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Grace Coolidge

New Release: ‘Eat Like a President’ in Paperback and Ebook

If you really want to know what a president was like, find out what he ate. That’s what Leslie and Dan Landrigan did with the six presidents from New England. The authors wrote the New England Historical Society’s new book, Eat Like a President: 30 Recipes from the White House to Your House, which tells you about the presidents’ families, their servants, their friends — and how they struggled to run the White House and the country at the same time.

You’ll find some surprises in Eat Like a President. Calvin Coolidge, for example, loved to play practical jokes on the servants. Chester A. Arthur indulged in fine dining despite having a fatal kidney disease. John Quincy Adams had a passion for Madeira wine.

Other presidential preferences won’t surprise you. The revolutionary presidential couple, John and Abigail Adams, served distinctly American food. Franklin Pierce, the backwoodsman, preferred comfort food from his native New Hampshire. And Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy loved fancy French cuisine.

The book also explores the historic setting in which the food was made and served. Each president grappled with America’s defining conflicts over freedom and equality. How they treated their servants revealed a lot about their attitudes toward servitude and slavery. Abigail Adams hated the Constitutional compromise that allowed slavery, and she hated watching enslaved servants toiling just outside the White House. She treated her own servants like family. Then, more than a century later, Calvin Coolidge tried to pass an anti-lynching bill and took his ill African American wine steward with him on an Adirondacks vacation to improve his health.

You’ll get a fuller picture of the difficulties a president faces from Eat Like a President. Among pressing cares about war, disaster, legislation and re-election, they still have to meet with hundreds of people every week – and feed many of them. A presidential couple still must host a state dinner even if their child is dying. A president has to spend hours shaking hands even when his enemies are killing his infrastructure bill. In the midst of all that, the first couple has to try to make the White House presentable.

You’ll also get a fuller picture of the presidential couples and their times just from what they ate and drank. Jane Pierce, a teetotaler, came from a cold roast Boston family, while Franklin, an alcoholic, grew up in a tavern. They didn’t appear together publicly very often.

Calvin Coolidge loved the Vermont pickles of his modest boyhood. People even said he looked like he was weaned on one. And yet he also enjoyed Chinese food, a cuisine embraced by aspirational middle-class city dwellers. Coolidge was both.

In the reckless 1960s, the Kennedys served tumblers of Cuba Libres at their White House Twist parties. Those were prosperous times, and the Kennedys — Jackie especially — spent lavishly. At one party they served 10 pounds of caviar in a gold bucket.

Finally, Eat Like a President describes where the presidents ate – in the White House. The first couples had to keep improving the building as America grew in power and prestige. In 1800, Abigail Adams furnished a drafty, unfinished 36-room house; 162 years later, Jackie Kennedy turned a 132-room mansion into an elegant showplace.

In the book…

Let’s face it, food is a fun way to learn about history. And history is a fun way to cook food.

In this book you will get step-by-step instructions on how to make 30 different kinds of presidential food in a modern American kitchen. The foods range from fairly simple colonial fare to fancy French dishes preferred by the Kennedys and the Chinese entrees the Coolidges loved.

You will also get an engaging account of each president’s White House years, with historical background and context. High school students might find it a compelling way to learn about American history — and American cooking.

Just click here to buy the ebook, here for the paperback.

About the authors

Dan and Leslie Landrigan are the authors of the New England Historical Society website. Over the past decade, they’ve written thousands of stories about New England history. They now live on an island in Maine, where they do a lot of cooking for themselves.

This books is the fourth in a series about historic foods. The others are 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods, 29 Historic Apple Recipes: Cooks’ Favorites from 1650 to 1960, and Historic Italian Christmas Cookies, all ebooks available from Amazon.

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The Pet Names of Famous New Englanders

When the Pilgrims came to America on the Mayflower, they brought with them two dogs described as a spaniel and a mastiff. Though their names are unknown, the pet names of many famous four-legged New Englanders have not been lost to history.

