Stuff, visit us before i introduce our guest at our moderators i want to give you a few quick housekeeping notes about using crowd deaths which you might not have used before. The event is recorded so you can watch it if you stay for part of tonights final talk because your water was boiling or you want to share with a friend it will be right here as well is on our facebook page. Second of all there is this lovely chat window open on the bottom of your screen, Say Something nice, please do. Type in, say hi, telling us where you are coming from all over the place it appears, and it almost goes without saying, please keep respectful and we will reserve the right to reserve anyone who doesnt it here to that standard which im sure will be unnecessary. And right next to that little chat box at the bottom of your screen you see the word ask a question, type it in there, chat any questions for david and we will have time at the end of the event to look at those. The event is Live Streaming on facebook, we can see your questions on facebook if you want to participate in that, you have to join us on crowd chat. And at the bottom of your browser to buy the book from us and through our partnership, delighted to offer free media mail shipping and david is providing us with signed bookplates so you will get in pandemic laid what passes for a signed book. I will turn you over to the director of american ancestors at the new England Geological Society and producer of its literary program. Beth is the head a special Collection State Library of massachusetts and im sure she will tell you about her eleanor shrine. Eleanor used to take the train to high school for right here where the bookstore existed. He is the author of awardwinning biographies of Charles Shultz and i have no doubt this book will add to his list of awards. Edit elements of markets and my. Wall street journal calls this book superb, the New York Times said it was a terrific resource and before we start i will tell you my own personal connection with Eleanor Roosevelt which is when my mom was in junior high in the late 40s mrs. Roosevelt came to visit her school in the bronx and my mother was the student chosen to escort her through the auditorium to the stage, and experience my mother talked about for the rest of her life. Without further a do please join me in welcoming margaret, beth and dave. Thank you. You just actually proved the point i want to make to start this wonderful evening and thank you for having me. Everybody, turns out, has some connection to Eleanor Roosevelt. I grew up in cambridge, you were aware that George Washington had been on a common and George Washington slept here you go around the country and George Washington slept here, always the joke of the 30s, not just eleanor slept here but eleanor registered deeply on every Single Person she met, those memories just as your mothers was were lifelong and stayed with people. I grew up in a household in which i thought eleanor was related to me. I thought it i thought she was a relative, there was such a sense of her presence. The reason was because my mother worked for Eleanor Roosevelt at wgbh which was then in its infancy, Public Television was in its infancy, National Education and television was the primitive version where in this story one half generation away or for 5 years from another tall, powerful woman arising in pioneer fashion on Educational Television named julia child from cambridge, massachusetts but right now, 1959, Eleanor Roosevelt decided she would have a one hour per month seminar like show that would be filled at brandeis which she cared about, she was on the board, was a perfect studio and there were cables and plywood, platforms running all the way through the theater part of the auditorium and the show, my mothers job was to prepare the script, to pick from her closet one of five identical broadway like dresses, more like washday addresses. She was simple in her presentation on the show and picking which address would be this month to go over the script she had prepared with paul noble, the other producer and in this period, four years old when i went one day to the studio and remember it is among my earliest memories. The impression i had was of in motion, walking down a court or and all i remember was somehow i was able to set my foot in one spot and another and another spot and move towards this figure and say two words, juicy fruit. Looked down at me and clearly had no stick of chewing gum but she had for me what i think she had 4 people she met in this way. Her eyes beamed out light as if there was light from within. Her smile was brought and she was full of sardonic mirth at a child asking her for a stick of gum and expecting it, that was the main thing and she kindly told me she didnt have gum. I dont remember what else she said. The memory is of a sense that i was very close to goodness, that goodness was pouring out of a human being in the form of light. This happened to me one or 2 other times in my life, once very movingly when Nelson Mandela came up broadway soon after his release from roman island and his release from the United States, by chance found myself downtown and as i walked toward broadway realizing something was happening just as i arrived at broadway there was mandela in a bubble car in the parade and his glance fell to the left of me and i felt i could see there was the same phenomenon of goodness appearing as light. I saw it once in an artist when he was looking at something, the same attention when it was given, pure attention, pure love of the subject the same thing happen and strangely, what connected me to mrs. Roosevelt and began this book for me was an odd coincidence, in 2001 i was given access to a basement on madison avenue. And go down is that basement under Office Building to look for records from 1950 of the beginning of the peanuts character and strip