OntheWilderSide

Sagamore Hill – Theodore Roosevelt House (Photo credit: J. Stephen Conn)

Our good friend and Poet Laureate, Max Wheat, sent this over…

Saturday, July 28, 2012 at 2pm
(Rain or Shine)
Sagamore Hill National
Historic Site
12 Sagamore Hill Road, Oyster Bay, NY 11771

Poetry Has Come to TR’s Sagamore Hill

Poetry is included in the Saturday, July 28th celebration of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill designation by President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago as Sagamore Hill National Historic Site. Dr. Linda Opyr, Poet Laureate of Nassau County, was commissioned by the National Park Service to write a commemorative poem which she is reading. Total of 275 numbered and signed copies will be available.

Linda has been active with poetry at Sagamore Hill since shortly after assuming the Poet Laureate position 14 months ago when she contacted the office, asked if Long Island’s poets could be involved, later was invited by Chief Ranger Sherry Justus to participate in the December, 2011 “Christmas with the Roosevelts” festival in December. She invited the previous Poets Laureate and Nassau County Poetry Laureate Society board members to participate—which they did, a couple each hour.

Saturday’s observance is a wonderfully planned day that will find its place in your memory—the spaciousness of the house, grounds and surrounding woods, the President’s robust speaking from the long, wide porch as he used to do [1] to people seated in front of him as you will be with your lawn chairs (Be sure to bring), presentation of the colors ceremony by the Girl Scouts of Nassau County, patriotic musical program and more.

Linda’s poem is appropriate. Roosevelt enjoyed poetry. “His favorite was Rudyard Kipling,” she says. “Even in poetry it was the relation of adventures that most appealed to me as a boy,” he writes in his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt—an Autobiography, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913). “At a pretty early age I began to read certain books of poetry, notably Longfellow’s poem, ‘The Saga of King Olaf,’ which absorbed me.”

Presidential homes are the nation’s intimate historic sites. They reach out to us with the things and stories of the people who lived in them. Nassau County is fortunate to have a wondrous presidential home—that of a large, playing, reading dynamic family with a father taking his children on nature walks down to the Sound. It was a home loved by the people who lived there, by the President of the United States who lived there. Come Saturday and enjoy this unique, warm, meaningful national historic site—and write a poem about Sagamore Hill.

Signed, Maxwell C. Wheat, Jr.

_____________________________________

Footnote:

1. James Foote, Portrayer

Filed under: events, local, long island, Long Island news, News, poetry Tagged: | John F. Kennedy, Linda Opyr, Long Island events, Max Wheat, Nassau County events, Rudyard Kipling, Sagamore Hill, Sagamore Hill historic site, Teddy Roosevelt's home, Teddy Roosevelt's house, Theodore Roosevelt, things to do on Long Island, Things To Do On Long Island for July 28