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Mary Bancroft - "Autobiography of a Spy"


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Mary Bancroft “Autobiography of a Spy” – Debutante, Writer, Confidante, Secret Agent. The True Story of Her Extraordinary Life. (William Morrow, NY, 1983)

Allen Dulles kept two things he knew from the Warren Commission that could have changed the nature of their work as well as their conclusion that the President was killed by a lone assassin and not the result of a conspiracy. The first was Dulles’ knowledge of the CIA plots to kill Cuba Premier Fidel Castro, and the second was the close association between Mary Bancroft - one of his intimate agents and Michael and Ruth Paine, the patrons of the accused assassin and his family.

If Ruth Paine was treated in the same fashion as the landlady of Lincoln’s assassin, she would have been hanged, and if the assassin happened today, or Kennedy had survived the attack, Ruth and Michael Paine would have been treated as cohorts that enabled the crime to happen and harbored the responsible terrorist.

It wasn’t until after Allen Dulles died that, with the assistance of many of her wartime OSS reports, Mary Bancroft wrote her book documenting her relationships with her stepfather – Clarence W. Barron aka “CW,” the founding publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Ruth Forbes Paine (Michael’s mom), OSS agent and CIA boss Allen Dulles, the reluctant Nazi Hans B. Insidious and her role in the Valkyrie Plot – the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler.

Although she opens with book as a young girl in 1919 holding her father’s hand while watching a parade march down Fifth Avenue in New York City, led by Col. William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan and his regiment, C.W. Barron probably had more influence on her than anyone else, giving her an early interest in “the news” and teaching her how to keep files on index cards and to write reports.

It was C.W. who also always told her to “Write it up,…but remember that the facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth my lie!”

Continued at:

JFKCountercoup2: Mary Bancroft "Autobiography of a Spy"

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Guest Tom Scully

......a group of Woods Hole Institute trustees including Thomas J Devine and a Mr. Howland, former OSS who was linked to the CIA's Paul Hellmuth and David Stone of the NE Aquarium and (Howland and his sisters) was one of less than two dozen named along with Michael Paine bequeathed shares in Naushon Island. .....

....

(quote)

Annual Report

books.google.com Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution - 2006 - Snippet view

.....Thomas J. Devine William Everdell, ... M. Hoch Robert F. Hoerle Lilli S. Hornig Weston Howland, Jr. James B.Hurlock Columbus O. Iselin, Jr. Mary D.Janney George F.Jewett, ....

(/quote)

Continuing from my last post on this thread, it is interesting to me that Janney's mother and other former intelligence officers have been so committed to the Woods Hole Institute, the New England Aquarium, and certainly rubbed shoulders with the son of "Mrs. Weston Howland of Milton. How many coincidental links will have to surface, related to Mr. Bush and his close friend, Mr. Devine, before Bush's eulogy on the occasion of the funeral of Jerry Ford is finally described in corporate media as what it was, a farce!

I'm surprised that no one seems interested in how far back the ancestors of Michael Paine go and how firmly entrenched they are in the power structure. I dealt with that in some articles on my website.

http://www.minormusi...Drugs/Mask.html

THE FORBES CONNECTION

TO THE KILLING OF JFK

Ralph and Elise Cabot Forbes' daughter was Ruth Forbes, who first married the son of a minister, George Lyman Paine, and had one son named Michael Paine. Ruth's brother, William Cameron Forbes, was an American business executive and diplomat, born in Milton, Mass. in 1870, but spent much of his career in the Far East. He entered the mercantile house of his grandfather, John Murray Forbes, in Boston, becoming a partner there, after the end of Teddy Roosevelt's "splendid little war," in 1899.

Teddy appointed him in 1904 to the Philippine Commission, and he held several administrative posts in the islands before he served (1909-13) as governor-general and as a member of the Wood-Forbes Mission sent in 1921 by President Harding to the Philippines. Chairman in 1930 of a commission to study conditions in Haiti, he then went as ambassador to Japan during the Manchurian crisis, and in 1935 led an economic mission to East Asia.

