White House gossip : $b from Andrew Johnson to Calvin CoolidgeColman, Edna M. (Edna Mary)
History
White House gossip : $b from Andrew Johnson to Calvin Coolidge
Colman, Edna M. (Edna Mary)
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Washington (D.C.) -- Social life and customs; White House (Washington, D.C.)
Banker Kling approved of all this and more, so he took his lively
little daughter in hand and trained her as he would have trained a
first son, in all the details of business and banking. Florence Kling
was an apt pupil, and soon she was as familiar with her father’s
routine and detail of work as he was. Naturally, the comradeship and
understanding between them became very close.
All the joys and sports of her day, the frolics, parties, and good
times belonging to girlhood, were also open to this girl, who had a
knack of making and keeping her friends. Early in young-ladyhood she
became the wife of Mr. De Wolff and the mother of a son. The marriage
was not happy, and in the course of time a divorce terminated it. Both
Mr. De Wolff and their son died.
As a child, this girl learned to ride horseback, becoming an expert
horsewoman, being able to handle any horse she chose to ride. This
accomplishment played a prominent part in her friendship with Editor
Harding. Gossip declared that they met at a dance and that the mutual
interest there created was speedily fanned into love. An ardent
courtship followed, much of which was spent by the two riding horseback
through the country lanes.
Mr. Kling viewed this budding romance with stern disfavour, for he had
little use for the newspaper profession. As the affair progressed,
his opposition increased, and he took a high hand in forbidding the
marriage. Equally high-spirited, his daughter refused to give up her
fiancé just because he was struggling with a one-horse newspaper. She
chose her lover in preference to her father, and for seven years Mr.
Kling refused to speak to either of them. Later, however, he came to
admire his son-in-law and to admit that his daughter’s husband was all
that he could desire. Because of the bitter feeling in her family, the
young couple were married in the house which Mr. Harding bought and
which they occupied as their home during all of their years of life in
Marion, and in which the front-porch campaign for the Presidency was
conducted.
From the beginning, their domestic life was ideal, that of comrades
sharing every problem. In the privacy of their home circle, they were
“the Duchess” and “Sonny,” and sometimes these nicknames slipped out
more readily than the Florence and Warren. He was always deferential
and solicitous to a degree that was a point of pleased observation to
the throngs that met them. Mrs. Harding was a notable example of the
modern woman whose pride in her husband personally as well as in his
career was the outstanding motive of her own life and activities. Apart
they were never content.
“I have no ambition for myself. I am content to trail along with Warren
Harding. He has the warmest sympathy of any man I know,” she once said,
adding, “Even the newsboys were crazy about him, just as crazy as his
dogs were.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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