 Hello, from the National Archives Public Programs and Education Team. My name is Missy McNat and I'm an education specialist in Washington, D.C. And welcome to the July National Archives Comes Alive Young Learners Program. You can find information about future programs on the National Archives website, archives.gov under events, and on the National Archives Facebook page. Today, we will meet President Theodore Roosevelt portrayed by Joe Wegan, historian and Theodore Roosevelt impersonator since 2002. And over the years, Mr. Wegan has portrayed Theodore Roosevelt in all 50 states. President Theodore Roosevelt was a soldier, a scholar, an explorer, scientist, conservationist, historian, and author. He was often known as Teddy and TR, and he remains our nation's youngest president. We will hear about many of President Roosevelt's accomplishments today, including the fact that he was able to double the number of national parks, despite his enemy's foes in Congress who declared not one red cent for scenery. The National Archives has in its holdings numerous documents related to Theodore Roosevelt. And here are two of the documents. On the one is a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt with his iconic pince-nez glasses. And the other is a Clifford Berryman political cartoon showing Theodore Roosevelt heading down the Mississippi River on a steamboat. And in front of the steamboat are partially submerged logs and branches that show some of the issues that Roosevelt faces during his administration. But look closely and you will see a teddy bear or cub bear sitting on the bow of the steamboat. Clifford Berryman used that cub bear to symbolize Theodore Roosevelt throughout Roosevelt's administration in his political cartoons. And eventually a toy store picked it up and it became the stuffed teddy bear. In this slide we see the Docs Teach activity for today's program about Theodore Roosevelt, our conservationist president. And we will share this slide again at the end of the program. At the end of President Roosevelt's presentation we will have a question and answer session with him. So please write your questions in the YouTube chat box and we have a National Archives staff member who is monitoring it and let us know where you're watching from today. This program is brought to you by the National Archives Public Programs and Education Team, the National Archives and the National Archives Foundation. And now it is my great pleasure to introduce to you the 26th President of the United States of America, President Theodore Roosevelt, a truly remarkable man whose unparalleled energy, dynamic personality, quick wit and intelligence enabled him to accomplish a great deal during his administration and he was the most popular president up to his time. Thank you President Roosevelt. Thank you Ms. McNat and thank you to each and every one of you who are viewing today or who may view this program in the future. I am indeed Theodore Roosevelt. I come to you today from Madora, North Dakota. It's the gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park and it is the future home of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum which will be working very closely with the National Archives to meet the mission of a presidential library here in the beautiful Badlands. We can come back to it but your viewers, your listeners might know that I said after my presidency I would have never been president but for my experiences in North Dakota and that I wrote of my time as a rancher, a writer and a hunter here in the Badlands that this is where the romance of my life began. The theme today is conservation and I am the conservation president. When we say conservation we are speaking of our natural resources, the water, the lumber, the minerals, the wildlife. All of that is something with which I was greatly concerned and my concern and interest in nature began as a little boy. In New York City, New York, then in my childhood, New York City was a city of a million people and half a million horses. The city was covered in sewage and we burned coal fires in the fireplaces such that the city was covered with a heavy black soot but even under those conditions a small child like me could find nature in nearby Gramercy Park or in the great Central Park designed by Mr. Olmsted, a wonderful playground still, or along the rivers, the East River and the Hudson River that define Lower Manhattan Island and as a little boy I collected snakes and bugs and turtles and birds, squirrels and rats and mice, alive or dead it did not matter. I brought these creatures home and had on the fourth floor of my home something that we called Roosevelt's Museum of Natural History. A very wide ranging, there was any mother might suspect a truly malodorous, a very smelly collection. You had to be careful coming to my house. If you poured yourself a glass of water from the pitcher, a snake might fall out of the pitcher into your glass for that's where I was keeping my snake cool. If you reached into the icebox, the refrigerator, you might pull out a collection of mice awaiting my experiment. One afternoon as a little boy I was walking up Broadway Avenue. Mrs. Hamilton Fish, the wife of the United States Secretary of State was walking down. I thought I should have some display of gentlemanly