Springwood estate at Hyde Park becomes an unlikely stop in the Washington varsity crew’s pre-race weekend: a presidential home the rowers set out to find on a whim, and a place where their sporting world briefly met the Roosevelt family’s. After a meandering approach through the grounds, the crew was welcomed inside and spent an hour talking rowing and coaches with Franklin Roosevelt Jr.

Setting and Approach

On Saturday evening, Al Ulbrickson let the varsity borrow the coaching launch. The rowers were bored with the amusement park nearby, and their coach hoped an outing would keep them from spending the evening indoors growing restless before Monday’s race. With a student manager steering and navigating, they chose a destination on the assumption that the president lived somewhere upriver: they would pay him a visit.

The launch headed north past the Navy and Columbia shell houses, then northwest around Krum Elbow and along two miles of forest and cliff. At a dock marked Hyde Park Station, the crew asked for directions and learned that the president’s home lay in a cove a mile back. They left the manager with the boat, crossed railroad tracks and a narrow trestle, and continued on foot through bridle paths, overgrown roads, lawns, an abandoned gristmill, and a large stable. The estate did not announce itself at once; the rowers reached a gardener’s cottage before its elderly occupants confirmed that they were already on the property and pointed them toward the main house.

The Mansion and Its Visitors

The path led through a nursery and up to a broad gravel drive, with Springwood standing beyond an expanse of lawn. The three-story brick-and-masonry mansion, with a semicircular portico supported by white Grecian columns, was more magnificent than any house the boys had seen. By then it was nearing nine o’clock and growing dark. Nervous but unwilling to turn back, they went up to the portico and knocked.

A young man about their age answered. When the rowers introduced themselves, mentioned having met John Roosevelt the previous year, and asked whether the president was home, he said that Franklin D. Roosevelt was away but invited them in. He introduced himself as Franklin Roosevelt Jr. and asked them to call him Frank. The impromptu visit thus shifted from a search for the president to a meeting with his son, who proved eager to talk with the Washington crew.

The President’s Library and Rowing Talk

Frank ushered the visitors into the president’s library, sat them down, and spoke rapidly about rowing and coaches. The room’s scale and contents gave the crew plenty to take in: books lined most of the walls from floor to high ceiling, while portraits of American presidents and members of the Roosevelt family covered the remaining spaces. An ornate fireplace dominated one end. A fifteen-foot library table in front of it held new books on a wide range of subjects; other tables displayed fresh flowers or porcelain figures.

The room also connected the grand house to the public voice of its absent occupant. Shorty Hunt settled into an upholstered chair near the fireplace, then nearly leapt out of it when Frank told him that it was the president’s favorite and that Franklin D. Roosevelt sometimes delivered his radio fireside chats from there. The setting made the rowers’ visit intimate and startling at once: the young athletes had entered not only a mansion, but a private room associated with the president’s public broadcasts.

The Visit’s Record and Significance

The conversation lasted an hour. Back at the shell house that night, Johnny White recorded the visit in his diary in the matter-of-fact tone of an ordinary neighborhood call, noting that they had visited the president’s home and that it was a fine place. The understated entry contrasts with the crew’s elaborate journey through the grounds and their astonishment at the mansion and library.

In the days before a closely anticipated regatta, Springwood estate at Hyde Park briefly widened the rowers’ frame of reference without taking them away from their shared subject. The meeting turned on rowing: Frank occupied number six in Harvard University’s junior-varsity boat, had just returned from New London, and discussed the prospect that Tom Bolles might become Harvard’s next head coach if he secured another freshman victory at Poughkeepsie. The presidential estate therefore enters the narrative not as a political setting for a formal audience, but as the unexpected backdrop to an easy exchange between young competitors and a fellow oarsman.