"This Is the House"

A black Packard limousine hummed up the long gravel driveway and crunched to a stop near the big grey house with the white-pillared portico. The President, having arrived a few minutes late, hurriedly got out. "We thought we'd lost you," said Anna Eleanor Roosevelt as she extended her hand.

As they strolled under the aged oaks, Franklin Roosevelt's widow pointed out to Harry Truman the places where her husband, as a boy, had joyously discovered Indian relics, and where, as President, he had spoken at the ground-breaking for his cherished Memorial Library. Leaving newsmen behind, the pair entered the library for a quiet look.Then, still together, they walked slowly toward the hedge-rimmed rose garden.

The family was there, waiting for them, when Harry Truman, hat in hand and carefully keeping pace with Mrs. Roosevelt, came through the garden entrance and took an enormous wreath of white gladioli from the leathery hands of an Army sergeant. Both the President and Mrs. Roosevelt raised their heads high as they turned and advanced to the white marble block where a small flag flapped over a cup of bright red tulips. The President bent slowly, and, with his left hand, placed the wreath on Franklin Roosevelt's grave.

As a cold wind blew out of the deep wooded Hudson valley and a bleak half-light streaked across the sky, President Roosevelt's widow and his successor stood in silence, with bowed heads. Only Secret Service men were near.

"With No Regret." A quarter of an hour later the official ceremonies marking the first anniversary of F.D.R.'s death began on the broad front porch of the Big House. Dutchess County youngsters perched in a tall tree; servants peeked from the house windows; Falla scuttled out and snuggled at Harry Truman's feet.

Reading his brief speech from a little leather folder, Harry Truman pledged his administration "to carry forward the underlying principles and policies, foreign and domestic, of Franklin D. Roosevelt." The biggest ovation was for Eleanor Roosevelt when she turned over the Big House, where Roosevelts had lived for some 80 years, to the people of the U.S. as a national shrine.

Said she: "This is the house in which my husband was born and brought up. He loved this house. . . . Here he played as a child. . . . Here he spent the summer, nine months after he was stricken. . . . Here he grew strong. . . . So it is with no regret that . . . I see this house and its contents dedicated to the people . . . whom my husband loved."

Inside the old white doorway the house had been arranged the way F.D.R. had left it for the last time. The clocks were stopped. His clothes, including the navy cape he wore at Yalta, still hung in the closet; his hat & coat were still by the hall door. Odd paraphernalia--bird collections, pictures, a cribbage board--were in their accustomed places. On the table near the mahogany bed in his old room were scattered mysteries and year-old newspapers and magazines.* In his library with the lived-in look were the maps on which he had followed the war--which he had never seen fully won.

* Including the March 26, 1945 issue of TIME.

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