conduct that report of my gentlemanly conduct might go home to my mother much to my own benefit. I cried before the fall as I passed Mrs. Fish in the street. I tipped my hat and wished her a good day and when I did so, two frogs fell out from beneath my hat and fell upon her shoes. I'm afraid that the only report that went home was of my un-gentlemanly conduct that day. Amongst my prized possessions in our Roosevelt Museum of Natural History was the skull of a harbor seal. I was but a boy five, six years old when sent down to the fish market to purchase something for the family for the supper table. I saw a dead harbor seal. I was so struck with awe and wonder at the sight of that creature that I ran back home, my shopping errand forgotten, grabbed my sketch pad, my pencil, and my folding ruler and I made measurements of drawing of that seal and had wonderful imaginations about the places that that seal had swum. And then I begged the fishmonger for that seal, but he used that seal in its parts until such time as the only thing left was the skull, which he gifted to me. As a little boy, you might know that enjoying nature under those conditions in the city was quite a challenge for me because I was quite a sickly child. I had asthma and any of you that have asthma or if you have asthma amongst your family or friends, you might know what a terrible disease that is to see a small child choking for breath and for life itself. Today, thankfully, the asthmatic child has the inhaler to restore breath hopefully quickly. In my day, we had no such medicine. In my day, the treatment for asthma was worse than the disease. Can you imagine giving a small asthmatic boy a cigar to smoke? The idea was that coughing would stimulate my breathing. I was given bitter black coffee to drink again as a stimulant and I was given Ipacac syrup to drink. Most of the children watching won't know Ipacac syrup. Ipacac syrup is something that you drink in order to see your lunch twice. Unpleasant memories for me to this very day. When I was a small boy, three, four years old, I can recall hearing my mother and father out in the hallway outside my bedroom speaking as if I might not survive the night. When my asthma was at its worst, my father in the middle of the night would have the horses brought round to the front of the house and tied to the carriage with me bundled in blankets in the front seat of that carriage seated beside my father. My father would speed that carriage through the streets of New York in the hopes of rushing air to my young and sickly lungs. Today, physicians tell me that rather than the speed of the conveyance, it was likely the excitement of the ride that naturally produced adrenaline in my bloodstream and assisted me to breathe. It was nature that helped restore my health as a child. Very often, the family would go on long hikes in the hills of northern New Jersey along the Hudson River and out in our beloved Oyster Bay Long Island. We rented a summer cottage there and eventually I would build my home. Today, a national historic site ably administered by the National Park Service, the National Park Service with its first park in Yellowstone in 1872 and then on through our modern era has helped preserve wild places. And this is from the legislation creating the National Park Service, wild places for the use and benefit and enjoyment of the people. That's part of conservation saving the wild places. I'll come back to the point that part of conservation is using what's been given us in those wild places, the lumber and the minerals and the opportunity to harvest electricity from the rivers and dams and that sort of a thing. But it was in my youth, what I wish to convey to the audience, is that as a little boy growing up in New York City, that is where the romance of the relationship between me and nature, wild creatures began. And also there's a great deal of preservation being done of our natural history. That's what we studied. That's what we call the study of nature in my day, natural science. And very often it was the hunter who gave us a window into the natural world. For example, John James Audubon. I would suggest that the children watching today find some of his pictures that he drew the birds of North America being a very important work. But in order to draw many of those birds, in his day, the only way to do so was to shoot the bird perhaps from a tree or in flight. And then having the dead bird taxidermy that bird, study it, mount it in such a way that the feathers and the coloration could be studied and drawn. And that was in its day as close as one might get to making a record of what a particular species of bird looked like. And I took to this very same science when I was a teenager, a boy of 13. I was given my first shotgun and I used that gun to collect birds, including when my family traveled to Egypt and we took a bark up the Nile. I shot and mounted using taxidermy in the Egyptian plover. And if you visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, you can see that Egyptian plover that I harvested and mounted using taxidermy. They are in the American Museum of Natural History. By the way, the charter for that museum signed in 1869. But that charter was signed in the Roosevelt family living room, where I had been a little boy. The