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I am always interested in the "Vintage View" pictures and columns that Art Smith frequently has in The Marietta Times. I particularly enjoy the scenes of years past in and around Marietta. One picture and story recently in the newspaper that struck a memory cord was Franklin Roosevelt's visit in 1938.
Certainly a presidential appearance and speech peaks the interest under any circumstances. But President Roosevelt carried his own mystique in filling the office during the time of the country's two monumental crises of the twentieth century – the Great Depression and World War II.
But my reason for this letter is personal. At the moment that the President addressed the huge crowd in Muskingum Park on July 8, 1938, my grandparents, Frank and Lucy Riggs McCaslin, were driving their daughter, my future mother, Carol, across the Putnam Street Bridge on their way to Gallipolis. Their destination in that city was the Holzer School of Nursing. My mother was beginning her studies as a new student there to become a registered nurse.
I well remember the story of my grandfather slowing the car to view the amazing scene spread on their right side.
The assembled throng was peering in the same direction. The focus was the top of a high podium from which hung the American Flag where the president stood in his familiar pose -- his arms spread out in his traditional grasp of the podium with both hands.
We know now that stance was necessary for him to balance his torso so that he could stand on his polio stricken legs. An illness that was well hidden from the general public during his years in office.
My mother would go on to graduate and be employed as an RN at Marietta Memorial Hospital. Following that she became a county nurse in Cuyahoga County and furthered her studies to graduate in Public Health Nursing from Case Western Reserve. She later became a hometown RN for Dr. H.L. Duncan in New Matamoras.
And she also became the wife of my father, Gail Miller. He would live to be the final surviving employee of the Strecker Brothers Company of Marietta.
John Miller
New Matamoras. Ohio