Miscellaneous Articles about First Ladies
Miscellaneous Articles
Florence Harding voice recording
During the years of my research on Florence Harding I found reference to her making a voice recording in private with Evalyn McLean - for fun, apparently on a "talkie" device given to Mrs. McLean by her friend D.W. Griffith. However, there was also a gramaphone recording device in the Harding's home in Washington when he was a U.S. Senator and read one of his campaign speeches to be sold in 1920, during the campaign. In all my my adventures and explorations for material on her, I never once came across it. I quite thoroughly went through every box and item in the McLean papers, etc. Nothing.
A few years ago, someone sent me a recording was made of a woman who seemed to "sound" regionally like Mrs. Harding on a record that was made of historical sound recordings during the 1976 Bicentennial. The suggestion was that the President had participated in some ceremony on the South Lawn in which he ignited a rocket and Mrs. Harding was recalling the event. The brief voice recording begins, "My husband placed the rocket on the lawn, lit it and it took off...."
After some extensive research, all indications were that it was, in fact, Esthert Goddard, wife of fuel-rocket inventor Robert Goddard and she was speaking of his first launching successful rocket launcing experiment which he conducted on the lawn of his aunt in Massachusetts - in 1926. Mrs. Gooddard died at age 95 in 1998.