Birthday

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's birthday is the occasion for more organized whoopee than Washington's or Lincoln's. The first Roosevelt Birthday Balls in 1934 netted $1,003,000, the next $803,000, the last two together $353,000. Of this total $2,159,000, $809,000 remained in the home towns of the dancers for local institutions, $241,000 went to various medical schools for research. The remainder went to the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation.

This is a private organization which operates a spa in the central Georgia mountains where the President occasionally went to swim after becoming paralyzed by poliomyelitis. Although doctors know that the chief merit of Georgia Warm Springs Foundation over a swimming pool or big bathtub is the fact that the residents can bathe in the open air in winter time, the place became a mecca for infantile-paralytics. After paying off mortgages with the dance money, putting up new buildings, Georgia Warm Springs had accommodations for about 300 infantile-paralytics at $21 per week, and some 75 charity cases.

With Georgia Warm Springs now self-sustaining and public interest in it waning, it was decided that this year the birthday celebration should finance a new National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. The event's organizers expect to raise $3,000,000, none of which will go to Georgia Warm Springs, but to research. Nominal head of the new organization is the President's onetime law partner, Basil O'Connor, who enthusiastically declared: "We could use the entire mint in this work and produce 10,000 Warm Springs." Actual head is Keith Morgan, good Roosevelt friend, glib insurance agent with a big-business clientele. Most of the trustees and directors of the new enterprise are businessmen. In the list are no doctors.

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