In Ohio

Through the quiet air of central Ohio, a Presidential salute banged out last week, followed by the long-drawn bugle notes of "Taps". Citizens of Marion, Ohio, stood with bared heads around a $500,000 marble tomb, "Marion's beauty spot and Ohio's shrine." They were reburying their fellow-townsman, Warren Gamaliel Harding and Florence Kling Harding, his wife.

The ceremony was a simple one. A truck moved the two 5,000-lb. sarcophagi across the Marion cemetery where they had rested temporarily, President Harding's since 1923, Mrs. Harding's since 1926. Baptist ritual was read. Then guardsmen of the Tenth Infantry took their posts and the Marionites went home, again full of love and admiration for the jovial, handsome man whom today's young men and women of Marion can remember as a fond patter of heads and chucker of chins when he was Marion's leading citizen, then Ohio's Lieutenant Governor, then a U. S. Senator and finally that incomprehensibly great man, the President of the United States.

It was a simple, hometown ceremony. But next June--! Next June, President Coolidge, the great man of the present hour, will visit Marion and make a speech. He will help Marion and the Nation dedicate the Harding sepulchre, even as President Roosevelt entered Ohio in September, 1907, to make a speech at Canton and dedicate what was then "Ohio's Shrine", the sepulchre of William McKinley.