​Almanac: Eleanor Roosevelt

And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac, October 11, 1884, 131 years ago today ... the day Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City.

A niece of Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor married her distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1905.

Following the 1932 election, the couple moved into the White House, where Eleanor transformed the role of first lady.

She traveled the country to see the misery of the Great Depression firsthand; and she openly expressed her personal views at press conferences and in a daily newspaper column.

Following her husband's death in 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt soldiered on as a tireless advocate for the United Nations and other causes -- all of which led Edward R. Murrow to pose this question to her on the CBS program, "Person-to-Person," in 1954: "Why do you work so hard?"

"What else would I do?" she replied. "I live alone, and my children are all busy and all have lives of their own. I wouldn't want them to be worrying about Mother having nothing to do."

No one ever had reason to worry that Eleanor Roosevelt would have nothing to do. She worked tirelessly almost to the very day of her death, in 1962, at the age of 78.