Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
May 2017
No matter how widely he was hailed as a hero fourteen years earlier, Christopher Columbus was all washed up by the time he died in 1506 (511 years ago this May 20).
This essay is part of a series of articles written by the readers of American Heritage entitled "My Brush with History" in which they recall meeting a famous personality or playing a small part of a momentous event. We invite our readers to continue to submit ideas to editor [at] americanheritage.com.
Early in the second month of 1953, I was summoned from study hall at White Plains High School. A college football coach wanted to see me.
On the morning of July 2, 1932, a slender, neatly dressed young woman with dark hair already threaded in silver stepped out of a car at the grass-and-gravel airport in Albany, New York. Her name was Marguerite Alice LeHand, but everyone knew her as Missy. Air travel was a new experience for the thirty-five-year-old woman, and though she had taken many other journeys with her boss, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the stakes had never been higher than for this trip. They were flying to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Roosevelt had been nominated for president of the United States the night before.