Seventeen found him the dignified teacher of the district school and an energetic member of the town band.
Photo. of Mrs. Harding (upper right corner) by Clinedinst Studio, Washington, D. C.
THE BODY OF WARREN G. HARDING
Lying in State in the East Room of The White House
In 1884, his father, Dr. Harding, pulled up stakes and moved his family and chattels into the little town of Marion, the county seat of the adjoining county, then of about four thousand population. But the eldest son did not join the family for several months. When he came, at the age of nineteen, barefoot and astride an old white mule, his advent into the city that he was destined to put upon the map in later years furnished the material for one of the stories he enjoyed telling upon himself.
“My father moved to Marion, from a farm near Caledonia, the winter before I came,” he used to relate.
“When he moved to Marion, he left behind a mule, because the mule was so well known in the vicinity that it could not be sold at a profit and so valuable that he could not afford to sacrifice it.
“I started out early one afternoon; but this mule had only one gait. You couldn’t put him in second or third, and couldn’t step on the gas or anything. The shades were falling fast as I reached Roberts’ Mill, four miles out of Marion. The situation was looking dark to me, and I stopped to ask an old fellow smoking a pipe how far it was to Marion. Without cracking a smile, he replied, ‘Well, if you are going to ride that mule, it is a further distance than you’ll ever get.’”
But notwithstanding the slow pace of his temperamental mule, he arrived in Marion and set about finding a job. The study of law attracted him for a time, with insurance on the side. He frequently insisted that the first real money he ever earned was when he secured the fire insurance on the Hotel Marion from Amos Kling, who later became his father-in-law. In this transaction, his commission was $150, and his first purchase was a “slip horn,” and then he joined the Marion Silver Cornet Band. This horn is still a treasured possession in the family.