The story of his life... at age 13

With the expert guidance of University of Rhode Island Library archivist Mark Dionne, who has been a tremendous resource, I pored through a box of old materials yesterday that included more letters, drawings photos and more from Claiborne Pell's childhood. This was a great find, as I thought we had already gone through everything that was on file. Here is an autobiography that Claiborne write in the early 1930s. It's not dated, but an educated guess based on the materials around it is that he was 13 at the time.
And check out the young Pell's letter he submitted to the editor of the New York Times endorsing FDR, a friend of Pell's father, Herbert. Pell was 15 years old when he wrote it on March 5, 1934. A nice try, I figured -- but lo and behold, a search of the Times online archives revealed that it was published on May 10 of that year. Politics was in his blood...
Image courtesy of Special Collections, University of Rhode Island Library.