Last updated: July 26, 2024
Person
Cesar Carrera
Quick Facts
Significance:
Valet to Franklin Roosevelt
Place of Birth:
Puetro Rico
Date of Birth:
December 5, 1893
Place of Death:
Washington, District of Columbia
Date of Death:
March 24, 1960
Born December 5, 1893 in Puerto Rico. According to the 1920 census, his occupation was a bookkeeper at a bakery. He left Puerto Rico for the continental United States in 1925 and a decade later was living in Washington, DC. By 1940, he was a houseman at the White House. His annual income was reported $1,120 (1940 U.S. Census).
The usual responsibilities of a valet were increased by FDR’s disability. Cesar’s wife described his duties:
Being the valet to President Roosevelt was grueling work. There was so little that President Roosevelt could do for himself physically that a valet had to be like two people. Everything connected with the bedroom involved the valet. Every telephone call. Much lifting of the President’s heavy body. And much running hither and yon to fetch and carry. My husband, Cesar, would wheel FDR into the White House wardrobe closet everyday for a “closet consultation.” They would select the clothes that suited the President’s mood of the day. But in the end being a valet to this great President eventually broke my husband’s health. It was just too much—mentally and physically.1
According to Lillian Rogers Parks, Cesar was devoted to Roosevelt, “but the job was agony for him when he had to set foot on the Sequoia, the presidential yacht. Cesar was seasick from the moment he got on the boat until he got off. He would do anything to get out of sea duty.”2
NOTES
1 Louise R. Carrera to Raleigh DeGreer Amyx, 30 January 1981. Copy of letter in park curator’s files.
2 Lillian Rogers Parks and Frances Spatz Leighton, The Roosevelts: A Family in Turmoil (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall Inc.), 56.