museum includes typical specimens of animals that I assisted to harvest, most especially the African collection on a hunt and the safari that I made with my son Kermit after my presidency. I wish to address before the time runs out of my formal remarks, of how I also came to respect nature a great deal after coming here to the badlands of what was then Dakota territory. Not yet a state, North Dakota and South Dakota joining the Union of States with statehood in 1889. My active ranching was done here between 1883 and 1897, a period when I was roughly 23 to 28 years old. When I first came here to the badlands, I came to hunt, and to hunt a bison, a buffalo known as a bison-bison. I wanted a trophy of that great North American mammal hanging in my trophy room in my home being built in Oyster Bay, Long Island. And I'm sorry to say that I wanted to hunt a bison before there were no bison to hunt. I knew that the bison was on the verge of extinction, of no longer being alive on the planet. I wanted to hunt a bison so badly, and I hunted that bison and hosted that bison, have that bison mounted in my home, now a museum. But I paid pennants. I made up for the fact that I had not yet developed my thoroughgoing ethic as a conservationist. I helped to found Boone and Crockett, named for my heroes, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Indeed, that organization, the nation's first fair hunting and conservation organization, has done more than any organization to help preserve the big game. That means the wild animals, some of whom are managed through a process in part that includes hunting. That perhaps provides food for the table for many tens of thousands of families throughout this country. We saved the bison from extinction when I was your president. I was able to order an amount of breeding stock. That's both mother bison and father bison, cows and bulls, that they be shipped to the Bronx Zoo, headquartered in New York City at the Bronx Zoo, my friend Professor William Hornaday, and head of the New York Zoological Society. We acquired breeding stock, more fathers and mothers, cows and bulls from private herds in Texas and Oklahoma. We shipped them to the Bronx Zoo. Their Professor Hornaday experimented with the species, bred the species. Many more baby bison were born. We call them calves. And they were sent back to repopulate Yellowstone, to repopulate Wind Cave, one of my five national parks. Also, Sully's Hill. We had bison game preserves in Montana and Oklahoma, where the species was propagated. Today, if you visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park, you can hear these bison, they still speak with a distinct Bronx accent. Followed me through the bull reeds on that one, didn't you? When I traveled as a young man between the badlands of the Dakota Territory and my native New York City to see to family affairs and to avoid some of the bitterest of the Dakota winter, that's when I became greatly concerned. I saw that much of the countryside between had been hunted out. The animals made scarce. The forests clear cut. The rivers polluted by a runoff and industrial waste. I knew that future generations, meaning you, that you would be ashamed of us, not for what we had used, but for what we had wasted. So as your conservation president, when I was able, I was able to protect 150 million acres of national forests, declare 18 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon. I was able to set aside 51 bird sanctuaries, now known as our first 51 national wildlife refuges. And I think I would conclude my prepared remarks by reviewing how the first came into being. I love birds. As a little boy, you heard of my glasses, my pince-nez glasses, that means pinch nose, and they do. But as a little boy, I didn't know that I could not see well until I was 13 years old. I went about learning my birds, not by sighting them, but by listening to them. And I became quite a bird watcher and bird listener throughout my lifetime. And the loss of one songbird for me would be like the loss of some great body of works by some great author. And so I wanted to help save the birds. In 1903, when I was your president, I was day-losed at the White House by letters and telegrams from members of the Florida Ornithological Union, members of the Florida Audubon Society. These are both bird watching and bird science organizations. My friend, Dr. Frank Chapman, was the head of the American Museum of Natural History's Ornithological Department, Bird Department. He did his fieldwork. He studied the birds on the coasts of Florida, from where he and the others complained and reported that for another season, millions of nesting birds would be slaughtered and their nestlings left to starve. All that mostly women might wear the feathers of those dead birds on their hats and on their dresses, sometimes wearing entire dead birds as adornment. There's no explaining fashion. But greed is understandable. An ounce of white egret feathers meant for adornment, they were worth more than an ounce of gold. Plume hunters, poachers, people who hunted against the regulations, they had wars with the game wardens. Two Florida game wardens and one South Carolinian were killed during my presidential administration by these poachers. So I asked my attorney general, was there anything