Those were stirring days for me as well as for my hero. I would fly from the Republican Convention at the Coliseum out to our baby, often giving her airings in the nearby park. The excitement those days seemed to sustain me with a strength not really mine. Elizabeth Ann made a perfect picture in her new carriage. I tried to persuade Mr. Harding to meet me some morning in the park so he could see her, but, though he pondered it all lovingly and said he was as “crazy to do it” as I was to have him, he never did. I suppose it would have been unwise, though I was sure I could pilot that project as safely as I seemed to have done the others up to this time, with my sister Elizabeth’s good co-operation.

Elizabeth Ann and I had lovely times together. I talked to her even from babyhood as though she were a companion instead of a baby, and she would lie there looking up at me so seriously that sometimes I felt she must understand me. I would whisper to her, “Darling, do you know who your daddy is? Well, maybe you do (her answering look was full of wisdom!), but you don’t know who he is going to be!” Then I would stoop down and whisper in her ear, “Your daddy is going to be the President of the United States!” And surely her look of comprehension was more than a baby’s look—it seemed to me to be the understanding gaze of her father’s own eyes.

Mr. Harding came several times to 6103 Woodlawn Avenue during that month. I remember one time I rode downtown on the elevated with him. Standing on the platform at University Avenue, I said, “Honey, why do they have primaries?” I could see no need for them. In fact, I told him I thought politics was a terribly complicated business—to go through all the red tape, when he would be President anyway. I talked on and on, suggesting a simplification of the whole governmental machinery. He seemed highly amused. “A fine politician you’d make, Nan!” he said. I remember also how he leaned far over to read his neighbor’s paper after we were seated in the train, and when I strained my eyes to see what could interest him, he turned and explained that he “was just trying to steal the baseball score.” He followed the ball games with great interest, and was a dyed-in-the-wool fan if ever there was one.

A few days later, in the lobby of the Auditorium Hotel, I met him and he gave me a ticket to the Convention. It seemed to please him to do it, and very likely he could not help recalling my many predictions. He may even have gloried a bit in the knowledge that he was fulfilling every ambition I ever had for him.

I listened with rapt attention and rising regard to Frank B. Willis, who made the nominating speech for Warren G. Harding. I had heard Mr. Willis only once before and that was at Kent, Ohio, where I attended Normal School the summer immediately following my graduation from high school. At that time—1914—I had looked upon him as an illy-groomed, small-stage politician, but my appraisal of him swiftly swung in his favor with that speech.

I witnessed excitedly the balloting at the Convention which slowly but surely rose in favor of Ohio’s son. I could not share with anyone, by the most extravagant verbal picture, the emotions I experienced as it was announced amid roaring acclaim that the Republican nomination for the Presidency of the United States had been given to Warren G. Harding. How could that surging multitude—cheering and whistling and stampeding the aisles with their Harding banners held aloft—be interested anyway in the tumult of unutterable emotion that rose within me? My eyes swam, and I recalled my Freshman school year at Marion, when, in the margins of all my books, I, then but thirteen years old, had written the prophecy of my heart-longing, “Warren Gamaliel Harding—he’s a darling—Warren Gamaliel Harding—President of the United States!”

48

The next conference between the new Republican candidate for President and his sweetheart, which took place at 6103 Woodlawn Avenue, was necessarily an important one. This time he was “dropped off” by the man whose car he said he could command during his stay in Chicago. He had been, he said, held up by Moffett, who had taken innumerable photographs of him and who, Mr. Harding told me in his adorably modest way, had seemed to take quite a fancy to him. He had wanted to get to me earlier but he just couldn’t. Mr. Harding said that the pictures Mr. Moffett had taken ought to please me because he had been thinking about me every minute during the sittings for them.

He warned me again that if I were shadowed I should give no heed to the trailer and just go about my business as usual. He told me how proud he was of the way things had been handled to date, and he did not seem at that time to have very great fear concerning our secret. He was, however, hurried, and I complained because he had to leave me earlier than I had planned. When I told him I had many things to tell him he smiled and said, with his characteristic slang which seemed to be reserved for me alone, “Well, shoot!” He used often to say that when I bubbled over with confidences. He was with me a couple of hours, and, though disappointingly brief, that visit was one of the sweetest I ever knew.

He attempted to seriously discuss with me plans for financially caring for my situation and for Elizabeth Ann’s, but, though I finally changed the topic, saying, as always, that I didn’t want to discuss those things, he did persuade me to begin some insurance, and he said that no matter how small the amount I took out, he could add to it. He had other plans, he said, for establishing a fund in a more substantial amount, but I curtailed that discussion. The time was so brief and I adored his kisses. However, I did actually start a policy with the Prudential Life Insurance Company, one of $500, requiring no medical examination. I had only a little over $100 paid upon it when I went to Europe in June of 1923, and when I returned I dropped it altogether.