Concurrently with these events, in 1902 Clarence Barron, representing Boston's powerful State Street, purchased Dow Jones & Company for $130,000. At the time of the purchase, Barron was publishing business bulletins in Boston and Philadelphia, which were merged into Dow Jones & Co. In 1907, the step-daughter of Clarence Barron, Jane Waldron Barron, married Hugh Bancroft, son of General William A. Bancroft (Harvard 1878), who was first elected mayor of Cambridge, Mass. in 1893 and reelected three times. He was chairman of the Brahmin-owned Boston Elevated Railway, and was a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University from 1893 to 1903. Hugh Bancroft also attended Harvard, where he was admitted to the elite Hasty Pudding Club. In 1912, Bancroft was made treasurer of Dow Jones, the holding company of the Journal. He became president in 1928, upon Clarence Barron's death. By that time, Bancroft and his family controlled the majority of Dow Jones & Company's shares. The Bancroft descendants have continued among the most significant shareholders of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.

THE MYSTERIOUS MICHAEL PAINE

Michael Paine, sixth in descent from Robert Treat Paine, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was also a great-great-grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His mother's grandfather William Hathaway Forbes, was the first president of the American Bell Telephone Company after the company consolidated a number of local telephone networks. His son, Ralph Emerson Forbes, left an estate of $2.5 million in 1937, in which Ruth had a share. Ralph's brother, Ruth's "Uncle Cam," (Harvard 1892), had started his career as a clerk with Jackson & Curtis, before moving to work as a partner in John Murray Forbes & Co. He was elected a director of AT&T, United Fruit, and Stone & Webster, Inc. in order to look after the family's large holdings in those companies. He was also appointed to the Philippine Commission and as vice governor of the Islands until 1913. After that he was a receiver of a Brazilian railway, and a presidential appointee to "study conditions" in the Philippines and in Haiti. He served as an Overseer of Harvard during 1914-20, then became a life member of MIT Corporation. From 1930-32 he was Ambassador to Japan. [Who's Who in America, 1954-55].

Michael Paine was descended from the Cabots on both his father's and his mother's side; he was thus a second cousin once removed of Thomas Dudley Cabot and a cousin of Alexander Cochrane Forbes, who married a daughter of Warren Delano Robbins (FDR's cousin) and served as a director of United Fruit and trustee of Cabot, Cabot and Forbes.

Paul F.Hellmuth (among the first Catholic laymen to serve on the board of Notre Dame), and a vice-president of Cabot, Cabot and Forbes was a trustee of the J. Frederick Brown Foundation, a CIA "conduit", along with G.C. Cabot. Thus the Paine family [had] links with the blue-blood intelligence circles of the OSS and CIA, In the summer of 1963 it was Ruth (Michael's wife), rather than Michael Paine, who maintained close relations with the patrician Paine and Forbes families, traveling east in July to stay with her mother-in-law at the traditional Forbes clan retreat of Naushon Island near Wood's Hole, Massachusetts (CE 416, 17 H 119). [source: Peter Dale Scott, The Dallas Conspiracy, ch. IV, pp. 2-4, as quoted in websites linked above]. Hellmuth's name would appear in 1974 in Jack Anderson's column as the law partner of Richard Nixon's impeachment attorney, allegedly involved in an industrial security company that was "wholly owned" by the CIA and used to shred documents to maintain secrecy.

...

Mary Bancroft's first husband, Sherwin Badger, was a Harvard graduate whose first job had been in the head office of United Fruit in Cuba. After a year in Cuba he became a journalist in Boston, later moving to the Wall Street Journal and Barron's in New York, both of which were published by Mary's step-grandfather, Clarence Walker Barron. Mary also had a long friendship with the Trotsky follower, architect George Lyman Paine, and his wife Ruth Forbes Paine, whose son Michael Paine and his wife Ruth befriended Marina Oswald the year prior to John Kennedy's assassination.