in the laws of the constitution of the United States which would prohibit me from naming a small mangrove island, the last nesting place on the Atlantic of the brown pelican as a federal bird sanctuary. This little island south of Melbourne, north of Euro Beach off the coast from Sebastian. I, when informed there was no express prohibition against naming it so, I said I thus declare it. The first of 51 bird sanctuaries declared during my presidential administration. Nature is a wonder. And our parks and a fish and wildlife service, our forest personnel, they all assist us to make sure that our children and grandchildren can enjoy the wild places. And also in the spirit of conservation, some of you youngsters might study the life of my national forester, Gifford Pinshow. But we understood that conservation meant the wise use and utilization of our natural resources. That indeed was the responsibility of each and every generation to use those natural resources, especially of the public lands. But to do so in a way that left those natural resources, the water, the air, the timber, the land, in better condition than we found it and not in worse. And in summary, that's what we mean by conservation and why I am still remembered as your conservation president. But as Ms. McNat said in the introduction, perhaps I'm actually best remembered for the legacy of the teddy bear. And that seems like a square deal to me. With that, I think seeing that I've done what an old politician does, I've gone and run on now, haven't I? But I'd be delighted at this point to take any questions from our viewers, our listeners, any from our guests who are online now. Well, thank you. That was wonderful. And I learned so much about your early life and that was great and all the conservation. So first of all, I'd like to say hello to our visitors, our watchers from New York, Maryland, Illinois, Naperville, Illinois, Santa Clara, California, Springfield, Virginia, a big fan, that's fantastic, and Michigan. So anybody else wanna jump in? We'd love to know where you're from, so thank you. So we do have some questions and I had mentioned that you are still the youngest president and how old were you when you became president? That's one of our first questions. 42 years and 11 months. You know I sadly came to the White House through the graveyard. I was the vice president when President McKinley was assassinated in September of 1901. So for those that keep track, I'm not the youngest president elected, that would go to President John F. Kennedy, the youngest president ever elected. I ascended to the presidency and can claim correctly to be the youngest president in our history to date. But maybe we have some young viewers who themselves may someday serve as president at the age of 40 or 41, which is the constitutional qualification. Or is it actually, I think it may be as young as 35. I must check my constitution. I believe it is 35. 35? Yeah, so those young folks out there, you can start working towards that. So here's another question. You mentioned the national parks that were created when you were president. Were you able to visit all of them at some point during your life? It's interesting that you mentioned that for of the five national parks that I created, I would say that I visited none of them. They were all reported to me. They were all rather remote in their day. So this includes Crater Lake National Park in Oregon, Mesa Verde National Park, the Pueblo Ruins in Colorado, and Wind Cave in South Dakota, which was also in a remote part of the Dakota territory, Platte National Park, the Hot Springs in Sofa, Oklahoma, and Sully's Hill, which is now a game preserve renamed White Horse Hill. So oddly, I never had a visit to any of my, I was only able to name five national parks. There were five in existence. Of course, I was able to visit Yellowstone and camp there for two weeks. I was able to visit Breton National Wildlife Refuge, the bird sanctuary off the coast of Louisiana. But an interesting question that I've never been asked before. I did not visit any of the national parks that I created. Ah, okay, well, thank you. So we have a question now from Reagan and she, Reagan, I don't know if it's Reagan's he or she, wants to know what it was like to be the 26th president and then going along with it, did your kids really drop water balloons on the guard's heads and misbehave? I never heard that one before about dropping the water balloons, but. The children at the White House and this to Reagan, I was the 26th president. I served in the White House from late September of 1901. We allowed Mrs. McKinley to take all the time that she needed as a bereaved widow to move out of the White House. But when we moved in and for the following seven and one-half years, Mrs. Roosevelt and I reared six children at the White House ranging in ages from four to 17. The head White House usher, Mr. Ike Hoover, he was the head usher for decades. He wrote to the Roosevelt years. It was no time for a person with a nervous constitution to be working at the White House. The older boys pretended to be jack in the boxes, jumping out of giant vases, just as stontal visitors walked by. Well, came careening down the grand staircase, riding on cookie trays, stolen from the kitchen as if it was a great toboggan. And