with Charles Shultz, a young cartoonist from minnesota had been trying for a number of years to get this cartoon started at United Feature Syndicate was the International Syndicate that shultz was accepted by and his papers were down there and as i found shultz at the s part of the bankers box to the right where they are alphabetical, the first one i saw to my left was roosevelt my day. I picked up the lid and magical dust flew into the air as i lifted out a long galley and i remember the first description, i had an impression that Eleanor Roosevelt had written a column, didnt know anything about it at that moment and so as i began reading a description of starlight from a sleeping porch in a fall morning, early fall morning and the great hopefulness that this site of the morningstar from mrs. Roosevelt brought into this first paragraph of this daily column myself the same sense of wonder and attention and joy and love, why dont i keep reading this . I had a lot to do right there and discovered shultz. I have very strong feeling that this was something that needed to be continued and i needed to look more carefully there and that was the beginning, strangely, on the same spot, i later learned as i began my research into eleanor and franklin and franklins mother, 200 madison avenue, the basement where i was had been franklins mothers house in new york city, the house she had moved from, when commercial when the commercial things began to arrive further uptown and that was her moment of escape from 200 madison up to 47, 49 e. 60 fifth where she lived with franklin, thats another story. Back to cambridge i wanted to say before i turn it over to margaret and beth, give a shout out to everybody, david, thank you, shout out to one of your neighbors, digital and otherwise. Eleanor parker, i wanted to shout out my train commuting buddy who i grew up in cambridge, she and i used to run for the train that ran to concorde and back, always a bit odd, there were very few people landed certified our oddball, we were taking it to concorde and no one else was doing that. It remains outer limit to me strangely enough, that was very far away from life as i knew it early on and then in my teenage years it is always a very romantic and highly literary locus that im proud to be at tonight. That was fascinating and i love your connection to boston. You are very much a new york person now i understand. The cambridge dies hard in all of us. Fascinating to hear. I havent appreciated your thorough connection to wgbh, a partner in the series we do. As i said, we do have a lot of partners, it is really a thrill to be with them at the state library. As many of you know we at american ancestors run the series american inspiration and i cant think of a better person to be part of this series then Eleanor Roosevelt. They are such looming the large figures in American History and eleanor particularly is such an inspiration particularly at this time for inclusion, diverse city for our great country such a role model and truly inspiring. One particularly big fan is beth carol from the university of massachusetts, tell us about your fandom and the first question. Let me apologize for being late to join you. My computer shuts down. I am head of special collections at the state library at the Massachusetts State House in Downtown Boston and we are depository of massachusetts back into publication and many other things in massachusetts history. We are glad to be part of this group tonight so margaret and i have written some questions for david and also compiled questions that came from people when they registered and we will be watching for questions that come in during the talk tonight so i will start with one question that is mostly mine because i am a huge fan of eleanors and it includes questions from other people. Here is my first question. My favorite line in the book, there were many favorite lines, was right after the dedication page but before the table of contents and it is a quote from eleanor that says i felt obliged to notice everything and to me that sentence can apply to every thing that happens to her in the book, everything but shaped her life. I wonder if you could give some context for that quote and tell us if you agree with my thoughts about it . Im so touched by your thoughts about it because that as an epigraph what i hoped that would sound, almost a as an overture to her life. Aaron copeland, appalachian springs, i began work, i thought of eleanors great expansion from her own life to the life of the country as being the whole country. Her ability to notice began when she was very young, something of a survival mechanism, it became something i was almost shocked how many people left records of her almost staring at them. When she didnt think someone was noticing her she would look carefully at them. I dont think she missed the thing. In one of democracys great principles which was reciprocity, that everybody counts, everybodys life and feelings and rights are to be equally judged and taken into account eleanors noticing was extremely democratic and equal opportunity and far reaching and farseeing. One thing that everybody who did meet her or came into contact with her felt about her, they felt seen and being seen by someone who comes from the center of the government or the center of democracy or washington dc was a very unusual experience in those days. It would be more unusual now to feel that seen in our mass world. To be glimpsed by someone like a letter roosevelt at the time is to feel as if youre very humanity had been taken into account and that was one of her gifts, that was automatic and natural, you couldnt fake it. It was authentic, and authentic wish to understand others. She felt after a certain point that there wasnt anybody she couldnt learn from. Everybody she met was somebody who if she understood them carefully and on their own