When members of America’s most Burns-worthy family visited Vancouver 70 years ago, it was Page 1 news … even when the news wasn’t reported for a week or so.
Ken Burns’ latest documentary took a 14-hour look at one family that produced two presidents and one first lady: the Roosevelts.
Eleanor Roosevelt was part of a 2013 story package about our World War II Kaiser Shipyard. She christened the first aircraft carrier built here, in front of an estimated 70,000 people.
Our coverage included a more intimate portrait of the first lady, thanks to a local man who was 8 in 1943. Mel Jackson provided a photo that shows two boys standing just a few feet from Mrs. Roosevelt, greeting her after a visit to the Kaiser Shipyard hospital; the boy on the left is Mel.
“My dad was an ambulance driver at the hospital, and I used to go to work with him,” Jackson told The Columbian in August 2013. Jackson’s dad knew where Mrs. Roosevelt would be leaving the hospital after visiting with injured shipyard workers. And that’s where Mel was waiting for her, along with another boy.
As Jackson recalls the conversation, the first lady did most of the talking:
“How are you doing?”
“Fine,” the boys replied.
“Nice to meet you,” she said.
Top-secret visit
Ships weren’t Vancouver’s only contribution to the war effort. Vancouver’s Alcoa plant turned out enough aluminum for 3,000 planes a month.
It rated a visit from President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Sept. 23, 1942. It was a top-secret visit: We didn’t report on it until Oct. 1.
In a 2007 story, a former Alcoa engineer recalled how his boss was told to hook up a phone with a long cord in a spot close to the railroad tracks. He found a small building with a wall phone near the tracks.
After office workers left for the day, the guy grabbed a secretary’s desk phone. He disconnected the old wall phone and wired in the secretary’s telephone, with a cord long enough to reach along the railroad tracks.
The next day, a passenger train was parked in the plant site, and everyone was joking about how the engineer must have gotten lost.
But the president’s private rail car had a phone. And when the secretary came in, her phone was gone.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
