Calvin coolidge jr son died
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To a casual observer on July 4, 1924, Calvin Coolidge must have seemed the most fortunate man in the nation. It was his 52nd birthday, and just weeks before he had secured the Republican nomination for the presidency. His election appeared a shoo-in as the Democrats were in disarray.
His wife, Grace, had quickly charmed Washington society and they had two handsome sons, John and Calvin. The president had come remarkably far from his birth in a rear room of his father’s general store in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. The Coolidges seemed to have it all.
In reality, on that day the president, his wife and son John were in deep emotional turmoil. The youngest son, Calvin, was in physical agony and facing hospitalization for treatment of a case of blood poisoning that had eluded all the efforts by doctors to control it. The Coolidge family would soon be in a bedside vigil in their son’s hospital room.
Calvin had just completed his junior year at Mercersburg Academy. He was an avid reader, a skilled debater and a hurdler on the track team. Despite being an excellent student, he had a reputation for being a prankster. During his junior year, Calvin underwent a dramatic growth spurt and, in the final family picture taken just before his illness, he was taller than both his father and br
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Background
When he went, the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.- The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge, 1929
Looking at the photos taken the day of the game, one can see the weather, albeit in the faces of President Coolidge's two sons, 17 year-old John and 16 year-old Calvin Jr. Washington D.C., infamous as the northernmost city to boast a humid subtropical climate - when, that is, it's not snowing - was 91 °F on June 30, 1924, and the boys, in their woolen suits and vests, hats and ties, were sweltering. But Coolidge had just been nominated for president some two weeks before and would seem to have needed the photos, for there were several newspaper shots taken on the 30th, of the Coolidge family, the Coolidge-Dawes Republican ticket, and various party worthies. But added to the campaign's demands, however, were Coolidge's own. The man who made his sons don tuxedos for dinner every night would not let a mere summer monsoon allow them to appear in a formal photo in anything less than a suit. Perhaps it was the heat, then, or all the layers of clothing, that made Calvin Jr. forego wearing socks under his sneakers that afternoon, when he went out to play tennis on the White House court. Maybe he couldn't find a pair, or clean ones, or didn't even•
Coolidge Chronology
Calvin Jr. Dies
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