Holiday's End

THE PRESIDENCY

Try as he may, no good U. S. President can get far away from his White House duties. After six days of mediocre fishing in the Gulf Stream off Long Key, Fla., President Hoover cut short his winter vacation and journeyed back to Washington. No Sunday fisherman, he did not want to waste an idle day aboard the houseboat Saunterer. Likewise he was impatient to get his hands back upon the London Naval Conference, where developments were not altogether to his liking. French demands had boosted auxiliary tonnage figures to such levels that the President could have read such press headlines as: HOPE FOR NAVY CUTS WANES POWERS FACE NAVY BUILDING RISE

President Hoover did not have to be told by Capt. Allen Buchanan, his naval aide and conference adviser in Florida, that limitation so high that the U. S. might have to spend half a billion dollars on new ships to attain its quota strength was not the reduction of naval armaments the President had first publicly set his heart on.

It was barely daylight when the President's train reached Washington. But he stepped off immediately and hastened to the White House, primed to steer the London parley, if possible, into new and more hopeful channels.

The President's fishing had not been extraordinarily successful. His total catch: one sailfish (45 Ibs.). one mackerel, four bonitos, three barracuda. Mrs. Hoover had caught a 38-lb. sailfish, some red snappers.

Honors for the expedition went to the Hoover guests. No. 1 angler was Agnes Harvey Stone, plain-dressing, unrouged intellectual wife of Associate Justice Harlan Fiske Stone of the U. S. Supreme Court. Her 66-lb. sailfish, landed after a two-hour battle from dusk to moonrise eight miles out in the Atlantic, set the season's record, won her one of the Long Key fishing club's little gold buttons for a championship.* Washington society, whom the Stones entertain often and well, waited for her own account of the feat. If anyone should impolitely doubt her story, she can substantiate it by the best evidence--a cinema of her catch taken by Mrs. Hoover herself in the same small boat at sea.

Close behind Mrs. Stone came Dr. Vernon Kellogg with a 65-lb. sailfish. After much razzing by his companions, because he complained sharks decapitated his big catches before he could land them, Justice Stone finally caught a 42-pounder.

Boastful Miami, fidgety at being out of the publicity picture of a President on vacation in Florida, hired the Goodyear dirigible Defender and sent its Mayor C. H. Reeder and other potent citizens flying down the coast to the Hoover offshore fishing grounds. The Defender dipped low over the Saunterer, dropped a pouch on its deck containing a hail-and-farewell message from Mayor Reeder to the President. Only thus did Miami get into the Hoover holiday news.

*The club's prize mounted sailfish caught by Author Zane Grey in 1918, weighed 125 lbs.

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