preceding President Roosevelt's birthday on January 30, 1938. Lapel pins were sold for ten cents (a dime) each; special features were produced by the motion picture studios and radio industry; and nightclubs and cabarets held dances and contributed a portion of the proceeds. As Cantor himself stated, “The March of Dimes will enable all persons, even the children, to show our President that they are with him in this battle against this disease. Nearly everyone can send in a dime, or several dimes. However, it takes only ten dimes to make a dollar and if a million people send only one dime, the total will be $100,000.” Cantor's appeal collected only few dimes and donation to begin with, just $17.50 had been sent in to the White House in two days. But what followed was a flood: by January 29, over 80,000 letters with dimes, quarters and dollars poured into the White House mailroom so that official correspondence to the President was buried in donation letters, with a final count of 2,680,000 dimes or $268,000 donated in what the press called "a silver tide which actually swamped the White House." Roosevelt went on the air to express his thanks, saying: Donald Anderson was the very first "poster child" to raise money for the March of Dimes. He was from Oregon and had been diagnosed with polio in 1943. Photos were taken of Donald in an almost paralyzed state. Another photo was taken seven months later to show how he had improved after receiving treatment funded by the foundation. His story was meant to show how regular, everyday Americans had helped Donald during his time in the polio ward by donating to the March of Dimes. The March of Dimes was the title used for the foundation's annual fundraising event that requested each child donate a dime. At the Christmas season, booths were set up in cities where the children could drop their dime in a slot. These were out on the street and sometimes not even overseen by anyone. Gradually the name became synonymous with that of the organization. "His genius was in generating large numbers of relatively small contributions for a cause," The New York Times wrote of O'Connor. "Over the years he collected and spent more than seven billion dimes — many of them from schoolchildren — with a half-billion dollars of it going to the war on