Michael Paine's uncle, Eric Schroeder, was a friend and investment associate of geologist Everette DeGolyer, a long-time Dresser Industries director, who served on the Dresser board with Prescott Bush. Schroeder was a cousin of Alexander "Sandy" Forbes, former director of United Fruit who "belonged to the elite Tryall Golf Club retreat in Jamaica with ... Paul Raigorodsky." [source: Richard Bartholomew, "Possible Discovery," p. 38. See also Mary Bancroft, Autobiography of a Spy (New York: William Morrow, 1983).

http://www.minormusi...ancroftbook.JPG

http://www.minormusi...ristocracy.html

In the acknowledgment of her book, Ms. Emerson states: "Pictures, information and every sort of help have been given by … certain members of the family now living on Naushon, Ralph E. Forbes, W. Cameron Forbes, and Edward W. Forbes." [19] The father of the three men mentioned was William Hathaway Forbes—married in 1865 to Edith, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson—who was the first president of American Telephone and Telegraph Co., having organized the corporation for Alexander Graham Bell in 1879. He had been a partner from 1865 until 1897 of J. Murray Forbes & Co. We met W. Cameron Forbes in the Forbes Clan. He was the uncle who had offered to bring John Kerry's mother, Rosemary, to keep house for him not long before she married Kerry's father. John Kerry has a brother named for this favorite uncle.

Friends of Lee Harvey Oswald

Ruth Forbes (1903-98), a daughter of William Hathaway and Edith (Emerson) Forbes, married George Lyman Paine (Harvard class of 1922), an "enthusiastic Marxist and Trotskyite," and gave birth in 1928 to Michael Paine. She and Paine divorced in 1934; she married a man named Giles W. Thomas, before marrying her last husband, Arthur M. Young—inventor of the Bell helicopter. [20] Michael Paine testified as to his family background during the Warren Commission hearings. Michael's testimony resulted from the fact that he and his wife had become very good friends with Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina in the six months or so before the Kennedy assassination. The friendship with the Oswalds occurred while Michael was employed in Fort Worth at Bell Helicopter—a company which eventually made a fortune manufacturing helicopters, a design patented by his stepfather, for the war in Vietnam. In Ruth Paine's testimony she recounted her visit to her in-laws' summer home on Naushon Island. Michael also testified that his grandfather paid his family's way to Naushon each year, but it is not clear whether this was a time the entire extended family came together or whether only parts of the family assembled at different times. It is clear from their testimony, however, that Ruth discussed Marina and Lee Oswald with her mother-in-law at that time, and that immediately upon her return in September of 1963 she invited Marina and the children to move into her house.

Much of the questioning of Ruth Paine before the Warren Commission came from Allen Dulles, the man whom John F. Kennedy had fired as Director of the C.I.A. Dulles never revealed at the time that he had known Ruth Forbes Paine Young and her family personally before questioning her daughter-in-law. Nor did he feel inclined to mention the fact that Michael Paine's grandmother's family (the Cabots) were huge stockholders in United Fruit Company; nor that both sides of the family—Cabot and Forbes—had owned land in Cuba that had been expropriated by Fidel Castro. [21] Above all, Dulles failed to mention that he and his brother, President Eisenhower's Secretary of State during the coup era, had previously been attorneys for the United Fruit Company.

April 8, 1947 - New York Times

HowlandForbesNaushonWoodsHole.jpg

http://www24.us.arch...12keit_djvu.txt

NAUSHON TRUST

Established Under

DECLARATION OF TRUST

May 2, 1932

....DECLAEATION OF TRUST made by W. Cameron Forbes, of

Norwood, Massachusetts, Rose D. Forbes, of Milton, Massachusetts,

James S. Russell, of said Milton, Ralph E. Forbes, of said Milton, and

Ellen Forbes, of said Milton, the original trustees hereunder.

