“It is a sobering thought,” Tom Lehrer famously said, “that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.”

Lehrer’s line, which I’ve loved and quoted for years, came to mind in the course of developing today’s #stampoftheday post, which marks the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1945.

For what it’s worth, writing about FDR wasn’t my original plan for today. Rather, I planned to feature a 1961 stamp marking the 100th anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. With a nod to William Faulkner’s great observation that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past,” I was going to say that my explorations of stamps over the past year have regularly underscored the many ways that racial tensions and racism are deeply embedded in our culture.

I was going to emphasize that point by noting that on April 12, 1949, the US Post Office also issued a stamp honoring the 200th anniversary of the founding of the university that became known as Washington and Lee University. That stamp featured pictures of its namesakes—George Washington (who saved a financially struggling academy) and General Robert E. Lee, who was its president from 1865 until he died in 1870. I would have noted that Lee, after all, commanded the forces that ardently defended slavery and pointed out, as I’ve done in several posts, that this was the second (of four appearances that Lee made on a US postage stamp, the others coming in 1937, 1955, and 1995, when he was part of a whole series devoted to the Civil War).

But, I discovered, there was a small flaw in my plan. There’s no copy of the 1961 stamp in my late father’s collection. While it does include the 1949 stamp, I’ve used it before and the connection was tangential, even by my often low standards.

I went back to the drawing board, looking for other options. I quickly learned that Roosevelt died on this day 76 years ago. I knew much of the story. I knew, for example, that doctors had warned him in 1944 that he probably didn’t have long to live, and that he nevertheless decided to run for an unprecedented fourth term as president. I knew that fearing he might die, conservative Democratic Party leaders in 1944 convinced Roosevelt to drop Vice President Henry Wallace, a progressive one-time Republican who had previously served as FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture. In his stead, they settled on Senator Harry S. Truman, who had led well publicized investigations in corruption and inefficiency in wartime industries.

I remembered that one night in the early 2000s, I found myself sitting at a dinner next to Frank Stanton, former president of CBS, who recalled getting a call from Truman not long after he became vice president. Though he’d had only limited contact with Roosevelt, Truman knew the president was quite ill. Moreover, Truman told Stanton, no one in Roosevelt’s inner circle was “telling him anything” about the war effort or other key issues. So Truman asked Stanton to arrange for regular briefings on what he needed to know.

Stanton also said that after Roosevelt died, Truman summoned him to Washington to help him, particularly in drafting his first speech to Congress and the nation. He recalled staying at the Truman’s home and being fed late-night sandwiches by Truman’s wife Bess while he helped draft the new (largely unknown) president’s remarks.

Somehow in all of this, I had never realized that that Roosevelt was only 63 years old when he died, which means he was slightly younger than I am right now. Or, to paraphrase Lehrer, “it is sobering to realize that when he was my age, Franklin D. Roosevelt…”

While those who had contact with Roosevelt or who had seen pictures of him, knew that the president was not in good health, his death shocked the nation and the world. For people like my parents, who were both born in 1925, he had been the only president they had known as they grew up during the Great Depression and came of age during a major war.

Ralph McGill, then a columnist who went on to be the great editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, was in Australia when he heard the news. In a column that appeared on April 14th, two days after Roosevelt’s death, McGill wrote: “There are many tributes flowing to Washington today from the great of the world, and I feel every one of them sincere. They perhaps are not as expressive as the first two I heard this morning. The boy who brought in the bags, seeing that we were Americans, said: ‘It is shocking about Mr. Roosevelt, isn’t it? You know, sir, somehow the world seemed to be more comfortable when he was in it.’ The porter who came to get laundry and suits for pressing said: ‘I know you gentlemen are sad. We all are. The people of the world will miss him very much. He had done so much for them.'”

McGill added: “It was said of Abraham Lincoln when death claimed him that a tree is measured best when it is down. So it will be of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The tree is down and the historians will begin to measure and will find what the hearts of millions of Americans and peoples of the world already knew, that here was the tallest man America has ever given to the world.”

Writing last year, on the 75th anniversary of FDR’s death, Paul Sparrow, director of the FDR Presidential Library, noted that earlier on the day he died, Roosevelt had been working on his upcoming annual Jefferson Day speech. As Sparrow noted, FDR’s words were timely then and, in light of all the absurd fights in the past year, are timely today.

“Today, science has brought all the different quarters of the globe so close together that it is impossible to isolate them one from another,” Roosevelt planned to say. “Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that if civilization is to survive we must cultivate the science of human relationships, the ability of all people of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace.”

And, to underscore his point, he planned to end by saying: “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”

Be well, stay safe, “move forward with strong and active faith,” fight for justice, and work for peace.