Old-Timers Remember The Man Behind New Deal

FOR THE RECORD: (April 11, 1995): Rod Hartman is mayor of Coulee Dam. A Sunday story named another city. Also, four counties meet near the dam. The number was reported incorrectly in the same story.

They stood beside the slate gray bust of a president like no other, overlooking a dam they built for him, the nation and themselves.

They stood beside the lake named Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a community that has a Roosevelt High School and a Delano neighborhood, in a region that has farms and factories made possible by the New Deal.

Some of them were here 50 years ago this Wednesday, when they learned that the president who bucked Congress to authorize Grand Coulee Dam was dead.

Most of the 60 people who attended Saturday’s remembrance are older now than Roosevelt was then. Whether it was the man or the times he ruled, they’ve yet to see his match.

“Like my dad and my uncle said, we’d have been dead without him,” said Bob O’Neil, who was a poor Lincoln County farm boy when Roosevelt came into office in 1932.

“The first time I voted, I voted for President Roosevelt,” said Tom Gorman, who started work on the dam in 1937. “I voted for him every time.”

Few areas, if any in the nation, were so changed by Roosevelt’s social programs as this arid coulee where three counties meet.

“There were politicians on the East Coast of this country who did not want to spend federal money on a project in Eastern Washington,” said Rufus Woods, whose grandfather used the family’s Wenatchee World newspaper to champion the dam.

Roosevelt couldn’t get those other politicians to support the project, so he authorized it by presidential decree in 1933. Grand Coulee was a sheep crossing at the time; four years later, it was home to 7,000 workers and the largest construction project on Earth.

The engineers and bosses lived in tidy, government-built towns below the dam. The laborers lived in boom towns above it.

Roosevelt, who made the dam a campaign promise in 1932, visited Grand Coulee two years later and again in 1937, when Grand Coulee Mayor Rod Hartman was 9.

“My dog, Ginger, decided at the last moment to dash across the street in front of the president’s car,” said Hartman, whose father managed the Roosevelt Theater. “That’s what I remember.”

Gorman stood along the presidential route with a $1.50 Brownie camera. Somewhere, he still has a picture of the Easterner in a fedora and a pin-striped suit. It is not as clear as his memory.

“I went ‘click’ and he waved,” said Gorman. “He smiled.”

Twenty years after Roosevelt’s death, workers removed the cast aluminum bust of the president to make way for an expansion on the east end of the dam.

For a few years, it sat in a warehouse. By then, there were a few Republicans living in the four towns surrounding the dam.

“Some of them wanted to leave it there,” said Jim Green, who worked 20 years on the dam. “I said, let’s get it out there.”

So the bust was moved to the south side, where Roosevelt looks uplake, often into a fierce wind. Saturday, the workers stared into the wind with him, as they sang “America The Beautiful” and wondered whether there ever will be another project like Grand Coulee or another president like Roosevelt.

“I don’t think it’s possible,” said Green.