© Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), future US President, contracts polio at age 39. Six years later he establishes an innovative polio rehabilitation centre in Warm Springs, Georgia. In a rare photograph that shows his leg braces, FDR fishes at Warm Springs in 1925. FDR's polio paralysis was well known, but the media respected his request, for political reasons, to never show him in a wheelchair or with his leg braces.