John Adams and his wife Abigail were the first inhabitants of the White House, and their dogs were the first to romp on the White House lawn. The Adamses had two mutts named Juno and Satan. “If you love me … you must love my dog,” Abigail wrote in a letter to her granddaughter, Caroline Smith. As president, John Adams had the White House stables built, presumably to house his horse Cleopatra.

‘Love me, love my dog.’ Abigail Adams, detail from painting by Gilbert Stuart

Satan and Sin

Mark Twain loved cats and loved to play pool. Whenever he played, he put a kitten into the corner pocket.

“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” he once wrote. So great was his affection for cats that he once rented two kittens, named Sackcloth and Ashes, during a summer stay in Dublin, N.H.

His pet names for his cats also included Sour Mash, Appollinaris, Zoraster, Blatherkite and Beelzebub. His favorite: Bambino.

pet-names-mark-twain-with-cat-on-his-shoulder

Mark Twain and friend.

He had a black cat named Satan and a tortoise-shell cat named Sin. They got along well.

“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” he once wrote.

“I simply can’t resist a cat, particularly a purring one,” he said. “They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.”

Henry David Thoreau had a pet cat named Sylvia. Ralph Waldo Emerson apparently didn’t much like animals and had no pets. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Una had a Newfoundland named Leo.

Smart Setter?

Author Thomas Bailey Aldrich had an Irish setter named Grip, who he believed was smarter than some men he knew. The dog loved to bring Aldrich’s slippers from the bedroom to the parlor. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier had a dog named Robin Adair.

Daniel Webster wasn’t terribly fond of dogs or cats, but he loved oxen. When the great statesman returned to his Marshfield farm to die, one of his last pleasures was to sit in his window and admire his oxen. He was said to know them all by name, but alas, those pet names are lost to us.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., during his two-year voyage aboard the Pilgrim, adopted a dog he named Bravo in San Diego. Frederick Law Olmsted took a bull terrier named Judy along when he traveled the South to write about slavery.

Grace Coolidge, official White House portrait

Abolitionist John Brown loved animals and gave pet names to many. As a boy he had a pet squirrel named Bobtail. He raised sheep and had two shepherd dogs named Toss and Jack.

A Vice Named Cuddle Bunch

Louisa May Alcott joked her vices included an inordinate love of cats. She had a black cat named Cuddle Bunch who “had a fit,” and fell out of a window to her death.

Harriet Beecher Stowe loved her cat named Calvin who, according to Charles Dudley Warner, “walked into her house one day out of the great unknown and became at once at home.” Stowe named Calvin after her husband and let him sit on her shoulder while she wrote.

Marian Anderson owned two Kerry Blue terriers, Falla, after President Roosevelt’s dog, and Fenon.

Presidential Pet Names

Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace brought a menagerie to the White House. Their pets included white collies named Rob Roy and Prudence Prim, terriers named Peter Pan and Paul Pry, a Shetland sheepdog named Calamity Jane, chow chows named Tiny Tim and Blackberry, a bulldog named Boston Beans and a German shepherd named King Cole.

The Kennedy family on vacation with their dogs. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

The John F. Kennedy White House was filled with pets comprised of a mutt named Pushinka, a gift from Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev. Other pet names included a German shepherd named Clipper, a cocker spaniel named Shannon, an Irish wolfhound named Shannon, and the president’s favorite dog, a Welsh terrier named Charlie.

The First Couple often took one or two of the family dogs out for a walk under the cover of darkness. Traphes Bryant, the White House dog handler, said the people didn’t recognize them as Secret Service agents followed discreetly in a car. Sometimes, Bryant said, they “looked like two young college kids taking the dogs for a walk. They looked so happy.”

Cultural Pet Names

Leonard Bernstein, who grew up in Lawrence and later lived in Redding, Conn., owned a series of Dachsunds all named Henry. As an adult he owned a sheltie named Honey.