terms, began to get a sense what they were about she would learn something and take it back, sometimes back to the president , the government, back to some agency that might help, sometimes back to her own column which she used to reflect those thoughts which she had seen in others. I have an entire file called simply noticing. Part of the Job Description where she changed what being first lady was and what being a human being was. Her job was to notice people what they were going through. The phrase, the quote meant more to me after i finished the book than when i first started so thank you for that. Part of that sentence is the word obliged. I was very struck by how obligated she felt to so many people through her life starting with her father, she developed a capacity to oblige, live subject to other peoples controlling teen years, she looked after the grant the girls who were there. And then she looked after fdr and she had a hard to please mother in law and stepping back and obliging what she did, was she born for this type of service . In someone, i used to think of Eleanor Roosevelt, there was a dogooder quality about her, they began to appear more subtly, beginning research and beginning to understand her. The wish to do good had a great deal to do with ideas about her father who died in such disgrace, absolutely drag through the mud, in his own world that may come across. Something that translated into a need to be useful. To take the care she had given them and give back to her. It became a mission to become a person whose usefulness was illuminating or enlightening or would open somebody up or create a sense of awakening. That never stopped her. It became her transaction, the way she connected. Why she risked uncertain things, was she an introspective store, did she have feelings . In the service you are talking about, the capacity, to purveyor. Something she first worked on to understand the parts of herself she knew she could not fulfill in others, allowing them to be tolerant, that she conquered, she had to conquer one of her feelings she understood in herself. She didnt have a broad range wasnt allowed to express anger. If she had a resentment, only a mild peak let alone the right to be fullblown angry, was told to go into a background, hang her head over the bathtub and cry it out. She was very constrained and learning how to respond to people who hurt her, to turns of the wall and turn it on. Self immolation was part of her responses and the transcendence of that allowed her to become the independent woman she became in stepbystep. The roosevelt marriage, she had learned early how to be friend someone in the instance of not lucy mercer who was a rival, but later, part of their lives and replace her almost as a surrogate to become part of the family and part of their parallel lives. Thank you. Many of the people attending the author talks, how authors do their work. This Eleanor Roosevelt biography seemed like it had a cast of thousands, thank you for that list of characters in the beginning of the book, there was helpful especially the nicknames. You manage your research, how you keep so many details . I am asking this partly as a librarian too. A couple tricks and big fails. I give each person of color, every blue index cards, every green index card is eleanor, every red index card, theodore roosevelt, oyster bay cousins, yellow, any woman eleanor sell in love with or any man eleanor fell in love with. White is quotation from other sources needs to be saved. Those are miraculously helpful in keeping things straight in the beginning. In eleanor surrogate with franklin, one of the purples, purples were franklin and eleanor people, or gobetween, folders in chronological order. The main principle i learned from Buckminster Fuller about his friendship, into a complicated life will of information gathering Free Internet and much of his work was global, the only way to keep things straight was to file, every time you get a piece of information if you do put it chronologically into a chronological file, you remember it better and it went into a chronological file starting in 1884 but every gear of eleanors life is in chronological when that happened. Back to that year you discover two things next to each other reveal something. Information that wasnt there in the first place. First answer to the question is index cards. I have to have it in my hand in the beginning. All things will go. I have a space in that because i will end up in a digital rolling stone, it will endlessly be alive. I burn his i was fortunate in my early publishing career, pat would do the same with chronology. He kept a chronology of everything and asked the administrative person every letter he wrote that would turn off chronological, all these letters he ever wrote to the same people but please give me 1990. Every person gets the file too. And it is important to keep each of them separate and clear. One thing i am delighted to keep all the gilded age families in order. Their marriage, fdr, the merging of the oyster bay long island roosevelt and hyde park roosevelt which come from the still futile but families on the Hudson Valley where a remarkable collection of land and gentry and governors mother was the merging, in new york, the displacer is at a high society sorts, an amazing collection of names of new york. She moves among new york, and she stuck in ground stone society, eta for naps land. Equal measure in the american, in the American Dream but also essentially that was created with all that wealth that overtook families like eleanors and the roosevelts. They were old new york, and she was from old new york, and she actually, i think, kept bits and pieces of that all, you saw the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt and the great roosevelt monument in washington, d. C. Next to the tidal basin there. The new roosevelt monument o