Whereas, simultaneously with the execution hereof, said trustees

have received the amount of cash stated in Schedule A hereto attached,

to be held in trust hereunder, and have agreed to issue therefor eight

hundred and forty (840) shares of the beneficial interest of this trust;

and

Whereas, said trustees intend to use said fund for the purchase of

real and personal property from the trustees of Naushon Island under

the will of John M. Forbes and for other purposes hereunder :

Now, therefore, said trustees hereby declare and agree that they

will hold and administer said fund, together with any real or personal

property hereafter acquired by them therewith or as additions thereto,

in Trust, upon the trusts hereinafter set forth.

ARTICLE I.

Name.

All things relating to this trust may be done under the name

"Naushon Trust." ....

ARTICLE II.

Beneficial Interests, Shares and Certificates.

...3. The trustees shall issue eight hundred and forty (840) shares in accordance with their agreement mentioned hereinabove....

....ARTICLE in.

Trustees.

1. The full number of trusteeships shall be five, except that at Number,

any time or times after January 1, 1940, the shareholders shall have

the right, by vote of four-fifths (4/5) of the shares outstanding entitled

to vote, to increase the full number of trusteeships to not exceeding

seven. The five original trustees are named above. .....

..... iWM ayBe 8. All but one of the trustees in office at any time must be lineal descendants of John M. Forbes. No corporation may be a trustee. 9. Title to the trust property shall always vest in the trustees for the time being in office, and no conveyance or transfer between trustees shall be necessary when a new trustee comes into office. ...

....

ARTICLE XVI.

Termination and Amendment.

1. Unless sooner terminated as provided in paragraph 2 of this ? r u n r 8 a t tion 0(

Article, this trust shall terminate upon the expiration of twenty (20)

years from the death of the last survivor of the following-named great-

grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of John M. Forbes :

Henry Russell Atkinson, son of Ellen Forbes Atkinson of Brook-

line, Massachusetts;

David Cabot Forbes and Pauline Forbes, son and daughter of

Ralph E. Forbes of Milton, Massachusetts ;

John Forbes Russell and Robert Shaw Russell, sons of James S.

Russell of said Milton;

John Forbes Amory of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Walter

Amory of Providence, Rhode Island, sons of Mary Russell Amory;

John Hastings Hughes, son of Walter S. Hughes of Cambridge,

England;

Elliot Forbes and Anne Forbes, son and daughter of Edward W.

Forbes of Cambridge, Massachusetts ;

Waldo E. Forbes and Amelia Forbes, son and daughter of Ellen

Forbes of said Milton ;

Florence Forbes and Alexander Irving Forbes, daughter and son

of Alexander Forbes of said Milton;

Gordon Donald Forbes and Marguerita Hoima Forbes, son and

daughter of Gerrit Forbes of Sunninghill, Berkshire, England;

Elizabeth Forbes and Marjorie Forbes, daughters of Henry S.

Forbes of said Milton;

"William Emerson and Hope Emerson, son and daughter of Amelia

Forbes Emerson of Concord, Massachusetts;

Hester Anne Howland and Judith Forbes Howland, daughters of

Alice Forbes Howland of said Milton;

Weston Howland, textile executive, 80

Boston Globe - Feb 3, 1976

He leaves his wife, Alice (Forbes); two sons, Weston Jr. of Weston and David M. Howland of Sherborn; two daughters, Mrs. Judith H. Cook of Weston and Mrs. Hester H. Whitcher; .

Ethel Forbes and Joan Forbes, daughters of John Malcolm Forbes

of Winter Park, Florida ;

Michael Paine, son of Ruth Forbes Paine of New York City;

Mary Stewart, Anne Stewart, Jane Stewart and Sarah Malcolm

Stewart, daughters of Sarah Klebs Stewart of Stamford, Connecticut ;

Henry Francis Colt, Jr., Ellen Colt and Mary Forbes Colt, daugh-

ters of Mary Atkinson Colt of Cambridge, Massachusetts ;

Walter Amory, Jr. and John Copley Amory, sons of said Walter

Amory ;

Douglas B. Smith, Jr., son of Catherine Amory Smith of West

Point, New York;

Henry Sturgis Russell, Jr., and Susan Whitmore Russell, son and

daughter of Henry Sturgis Russell of Carpenteria, California. ...

