The Bear at Home

THE ROOSEVELT FAMILY OF SAGAMORE HILL (435 pp.)--Hermann Hagedorn--Macmillan ($5).

Theodore Roosevelt's house in Long Island's Oyster Bay is now a national shrine. But on a windy March day in 1887, Sagamore Hill was just a large, rambling house young Teddy had built, with twelve bedrooms for foreseen eventualities. That March day Teddy brought his bride home in a surrey with a fringe on top; soon enough the eventualities came too. The house with its 80 acres was plenty of home, but not too much, for the two girls, four boys and their innumerable cousins. Teddy thought it was bully, and the children thought that their romping, happy father was bully too.

The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection for August, is an album of Teddy and family from the turn of the century through World War I. Author Hermann Hagedorn, a former Harvard English instructor who has written or edited six previous books on T.R. (The Boys' Life of Theodore Roosevelt, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands), knew and loved the family well. His camera is sometimes less than candid, but even when freckles and awkward angles are airbrushed out, his snapshots are warm, intimate closeups that usually show what the outsider wants to see.

Sunday Morning Tag. Teddy carried daughter Alice "pig-a-back" every morning, and she took to addressing him somewhat irreverently as "Now, pig!" Little Kermit had fun "turning somersaults on the manure heap." Ethel and Archie invented a game of tag involving pokes and crossed fingers during the pastor's long prayer on Sunday mornings. Teddy played bear with Baby Quentin and assorted small fry, pouncing on them with such energy "that he tore all the gathers out of [one little girl's] frock and both buttonholes out of her petticoat." When Teddy became too violently playful, wife Edith, no "Patient Griselda," intervened. Edith was a childhood friend of Teddy's and a lifelong love. Her standards were Victorian, but she knew the business of being mother and running a household, and when she spoke up, Teddy knew the moment for silence had come.

Meanwhile, the chunky, ruddy-faced Teddy bear with the walrus mustache had become Civil Service commissioner, New York City police commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy and the most famed Rough Rider on San Juan Hill. He ran successfully for governor of New York and Vice President of the U.S. while bands blared A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, and admirers extravagantly told of his exploits (Finley Peter Dunne as "Mr. Dooley" wrote: "In Wounded Knee he busts a broncho that has kilt almost th' entire male popylation; busts it so har-rd 'twud dhraw a baby cerredge without wakin' the occupant").

Neither adulation nor public office could keep Teddy from home. Whenever he could, he went back to the small fry, organizing games, obstacle races, camping and hunting expeditions and a wild slide down Cooper's Bluff, a steep, 200-ft. sand slope to a beach on the Sound. One reason the kids liked camping with him was explained by a delighted ten-year-old: "He never asked me to wash once!!!"

Presidential Pillow Fights. When T.R. became President on McKinley's assassination, he was not quite 43. Going to Washington, wife Edith had to buy a good black dress and wailed, "Alas, alas, I had to pay $135 for it." Daughter Alice, almost 18, was already playing the high octaves of the Social Register and regarded the publicity about her father as "rather vulgar." But the others, "just plain American kids," were dazzled by White House receptions. They sat halfway down the stairs in their nighties, observing and observed, until their mother shooed them off to bed.

Between receptions and affairs of state, the President dallied behind the scenes, where war was immediately declared. The weapons: pillows. Quentin's tactic was to lie on as many pillows as possible to keep them away from the enemy, while Archie screamed that he stand up and "fight the bear." The bear made Sagamore Hill the summer White House, which enabled him to arrange "romps" for the children and their cousins, who invariably returned with torn, soaked, muddied clothes. The defense to outraged parents that "Cousin Theodore took us" was not always effective. One mother replied: "You mustn't be a fool even if your Cousin Theodore sets you the example." Teddy appeared to agree when he wrote that it seemed "odd for a stout, elderly President to be bouncing over hayricks in a wild effort to get to goal before an active midget of a competitor, aged nine years."

The Lion's Brood. When the second term ended in 1909, Teddy returned to Sagamore Hill to find the old days gone. The children had grown up, and all but Quentin were married. All four boys went off to war, and Aviator Quentin was shot down over Germany. Teddy wanted to fight too, but nobody would let him. He resented sitting at home "ignobly in comfort and uselessness," and proudly followed the fighting fortunes of his sons. When Quentin, the youngest, brought down his first German plane, Teddy roared: "The last of the lion's brood has been blooded."

Teddy was 60 and on his way toward the 1920 Republican nomination for President. But one January morning in 1919, 32 years after he first brought his bride home, Teddy died in his Oyster Bay house. His last words to wife Edith were: "I wonder if you will ever know how I love Sagamore Hill."

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