within a week received a response from Kirsten Strigel Carter, a digital archivist for the library in Hyde Park, N.Y. Carter, in turn, began searching the archives, a collection containing about 17 million pages of documents.
“The letter was kept in FDR’s White House files, so I sent her a copy after finding it, plus the photo her dad had included,” says Carter, who grew up in Little Rock.
“Thank you for your recent message to the FDR Library regarding your father’s 1941 letter to President Roosevelt,” she wrote to DeCoursey. “I am happy to say that we located his letter, along with an enclosed photograph, and the carbon file copy of Missy Le-Hand’s reply. This correspondence is a wonderful example of the affectionate mail FDR received from children, and the letter dates to the time of Roosevelt’s unprecedented third inauguration.”
DeCoursey cried when she opened the first attachment from Carter and her father’s original letter appeared on her computer screen.
Dear Mr President,
I am a little country boy eight years old. I have been going to school three years, and I am now in the third grade. I got one spanking when I was in the first grade for talking. I like my teacher. Her name is Miss Don. When I was born on June 28, 1933, my parents named me for you. I am sending you my picture and I hope that some day my country will think as much of me as they now think of you.
Your friend, F.D.R. Ferguson
DeCoursey recognized her dad’s 8-year-old penmanship from countless birthday cards and letters he had written to her. Always block print, never cursive.
The second attachment contained a black-and-white photo of her father that he sent the president; a photo Ferguson had long ago forgotten that he’d included.
“He looked like he belonged in a Little Rascals episode as he stood between two yucca plants and grinned, his head tilted down,” she says.
DeCoursey thought of waiting until Christmas to surprise him with his letter and photograph but made an impromptu visit instead.
As the family chatted in the den, DeCoursey took a photograph of her dad holding his framed letter and photo and then handed him two sheets of paper, face down, and said, “I want you to take a look at these and tell me what you think.”
Ferguson turned the sheets over, immediately recognizing the top one as his letter to the president dated March 3, 1941. Silence. One hand moved to his mouth.
Ferguson was amazed that the FDR Library had kept his letter and photograph.
“I was speechless,” he says. “I was flabbergasted to see that something which had come from such a small, isolated area in the country as where I was from was saved like that.”
Carter says, “I feel honored every day to help people access these documents, and in this case, the Arkansas connection made it that much more special.”
When Ferguson called the library to thank Carter for finding his correspondence, she told him that LeHand was known for her respect of presidential communications and understanding that they should be kept for posterity.
In reading his letter, Ferguson chuckled at the reference to Miss Don, who was also his older sister and the teacher who gave him that first grade spanking for talking too much. When he shared the letter with his sister, Don Patterson, now 92 and living in Tuckerman, she said she didn’t remember spanking him, but Ferguson assured her that she had.
“The spanker may forget, but never the spankee,” he told her.
Ferguson and his family laughed that he’d signed his name as F.D.R. Ferguson, not revealing that his first name was actually Forest. The photo was taken by Patterson with the Kodak camera she bought with her teacher’s salary and since passed down to her daughter.
Ferguson’s original letter is filed away at the presidential library, saved in the archival file “Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Paper as President - President’s Personal File 15 - Namesakes - F, 1940-1945.”
“I was just astounded that the letter had been retained and made its way back to us,” says DeCoursey. She and her sisters are planning to add the copies of Ferguson’s letter and the photograph to a larger frame alongside the earlier-framed reply from LeHand and the photograph of Roosevelt.
“Even though we’re a close family, this has made us even closer and has given us another pleasant memory to share,” Ferguson says.
Visit the website go.usa.gov/4z9Y to read Sherri DeCoursey’s account of her search for her father’s letter.
Style, Pages 46 on 04/07/2013