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Mary Bancroft’s recollections of her step-grandfather Clarence W. Barron

From Autobiography of a Spy (William Morrow, 1983, p. 24-)

JFKCountercoup2: Clarence W. Barron & Mary Bancroft

….my stepmother’s stepfather, Clarence W. Barron – or “CW” as I called him – publisher of The Wall Street Journal….C.W. had married, rather late in life, a widow with two daughters whom he had adopted, the elder of whom became my stepmother. He was exactly fifty years older than I was, but I adored him, and he was a tremendous influence in my life.

A short man, about five feet inches tall, weighing well over three hundred pounds, CW had rosy cheeks, bright blue eyes twinkling behind rimless spectacles, and a beautiful white beard that he combed with a small gold comb at the table after meals, much to my stepmother’s annoyance. Until I was six, I thought he was Santa Claus.

When at home from his many travels, he entertained lavishly both at his house on Beacon Street in Boston and his summer place at Cohasset. In the downtown front room at Beacon Street, a white bear rug with head attached lay on a highly polished floor. I loved to stick my fingers in the bear’s open mouth with its bright red tongue, thrilled by the thought that the bear might come alive and bight my fingers off.

There was a large conservatory off the dining room where several brightly colored macaws squawked from their perches among CW’s magnificent orchid collection. Huge fantailed goldfish swam in and out among tiny stone castles in a pool over which an illuminated fountain played on the nights when CW entertained. The whole house smelled of fresh flowers, and the meals were delicious.

This setting was very deferent from the world into which CW had been born. His family had been of extremely modest means. His father worked as a teamster all his life to support a wife and may children of whom CW was next to the youngest and the only one to achieve such worldly success.

CW was the pioneer in financial journalism as we know it today, the first to tie the industrialization of the country into its history, the first to realize that the “news” lay not only in the building of railroads and the establishment of corporations but also in the character and mode of operation of the men involved. He knew and interviewed them all. Even those who were up to no good realized it was not in their best interest to refuse him an interview. Not only was he a crack reporter and the proprietor of an influential newspaper, but he was also the owner of an important news ticker service over which he exercised strict control. No company was mentioned on the Dow Jones tickers that CW had not investigated, either personally or through the gifted reporters in his employ.

In his vest pocket he always carried a pack of three-by-four-inch white cards on which he’s quickly jot down shorthand notes during an interview. He would later use these as references points for enlarged reports about the people he’d seen, what they’d said, as well as what they were planning to do and how this fitted into the larger picture. He worked at such a pace that he had two, sometimes even three, male secretaries dancing attendance, living at the house when he was home, or accompanying him on his travels.

He would stay in bed, dictating until noon, for he seldom retired before, two, three, or even four A.M. I learned more on a wide range of subjects when I dropped in on those morning dictating sessions than I ever learned at school. I became familiar with names like Morgan, Rockefeller, Schwab, Carnegie, Frick, Harriman, Ford, DuPont; with what these men were thinking; what they were planning and how they intended to go about it. I learned what was happening in the stock market, in railroads, oil, mining, shipping, public utilities, the automotive industry, and on the commodity markets. I learned how the stock market itself operated, about mergers, options, “puts” and “calls,” about “buying on margin” and “selling short.”

CW always kept a volume of the Bible on his bedside table and read in it first thing on arising in the morning and before retiring at night. He gave me what he considered the most useful edition of the Bible, “The Oxford Self-Pronouncing Bible – S.S. Teacher’s Edition,” printed on extremely thin paper, with many excellent maps and an elaborate Cyclopedic Concordance. He often quoted the Bible to make a point in the letters he wrote me from his travels and on his return would question me as to what I thought of the relevance of the quotes. His letters meant so much to me that I pasted them into a special scrapbook. And I am still amazed at the way in which he was able to write to a girl fifty years younger than he was in a way that meant so very much to her at the time.