Bernstein incorporated the pet names of his friends’ animals into his music. The Library of Congress’s collection of his music manuscripts includes a trumpet score in Bernstein’s writing called Rondo (for Lifey). He sent it to actress Judy Holliday, whose dog was named Lifey. The music and lyric sketches for Bernstein’s orchestral composition Slava! have an alternate title on the title page: Puk – the pet name for Rostropovich’s dog.

The Bernstein family and Honey. Photo courtesy Library of Congress .

T.S. Eliot, though he grew up in St. Louis, was a member of the Boston Brahmin Eliots and summered in Gloucester, Mass. Eliot wrote “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” full of eccentric pet names like Skimbleshanks, Growltiger, Mr. Mistoffelees and Gus.. The book became the Broadway musical Cats.

And Lillian Jackson Braun, a native of Chicopee Falls, Mass., also invented fictional cats — Koko and Yum Yum — in her The Cat Who… mystery series.

This story about the pet names of famous New Englanders was updated in 2022.

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Eat Like A President, Part II

In honor of President’s Day, the New England Historical Society brings you another guide to how to eat like a president.

John F. Kennedy. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

We focus on New England presidents beginning with John Adams and including one or two diversions such as Abraham Lincoln. (Though it’s worth pointing out that Legal Seafood’s clam chowder has been served at every presidential inauguration since Ronald Reagan.)

Eat Like a President

Green Dragon

John Adams drank a tankard of hard cider when he got up in the morning, and when in Boston he stopped off later at the Green Dragon Tavern.

Paul Revere talks in his memoirs about meeting John and the other Sons of Liberty, like Samuel Adams and Dr. Joseph Warren, to start a revolution. The tavern isn’t exactly where it was back in the day, but absent the karaoke bar and table tents it’s quite evocative of the Revolutionary era.

When at home, John and Abigail ate typical New England foods such as codfish cakes, New England clam chowder, Johnny cake, apple butter, succotash, Indian pudding and gingerbread.

John Quincy Adams

Their son, John Quincy Adams, was notoriously indifferent to food despite his exposure to many fine international cuisines. He liked fruit, and was known to say, “Five or six small crackers and a glass of water give me a sumptuous dinner.”

Pie at the White House

Franklin Pierce was another president who liked solid, traditional fare. It was a preference he would have picked up at his father’s tavern in Hillsborough, N.H., where a Christmas dinner was once held for Revolutionary War veterans. Pierce and his family were fond of maple syrup and New Hampshire fried pies, made with dried apples.

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Abraham Lincoln, though not a New Englander, had relatives in Massachusetts. His distant cousin Levi Lincoln supported his political career. You can visit Sturbridge Village and see his former mansion where Abraham Lincoln dined in September 1848.

Levi Lincoln, former governor and then the mayor of Worcester, held a meal that Cousin Abraham remembered long afterward. Thirteen years later, he told Massachusetts Gov. Henry Gardner:

I had been chosen to Congress then from the wild West, and with hayseed in my hair I went to Massachusetts, the most cultured State in the Union, to take a few lessons in deportment.

Lincoln, Gardner said, added

That the dinner at Governor Lincoln’s by reason of its elaborate hospitality and social brilliancy was different in kind from any function he had ever attended before. He remarked upon the beauty of the china, the fineness of the silverware and the richness of all the table appointments, and spoke of the company of distinguished and thoroughly educated whom he met there in the animated, free and intimate conversation inspired by such an accomplished host as Governor Lincoln.

Picky Presidential Eater

Where Calvin Coolidge developed his eating habits

Calvin Coolidge, as a state lawmaker and governor, enjoyed dining at the private Algonquin Club on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. He was a fastidious eater who believed chicken should be raised close to where they were eaten and kept chickens at the White House. They had an unusual flavor because the chicken yard was built on top of Theodore Roosevelt’s mint bed.

Coolidge liked roast beef, Vermont pickles and corn muffins. According to the Food Timeline, his fastidiousness created a problem for the White House chef, who couldn’t get the recipe for corn muffins right. First Lady Grace Coolidge finally sent off to a Northampton inn to get the recipe.

