{"id":276,"date":"2008-05-21T20:10:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-21T20:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2008\/05\/21\/276\/"},"modified":"2014-12-14T20:31:53","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T01:31:53","slug":"276","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=276","title":{"rendered":"FDR’s Private RR Tracks"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was watching a PBS show<\/a> on Franklin D. Roosevelt the other night. As you may know, FDR was crippled and confined to a wheelchair. But he didn’t want the public to know it. Those were the days when the press could keep a secret! There were lots of clips showing all the elaborate preparations that occurred whenever FDR made a public appearance, so as to hide his disability. <\/p>\n

Following up on this, I came across a web site<\/a> that talks about a “secret” railroad track that ended under the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan. This track was used for a variety of things, but one of the most important uses was for President Roosevelt. This siding was walled-in, so whenever FDR visited New York they would put his private train car on this track and get him up into the hotel without any nosy reporters taking embarrassing pictures (or exposing him to a whacko with a gun). <\/p>\n

That brought back a memory from my youth. My first real job out of college was with the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington DC. I was working on facilities projects, and one day I was in the basement with one of the old-timers in my section. He brought me over to a dimly lit old concrete platform where there was an unused train track, which led toward a closed metal garage door. Years ago, they would occasionally open this door to let a train bring in a tank car of printing ink, for use in the money printing factory. But by the 1970s, the BEP got all of their ink in barrels that were shipped by truck and the train door was sealed. The old guy told me that as grungy as this basement scene was, it was historical; it was where they would sometimes get FDR onto or off of his train car when he was traveling to or from Washington. As with the Waldorf-Astoria siding in Manhattan, it was fully enclosed. Even better, it was government property that was guarded at all entrances (again, because this was the national currency factory). <\/p>\n

The article about the Waldorf-Astoria siding notes that Andy Warhol once threw an “underground party” there. Unfortunately, the inky old track at the BEP enjoyed no such celebrity. But hey, at least I saw it.<\/p>\n

PS, back on the political front, most of the pundits seem to be attributing Hilary Clinton’s demise to Barack Obama’s superior handling of the state caucuses. Senator Obama used the lessons regarding grassroots level organizing that he learned in Chicago during his days with the Industrial Areas Foundation<\/a> in the caucus states; Hilary’s people stuck with a top-down reliance on the big state primaries. Given the edge that this gave to Obama, I wondered what did he have to say about IAF’s founder and guru, the legendary Saul Alinsky<\/a>? Mr. Alinsky was gone by the time Obama hit the scene, but you’d think that the Illinois Senator would give him his due. However, it appears otherwise; Obama recently said<\/a> that “. . . the tendency in community organizing of the sort done by Alinsky was to downplay the power of words and of ideas when in fact ideas and words are pretty powerful.” <\/p>\n

Hmmm. This sounds a bit revisionist to me. Obama’s people used Alinsky’s organizing principles to good advantage in Iowa and a slew of other small states thereafter; that made all the difference for Obama (and it’s not a big difference, remember — he may win the delegate count by less than a 10% margin). But he seems to focus on “ideas and words” — as in an Obama speech, the event where Obama transcends himself. It’s not that Alinsky didn’t have ideas; he wrote several books, and I have one of them myself. But Alinsky wasn’t an eloquent orator, like Obama. So now the good Senator-cum-Presidential Candidate can look down at Alinsky, even though without the lessons that he learned from Alinsky’s machine (the IAF), his speeches would now be mostly forgotten. <\/p>\n

A nation can’t live on eloquent speeches alone, as McCain will be reminding the country this fall. I’m not in any mood to vote for McCain, but I’d still like to see a bit more substance from Obama. Also some more evidence of good-old-fashioned Alinsky-style “can do”. If we were voting this fall for National Speechgiver, I’d feel entirely comfortable with Barack Obama. But as to the office of President of the United States . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was watching a PBS show on Franklin D. Roosevelt the other night. As you may know, FDR was crippled and confined to a wheelchair. But he didn’t want the public to know it. Those were the days when the press could keep a secret! There were lots of clips showing all the elaborate preparations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4994,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions\/4994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}