Recently the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation hosted our July Fourth at the Notch Celebration, including a remembrance ceremony at the Plymouth Notch Cemetery and a special reading of the Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge to celebrate our thirtieth president’s birthday and the birth of our nation.

President Calvin Coolidge was fortunate to preside over what was probably the most exciting, vital, and creative decade of the Twentieth Century — the Nineteen-Twenties. It was a decade of youth, symbolized by Lindbergh and the Flapper. It was a decade when modern America came alive. Cars filled the roads; radios, refrigerators, and electric washing machines appeared in the home; movies sparkled with “stars,” whose voices would soon be heard on the screen; and thanks to a general prosperity, there was money to spend not just on the necessities of life but on its pleasures as well. It could be rightly said that the American people had never had it so good.

This week marks the 90th anniversary of the sad and untimely death of Calvin Coolidge, Jr., President Calvin Coolidge’s younger son. The general story is well-known: while playing lawn tennis with his brother on the White House grounds, sixteen-year-old Calvin, Jr. developed a blister atop the third toe of his right foot. Before long, the boy began to feel ill and ran a fever. Signs of a blood infection appeared, but despite doctors’ best efforts, young Calvin, Jr. was dead within a week.