Last week, while the 75th Congress hustled through the last busy hours of a four-and-a-half-month session (see p. 10), Franklin Roosevelt suffered from traveler's itch. Finally came the hour when he could send a message to Congress saying he had "no further business" for it. By the time Congress had chosen a committee to notify the President that it was ready to adjourn, Franklin Roosevelt's special train with him aboard was highballing out of Washington's Union Station. Once more Father Roosevelt was off to one of those family ceremonies which Roosevelts love. This time the event was Johnny's Day, the wedding—perhaps the last among Franklin Roosevelt's lively brood— of his youngest, John Aspinwall Roosevelt, 22, to Anne Lindsay Clark, 21, at Nahant, Mass.
Johnny Roosevelt is the gayest, vaguest, gentlest, most winning of the Presidential sons. Anne is no great beauty but full of spirit, a good sailor, swimmer and dancer. When Johnny first presented her to his father, he said: "This is Miss Schmaltz." "Oh!" exclaimed the President, "I thought it was Zilch." The late F. Haven Clark, Anne's father, was a Boston banker. He had a place on Campobello Island, N. B. straight across the road from the Roosevelts'. But Anne became engaged to another boy, John interested in another girl. Not till last year did they take to one another.
Last week, when the President got off his train at Salem, he went down to a scrubbed-up coal wharf at which his yacht Potomac had tied up. There, Anne and her pretty 18-year-old sister Sally went aboard with John to pose for more photographs. Father Roosevelt had the ship anchor for the day off the Nahant peninsula. That evening the wedding party dined aboard, later went ashore for more gaiety than the Presidential yacht could offer.
The wedding day was the biggest that sleepy Nahant has known since Roosevelt I paused there in 1902 to visit Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's grandfather. Anne's Boston background is thoroughly Republican (though not so dramatically Tory as Ethel du Font's) but many a Bostonian declined an invitation to the wedding reception. Startled Mother Clark, after planning for 400 guests, received White House requests for 550 invitations, most of which were accepted. The Secret Service cautiously wired off the narrow causeway leading out to the village from the mainland, made guests walk to the church. Cars there were for the bride & groom's families, including the entire clan Roosevelt, even Sistie and Buzzie Dall (now 11 and 7, called Eleanor and Curtis), with their mother, Mrs. John Boettiger, all the way from Seattle.