it was the little boys, the youngest Archie and Quentin, seven and four years old when we entered the White House as those boys grew, so did their mischief. They and their friends known as members of the White House gang and my recollection, not of water balloons, but of a giant 30-pound snowball, mostly ice, that when I left the White House after a heavy midwinter snow and ascended an open-air carriage for an appointment, one Washington DC police officer gave me a crisp salute. Just as the tips of his fingers hit the brim of his helmet, so did this giant 30-pound snowball drop from the White House roof. The snowball smashed through the officer's helmet and left it knocked out cold on the driveway. I did not need to investigate. I turned over my shoulder, I said, boys, get down here immediately. Down the little boys came, they apologized profusely and sincerely. And they meant to frighten us for fun, not to harm anyone. I looked into the issue and I discovered Reagan that that officer was long overdue for a promotion. It's good to be president. And as far as being the 26th president, I don't think any president before or since ever enjoyed themselves as much as your president as I did. I said, when you work, work hard, when you play, play hard, when you work, don't play at all. But when the work day was over, I played hard as your president. In the White House, I boxed with army and Navy officers. I wrestled jujitsu and sumo with great bare-chested men brought over by the Japanese ambassador. And I took my point-to-point hikes out across places like Rock Creek Park, scrambling across the rocks and through the river. And when we played point-to-point, the rule was that whenever you came to an obstacle, a downed tree, a cliff, a barn, a haystack, you never went around the obstacle, but always and only over it, under it, or through it. It makes for great dirty fun. I recommend the viewers play that at home. And I will say in all earnestness, Reagan, there was very important work to be done when I was your president. Those years that I served from late 1901 until early 1909, well, that's nearly a decade. And the century is known as the Great American Century. And I think perhaps the work that we did in the Roosevelt administration during those seven and one-half years helped to launch the efforts that would become known as the Great American Century by building up our Navy, by building the Panama Canal, by filling in the country and caring for this issue of conservation and indeed taking the world stage to, for example, negotiate peace between Russia and Japan with the Treaty of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which earned me the Nobel Peace Prize, but more importantly, saved hundreds of thousands of lives amongst the combatant nations. There was important work to be done. So while I had fun being your president, I was also glad to hopefully make some contribution to the accomplishment of important work being done. Yeah, it's amazing the numerous accomplishments. So somebody from Connecticut has joined us and this sounds, this next question sounds like someone who has really knows a lot about President Roosevelt and it says, Mr. President, I think I remember seeing a picture of you and your brother as children viewing the funeral procession of President Lincoln from your home in New York City. Can you speak to that? It is quite a famous photo taken during the April funeral parade, bringing the martyr presidents remains back along the route to Springfield, Illinois, the route that he had come in 1861 to take his inauguration. It was from the second floor of my grandfather's house at Union Square that when you see the photograph, you can see the silhouettes of two small boys watching the parade below. That's me and my brother, Elliot, sometimes called Nell or Nelly in the family. What you do not see is that my future bride, Edith Carroll, she had been watching from the windows, the parade below, but she was younger than Nelly and I and she was distraught by the sadness of the occasion and the sight of the wounded Union soldiers in the parade, the sad funeral music being played. She was crying and shrieking. It was annoying as greatly. So Nelly and I picked her up and locked her in the closet, a sin for which she apparently forgave me in the intervening years, but an event of which she would still say in later years that horrid little boy, meaning me. That's a great story. I've never heard that one before. That's terrific. So you talked about all the incredible accomplishments during your administration. You had mentioned many of them from, you know, earning the Nobel Peace Prize and the parks, but is there one that you think was more important than any of the others? Most definitely so. And that is the building of the Panama Canal. As you know, it had been a vision of mankind, at least of that portion of mankind that was sailing the oceans to somehow find a pathway through the isthmus of Central America, since the explorations of the Spaniard, Balboa, whose name is remembered now in Panama. And so the United States had even since the time of President Grant been exploring routes, perhaps through Nicaragua, taking advantage of the giant in Linda Lake, Nicaragua, but the French had attempted to build the canal in the 1890s. And this