Private collector runs unique museum

And they're all given the same quick history lesson about the New York native's ties to Massachusetts. Roosevelt attended boarding school in Groton before going to Harvard and made several train stops at Union Station. But that history almost seems like more of a fortunate coincidence for Plaud.

Until 2004, the documents, pictures, books and knickknacks that Plaud alternatively categorizes as "ephemera" and "stuff" were hanging on walls and filling bookshelves and safes in his home in nearby Whitinsville.

"This is my home," he said. "And this is my stuff. This is where I want people to be able to see it."

With the collection outgrowing its domestic space, Plaud established the nonprofit heritage center in 2002. Two years later, he opened the museum on the second floor of Worcester's refurbished Union Station.

The collection includes many items that offer unusual insights into FDR's public and private life, such as the letter Roosevelt sent in 1927 to a man who was seeking treatment for his nephew stricken with polio. Roosevelt had been diagnosed with the disease six years earlier, just after his 1920 vice presidential loss.

"A year ago I had great difficulty in walking with braces and crutches but now get around with a good deal of ease with one brace, one crutch and one cane," he wrote in the year before he was elected governor of New York.

That letter gives a more honest accounting than one sent by a Roosevelt political adviser in 1921 to allay any fears that polio might be an obstacle to FDR's political rise. The letter downplayed the illness as a "very mild" case that would have "no permanent effects."

But the pictures showing FDR wearing leg braces and one of the canes he used prove otherwise.

Along with displays of FDR's statesmanship, Plaud's exhibit includes a set of hand prints that a so-called palmist used for a character sketch of the president. The work done by Nellie Simmons Meier came at the request of Eleanor Roosevelt, who realized that any leak of the arrangement could cause her husband significant embarrassment.

In a series of letters exchanged between Eleanor Roosevelt and Meier, the palmist assures the first lady that she wouldn't publish her findings while FDR was in office.

Meier honored her word, but put her findings in an essay that is part of Plaud's collection.

She concluded that Roosevelt was a "mental explorer with the inquiring mind of a research worker interested in experimenting in varied laboratories of unlimited possibilities."

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