I should call this blog “I get by with a little help from my friends.” This time it was a post by the Phi Gamma Delta Archives (and Archivist Towner Blackstock) that reminded me about the events of the early morning hours of August 3, 1923.
On August 2, 1923, when Grace Goodhue Coolidge fell asleep in her husband’s boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, she was the wife of the Vice President. In the wee small hours of August 3, she awoke to news that President Harding was dead. She dressed and joined her husband in the small parlor. Because the home had not yet been fitted with electricity, her father-in-law, Colonel John Coolidge, a Windsor County notary, administered the oath of office to his son Calvin, her husband, by the light of a kerosene lamp.
In his autobiography, Calvin Coolidge recalled that prior to heading to the parlor, he knelt down, and “with the same prayer with which I have since approached the altar of the church, asked God to bless the American people and give me power to serve them.” He took the oath with his hand on his mother’s bible. She died when she was a young boy.
If you’re ever near Plymouth Notch, Vermont, you can stop by and see the room where it happened. On that night, Grace Coolidge, a charter member of the Pi Beta Phi chapter at the University of Vermont, and Calvin Coolidge, a member of the Phi Gamma Delta Chapter at Amherst College, became the first President and First Lady to have been initiated into Greek-letter societies as college students. Only one other Presidential couple can make that claim – George W. Bush, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and Laura Welch Bush, Kappa Alpha Theta.
Two additional couples can both claim membership, however there are some caveats. Rutherford and Lucy Hayes, were honorary initiates, he of Delta Kappa Epsilon and she of Kappa Kappa Gamma. George Herbert Walker Bush and his son share membership in the Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter at Yale University and both were initiated as undergraduates. Barbara Pierce Bush was an alumna initiate of Pi Beta Phi.
