SHANGRI-LA

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked during a press conference in the spring of 1940 where he had mysteriously spent the better part of a day away from the White House with only a minimum Secret Service escort, he smiled and replied simply, "Shangri-La." No one knew then that he referred to the mountain spot a short distance north of Washington that he had selected as a presidential hideaway for weekend relaxation.

Around the latter part of March, Roosevelt sent a communication to National Park Service Director Newton B. Drury indicating that he would like to find a place fairly close to Washington where he could have a cabin or a small lodge for occasional use. The war in Europe was causing more and more concern in this country, and the president couldn't risk being as far away from the capital as Hyde Park or the Little White House in Georgia. His advisers did not want him to use the presidential yacht because of the dangers involved. Of course, President Herbert Hoover's camp on the Rapidan River in Shenandoah National Park was available, but President Roosevelt was not a fly fisherman, and the damp valley aggravated his asthmatic condition.

At that time I was in charge of Recreation and Land Planning, and Director Drury called me to his office to discuss the matter. He told me the president was looking for a place at an elevation of about 1,500 to 2,000 feet and within an hour or an hour and half from Washington by car. He had already checked out Sugar Loaf Mountain, a short distance from Washington, in Maryland, and found that under no circumstances would the owner make it available. In the course of our discussion two or three places came to mind almost immediately, but all of them needed checking out on the ground. The director emphasized that the matter should be kept confidential.

The following day a small group of us, including Harry Thompson, a very capable landscape architect with the National Capital Park System, and Ab Good, an excellent architect and author of the book Park and Recreation Structures, started investigating some seven or eight places in Maryland and Virginia. We checked every conceivable place within reasonable distance of the necessary utilities and satisfactory roads. We ended up with three sites to suggest to the president. One was Comers Deadening, a mile or so from Skyland in Shenandoah National Park, in Virginia, at an elevation of 3,300 feet. It was about a hundred miles from Washington and could be reached by car easily in two and a half hours. To build the camp would require two or three months and approximately $150,000. We had a preliminary layout plan prepared to go with a memorandum. The second site was known as campsite number four in the Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area, in Maryland. It was about sixty miles from Washington, at an elevation of 1,700 feet, and would require approximately one and a half hours of travel time over good roads. It was one of the four group campsites called for in the Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area master plan, but construction had not been started. The cost here would be approximately the same as at Shenandoah—$150,000. The third suggested site was also in Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area, about a half mile from the number four campsite. At this site the group camp had already been constructed, but with certain revamping it would meet the requirements of the president and would cost in the neighborhood of $25,000.

On April 22 the director went to Catoctin with the president for a look at the two proposed sites. The following day the director indicated that he was quite sure the president wanted site three, which we had estimated would cost around $25,000 to alter and make suitable for his use. By April 25 we had a memorandum prepared for Director Drury to send the president that outlined what we proposed to do and that included a cost estimate, which came to $18,650, and a floor plan showing the proposed alterations and additions to the lodge. It stated that if these funds were made available immediately and if we could obtain the necessary wartime construction priorities, we could proceed at once.

There was some slight delay, but soon I was asked to go with the president on another visit to Catoctin, and I took along Ab Good, the architect. In looking over sites three and four again, the president indicated that he was more interested in number four. Site four had a one-room mountain cabin about one hundred feet back from the breaking line on Military Crest, where the mountain starts to get very steep. The vacant cabin had a full length porch facing the distant view to the east and south. The floor of the porch was well pitched to provide for quick runoff of rainwater. The president was fascinated with the view from this cabin and wanted to sit a while; so RDA Project Manager Mike Williams went down to his office at the foot of the mountain and brought back his desk chair—the only chair he thought would be comfortable for the president—and put it on the porch. Two Secret Service men lifted the president out of his car and placed him in the chair. As soon as they let go the chair stated rolling toward the edge of the porch, where there was a drop of two or three feet to the ground. The Secret Service men dove and caught the chair before the president went off the porch. It was a narrow escape, but the president was all laughter and said he realized that somebody might try to get him someday, but he never suspected his own boys.

