"Let me tell you, Alf Landon, if you succeed me at the White House you ought to get a boat and try out the Potomac River for fishing. I have taken week-end trips and they have done me a lot of good."
A year ago last week, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt met Governor Landon, this was the genial advice which he gave his rival in the Presidential campaign. (Last week, President Roosevelt commemorated the occasion by going fishing himself—not in the river Potomac, because he had repaired to Hyde Park—but on the yacht Potomac, in Long Island Sound.
The week began with the Dutchess County Fair, at Rhinebeck, N. Y., a few miles up the Albany Post Road from Hyde Park. One visit to the Fair, for any Dutchess County squire, amounts almost to an obligation. Last week, the President made two. First afternoon, his car drew up under a canopy where the prize-winning cow and calf were brought over to be patted and he held the day's informal press conference. Next day Ambassador Robert W. Bingham, just back from London, lunched at Hyde Park. In the afternoon the President went to the Fair again, awarded a trophy, which he and Mrs. Roosevelt give each summer to the winner of the hunter championship, to Claredda Farm's handsome bay gelding Prince Charming II.
The fishing trip started late the next afternoon when the President boarded the Potomac at Poughkeepsie's wharf. Mrs. Roosevelt, White House attaches and a hundred or so neighbors were on hand to see him off. Aboard were WPAdministrator Harry L. Hopkins, who usually falls asleep as soon as he gets on a boat; Naval Aide Paul Bastedo; Physician Ross McIntyre; and Son James Roosevelt who, with Steve Early in Washington and Marvin Mclntyre on vacation, was getting his first taste of single-handed duty as one of his father's secretarial triumvirate.
Next day, convoyed by the destroyer Selfridge, the Potomac cruised off Montauk Point, the eastern tip of Long Island. The fishing was atrocious. First day's catch was one bass and "two miserable what-nots," one of which attached itself to the Presidential line. Next day's was just as bad. The third day of the cruise, when the President's onetime law partner Basil O'Connor joined the party, there was no fishing at all. Stormbound and anchored off Block Island, the President resigned himself to a press conference. Fourth day, en route back to Hyde
Park, the Presidential party finally contrived to catch 36 striped bass off New London.