“He was a good friend. He was a good neighbor,” said a parishioner as she left the sanctuary with tear-dimmed eyes.
Hymns were sung by an all-high-school chorus at City Hall Park, New York City, on Saturday afternoon, following the one minute of silence, and these included “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Fifty thousand people were present and many joined in the singing. A memorial service was held in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and seven thousand people were gathered an hour before the service began on Saturday afternoon at four o’clock. The hymns there sung were “Nearer, My God, to Thee”; “Rock of Ages,” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Communities all over the nation also held services at the hour when the funeral was held in the White House and in thousands of churches, public squares and parks, after the moment of silence in which traffic was hushed, and men and women stood with bowed heads, some of the hymns already mentioned were sung. “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” was sometimes included. Many of these programs also included “America the Beautiful,” and, of course, our beloved national hymn, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”
Those who could not leave their homes were still enabled to listen to these services (and perhaps join in the singing of the hymns). “The networks,” said an editor, “gave an impressive picture of the tribute being paid to a departed leader from one end of the country to another. One joined the solemn throng in front of the City Hall in New York, or sat in a great cathedral in Boston. Swiftly from the Eastern seaboard to the Far West, the radio gave us glimpses of memorial services in Chicago, in Kansas City, in Dallas and in Seattle.”
An appreciative letter to an editor by a woman said of those days from the death to the burial of Mr. Roosevelt, “Along with our grief and tears we were given an uplift such as the broadcasting companies have never given us before for a period of time like that.”
CHAPTER VI
OCCASIONS TO REMEMBER
“Once I remember taking a service while the shells screamed over us into Ypres. And as the men were singing:
“‘Cover my defenseless head
With the shadow of Thy wing,’
one that fell short came hurtling, landing not two yards away—a dud.”—Dr. A. J. Gossip in “The British Weekly.”
“What was the greatest moment of all?” That was the question put to General Evangeline Booth of the Salvation Army when she was 81 (Christmas Day, 1946), by Dorothy Walworth, who narrated the interview in The Christian Herald.
Retired, yet in good health and still working hard, this magnetic speaker, whom I once heard as she thrilled a mighty audience with her fervent oratory, paused a moment. As daughter of the founder, and later his honored successor in its leadership, there had been many high moments. Then came her answer with conviction as she related that her finest experience came on a day which she spent in the Leper Colony in Poethenkuruz, in southern India, where a chorus of little leper girls had been trained to sing one of the hymns she wrote for the Army. They stood before her in their dainty white dresses. Faces and hands were badly scarred, “but their voices were clear and true. As they reached the words in the hymn:
“With all my heart, I’ll do my part,”
They put their tiny scarred hands over their hearts, and I was overcome,” said Miss Booth.