was under the engineer, De La Cepes. He and his crews had built the Suez Canal, opening up that portion of the world to commerce and transportation. And the French thought that they would build a similar sea level canal, but we thought better after the French failed and after more than 10,000, mostly Frenchmen, but also nurses, they died of yellow fever. They did not understand the disease. So when we began the work of the canal again in 1903, completed under President Wilson in 1914, it was not only a great work of engineering and excavation, but also a work of medicine. Dr. William Crawford Gorgas, later Surgeon General of the United States by my appointment, Health Commissioner to the Panama Canal Commission. It was he having worked in Havana with the Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay and with the famous United States surgeon in the army, Walter Reed, for whom the famous veterans hospital in Washington is named. These men together had the right idea that yellow fever was transmitted by the bite of the ages, Egypt time mosquito. And so it was Dr. Gorgas that saw all the rain barrels poured out, all of the ditches sprayed with oil and kerosene to keep the mosquito from breeding, while even putting screams on the doors and windows for the first time so that by 1907, there were zero cases of yellow fever amongst the American workers that helped to lead the effort to dig the canal. And on this point I must acknowledge that workers from Southern Europe and from the Caribbean islands, it really was a work done internationally. And many of those men working with shovels and dynamite and many sacrifice to accomplish what I thought the greatest work of my administration and that completed under Taft and Wilson, the building of the Panama Canal primarily because it cut to one third the amount of time necessary to move our Navy, our naval assets, our battleships from one ocean to the other because the protection of the sovereignty of the United States, our ability to rise to the challenge, if given, that can only be met by the United States Navy. Moving that Navy from one ocean to the other during the Spanish American War, it became highly evident that that was a primary responsibility and achievement that was most necessary for the defense in the future of the United States of America. Oh, that's great, yes. I mean, that was a huge, huge accomplishment. That's for sure. So, Reagan has jumped in again and she tells me she's an eight-year-old girl. So, but she has asked another bit of a question and that is, do you have any advice for someone who wants to become president? Most definitely so. And that is to listen to your mother and your father to find joy in reading books. I really have no care for the subject matter about which you like to read. The varieties of taste in books is just about like the variety of taste in art or food. But if you like to read and if you listen to your mother and your father, very likely you could be a citizen who would serve as a good and competent president. But most especially, I would say, Reagan, go forth forgetting any idea about being president. Start out the way I did. I wanted to be a good son and a good brother. Eventually, in my life, I had the opportunity to attempt to be the best I could be at being a good husband and a good father. When Ms. McNat asked me about the most important accomplishment, as president, it was the Panama Canal. As a human being, as an American, my greatest accomplishments were in these familial relations to have had a wonderful marriage with my wife, to have known at the time of the passing of my father and my mother that each one of them considered me to be a good son. Oh, as pedestrian as it might see in this hurly burly of a world in which we live, the love that we have in our homes for one another, the encouragement that we receive from one another and then the duty that we have because Reagan, to whom much is given, much is expected. There's not a lot of responsibility for an eight-year-old except to listen to mother and father and do those chores which you're assigned. In my family, though, we often wanted to express the love and care we had for one another and that meant more than just saying I love you. It often meant that in the evening after my father had labored hard all day that we children might do a recitation of poetry or share with the mother and father some of the Bible verses that we had committed to memory earlier that morning in our studies. And so just go have fun, enjoy being a little girl. And as you continue on in your education, if you're able to take care of yourself and your family's able to take care of things about them, well, then at your earliest opportunity, stop thinking about how you might help others, your classmates, your neighbors, maybe some older lady or old gentleman who lives down the street who has no children or grandchildren of her or his own. Maybe there's a little chore you could do for your neighbor. Maybe there's something you could do for your teacher at school. You do those things well and then maybe you'll be ready to do the things well that are required to be done well by the president of the United States. Well, that's fantastic advice. So we have time for just maybe two more questions and one is somewhat similar to the one