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On the east bank of the Hudson River, near the town of Hyde Park, sits this unpretentious house, which was home to James and Sara Roosevelt and later, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. On the grounds of the estate, called Springwood, are the graves of Franklin and Eleanor and the FDR Library, the first presidential library to be built in this country.

When Franklin was a boy he emulated his father's passion for the outdoors, spending much time playing in the woods and fields of Springwood. In later years, Franklin reminisced about his childhood:

"In thinking back to my earliest days, I am impressed by the peacefulness and regularity of things both in respect to place and people."

Inside the entryway of the mansion I saw a statue of Franklin Roosevelt as a young man. The sculptor had chosen to show him seated on a slatted chair, and the lower legs of both the chair and of the man disappear into the base of the statue as if unneeded for the artist's interpretation. It was several years later that FDR was paralyzed from polio--having no more use of his legs, he preferred to sit on a slatted kitchen chair which had been fitted with a base and wheels to make it easy for him to get around.

Eleanor felt she never really belonged in the large house, as the title of the house remained in Sara's name until Sara's death in 1941. Sara lived in the house with Franklin and Eleanor and all the children till the end of her life. A small home was built on the estate, a few miles away, which became a sanctuary for Eleanor. She entertained many dignitaries there in her later years.

The statues you see in the second picture are carved from sections of the Berlin Wall and were a gift to the estate after the wall came down. They stand outside the Library, which is a museum containing the objects and documents of four terms of the presidency served by FDR. It was during Roosevelt's second term as president that he began construction on the library, and during his unanticipated and unprecedented third and fourth terms, he sometimes conducted the business of the nation from his office in this library. It is the only presidential library that was ever used by an acting president.

I was pleased to see that there is a great amount of space reserved in the Library for mementos and pictures of Eleanor's life of service to our country. I spent a very long time in there, looking at everything on display. That remarkable woman continues to be a great inspiration to me.

The mansion shown here is on the Vanderbilt estate, just up the Hudson River three miles from Springwood, home of James and, later, Franklin Roosevelt. The Vanderbilts, unlike James Roosevelt, had great desire to show their wealth, and they built with opulence in mind. I show you this picture not to see yet another mansion, but to give you an idea of what the view was like from either the Roosevelt or the Vanderbilt estates. There is about a two-hundred-foot difference in elevation from the mansions down to the broad Hudson River below. Far off in the west you can see the Catskill Mountains, which in the photograph look blue or purple. I know that if I drove up in them the day I was here I would have seen vistas of slopes draped in a cloak of crimson and orange and gold leaves.

The first photo shows part of the famous Delaware Water Gap, about one-half of the amazing S-curve that the Delaware River carved through a narrow range of hills called Kittatinny Ridge. You are looking from Pennsylvania across the river to New Jersey, as the river forms the state line between the two states. In the second photo you are looking up at the New Jersey side at the end of the Gap, and you can see the upthrust, tilted layers of the earth that were formed millions of years before the river cut down through them to create this canyon.

I drove through the Gap two days earlier and despaired of showing it to you because it was raining a little and the raindrops were occasionally turning to flakes of snow. You couldn't have seen much, even if I'd been silly enough to stand out in the rain and try to take a picture. I camped in a campground for two days across the river in New Jersey, in a quiet, rural campground far from highways and noise. Gradually, the weather brightened up as I spent my days and evenings writing. Today glorious warm autumn was back--and I drove right back to the Gap to take these photos for you.

