THE CONGRESS: No. 3 for McAdoo

In 1885, the year he was admitted to the Tennessee bar, lean, virile William Gibbs McAdoo, 22, married Sarah Houstoun Fleming of Chattanooga. She bore him six children, saw him grow rich & famed, died in 1912. Next year Mr. McAdoo became Woodrow Wilson’s first Secretary of the Treasury and, somewhat hopelessly because he was already a grandfather and twice her age, began courting the youngest of the President’s three daughters. On a bench near the foot of the Washington Monument one December evening he plucked up courage, proposed, was accepted. Secretary McAdoo, 50, and Eleanor Randolph Wilson, 24, were married in the White House in the spring of 1914. She bore him two daughters, accompanied him to California after he had retired to practice law, saw him elected to the U. S. Senate in 1932. Last July, on the grounds that their interests were divergent and that her health did not permit her to live in Washington’s climate, Eleanor Wilson McAdoo formally divorced her Senator in Los Angeles. Though he rated as the Senate’s foremost frequenter of night clubs, spry, fun-loving old Senator McAdoo was not one to enjoy single life. Social Washington was fully prepared to see him marry one of the gay young women with whom he often danced at the swank Shoreham Hotel. But it was vastly surprised to learn one day last week that Senator McAdoo, on the eve of the golden anniversary of his first wedding, was about to marry one Doris Cross, 24. Miss Cross had entered Senator McAdoo’s California home as a nurse shortly after finishing her training course in 1931, was put on the Government pay roll two years ago when the Senator got her a job in the Public Health Service. Last winter she was transferred to Washington. Reserved and pious, she belongs to the Seventh Day Adventists’ Church.

Day after their engagement was announced, Senator McAdoo took Doris Cross to “Beall’s Pleasure.” ancient, ivy-covered Maryland home of his daughter, Mrs. Brice Clagett. There, to the tinkling of a large golden harp, the gaunt, grey Senator and the small, brown-haired nurse quietly took their vows.

Said Senator McAdoo’s new mother-in-law in San Diego, Calif.: “They should be very happy. The Senator is a fine man, a good man.”

Said Senator McAdoo’s new father-in-law, 16 years his junior, in Oakland, Iowa: “I don’t care if he is a Senator and a Democratic leader, I still don’t like the idea of a girl her age marrying a man his age.”