Passing of FDR

Passing of President Franklin Roosevelt

Bainbridge News & Franklin, April 19, 1945

 

Last Thursday at 4:35 p.m. the United States suffered one of the greatest losses in its history, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Ga.

 

The funeral was held in the East room of the White House on Saturday at 4 p.m. and burial was Sunday morning at 10 o'clock in the garden between his mansion house and the Roosevelt library at Hyde Park.

 

In this village [Bainbridge, Chenango Co., NY] flags were displayed and all business places closed from 4 until 6 p.m. Saturday.

 

The death of Franklin D. Roosevelt has taken from this nation a great President and a great war leader--perhaps the ablest wartime Commander in Chief in our history.  No President since Washington--with the possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt--has so well understood the basic strategical needs and interests of this nation.  No President before him has led the nation in war with such competence, indeed, such brilliance, as Franklin Roosevelt.

 

During his term of office there arose the most terrible danger to the cause of freedom, to the concept of individual human rights and dignity which free peoples of the world have had to face since the Dark Ages.  the basic principle upon which this Republic was founded, that the State exists to serve and to protect the individual in the exercise of his inalienable rights, was directly assailed by powerful forces which were dedicated to the view that the individual exists only to be the slave of the State.  From the very beginning President Roosevelt saw the real nature of this threat, recognized it as a threat not only to Britain and France and China but to ourselves and to freedom everywhere and opposed it with all his energies. The venomous attacks upon him by our German and Japanese enemies show clearly that they recognized in  him the arch foe of their evil designs. More than any other human being, Franklin Roosevelt has brought about the defeat and downfall of those designs.

 

The Allied nations mourn the passing of this great American.

 

Pvt. Ruth Fenner Sings at Service for the President

Bainbridge News & Republican, April 26, 1945

 

Pvt. Ruth Fenner, WAC, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C.A. Fenner, Bainbridge [Chenango Co., NY], with Miss Elizabeth Pasek, sang the duet, "Sometime We'll Understand," at the memorial service held for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Sunday, Apr. 15, at the Kilmer Bowl.  Eight thousand people attended this service given by the Army Service Forces, New York Port of Embarkation, Camp Kilmer, N.J.