Myths and Realities: FDR's 1943 Vacation on Lake Huron, 1-7 August 1943

Publication
The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord (St. John's, NL), Jul 2001, p. 23-32
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Myths and Realities: FDR's 1943 Vacation on Lake Huron, 1-7 August 1943


This article began as a piece of local history. Jeff Wallace, now a Sudbury lawyer, spent his childhood summers near Little Current on the Manitoulin Island. There he heard rumours of a presidential visit, of the people who supposedly accompanied President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (including, according to some accounts, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd and Winston Churchill) and of a plane which crashed and sank. Islanders reported that the Roosevelt visit was so secret that it attracted little or no attention in history books. Wallace organized a team of scuba divers which found the aircraft, now housed at the island museum on the east side of Highway 6 south of Little Current. Having found tangible evidence ofthe presidential visit, Wallace had a number of unresolved questions. What was the truth of the rumours? Why would Roosevelt take a vacation, if the trip to Northern Ontario really was a vacation, during the critical summer of 1943? What could the presidential party really have been doing? This article summarizes what actually did happen, and in so doing, it dispels rumours. It also deals with challenges connected with presidential travel in time of war (even to a friendly country like Canada), wartime censorship in Canada, and, to a limited extent, Canadians' views of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.