National Affairs: Two Little Girls

One afternoon Mrs. Calvin Coolidge and Mrs. Herbert Hoover chatted, as only women can chat, on the porch of the White House. It was to girlhood that their conversation turned.

Said Mrs. Hoover: “May I write the story of your childhood?”

Said Mrs. Coolidge: “Yes.”

So Mrs. Hoover wrote. The article was given to The American Girl, official magazine of the Girl Scouts for publication.* Last week it appeared under the title “When Mrs. Coolidge was a Girl.” Excerpts:

“She was a brown-haired, sweet-faced, sunny-tempered little girl whose name was Grace Goodhue, and she lived not many years ago in Burlington, Vt., on the shore of lovely Lake Champlain. Her name is now Mrs. Calvin Coolidge and she lives in the White House in Washington. Most of us when our span of life is run are found to have been very much the same from year to year, and those who have known her all her life say that Grace Coolidge is very like Grace Goodhue, even very much like wee Grace Goodhue, who rode in her tall springy baby carriage of the period and looked out with wide, serious eyes upon the Vermont world and thought it a fascinating place, “Having no brothers or sisters for playmates and with no little girls of similar age and tastes in her neighborhood, she nevertheless did not feel the loss of companionship, because of the devotion of her own play-loving mother. . . .

“Like all the rest of you, even when she was very tiny, she was busily doing whatever mother was doing and early learned to sew, to knit, to dust, to sweep, to set the table, to stand on a box and help with the dishes at the sink, to dry them shinily and to put them away on the cupboard shelves. . . .

“She and her mother told each other stories, sang songs together and discussed the little affairs that came their way as they sat and rocked and knitted or as she ironed put handkerchiefs on her own small ironing board, while mother was doing some of the larger pieces. . . .

“Whether she [Mrs. Coolidge] sits and knits, chatting with a friend or two in her lovely upstairs sitting-room with the view where the glorious Washington Monument pierces the blue sky and the green shores of Virginia rise beyond the Potomac, or whether she stands in a gown of state of white-and-gold brocade, about to receive some royal visitor, the present mistress of the White House is always a real person—just as real, just as sincere, just as easily understandable, as was tiny Grace Goodhue in Vermont or older Grace Goodhue of the Burlington [Vt.] High School.”

And who is this nice lady who writes so charmingly, so naively of the little girl of Vermont? Her name was Lou Henry when she romped among orange blossoms of Monterey, Calif. Later when a lovely coed, she met an earnest young man who was working his way through Stanford University. They were married, and her name became Mrs. Herbert Clark Hoover. She followed her husband to the ends of the earth. In China, in 1900, they lived for six weeks behind a barricade of sugar barrels and sandbags (Boxer Rebellion). Together they translated from medieval Latin the first work ever written on mining. In England, she brought up two sons in a home which became a rendezvous for U. S. citizens. And a few years ago she was content that her husband should become perhaps the busiest man in Washington. The lives of few U. S. white-haired ladies would be better reading for Girl Scouts than that of the onetime Lou Henry.

*A fortnight ago Mrs. Coolidge refused to allow the magazine to syndicate the article through newspapers. Mrs. Coolidge is honorary president of the Girl Scouts; Mrs. Hoover is first vice president.