• U.S.

Back from the Barony

3 minute read
TIME

The mystery was over, and the rumors —which had had him everywhere from the Mayo Clinic to London—were disproved. On doctor’s orders Franklin Roosevelt had treated himself to the most thoroughgoing rest of his eleven years in the White House.

For four long weeks he had slept twelve hours every night in the indolent air of Hobcaw Barony, Bernard Baruch’s 23,000-acre South Carolina plantation, 60 miles north of Charleston. He had sunned himself on the pier that juts out into the brackish waters of Winyah Bay. He had cast for bass in plantation ponds, gone crabbing and snagged eels from the pier, fished up & down the Black and Waccamaw Rivers on a 54-ft. Coast Guard patrol boat. Under a canopy of blimps and patrol planes, he had trolled for bluefish and bonito 15 miles out in the Atlantic. (He was almost caught at sea in a thunderstorm kicked up by a tornado that killed 38 people farther west.)

Other days he went driving through the plantation’s pines and cypresses, looking at jonquils and dogwoods in full bloom. Sometimes he “just sat” on the white-columned front porch of Hobcaw, a stately 21-room house built by Baruch twelve years ago on the 226-year-old plantation.

To insure the President’s isolation, 65 Marines and 40 Secret Service men stood guard. Some were spaced along the fence that surrounds Hobcaw. Others guarded the lonely, forested 4½ miles of choppy sand road that leads to the highway to Georgetown, ten miles away. Several of the Marines had been at Guadalcanal, and knew how to drive off mosquitoes at night with small fires of pine cones. Their only excitement came when four Nazi prisoners escaped in Georgia; Hobcaw kept close track of the manhunt, until the last two Germans were caught at Columbia, S.C.

Otherwise the outside world intruded only when planes brought in mail pouches, about every other day, and once when Prime Minister Curtin of Australia, President Picado of Costa Rica, their wives and Mrs. Roosevelt flew in for lunch and the afternoon. Lieut. Commander Franklin Roosevelt Jr. dropped by for dinner one evening. The President kept paper work to a minimum, but even so had to sign a lot of papers—including commissions for notaries public in the District of Columbia.

At the end of his vacation, the President called reporters into Hobcaw and with a casual wave of his ivory cigaret holder announced that he was just about up to date on all current business. He had no comment on Sewell Avery, nor had he yet considered a successor for Frank Knox. As the well-tanned President arrived back in Washington, Vice Admiral Ross T. McIntire, his personal physician, said proudly that his patient had shaken off his winter sniffles and bronchitis, declared: “I am perfectly satisfied with his physical condition . . . excellent shape … as strong as he was a year ago.”

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