that we were talking about. But before we get to that one, can you recommend any books for both younger and adult readers who would like to learn more about and study your life? I shall. First, of course, my autobiography. Not that I'm receiving royalties on it anymore, but written in 1913 after my 1912 presidential campaign, while it does not include the last seven years of my life. It does include one of those stories about my youth in New York City, about my time, cattle ranching. With regards to a book that I think is accessible for the families, there's one called, Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough. Now that might be a book read aloud by a parent to a child, as is another book called Hero Tales. I was at dinner with Mrs. Roosevelt and with Mr. and Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, Fanny Lodge. And Henry and I, I called him Cabot. Cabot and I, we said that we should write a little book of biographies of our heroes. Well, Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Lodge said, well, stop talking about it and get about the work. And we did when I was a United States Civil Service commissioner in the early 1890s. Cabot and I published Hero Tales. Most of our heroes are from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, but you'll also find one of my heroes, Francis Perkins, who was a historian and who wrote The Oregon Trail. Parkman, I'm sorry, Francis Parkman. And you'll find that he's one of my heroes because Parkman wrote his history at a time when he was tremendously ill, nearly blind, neurological issues. He had enough strength to get out of bed and dictate a line or two of history before crumbling from the effort. Well, he's a hero too, so it's not just the generals and the heroic soldiers and sailors of the wars that are our heroes, but that's a wonderful book. Those are the two that I'll recommend. And for those with a sense of adventure, by Candice Millard, she wrote the wonderful book, The River of Doubt. It tells the story of my explorations of a river in the Amazon never previously explored, Colonel Candido Hondon, the Brazilian army, he for whom the Brazilian province of Hondonia is named. He and I were joined by my son, Kermit, and we successfully explored the Rio da Duvida. And today you can look it up on the map as Rio Roosevelt. We put the family name on the map. Candice Millard's The River of Doubt, a wonderful book. Well, thank you. I hope everybody's been writing those down. And then our last question, but actually kind of connects with what the advice you were giving to Reagan earlier about what to do as a president, but is there any additional advice that you would give to young people today in 2021? Find where you can be of assistance to this country. We live in a land of freedom and opportunity that has come to us, not free, but at great sacrifice by previous generations. And so to reiterate to whom much is given, much is expected. It is very likely that Reagan and some of our other young viewers and listeners, they perhaps are receiving some of the greatest educations available in the world. And I hope that they understand that when it comes to graduating their high school or graduating their college, and then going about the work that they've chosen in their lives, that if they want to bring honor to their alma mater, to the schools that they attended, then they must find some way to make the world a better place for their having been here. And that means service, whether it's service through your school, your own initiative, through your religious community, your temple, your mosque, your church, your synagogue, get involved in some way in the activities that make this country a better place. And then good things will happen from it, including opportunities to serve perhaps in some capacity that makes a big difference. But I'll tell you, Ms. McNat, I think a member of a school board can make just as big a difference in this country as the president of the United States. The challenges are many, the workers are too few. That, yes, that's true. We all do need to work in many different ways, in whatever way we can to make our world a better place. And you're right there, whether it's through conservation efforts or whether it is through something that you do in service to others, absolutely. So wonderful advice, wonderful, wonderful. And thank you. I cannot thank you enough for joining us today. President Roosevelt, you have shared so much with us. And I know that our viewers have had a delightful time during this past 40, 45 minutes or so. So thank you again. And we appreciate you joining us. And goodbye to everybody out there and thank you to everybody who joined us. And I hope you'll join us for our next program on August 26th, where we meet somebody very different, Ida B. Wells. But yes, yes. Fantastic. Thank you very much. And I just recognize if I may, by presidential prerogative request, a last word. Sure. A bit of inspiration, if I may, to your viewers. Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet planted firmly on the ground. Believe you can, you're halfway there. Do what you can with what you have, where you are. And thank you so very much. Well, that's wonderful advice. Thank you, thank you. A good rest of your day and take care. Goodbye, everyone.