Where is "Boy's Life?"

Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography that he was disappointed in the in the magazine industry that would shut down the productive and useful magazine publication titled "Our Young Folks".

In the years just before the Civil War, New York was already a metropolis of more than a half million people where the rumble of loaded wagons, the stamping of big dray horses, and the hooting of tugboats on the rivers were never stilled. Ugly, overcrowded, and dirty, the city was sharply divided between rich and poor. While the Renaissance palaces of the wealthy were beginning to march uptown along Fifth Avenue, the poor huddled in foul, ratinfested slums such as the notorious Five Points in lower Manhattan. "All that is loathsome and decayed is here," observed the touring Charles Dickens. Only a few miles away, what Edith Wharton described as the fashionable "pioneers of the younger set" were taking over rows of stolid brownstones newly erected in the tree-shrouded streets adjoining Gramercy Park. "Thee," Roosevelt and his wife, Georgia-born Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, were among the most engaging couples in this society.

Tall, handsome, and with a leonine head, Roosevelt had a glossy chestnut beard and the natural grace of an athlete. He was the youngest of the five surviving sons of old Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt who, along with William B. Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and A. T. Stewart, was one of the city's wealthiest men. Although active in Roosevelt & Son, the family glass-importing business in Maiden Lane, Thee was more interested in charitable work and philanthropy, which eventually became his main interest."Mittie" Roosevelt was a reigning beauty of Knickerbocker society. Fine-featured and with lustrous, jet-black hair, she had a tiny waist and coral-tinged skin that was, according to her daughter Anna, "the purest and most delicate white, more moonlightwhite than cream-white." Every day she took two baths, and she wore white both summer and winter.

The Roosevelt family had lived in New York City for more than two centuries, but after Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., became president, he insisted that his background was quite ordinary. For example, in his Autobiography he described Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, the family's founding father in America, as "our very common ancestor" and observed he had come over from the Netherlands in the seventeenth-century version of steerage. In reality, however, this was part of a conscious effort to skew accounts of his life, to downplay the advantages of a privileged background to bridge the chasm between himself and most Americans. Roosevelt was not a common man, and he knew it. Nevertheless, he wished to share the thoughts and aspirations of the average American-and if this created a somewhat synthetic personality, it was an intellectual rather than a moral failing.

Claes settled in New Amsterdam, the struggling Dutch settlement at the tip of Manhattan, sometime before 1648. Like that of many immigrants to America before and since, his past is a recordless blank. One of the few clues is his name, which rendered into English is Nicholas, son of Martin, of the Field of Roses. In those days, Dutchmen took in addition to their baptismal name that of their father and the locality from which they came. The family name, spelled a dozen different ways in the records - Roosevelt, Rosewelt, and Rosvelt among others-indicates that the ancestral home of the Roosevelts was the island of Tholen in the province of Zeeland, where a Van Rosevelt family was once prominent. Their family motto, Qui Plantavit Curabit - He Who Has Planted Will Preserve-was adopted by the American Roosevelts. The family name is pronounced by all its branches as "Rose-uh-velt."

Certain leaders have learned how they can use moral purpose to empower them to inspire and lead their membership toward achieving a strong competitive advantage. In TR's day political economists were not to blame for the commentary, rather the general attitude of the writers, used when penning the comments of that generation. McKinley's 'Silver Certificates' were just and right for the burst of production that occurred near the the Great Lakes. Opportunity and growth was flooding from this Ohio well, to low spots all over the United States. It had even affected the lights of downtown Tokyo, as well as the breakfasts being served in London.

A publication focusing on individual development complete with virtues such as TR's favorite magazine was "Boy's Life". The publication of the Boy Scout's in the USA available into the 21st century.