By Msgr. Noel C. Burtenshaw

In the beginning it was called Bullochville.

That's because the Bulloch family dominated that middle western part of Georgia. Maybe dominated is not the right word. For everyone knows that it was not the family, not the people, but the water, the spring, that was really the dominant factor.

The Indians called the warm springs magic and they were wrong. The waters bubbling up from the earth in Warm Springs, Georgia were not magic but they were and are health-soothing mineral waters always extending welcome relief to bodies racked with the crippling pains of arthritis and stroke, and before the vaccine, polio too.

The Indians could easily be forgiven. In 1924 the rich, influential, young New York politician, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mysteriously crippled with polio just three years before, came to Warm Springs and proclaimed the waters "magic." His coming to this little rural Georgia community gave new life and worldwide fame to the town, the resort and the precious waters of Warm Springs.

When Roosevelt first arrived in his famous retreat it was a resort for a wealthy few. Warm Springs was dominated by the grand Merriwether Inn. "The guests would come in their noisy Fords," says therapist Jim Poulson, "using the spring waters to soothe their aches and pains. Crippled polio victims and other invalids would come too but they never got much of a welcome. They were clearly unwanted by the monied folks. FDR changed al that."

He certainly did. He bought the place. In 1927, clearly thrilled with his new find and the medication the waters gave his crippled legs, Roosevelt bought the land surrounding the springs and set up the Warm Springs Foundation. The welcome mat in this natural Georgia rehabilitation center was out. And over the years, hundreds came to be treated.

Today the victims of polio, cleansed by the miracle vaccine in 1956, no longer come and new buildings have been added, but the life and times of the great President are there to be seen. FDR is everywhere.

"Children were a big part of the Foundation in the President's time," says Rita Kitts, who has worked at the Foundation since 1947 when her brother, a Benedictine priest, was a patient. "That was the school for them," she says, pointing to a building. "At all times there were at least 30 children receiving treatment at the Foundation."

The children and FDR are well remembered. Even as President, he could be seen in the warm spring waters, playing with the children, making them use their crippled joints as they delightedly dashed for balls he would throw to them in the pool. And Dora Dunn, a therapist in the Foundation today, vividly remembers the children and their dinner parties with FDR at Thanksgiving.

"It was beautiful," says Dora. "We would dress them in their finest, very formal. And then the President would come in, sit at the head of the table insisting that only the children would sit nearest to him while he carved the turkey and joked with them all. They laughed and laughed."

Rita Kitts will show you the Interfaith Chapel where services are still held. Mass is offered each Sunday at 5:00 for patients and local Catholics. It was in that tiny chapel with its ten little pews that the President attended his final worship service on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945. Twelve days later, in the Little White House, in Warm Springs, FDR died. The pew where he sat is marked with a plaque.

Rita points to the large distance between the front pew and the altar. "It was here in this open space," says Miss Kitts, "that the stretcher patients were laid to hear Mass. It was most impressive to see them lined up in front of the altar."

The old pool, designed partially by Roosevelt, located at the entrance to the Foundation, is not in use any longer. The warm waters of the spring now bubble up into a modern indoor pool where the patients receive therapy. Billy Garrison cares for the pool. "The waters come out of the ground at a warm 80 degrees," says Billy, a physical therapy technician. "We then heat it up to 96 or 98 degrees before the patients are placed in it. The only thing we add is a little chlorine. The waters do the rest."

And what do these famed medicinal waters accomplish? "No magic," says Jim Poulson. "They are therapeutic. The patients, who are mostly victims of stroke and arthritis and also amputees, are placed in the waters and, with the least possible discomfort, have their limbs treated. They are enabled to relax more easily because the waters give buoyancy and the patients float. It is a soothing treatment."

It is obvious that Roosevelt fell deeply in love with his Warm Springs retreat. The waters alone at first drew him to this Georgia resort. But he came to love the restful pace. At all times of the years, even in those hectic war years, he would steal away to this exquisite area.

Overlooking a valley of Pine Mountain, he built his Little White House, a most unpretentious little home where princes and rulers of all kinds came to visit the President. Often these same VIPs would be entertained by country fiddlers and backwoods songsters, loved so much by this unusual New Yorker. He loved to sit nearby on the banks of the Flint River and fish for breakfast like any sportsman, or lead a horse gently down one of the many paths in the rolling hillside.

But mostly it was the warm waters racing over those polio-stricken legs. It was the exercises his limbs would perform, miraculously, as he raced around the giant pool with gangs of children screaming in his ear. Warm Springs was a place of healing for this genius of the common people. He loved the life it offered him. Little wonder, then, life ended for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in that sleepy, southern retreat that he so often called "down home."

On April 12, 1945 at 1:00 p.m. as the famous "unfinished Portrait" was being completed by Madam Shoumatoff, (it never was) President Roosevelt suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died in the Little White House two hours later. His train, standing at the depot, took him for the last time away from the waters of Warm Springs to Washington and finally to his New York home for burial.

For his leadership in the nation and finally in the world Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man who won the Presidency for a record four terms, was called a savior. Down in Warm Springs, GA, in those famous baths, still bubbling from the earth, he was known as a man who knew pain in himself and others and sought to bring healing.