IV
In personal appearance Senator Kern was always slender and never very robust, and in his younger days this was the more noticeable because of his custom of affecting the Prince Albert coat of the period and the high silk hat. Soon after leaving Ann Arbor he permitted his beard to grow to a considerable length and as the political “speaker with the long black beard” he was known through the length and breadth of the state for many years. His height, slender form, black beard, and keen, penetrating dark eyes, an inheritance from his mother, made him in his youth an impressive figure. In later years he abandoned the Prince Albert for a business man’s sack suit, and seldom wore a silk hat except on state occasions. His beard, now gray, was cropped short and little more than covered his chin, but the memory of the flowing beard persisted in the minds of the cartoonists and curbstone wits, and constant reference, which was offensive to him, was made to his beard which differed little from that of Harrison or Fairbanks and was a very modest affair compared to that of Hughes. He never indicated, however, that he cared for the strained witticisms about his beard, and when an acquaintance, presuming upon his friendship, wrote him and suggested that he part with it after his election to the senate he merely wrote that “the beard has been attached to me so long it would be an act of base ingratitude to desert it now.” His eyes, always his finest feature, never lost their luster or fire. He was always perfectly groomed without being noticeably so.