Extra Credit: A Characteristically Quiet Centennial

This summer marked a centennial for both a U.S. President and a First Lady and UVM alumna. One hundred years ago in August, Grace Goodhue Coolidge and her husband, Calvin, then the vice president of the United States, were far from Washington, in the middle of their summer vacation at the Plymouth Notch, Vt., home where Calvin was raised. Grace was born and grew up in Burlington, where her father was a steamboat inspector. After her graduation in 1902 with a teaching degree, Grace went to work at what is now the Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech in Northampton, Mass., where she met the young lawyer she would wed in 1905 in Burlington, in the parlor of her family’s house on Maple Street.

Calvin’s political career soon blossomed, and he would serve two terms as governor of Massachusetts before becoming vice president in 1921. On the night of August 2, 1923, the Coolidges were roused from their sleep in the middle of the night by a messenger (the farmhouse had neither electricity nor telephone). President Warren Harding had died of a heart attack. After it was determined that John Coolidge, Calvin’s father, as a notary and justice of the peace, could administer the Oath of Office, the simplest presidential inauguration in the nation’s history took place in the farmhouse by kerosene lamplight at about 2:47 a.m.

As First Lady, Grace shared the aversion to publicity that had helped earn her husband the nickname “Silent Cal,” but she overcame it to become a popular Washington hostess and the first First Lady to be heard nationwide on the newfangled talking newsreels. After the Coolidge administration ended in 1929, the family retired to Northampton, and Grace continued her work on behalf of the deaf community and the Red Cross. Calvin died suddenly in 1933, and Grace survived until 1957. She and her husband are both buried in the Plymouth Notch Cemetery.