Service
Ethel's indomitable spirit in the face of tragedy has been chronicled, along with a number of triumphs.
During World War I, Ethel, now a nurse served in France in the same hospital as her husband served as a surgeon. Later, she became involved with the Red Cross, and served as Nassau County Chairman during World War II, and then as Chairman of the Nassau County Nursing Service. Her long involvement, even while traveling, is shown by her correspondence still residing in the Nassau County Red Cross archives. When the Red Cross recently brought her Fifty Year Service Pin to Sagamore Hill, they had to correct themselves—it was not fifty years of service, it was sixty. When it came time to have her portrait painted, she did not choose to wear an evening gown and jewels, she wore her Red Cross uniform.
She put in many years of work to turn Sagamore Hill into a National Historic Site.
Ethel was one of the first two women to serve on the Board of Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History.
Read more about this topic: Ethel Roosevelt Derby
Famous quotes containing the word service:
“In any service where a couple hold down jobs as a team, the male generally takes his ease while the wife labors at his job as well as her own.”
—Anita Loos (1888–1981)
“The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
Of one whose promised thoughts of other days
Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)