Coolidge’s discriminating dining habits are illustrated by several versions of a story told about him while he attended Amherst College. Here’s one version:

Dwight Morrow was a classmate of Coolidge’s at Amherst and the father of Anne Morrow, the wife of Charles A. Lindbergh. (Coolidge later appointed Morrow as Ambassador to Mexico.) Morrow used to like to tell the story of when he and Coolidge went to the same boarding house to take their meals. Hash was served frequently. When it was served, Morrow said Coolidge turned very grave. The landlady had a dog and a cat. As the hash was being served, Coolidge would ask “Where’s the dog?” and the dog would be brought in. Then he’d ask “Where’s the cat?” — and the cat would be called in. Only then would he help himself to the hash.

The Modern Era

George H.W. Bush in his broccoli-eating days.

As a member of Congress, John F. Kennedy stayed at a hotel near the Statehouse in Boston. He notoriously showed up at the nearby 21^st Amendment for a beer he never paid for.

Kennedy also liked to read his Sunday paper at the Union Oyster House, where another presidential wannabe, Daniel Webster, used to consume six plates of oysters and a tumbler of brandy for lunch.

Like Coolidge, Kennedy liked corn muffins. He also dearly loved Boston clam chowder. White House chef Rene Verdon remembered,

He asked me to prepare it for him on many occasions…I did everything I could to satisfy Mr. Kennedy’s New England liking for good fish cookery. Quite naturally, as a Catholic, he had it every Friday.

When vacationing on Cape Cod, the Kennedys liked the homemade ice cream from the Four Seas ice cream parlor in Centerville, near the family compound in Hyannisport. Jackie Kennedy’s favorite flavor: peach.

George H.W. Bush was as fastidious about vegetables as Calvin Coolidge was about everything else. He hated broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and cabbage. Barbara Bush said,

The day he was 60, he said to me: `I am never going to eat broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower or cabbage again.’ And he hasn’t!

Bush and his family liked lobster and ice cream, though. When vacationing in Kennebunkport, they enjoyed Mabel’s Lobster Claw, a seafood restaurant that’s been serving tourists since the 1950s. The Bushes allegedly liked the peppermint stick ice cream.

And on the walls of Frank Pepe’s Pizza Napoletana in New Haven hangs a framed photo of Bill Clinton. Though now a vegan, he liked a good white clam apizza in his day.

This story about eating like a president was updated in 2022.

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The Peculiar and Biting Calvin Coolidge Wit

The Calvin Coolidge wit was once described as ‘sharp and cold as a frost-etching on a windowpane.’

His humor completed his image as an old-fashioned Yankee. He was thrifty, puritanical, moralistic and he even did farm chores.

That image –Calvin Coolidge, wit and all — proved reassuring while people abandoned traditional values during the Roaring 20s.

Were they laughing at the Calvin Coolidge wit? Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The Calvin Coolidge Wit

Once, at a dinner party, the woman sitting next to him said she bet she could get more than two words out of him. Coolidge then famously responded: “You lose.”

In 1925, someone asked how it felt to be president of the United States. “Well,” he said, “You got to be mighty careful.”

Soon after Calvin Coolidge took office, he received his first paycheck, which delivered a messenger from the Treasury Department. Coolidge solemnly told him, “Call again.”

His supporter Frank Stearns, son of department store mogul R.H. Stearns, thought Coolidge probably inherited his brevity from his father. As an example, John Coolidge once received an invitation to attend a presidential event. He replied:

Dear Gentlemen,
Can’t come.
Thank you.
John Coolidge

Calvin, Jr., likely inherited the Calvin Coolidge wit. On the morning after his father took the oath of office as president in Plymouth Notch, Vt., he went to work bundling tobacco.

One of his co-workers said, “If my father were president, I wouldn’t be working in a tobacco field. Calvin replied, “If my father were your father you would.”

Calvin, Jr., died at 16 during his father’s presidency. His death caused Calvin Coolidge to fall into a deep depression. Even as president he suffered from intense social anxiety, and his son’s death exacerbated the problem.

