New Fowl Roost?

When careful Calvin Coolidge became Vice President, he looked around Washington for a house. But "they were all too small or too large.'' He had two boys in school. His salary ($15,000) was almost his only income. Living beyond his income was inconceivable. So he availed himself of the New Willard Hotel's natural eagerness to shelter a Vice President and took a suite there at satisfactory terms. "Any other course for me," he later wrote, "would have been cut short by the barnyard philosophy of my father, who would have contemptuously referred to such action as the senseless imitation of a fowl which was attempting to light higher than it could roost." Mr. Coolidge urged that something be done to house future Vice Presidents permanently.

Among those who offered fowl roosts too high for careful Calvin Coolidge was rich Mrs. John B. Henderson, Washington socialite, nonagenarian widow of a Senator from Missouri, who has seen all Presidents from Lincoln to Hoover. Long has she labored to build up Washington's Meridian Hill district into a paradise of embassies and official buildings along an "Avenue of the Presidents." She asked Congress to let the Vice President live in her $300,000 mansion on 15th Street. Representative Ernest Willard Gibson of Vermont prepared a bill accepting Mrs. Henderson's gift for the nation, and appropriating $30,000 to furnish the place, $25,000 per annum to maintain it.

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