Fred Hill of New York was attending the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House with his family on April 22, 1935, when he used his movie camera to capture the moment Roosevelt emerged from the White House onto the South Portico. amateur black-and-white footage recently deposited at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library offer the most vivid glimpse we’ve yet had of his gallant attempt to persuade the public that he was merely “lame,” that he was vigorous enough to withstand the awful pressures of the presidency. It’s an important part of history that almost got away.” 
 
 As a 39-year-old rising politician, Roosevelt first showed symptoms of infantile paralysis, or poliomyelitis, at his family’s beloved Campobello Island retreat in New Brunswick, Canada, in the summer of 1921. Instead, from a distance but in crystal-clear detail, we see Roosevelt proceed along the portico with the slow, rocking gait he had painstakingly developed with physiotherapists at Warm Springs, Georgia. The White House imposed strict rules on how he could be filmed or photographed: no images of FDR in his wheelchair or being helped in and out of cars were permitted; no visual record was to be made of the arduous effort it took him to move just a few steps on his rigid braced legs.  Fred Hill Film 
 
 Article by Roosevelt historian and Library Trustee, Geoffrey C. Ward 
 
 Franklin Roosevelt was elected president of the United States four times, yet most of those who voted for or against him had no idea that infantile paralysis had rendered him unable to take a single step unaided. The larger-than-usual crowd on the lawn that day may account for the fact that the Secret Service fails to see what Hill is doing; had they seen that he is filming the President in motion they would have asked him to hand over the camera and removed the film before handing it back. The crowd was enormous: by evening, 51,391 people would pass through the White House gates – a record for the time.
– For seven seconds, the footage shows an American president walking to a White House railing to wave at a crowd. But "when I saw [it] ... I gasped," says Paul Sparrow, director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, which has acquired the silent film of the 32nd president at the 1935 White House Easter Egg Roll. It's so remarkable because FDR, disabled by polio in 1921, wasn't keen on walking, which for him often required braces. Only a handful of short, blurry films show him doing so, per History. Indeed, cameramen were told not to record his stiff gait for fear it would make clear his disability, per the Washington Post. Apparently unaware of such a rule, New York tourist Fred Hill aimed his camera at Roosevelt as he walked with help from a cane and bodyguard, his wife and two nieces at his side. Secret Service agents surely would've taken the film had they spotted Hill's camera amid the crowd of 50,000, says Roosevelt biographer Geoffrey C. Ward. "It's by far the clearest image I've ever seen of something that's obsessed me for 20 years," he adds, pointing to the careful "choreography" of bodyguard Gus Gennerich, who helps FDR to a railing, vanishes behind a pillar, and reemerges just as the president is ready to leave, per the Post. The footage stayed with Hill as he relocated to Reno, Nev., continuing to make home movies, and was discovered by his grandson in the 1980s. "I've kind of jealously guarded this stuff" but it "needs to go where it belongs," says Richard Hill, 66, who made the December donation announced Wednesday. "It's an important part of history that almost got away." (This FDR footage is rare for another reason.)