If a picture's worth a thousand words, one taken in Washington, D.C., recently is near priceless.
Maggie Thomas, the only female veteran of the Honor Flight of Ellis County, in the rain, her wheelchair pulled up beside the bronze statue of FDR at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.
Her gentle hand on his monumental arm, some 63 years after the day when, as a staff nurse at his rehab facility, Warm Springs, she saw him for the last time.
April 11, 1945
That was April 11, 1945, the day before he died at The Georgia Warm Springs Foundation. Back then, 2nd Lt. Maggie Allan Thomas was a young Army Reserve nurse who worked for four years in the 1940s at the facility owned by Roosevelt.
Crippled by polio two decades earlier, FDR was so pleased by the benefits the warm waters had on his after effects that he'd purchased the 900-acre resort with two thirds of his own personal fortune.
"They called it The Little White House, and he would come down with part of his family, and a darling little dog, a Scottish terrier named Fala, who was treated royally, of course," she recalled.
"The President would get a little rest, away from all the Washington goings on," she said.
FDR usually made a couple trips there a year, and he spearheaded the facility's efforts to treat polio and to research the disease and the rehabilitative process. (He had Warm Springs' work in mind when he started the March of Dimes.)
He was a regular honored guest at the facility's massive Thanksgiving dinners with the staff and patients in Georgia Hall.
"He would stand there with his Secret Service men and he would shake hands with everyone who came in. We all shook hands with him as he came in. It was a good, manly handshake," she remembered, adding that she didn't notice at the time what she learned later that even his thumbs, especially the right one, had been weakened by the dread disease that wouldn't be cured until a decade after his death.
Thomas said FDR's treatment of staff and patients was always exemplary.
"He was very kind, and always very understanding and patient to all of us," she said.
Thomas said it was believed at the time that surgery would have made it possible for FDR to walk again, but that he put the country and the presidency first.
"It's possible he could have walked if he could have taken the time for surgery but recovery would have taken a year or years," she said.
She vividly remembers seeing FDR the day before he died April 11, 1945.
"That Sunday before he died, I told several patients I'd take them to chapel. Roosevelt came in to attend church in his wheelchair. He participated in the service, sang the songs and everything," she remembered. "I looked at him and thought he looked very grey his color was very bad."
The President died April 12, 1945. Thomas remembered that he continued to work right up until the end of his life.
"It was a trying time, and he had a heart condition He was suffering, I'm sure, but not to the extent he couldn't do his day-to-day work," she said.
Georgia roots
Born in Maggie Allan in Spartanburg, S.C., and raised in Georgia, Maggie Allan Thomas graduated from Duke University's school of nursing in 1940.
She first went to Warm Springs in 1941, recruited because the dean at Duke knew she was from Georgia and would like to be close to family. The pay hike from $60 a month with room and board to $100 sounded good, too.
Thomas remained in the reserve with the 65th general hospital unit, and married a promising young engineer, Capt. Earl Thomas, who worked in preparation for the use of chemical warfare.
Maggie Thomas was called up to Fort Bragg, and then to Camp Shanks in New York. By the time her unit mobilized, she was disqualified by a pregnancy test; she received an honorable discharge and went back to Camp McCall with her husband until he shipped out to France with the 7th Airborne.
Maggie Thomas returned to Warm Springs as a married nurse, waiting for her husband to come home from the war. There were many opportunities for service polio patients, wounded servicemen and orthopedic patients there for surgery and recuperation in the springs' warm, healing waters.
Capt. Earl Thomas came back in the big ticker-tape parade in New York with the 82nd Airborne; the Army brought his bride, along with the other wives, to town for the occasion and treated them well, she remembered. But the frenzy of the triumphant parade was what she recalled the most.
"The city was just hysterical because the war was over," she recalled.
An unscheduled stop
Her recent visit to the FDR memorial wasn't a scheduled stop. It was raining hard enough that Thomas needed a raincoat, and the waiting bus was full of Texas veterans ready for their next stop on a full two-day itinerary.
"But they knew how bad I wanted to see the memorial I had a little time, not much," she said.
Thomas's first impression of the memorial itself was that it was kind of stark.
"There were beautiful walls of stone. And then I saw the monument made out of bronze he was sitting in a little chair, very similar to what he always sat in. It was just an office desk chair he had mounted on wheels so he could easily turn it with his hands. It was what he always used inside," she said.
The main FDR memorial depicts his four presidential terms in four granite outdoor "rooms." Finished in 1997, it met with scorn from activists for the disabled who weren't pleased that his disability was masked in the memorial as it had been during his political career, with the largest sculpture showing him conveniently cloaked.
So another $1.65 million was raised to fund a statue that showed him in a wheelchair. It was placed in a "prologue room" near the entrance of the memorial.
It's this most human depiction of Roosevelt, so like the wheelchair-bound President she remembered, that caught Thomas' eye.
Still spry in her 80s, she doesn't usually need a wheelchair, but she used one for portions of the Washington trip, sitting in it beside the statue of FDR in his.
It was then that out of deference to the leader and patient she remembered from six decades ago, she rested her hand for a moment on his bronze arm.
And as she did, one thought crossed her mind.
"I hope that this great man knows that I am paying respect to him for all he did for our country, and for how wonderful he was in his humanitarian efforts by having patients from so many other countries come to Warm Springs for treatment for polio," she said.
It was the briefest of stops, but accompanied by her Honor Flight guardian, son and Ennis Mayor Russell Thomas, 2nd Lt. Thomas sort of closed the loop on her own place in history.
"I felt like I had accomplished my mission, that I had seen his monument as well as the one to World War II veterans," she said. "I appreciate all the people of Ellis County who saw that we got there."
A lifelong learner, Maggie Thomas' curiosity has been piqued. Now she wants to learn more about the FDR memorial she saw for a fleeting moment and she's considering one more trip to Warm Springs.
Known now as the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, it's a working National Historic Landmark, with 450 rehab employees who continue to provide medical rehabilitation services perhaps the best memorial of all to the memory of FDR.
"I'd love to see it one more time," she said.
This article originally appeared in The Waxahachie Daily Light. For more Daily Light stories, see www.waxahachiedailylight.com
J. Louise Larson is the managing editor of The Ennis Journal in Ennis, Texas. She is a Texas-based writer and speaker whose work has been published in magazines and newspapers, including Entrepreneur Magazine, AirTran's Go Magazine, Smart Business Magazine, Midwest Airlines' MyMidwest Magazine, DS News, the Dallas Morning News and others. Her work has been featured on thestreet.com, msnbc.com, entrepreneur.com, business.com and other sites. Her family blog can be seen at http://familyrootsandwings.blogspot.com/ and her writing blog at http://writingporch.blogspot.com/. She is the author of The FabJob Guide to Become A Party Planner (FabJob Publishing 2006) and a member of The Author's Guild and the Writers League of Texas.
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