When The First Lady Paid a Visit

W O M E N W H O T H E W O R L D S H A P E D

Anna Pennybacker (left) with Eleanor Roosevelt and Dr. Harry Estill during a visit to Sam Houston State University in 1937. Image courtesy of Sam Houston State University Archives.

K.K. Black and Captain Van B. Houston of CCC Company 1823 and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on the front porch of Sam McKinney’s Huntsville home March 7, 1937. During her visit, Roosevelt toured the CCC camp of Company 889 in New Waverly, the Sam Houston Memorial and its newly opened museum, and delivered an address to a crowd of 2,000 people packed into the Sam Houston State Teachers College g ymnasium. Image: courtesy Texas Parks & Wildlife Department.

When The First La y Pai a Visit

“B efore a crowd of 2000 thrilled and awed spectators, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Lady of the Land, spoke Sunday afternoon at the gym of Sam Houston State Teachers College.” So began the lead article that appeared in the Huntsville Item the day after the notable visit of Eleanor Roosevelt on March 10, 1937. The occasion was a first for any traditional normal school, and one that lifted the mood of the staff and student body as well as many depressionweary townspeople. Roosevelt made the trip from Baton Rouge to the Bayou City on the Union Pacific, where Charles O. Stewart of Sam Houston State Teacher’s College met her. After breakfast at the Rice Hotel, the first lady and her personal secretary climbed into the English professor’s car and made the trip to Huntsville behind a police escort.

From when she arrived in the morning, until she delivered her speech on “The problems of youth” shortly after three in the afternoon, Roosevelt’s schedule was packed. She took a tour of the local civilian Conservation Corps camp, where she marveled at the towering pines, and then visited the Sam Houston Museum that left her even more impressed.

On her way to the gym, where the audience had already assembled, Roosevelt, stopped at the Estill Library to greet the Pennybacker Girls, the Home Economics Club named after her dear friend, Anna Pennybacker. When the first lady at last entered the gym, the crowd leaped to its feet and gave her a long, tumultuous applause. Speaking of the New Deal programs as mere stopgaps for the larger problems of finding permanent measures to ensure the futures of youths, “her marvelous voice and her thrilling words enthralled every hearer.”

For the first lady of our nation, it had been a quite typical day, yet for the people of Huntsville and the staff and students a top College Hill, the visit would be a special event long remembered and often recalled.★