Number four was the site he wanted, and that was the one he got. It required a great deal more than the $18,000 we had estimated as the cost of remodeling camp number three. The president and the Secret Service had in mind accommodations for some forty-five guests and staff, in addition to servants and Secret Service men. Further, the area would have to be completely enclosed with a heavy mesh wire fence out of sight of the president and his guests. All utility wires would have to be underground. A special building would be needed for the telephone operators with quarters for four because they would maintain twenty-four-hour service. Fortunately, we had some CCC barracks we could make over into a dormitory for the Secret Service men. After the camp was completed and occupied, the Marines came in for security purposes and had to have quarters, but they took care of that themselves.

We informed the president that we would have to revise our original figures of $150,000 upward, but before we could say anything more he told us laughingly that the Congress would never give him $150,000 for such a purpose. He said that he wanted the camp nevertheless and that we should be able to reduce the cost in some way. All he could give us was $15,000, and he wanted to have the place ready by June 1. Well, we started in, and there was hardly a day when somebody from the Washington office was not at Catoctin. Harry Thompson and Ab Good spent a great deal of time there with Project Manager Williams, who was a hard-working man who knew how to get things done. The job was finished about two weeks late, but the president was very much pleased with it.

President Roosevelt took great pleasure in going up to Shangri-La during construction, and it wasn't uncommon for the telephone to ring and the operator to say the president was leaving in a half hour for Shangri-La and would like me to join him. On one of these outings we stopped on the way to pick up Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. At Catoctin the three of us sat on a car robe spread out on the ground right in front of the lodge under construction to have lunch and look out over the beautiful rolling Maryland farmland. Altogether, I believe, it was about as nice an assignment as a person could have had.

The navy had been of great help to us, getting various supplies on priorities that we could not touch. Everything had to be electrified including the protective fence, and I don't know how many miles of underground cables we had to put in. The captain of the president's yacht, who enjoyed going to Catoctin, got the cable for us and charged it to maintenance of the yacht. One day the admiral in command of the navy yard called the captain into his office and wanted to know what he was trying to do with all that cable on the yacht, "sink it?" The captain had previously told him about helping us to get the president's camp in shape, charging certain things to the yacht, but apparently the admiral had forgotten. So the captain said, "Well, Admiral, you know the yacht is at Shangri-La." The admiral looked blank for a minute, then said, "Oh hell, all right." A good deal of the furniture from the president's yacht was also moved to Shangri-La.

The incident of President Roosevelt's near tumble from the cabin porch the day he inspected the site of his future Shangri-La was a relatively minor one compared with the tragedy that almost happened one night that he spent there. That evening the president sat playing cards with some friends at a table directly beneath a chandelier made from an old farm wagon wheel fitted with wrought iron electric light fixtures. The next morning the table was found crushed under the heavy wooden part of the wheel. Apparently it had been gradually drying and shrinking and had slipped out of its suspended iron rim some time during the night, after the people who had been sitting under it had left. Roosevelt was not told of this, nor have I seen the story published heretofore. We rushed up to the camp early the next morning and saw to it that the table was repaired and light fixtures put together again. This time the wooden part of the wheel was securely bolted to the iron rim.

Shangri-La is still there and apparently being well used by our presidents. It is not an elaborate place but very comfortable and attractive. President Dwight D. Eisenhower changed the name to Camp David, as he had a right to do, though I wish he had kept the name Shangri-La. Additions made to it: instead of the screened porch that FDR had, there is now an enlarged, glassed-in porch; President Eisenhower added two tees and small fairway and a green so that he could practice golf, FDR had a swimming pool built, and I understand that it is still there and used. The property is still the responsibility of the National Park Service, as is the White House. Having had the responsibility of building the presidential retreat and not having been back since 1942 or early 1943, I was curious to see it again. So, once when I was in the White House going over plans for LBJ State Park near the Johnson Ranch in Texas, I asked Lady Bird Johnson whether she could arrange for Mrs. Wirth and me to go up and take a look at it. She talked to the president, and I got word back that they would like very much for us to spend the night there. We declined the overnight invitation but did go up with our friends Mr. and Mrs. Roger Ernst and had a fine day and a nice lunch at Camp David.