It was a fun discovery to learn that my campground in northwestern New Jersey was so near the Crayola Factory, across the Delaware River in Easton, Pennsylvania. I took a special trip over there just to have a tour. You're going to have to go to their website to check out all the information there! I saw how crayons and markers are made, and then my tour group got to go play with clay. That's what they're doing in the picture. I learned that Mr. Rogers was invited to make the 100-billionth crayon (can you find out what color it was?). I got to wrap two newly-made red crayons in their wrappers that had been spread with glue, and I got to keep them! Do you know what the glue is made of to fasten the paper to the crayon and to itself? (Hint: it's something that won't make little kids or even dogs sick if they chew on the crayons.) I bet the answer is on the Crayola website. Then I got two lime-green markers, after I watched a machine make them. There was a video that showed a machine making Silly Putty and cutting it into chunks. However, it took people to put the Silly Putty chunks into the plastic eggs and snap the eggs shut. I also watched a video of another machine mixing tempera paint to pour into bottles and then put labels on the bottles. And last, I saw how they make colored chalk. It was all so interesting to me! What a happy place for people to work! Best of all, at the end of the tour I went to the Crayola store. They had Crayola everything! I won't tell you what I bought because it's a surprise for my grandsons. The second picture is of a display about the connection between Crayola crayons and American painter Grant Wood. The caption says:

Renowned American artist Grant Wood entered a Crayola coloring contest in the early 1900's and won. Wood later commented that winning the contest gave him the encouragement he needed to pursue a career in art.

This picture was taken early in the morning, looking west from Jenny Jump State Park in New Jersey to the Delaware Water Gap, about twenty miles away. You can see the V-shape opening in Kittatinny Ridge, in the background of the picture. That opening is the Gap, through which flows the Delaware River. The left (or south) side of the gap is in Pennsylvania, and the right (or north) side of the gap is in New Jersey.

Jenny Jump State Park was a lovely little surprise for me. It sits atop the rolling terrain of Jenny Jump Mountain, allowing motorists and hikers vista views like this one. One can also look out on the Great Meadows in the eastern part of New Jersey from the other side of this mountain. The original inhabitants of this area were the Lenni Lenape people (American Indians who were hunter-gatherers). When Moravians from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, moved into the area, conflict between the two groups of people occasionally erupted. It could have been that out of that conflict the modern name for the area emerged. A legend from that time, written down in 1747 by a Swedish missionary named Sven Roseen, tells the story of a little girl named Jenny who was out gathering berries on the mountain. Her father saw Indians approaching and yelled to her to jump. Some versions say she died from the fall; other say she survived. It is also possible that the name Jenny Jump could have derived from Lenni Lenape words that were anglicized by the settlers into words that had at least some meaning for them, and that the legend grew out of the name.

This building is one of several in a once-huge complex owned by Thomas Edison, inventor and businessman. At one time Edison actually ran an industrial empire. This building was the original lab at this site (built in 1887), but soon after it was constructed more outbuildings were required for housing the research that went on in this complex. There was a lab for physics and one for chemistry and several others, as well. Around these labs in West Orange, New Jersey, Edison built large factories where thousands of employees mass-produced his inventions for the public. Edison once said, "I always invented to obtain money to go on inventing." It doesn't show in this picture, but there is a six-story concrete building still standing across the street from this lab that was a factory built to produce storage batteries. Also manufactured in this huge complex were phonographs, business phonographs, and motion picture equipment. At the peak of production at this site in West Orange (1918-1919) Thomas A. Edison, Inc., employed 10,000 workers.

Not far away, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, is the site of another of the Edison labs and research facilities. Several of those buildings were moved to Henry Ford's Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, to honor the work of Ford's friend Thomas Edison.

The level of intelligence it took me to navigate through fast, intimidating New Jersey traffic in order to find this place in a huge, crowded city and then to survive a wrong turn into a bad neighborhood in leaving this site is certainly not on the scale of intelligence that Edison worked with, but I'd like to think that I used some of the same problem-solving skills that Edison used in creating his inventions. At least, I survived to tell the story!

These two pictures were my views of New York City from the top of the World Trade Center on Friday the 13th. A great day in the sunshine! The first picture shows part of Manhattan Island, looking uptown or north. The water on the left side of the island is the Hudson River. Remember seeing in an earlier report the headwaters of that river that looked like a small stream in upstate New York? The water on the right is called the East River, but on the map it looks as if it's really part of the Hudson River mixed with water from Long Island Sound.

The second picture shows the view looking south from the tower, and you can see Bedloe's Island (now called Liberty Island) on the left, out in the harbor. Can you make out the shape of the Statue of Liberty on that island? The other island is Ellis Island, where immigrants to America from other countries first stepped off their ships and began their processing to enter the country. The land in the background is part of New Jersey.

