When a President's son-in-law and daughter ran the SeattlePI

The mother of President Franklin D. Roosevelt decamped from Hyde Park and visited Seattle in 1937, shortly after her granddaughter Anna and husband John Boettiger had taken the helm at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Washington was "unsettled country" to the grand dame from the Hudson Valley, her great-grandson Curtis Roosevelt would recall in his memoir. Sara Delano Roosevelt was shocked that the Boettiger brood had been enrolled in public schools. The kids should be educated "back East."

"To a woman born before the Civil War, it was still the Wild West," Curtis Roosevelt would write in "Too Close to the Sun."

The Roosevelt connection is a fascinating sidelight in the 155-year history of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, now SeattlePI.com.

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Newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst was putting the P-I back together after a fierce strike and shutdown. He wooed the Boettigers, making John the publisher while Anna took over (as they were known then) the women's pages.

And the Boettigers needed Hearst. John Boettiger had met Anna -- separated from her first husband -- on the campaign trail as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. The Trib was owned by Roosevelt-hating publisher Col. Robert McCormick.

Obviously, Boettiger could not continue to work at the Tribune, or cover his father-in-law. Conflicts of interest were recognized back then, long before the advent of Fox News.

Hearst signed the Boettigers to a succession of one-year contracts. Three Secret Service agents looked after Curtis and his sister, products of their mother's first marriage. The Boettigers had a son while in Seattle.

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They moved often, from the "countrified air" of Lawtonwood in Magnolia, to Galer Street on Capitol Hill, to Seward Park and finally to Mercer Island, soon after construction of a wondrous floating bridge.

The family came calling. Eleanor Roosevelt would fly in for a Christmas at Lawtonwood. The President of the United States would be pictured reading to his grandchildren on the couch at Mercer Island.

If the Northwest was "unsettled country," Franklin Roosevelt was the president who laid in its infrastructure. Curtis Roosevelt would find himself seated beside his grandfather at dedication of Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, a New Deal WPA project.

Bonneville Dam was newly completed, and FDR came twice to visit the construction site of Grand Coulee Dam. He toured the Olympic Peninsula in 1937, became infuriated at its clearcuts -- "I'd like to get my hands on the sonofabitch who did this," he said at one point -- and midwifed creation of Olympic National Park.

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The Post-Intelligencer increased its circulation under the Boettigers, who enjoyed autonomy even as Hearst was becoming disaffected with FDR.

World War II would ultimately end the Seattle odyssey. The President would come back to inspect troops training at Fort Lewis, and visit the Bremerton Naval Shipyard. (He would suffer an angina attack in mid-speech while on a 1944 visit to Bremerton.)

John Boettiger felt he was not contributing to the war effort. The couple moved back East where John became an Army captain. The President trusted and needed Anna, after the stroke and subsequent death of his indispensable secretary/aide Missy LeHand.

It was Anna who made it possible for FDR's onetime mistress, Lucy Mercer Rutherford, to visit the ailing president during the last months of his live. Eleanor Roosevelt found out only with revelation that Rutherford had been with Roosevelt when he died in Warm Springs, Georgia.

Postwar, the Boettigers tried to establish a left/liberal newspaper in Phoenix. It failed and put them deep in debt. The couple divorced in 1949, John Boettiger suffered depression, and killed himself in 1950 by jumping from the window of a New York hotel room.

Curtis Roosevelt returned a decade ago, promoting his book and seeking out old friends from Lakeside School.

Yes, he was finally sent to private school. Sara Delano Roosevelt would have been pleased.