Grace Coolidge

The vibrant, outgoing Grace Coolidge filled in her husband’s many silences.

Calvin and Grace Coolidge. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

She often told stories about the Calvin Coolidge wit.

On their return from their honeymoon. Coolidge handed her an old brown bag filled with 52 pairs of socks with holes in them. She asked him if he married her just to get his socks mended.

He told her, “No, but I find it mighty handy.”

Once as first lady, she and the president visited a government farm on separate tours. She came to the chicken yard and showed some interest in a prize rooster. The farmer told her the rooster could mate several times a day.

Mrs. Coolidge said, “Tell that to the president when he comes by.”

The farmer told the president. Coolidge asked, “Same hen every time?” The reply: “Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time.”

Coolidge said, “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

Arthur Cheney Train, who created the fictional character Ephraim Tutt, didn’t admire the Calvin Coolidge wit.

“He had a perverse streak that led him to do and say eccentric things which he did not intend to be funny at all,” wrote Train. Once in a while, for example, Coolidge would press all the buttons on his desk, causing bells to ring all over the White House and all the servants to come running — for the fun of it.

A Good Angleworm

As a student at Amherst College, he took his meals in a boardinghouse with his friend Dwight Morrow, whose daughter would marry Charles Lindbergh. Morrow said the landlady often served hash, which caused Coolidge to turn serious.

The landlady had a dog and a cat, Morrow said. Coolidge would ask “Where’s the dog?” and the dog would be brought in. Then he’d ask “Where’s the cat?” and the cat would be brought in.

Only then would he eat the hash.

“That’s a good angleworm,” was an example of the Calvin Coolidge wit. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

As president, he once presided over a tree-planting ceremony. He turned back the soil with a golden trowel, the Army and Navy bands stood waiting on cue, the crowd quietly anticipated Coolidge’s words.

The president stood silent until Supreme Court Chief Justice William Taft said, “Please say something.” Coolidge finally replied, “That’s a good angleworm.”

The Soul of Wit

Massachusetts Gov. Channing Cox, Coolidge’s former lieutenant governor, visited him at the White House. He complained that back home in Massachusetts he always had to see people and fought all the time to get some real work done.

Coolidge told him, “Channing, the trouble is you talk back.”

Coolidge once observed that what he didn’t say never hurt him.

At one White House press conference, reporters fired questions at him.

“Have you anything to say about Prohibition?”
“No.”
“Have you anything to say about the World Court?”
“No”
“About the farm situation?”
“No.”
“About the forthcoming senatorial campaign?”
“No.”

Then as the reporters filed out of the room, Calvin Coolidge finally called out, “And don’t quote me.”

This story was updated in 2023.

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How To Make a Maine May Basket

An old New England tradition that perhaps deserves reviving is the giving of a May basket on May Day. It was popular among children, especially in northern New England, during the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century.

Grace Coolidge gets a May basket. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Children made small homemade baskets or used available ones. They filled them with treats: candy, cookies, flowers. Then they’d hang them on the doorknob or leave them on the doorstep of a friend, a sweetheart or a favorite relative. The custom was to knock, yell “May Basket” and then run. If the recipient caught the giver, he or she was entitled to a kiss.

Louisa May Alcott wrote about May baskets in her 1880 children’s book, Jack and Jill. “Such a twanging of bells and rapping of knockers; such a scampering of feet in the dark,” she wrote. She described ‘droll collisions as boys came racing round corners, or girls ran into one another’s arms as they crept up and down steps on the sly.

“Such laughing, whistling, flying about of flowers and friendly feeling—it was almost a pity that May-day did not come oftener,” wrote Alcott.

In 1889, a young man in Taunton, Mass., got up very early and walked a mile and a half to hang a basket on his sweetheart’s door. When he got there he found another basket from another young man already hanging there.

The kissing game proved too much for the parents of Caroline Creevey, who in the 19th century made May baskets of willow twigs and trailing arbutus. She recounted in her book, A Daughter of Puritans, how her father gave her a May Day party to take her mind off osculating boys.