Please see the October 14, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Please see the October 16, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

The same ferry that took me out to Liberty Island came back an hour and a half later, and I got on it to go on to Ellis Island and then back to Battery Park. I had run out of time for sightseeing, and I couldn't even get off the ferry at Ellis Island. The next boat wouldn't have come along for another half hour, and I would have missed my ride home to my friends. So I stayed on board the ferry and took this picture for you. It shows you how the island would have appeared to immigrants arriving on their ships from Europe and other countries in the 1800s and early 1900s. The people would have disembarked from their ships and walked into the huge building on the right, where their processing would have started for their settling in the U.S. That enormous hall must have been a very busy, very noisy place--and very confusing for all the people who spoke no English. The immigrants must have felt relieved that the long sea voyage was over with. I'm sure that many of them felt a little fear, mixed in with a great amount of excitement. Imagine the gamut of emotions those people experienced! They were certainly very brave to leave their homelands and come to America.

Here in the center of Philadelphia I visited many sites which are part of Independence National Historical Park. My first stop, early in the morning as buildings were opening at 9:00 AM, was the Liberty Bell. It sits protected inside its own building, and the glass windows behind it look out across a grassy mall to Independence Hall.

It was a joy not to have to stand in line to see it and to have as much time to take a photograph as I needed, without ten or twenty people trying to stand in front of the bell to have their picture taken with it. I listened to the National Park volunteer tell stories about the bell. One thing I know for sure: the bell doesn't make a ringing sound any more, not with that huge crack in it. It would just make a dull "clunk" sound, if it were ever struck, the volunteer told us. But no one strikes it, so as to preserve it for many centuries to come. It has become an international symbol of freedom.

My second stop on my walking tour of Independence National Historical Park in the heart of Philadelphia was Independence Hall. This building was originally the Pennsylvania State House. It was borrowed by delegates to the Second Continental Congress to be used for their meetings, beginning on May 10, 1775. Philadelphia at that time was the principal city of the Colonies. It was situated in a central location between North and South. A nearby building, Carpenter's Hall, had been used a year earlier when the First Continental Congress met to discuss grievances over England's disregard for the rights and liberties of the colonists. Fighting between colonists and British troops had broken out in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in April of 1775, and as a result, the Second Continental Congress appointed George Washington commander in chief "of all continental forces, raised, or to be raised, for the defence of American liberty." During the next year, the Congress continued to meet in this building to search for ways to resolve the dispute between England and the Colonies.

At last, in June of 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia offered a resolution declaring "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." The Congress appointed a committee to draft a declaration "setting forth the causes which impelled us to this mighty resolution." Most of the work of the committee fell to Thomas Jefferson, who, working alone in his rented rooms in a Phildelphia house, authored the original rough draft of the most famous document of the Revolution--the Declaration of Independence. The declaration was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, in this very room you see in the picture.

It was also in this room that the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were adopted as the first constitution of the United States on November 15, 1777. Their failure to provide for a strong central government resulted in the calling of a convention, held in this room ten years later in 1787, to revise the document. Revision proved impossible, and the convention delegates decided to write an entirely new charter that became the Constitution of the United States, formally adopted on September 17, 1787. The chair that you see at the front of the room had a carving of the sun on the top of its back. George Washington sat in the chair throughout the proceedings. The sun carving had fascinated Benjamin Franklin through all the weeks and months of meetings. After the Constitution was adopted, Franklin proclaimed the design to be "a rising and not a setting sun."

Our tour guide called this the most historical room in the most historical building in the most historical city of our nation.

Please see the October 19, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Edgar Allen Poe rented this house in Philadelphia for only one year, 1843 to 1844. While living here he published "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," and other works. In the first picture you can see evidence of the reconstruction going on in this house right now. Needless to say, I didn't visit the inside of it because it is closed to the public during the reconstruction. The second picture shows a sculpture of a raven at the side of the house. The raven was the subject of a famous poem of Poe's.