Ridgewood September 26, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 5 Resident recalls FDR after Eleanor impersonator’s talk by John Koster Rene Goodwin had her Ridgewood audience half-convinced they were listening to the real Eleanor Roosevelt, but Ridgewood resident Rita Foote brought down the house when she told “Eleanor” she had shaken hands with her “husband.” Foote, who has lived in Ridgewood for 62 years, told Goodwin that when she was a little girl, her father took her to a county fair at Canton, New York, and told her to remember the next man he was about to introduce. The man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a former vice presidential candidate then running for governor of New York in 1928. Foote said she still remembered how charming and pleasant the candidate was as he shook her little hand and told her to behave herself and keep up with her studies. FDR won that 1928 New York gubernatorial race and, four years later, won the 1932 presidential race. “Now I know I have one more vote I can count on at the polls,” “Eleanor” told Foote, who said she had been an election worker in Ridgewood for 20 years. The meeting of “Eleanor Roosevelt” and Foote took place at last week’s meeting of the Post Stroke and Disabled Adult Support Group. The crowd assembled in the Ridgewood Courthouse. Goodwin, who specializes in Eleanor Roosevelt impersonations, drew in her audience with stories about the Roosevelt family. Eleanor was eight when her mother died and 10 when she lost her father. She recalled how, as a teenager, she began to walk with a deliberate stoop because she was dismayed at being taller than many boys her age. Her grandmother forced Eleanor to wear a steel corset that fit her like a straitjacket. Later, she said, she was simply forced to walk around with a cane braced against the small of her back and held in place with both of her elbows. Dressed in the upper-class mode of the 1930s, including a fur piece with a visible face and ears, Eleanor explained automobile, and work a full day and into the night in a custom-made wheelchair. She explained that the family would distract attention when they entertained dinner guests by having Franklin sit at an end table mixing cocktails and then usher the guests out, and quickly shift Franklin to the dinner table so no one could see his leg braces or know that he could not walk unassisted. She said it was important for the people of the United States, daunted by the Great Depression and World War II, not to dwell on the fact that the president was physically disabled, even though she asserted that he was never mentally disabled. “He was never pain-free,” she said in response to a question. Goodwin, who studied dramatic impersonation in (continued on page 15) Rita Goodwin as ‘Eleanor Roosevelt’ in Ridgewood. the far more serious therapeutic work that helped Franklin Roosevelt come back from complete paralysis from the neck down. After six years of physical therapy at Warm Springs, Georgia, and at home with her help, FDR learned to walk with leg braces and to travel extensively by air, drive himself and friends around in a specially-equipped