Allen Thomas

Have you heard of our new initiative called “The Together Table”? Check out this quick video on how we’re tackling food insecurity in the @CityofDurhamNC through partnerships throughout our entire community.

Teddy Roosevelt was born 168 years ago today, and his life reads like someone made it up. As a kid his asthma was so bad he sometimes had to sleep sitting up in a chair just to breathe. He was too sick for regular school, so he was taught at home and spent his time collecting dead animals. At 9 he opened the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History" in his bedroom. He taught himself taxidermy and the maid complained about the smell. His father told him he had the mind but not the body, and that he had to make his body. So he did. Boxing, rowing, hiking, lifting, for years. He went to Harvard, then wrote his first book at 23, a naval history of the War of 1812 that the Navy actually used. He'd go on to write around 35 books and was known to read a book a day, sometimes more. On Valentine's Day 1884, his mother died of typhoid and his wife Alice died after giving birth to their daughter. Same day. Same house. In his diary he drew a large X and wrote "The light has gone out of my life." So he went to the Dakota Badlands and became a cattle rancher. Locals mocked the glasses and the Harvard accent until he knocked out a drunk who pulled two pistols on him in a saloon. Later, when thieves stole his boat, he built another one, chased them downriver in the freezing cold, captured all three, and marched them to the nearest jail. He read Anna Karenina while guarding them. Back in New York he became police commissioner and would walk the streets at night in disguise to catch cops sleeping or drinking on duty. In 1898 he quit his job as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to lead the Rough Riders in Cuba and charged up Kettle Hill under fire. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for it in 2001, making him the only president to receive one. At 42, after McKinley was assassinated, he became the youngest president in American history. Weeks in, he invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, and much of the South lost its mind over it. He didn't apologize. On a hunting trip in Mississippi, guides tied a black bear to a tree so he could shoot it. He refused. A cartoon ran, a toy maker made a stuffed bear, and that's why it's called a teddy bear. He put around 230 million acres of land under federal protection. He went down in a submarine. He became the first president to fly in an airplane. He kept boxing in the White House until a punch left him blind in his left eye. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Russo-Japanese War. In 1912 a man shot him in the chest outside a Milwaukee hotel. The bullet went through his steel glasses case and a folded 50 page speech in his coat pocket. He coughed into his hand, saw no blood, decided it hadn't hit his lung, and went on stage anyway. He told the crowd "it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose" and spoke for roughly 90 minutes with a bullet in his chest. Doctors left it in. He carried it the rest of his life. Two years later, in his mid 50s, he went to map an uncharted river in the Amazon called the River of Doubt. He got an infected leg, a raging fever, and lost about a quarter of his body weight. He nearly died. The river is now named Rio Roosevelt. When WWI came, all four of his sons went to fight. His youngest, Quentin, a pilot, was shot down and killed over France in 1918. People who knew him said he was never the same. He died in his sleep a few months later in January 1919, at 60. His son Archie sent a telegram to his brothers: "The old lion is dead." Vice President Thomas Marshall said death had to take him sleeping, because if Roosevelt had been awake there would have been a fight.