The Story Of An Experiment: After 15 Years

TIME’S way of handling news should always produce a sense-making report. Occasionally, it achieves something more—a story that readers remember and quote and write about to TIME. After 15 years, many old TIME readers remember its story on the death and funeral of Calvin Coolidge. Written by John Shaw Billings (then National Affairs editor, now editorial director), the story told simply and very clearly how the news of his death came to the Senate, the House, President Hoover, and to Mrs. Aurora Pierce, “longtime Coolidge housekeeper” at Plymouth, Vt. She “heard a tap on the homestead window. Allen Brown, a neighbor, was outside. She raised the sash to hear him say: ‘Calvin’s dead, Aurora.’ ” TIME told how the stockmarket, shocked, had fallen and then “closed with a brief little rally —a farewell salute to the man whose name has been given to the greatest bull market in history.”

TIME gave the circumstances of his death: “Mr. Coolidge sat talking with Secretary Ross—about the Plymouth place, last year’s pa’tridge shooting, hay fever. … He evened up the pens on the desk. He went ‘down cellar,’ watched the furnace man shovel coal. About noon he disappeared upstairs, presumably to shave, as so many New Englanders do about midday.”

Billings’ selection of detail told a lot about Calvin Coolidge, the stock from which he sprang, and a lot about the U.S. and about a period which, even in 1933, was becoming dim. The “point” of the story was news because, although it may be hidden, the New England stamp, the shrewd, homely democracy of the little white towns, is impressed on the American character.