May Basket Misadventure

Renee DesRoberts, writing for the Maine Memory Network, told the story of another May basket adventure that went awry at the Biddeford Pool in 1917.

A Mrs. T. K. Niedringhaus, wife of a St. Louis railroad financier, was spending the night at the Main Street home of Mrs. Fanny C. Foster, another summer resident.

The women heard a knock on the door and,

…”fearing burglars, the house dog was loosed and he chased whoever the party was across the golf links and far away.”

The next day, the women discovered two May Baskets hung on the door by children. As an apology for the chase, each woman held a party for the children.

An item in a Biddeford newspaper concluded, “There are those among the children who aver that they would gladly be chased across the golf links again for another such good time.”

Grace and Edna

In 1918, a friend of Maine poet Edna St. Vincent Millay sent her a May basket. Millay, then a rebellious Vassar student, sent a thank you note to the friend, Corinne Sawyer of Camden:

Dear old chum –
Bless your heart! You
don’t forget me, do you? A May Basket! Why
it made me a little girl again.
It got here in wonderfully good condition
nothing smashed – nothing spilled. And its
perfectfully dear so sweet outside as in –

Children in other parts of the country hung May baskets as well. In 1927, Washington, D.C., schoolchildren hung a May basket on the White House door for First Lady Grace Coolidge.

Hallmark Gets Into the Act

Hallmark tried to bring back the tradition — in fact, it’s still trying. In 1954, the company advertised ‘May Day Baskets’ that come in ’15 colorful designs — five different designs in each package — and can be assembled easily without scissors or glue.’ You could find them in ‘the fine stores where Hallmark cards are sold, and the price was just 50 cents.’

1954 Hallmark advertisement

In Roots and Branches: Or growing up in Maine, Jane Rozelle recalled making May baskets:

…one of the “funest” things of spring to do, May Basket time! May 1st all the kids in the neighborhood would be figuring how to make a pretty May basket. It usually started with crepe paper, scissors, maybe a little box, glue and many other ideas.

To just use crepe paper, use two pieces approximately a foot square, or a size that you like, fold it so there was a middle point, keep folding it to make a pointed v. Then cut little v’s out of the side and when you open it up you’ll have a sort of lacy bag with the top sort of a handle. If you had a little box then you could paste different pieces around the side and braid some paper to make a handle.

Clotheslined

“May was meant for May baskets, and we hung them all month long in a sweaty helter-skelter of running and hiding,” wrote John Gould in his book, And One to Grow On: Reflections of a Maine Boyhood.

He hung his first May basket on the door of one of his true loves, Grace. Her father answered the door. “Life brings many pleasures, but life has nothing to offer like the shriek of a youthful blonde who has received her first May basket,” he wrote.

Sure enough, Grace chased him, but he met the fate of so many Maine children who go May-basketing. He got clotheslined.

“The first great discovery that came to me, as I sped around the house, was the location of the clothesline. I found it when it sang under my chin,” he wrote. But the evening ended happily, with raspberry shrub and lemon cookies in the kitchen until it was time to go home.

When June came around, Gould and his friends joked about June baskets. They were supposed to be filled with stable manure and left on the doorstep of someone you didn’t like. But no one ever hung one. It was just something you joked about.

This story about the May basket was updated in 2022.

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Gregarious Grace Coolidge, Who Filled in the Silences

Grace Coolidge burst out laughing when she glanced through a boardinghouse window and spotted her future husband shaving in long underwear and a hat. Their relationship – and his political career – would be marked by her ebullience, which filled in his silences.

Grace Coolidge, official White House portrait

Decades after his death, it was revealed Calvin Coolidge’s silences resulted from intense social anxiety throughout his life. Grace made up for it, becoming one of the most popular First Ladies in history.

The American public followed her fashion choices at weekly photo ops. They read about the Coolidge menagerie in the White House, enjoyed her exploits on the hiking trail and joined in her enthusiasm for the national pastime.

When her 16-year-old son died suddenly, they sent her thousands of letters of sympathy.

