White House gossip

by Edna M. Colman

No factor has contributed so largely to her continually mounting host of friends and admirers in the Capital City and the country at large as her modesty and simplicity, which have kept her natural and wholesome.

Mrs. Coolidge was born about a hundred miles from the home of her husband, and, like him, she comes of an old New England family. She is a native of Burlington, Vt., where her mother, Mrs. Lamira Goodhue, resides. Her father died after she came to Washington.

After a childhood and girlhood practically like that of the generality of girls born into good families of moderate means, she went to college at the University of Vermont. In her freshman year she became one of the founders of the Vermont Beta Chapter of the Pi Beta Phi Sorority, which, years after, presented a portrait of her to the White House. She took her A.B. degree, and after that followed the custom of New England girls in seeking a vocation. In her case, it was teaching, the less usual branch of teaching mutes. After three months’ training for teaching the deaf at the Clark School in Northampton, she was given a class of beginners. The difficulties of this work may be imagined when it is remembered that she had not only to teach her pupils to read, write, and cipher, but also to speak. One only need hear the vivacious lady tell of her class of youngsters set apart from others by reason of their defective senses to realize the enthusiasm she must have put into this work of helping them acquire the art of spoken communication.

Her teaching was limited to three years, for at the end of that time Mr. Coolidge persuaded her to give up a career and devote herself to making a home for him.

With the advent of her own children, Mrs. Coolidge made a thorough study of motherhood and child education. She always worked and played with her boys and thus became really acquainted with their virtues and their faults, and through this comradeship found herself able to encourage and help them best. She studied educational problems with minuteness, visiting all sorts of institutions of learning. She believes in a close personal relation between the parent, the school, and the child as a solution for many difficulties that beset both pupils and instructors.

Mrs. Coolidge is a home-maker, first, last, and always. Her conception of home-making is not bound by a perpetual routine of the mechanical phases of housekeeping, as so often has been claimed, and over which she has laughed merrily, but home-making, according to her code, means first of all providing the family with all comforts possible to the income and the luxury of genial, happy companionship: she served as a buffer, firm and gracious, for a weary Vice President husband from the importunities of the hotel telephone, and, despite the limitations of a hotel suite, manipulated a chafing dish, hot-plate, and all of the accessories for a daily popcorn feast, or a fudge party for vacationing boys pining for a bit of their home treats.

She believes that it is a woman’s first duty to provide her husband with all of the cheer and pleasure and creature comforts her surroundings will permit, and send him forth to his battle with the world, secure that at the end of a heavy day of toil he will find her waiting for him ready to share his troubles or pleasures.

All of the world looked on with approval at the simple, dignified, and wholly American good sense which controlled the movements of the Coolidge boys when their father became Vice President of the United States.

Mrs. Coolidge came to Washington with a half-formed plan for installing her family in a house and sending her boys to the public schools of the city. She had been there but a few hours, however, when she learned the futility of such an idea, for she found out, as Vice President and Mrs. Marshall had done when they came, that the vice-presidential salary would be inadequate to meet such a plan. It simply would not cover the rental of an appropriate house and the necessary upkeep, with the added burden of food and clothing. Mrs. Coolidge decided to follow the example of the Marshalls and do her official entertaining in a hotel. She further concluded to take over the hotel suite of her predecessor. As the duty of the Vice President, outside of presiding over the Senate, is to represent the President, who entertains, but is rarely entertained himself, Mrs. Coolidge rapidly became convinced that there would be but little time or opportunity for any family home life with her sons in Washington, and after they had seen their father inducted into office, she sent them home with their Grandfather Coolidge, with whom they had come to the city, and had them finish their school term at home.

Vice President Marshall called himself “the official diner out,” and the appropriateness of the term may be gathered from the fact that the Vice President and his wife are expected to attend all of the White House official dinners and receptions, all of the ten Cabinet dinners to the President, and also that of the Speaker of the House, all of which are fixed affairs. In addition, it is the duty of the Vice President and his wife to appear everywhere. Throughout the season, they are the guests of honour at dinners with such regularity that they have about one evening a month when they have the opportunity to remain at home.