American Boy's Life of Theodore RooseveltStratemeyer, Edward
History
American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt
Stratemeyer, Edward
Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919 -- Juvenile literature
"I do not recollect that I dreamed at all or planned at all," was the
answer. "I simply obeyed the injunction, 'Whatever thy hand findeth to
do, do that with all thy might,' and so I took up what came along as it
came."
In 1876, while the great Centennial Exhibition was being held at
Philadelphia in commemoration of one hundred years of national liberty,
Theodore Roosevelt took up his residence at Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and became a student at Harvard College. During the previous year his
health had been poor indeed, but now he had taken hold of himself in
earnest.
"I determined to be strong and well, and did everything to make myself
so," he has said. "By the time I entered Harvard I was able to take part
in whatever sports I liked."
As perhaps some of my readers know, Harvard College (now termed a
University) is the oldest and largest institution of learning in the
United States. It was founded in 1636, and among its graduates numbered
John Quincy Adams, sixth President of our country. The college proper is
located in Cambridge, but some of the attached schools are in Boston.
Theodore Roosevelt was rich enough to have lived in elegant style while
at Harvard, but he preferred unostentatious quarters, and took two rooms
in the home of Benj. H. Richardson, at what was then No. 16 and is now
No. 88 Winthrop Street. The residence is a neat and comfortable one,
standing on the southwest corner of Winthrop and Holyoke streets.
The young student had two rooms on the second floor,--one of good size,
used for a study, and a small bedroom. In the whole four years he was at
the college he occupied these rooms, and he spent a great deal of time
in fixing them up to suit his own peculiar taste. On the walls were all
sorts of pictures and photographs, along with foils and boxing-gloves,
and the horns of wild animals. On a shelf rested some birds which he had
himself stuffed, and books were everywhere.
[Illustration: HOUSE IN WHICH THEODORE ROOSEVELT ROOMED WHILE AT
HARVARD.]
"It was a regular den, and typical of Roosevelt to the last degree," a
student of those times has said. "He had his gun there and his
fishing rod, and often spoke of using them. He was noted for trying to
get at the bottom of things, and I remember him well on one occasion
when I found him with a stuffed bird in one hand and a natural history
in the other, trying to decide if the description in the volume covered
the specimen before him." When Roosevelt graduated from college, he was
one of a very few that took honors, and the subject of his essay was
natural history. How his love of natural history continued will be shown
later when we see him as a ranchman and hunter of the West.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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