‘I am going to be married to you’

Grace Coolidge was born Jan. 3, 1879, in Burlington, Vt., the only child of Andrew Goodhue, a steamboat inspector and mechanical engineer, and Lemira Barrett Goodhue.

She graduated from the University of Vermont at Burlington and taught deaf students at the Clarke Institute for the Deaf in Northampton, Mass., for three years before her marriage.

She was actually involved with someone else when she first dated the dour young attorney who’d just moved to Northampton. They went to a Republican rally.

Calvin and Grace Coolidge, about 1918

He proposed by stating, “I am going to be married to you.”

She agreed, but her mother didn’t. They were married on Oct. 4, 1905, over her mother’s vehement objections, during a plain ceremony in her childhood home.

Politics

The Coolidges initially lived in a Northampton hotel. When it went out of business, they bought linens from the hotel and used them even in the White House, despite the hotel monogram.

In 1906 they rented half of a duplex they’d live in for two decades.

During the early years of their marriage, Grace Coolidge raised their two sons, John and Calvin, Jr., in Northampton while Calvin pursued his political career in Boston. He did spend two years in Northampton as mayor, from 1910-11, but most of the time from 1907 to 1921 he lived in a dollar-and-a-half room in Boston and came home on weekends.

Grace’s quiet life was interrupted in 1921, when her husband became vice president of the United States. She was abruptly shoved into the spotlight, and Cal quickly recognized how much her gregariousness helped him.

He set limits on her, though. He wouldn’t let her wear pants, drive a car or ride in an airplane. When a comment appeared in a newspaper about the jodhpurs she wore while horseback riding, he told her “…you will get along at this job fully as well if you do not try anything new.”

The White House Brings Grief

John Coolidge, 1924

Early in the morning of Aug. 3, 1923, the Coolidges were vacationing at his family home in Plymouth Notch, Vt., when they received word that President Harding had suddenly collapsed and died. Grace lit a kerosene lamp and watched while her father-in-law, a notary, administered the oath of office to her husband.

During their stay in the White House, the animal-loving Coolidges kept a menagerie: dogs, cats, birds and even a raccoon named Rebecca. Grace held weekly photo ops, and the public avidly followed her: She went to the movies and concerts, wore the latest fashions and campaigned for the Red Cross and the Clarke School for the Deaf. She hiked, swam and listened to sports on the radio when she wasn’t attending games. If she couldn’t get a football game on her crystal radio she went to the White House telegraph room for scores.

You can watch a video of Grace Coolidge with Helen Keller here and in her first talkie newsreel here.

Grief

In July 1924 her 16-year-old son Calvin died when a blister developed into blood poisoning. On the five-year anniversary of his death, Grace Coolidge published an original poem, ‘The Open Door,’ in Good Housekeeping magazine. It began,

Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

You, my son,
Have shown me God.
Your kiss upon my cheek
Has made me feel the gentle touch
Of Him who leads us on.

For most of the 1924 presidential campaign, she and her husband were in mourning. Grace became a rabid baseball fan at about that time, frequently attending Washington Senators games. Later in life she had a season pass to Red Sox games. She sat near the dugout and chatted with the players. In 1948 she sent a quarter and a Post cereal box top to get a genuine Red Barber baseball guide. She got a letter from Red in return (and the guide).

By 1928 President Coolidge’s health was deteriorating, and he decided not to seek reelection. They moved back to the two-family home they rented before moving to Washington. Finally, to protect themselves from sightseers, they bought a large home on the Connecticut River with a gate.

Calvin Coolidge died of a heart attack on Jan. 5, 1933. Grace Coolidge lived as an active widow for the next 25 years. She often attended Red Sox games at Fenway Park, supported her favorite charities and toured Europe in a car, which she drove herself. She also flew in planes.

Grace Coolidge died July 8, 1957 in Northampton, Mass. She is buried next to her husband in Plymouth, Vt.

With thanks to the National First Ladies’ Library. This story was updated in 2022.

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