His letters were full of anecdotes about the people he met. And scattered throughout were bits of advice that I have never forgotten such as “Always put the unpleasant truth in the interrogative form” and “Remember that facts are not the truth, but only indicate where the truth may lie.”

When my first husband, Sherwin Bdger, was working for the United Fruit Company and we were spending a year in Banes, Oriente, Cuba, I wrote CW how unhappy I was with life in the company-owned sugar mill town, how disgusted by the intrigues and disloyalty that I saw around me. In answer to my letter, he wrote,

It doesn’t make any difference where you take hold of the world, whether in Cuba or South Boston, if you only get down to the bottom and master the situation there. The railroad presidents are the men who came up from the coupling pins. They do not graduate from Harvard or Yale as a rule, but from the college of hard knocks….We should be grateful to our Heavenly Father if we get the rough experience of life in early youth and learn the lesson it provides….You will run up against a lot of adventures, I believe, in Cuba, a lot of bad politics, bad manners, disloyalty, and dishonesty. But never hesitate to meet people from all walks of life – even gamblers and crooks – always study them and learn to differentiate clearly between the good and bad you find everywhere, not only among people, but within individuals themselves.

I was only twenty-one and CW’s comments struck just the right note, making it possible for me to look at my surroundings with different eyes. I realized that no matter what happened, I had CW’s backing. He was always there to help me incorporate the most bizarre experiences, the most unconventional thoughts and feelings into an enlarged and more detached view of the world. There was no one else in m life in those days with his particular type of vision, or anyone I felt had such genuine affection for me as I actually was. I could confide in him exactly how I felt, exactly what I thought, and he would not pooh-pooh it as nonsense. Nothing seemed strange to him. He was interested in everyone and everything in some particular way, and he took endless pains to explain to me just what that way was. He was my one real and trusted friend from the time I was fifteen until I was thirty...

CW urged me to keep a line-a-day dairy and a journal in which to write about anything that interested me. And he persuaded me to learn to type and to set up my own files of subject for articles and stories. Because I felt he cared for me and was interested in my having a life that satisfied me, I eagerly followed everything he suggested.

He’d send me packages of book on every imaginable subject with no rhyme or reason in their selection. And he’s enclose a note asking me to write him what I thought of the books after I’d read them. He took all my ideas seriously and spent time, either arguing with me or questioning me as to why I felt as I did.

I have never known anyone more alive than CW. Even today when I think about him, as I do so often, I cannot help smiling to myself and feeling the same warmth I always felt in his presence. He made the world seem a glittering, exciting, and very worthwhile place to be and that it was a privilege merely to be alive.

He thought I should try my hand at journalism, not only because I could “express myself,” as he put it, but because he thought I had what he called “a nose for news.” Later, after I had worked with Professor Jung, I realized this nose for news was, in Jungian terms, nothing but a highly developed and extroverted intuition. Needless to say, CW himself had an extraordinary nose for news. Once, when crossing Texas on a train, he suddenly insisted that the train be stopped at an unscheduled way station because he was convinced that the Supreme Court was about to hand down an extremely important decision. There was absolutely no reason for this hunch. He had simply picked it out of the air. However, the result was that the reporter from The Wall Street Journal was the only newspaperman present when the Supreme Court handed down its decision on the Teapot Dome case, a decision that had not been expected for several months.

I was present myself on one occasion when CW’s “nose” was at work. We were playing bridge at his home in Cohasset. CW was an excellent bridge player, but on this particular evening he revoked several times and, finally flinging down his cards, said he couldn’t continue. Important news was about to break. Every ten minutes or so he sent one of his secretaries to phone the office to see what was coming in over the wires. For over an hour the secretary would report that there was nothing. Finally he returned to say there was still nothing – except that President Warren G. Harding, on a visit to California, had had crabs for dinner and was suffering from an upset stomach. “That’s it!” CW exclaimed. “Get me the Vice President!”

Calvin Collidge, the Vice-President and a good friend of CW’s was visiting his father at his home in Vermont. CW finally got in touch with him, told him about Harding, and added that Collidge should stay where he was and be sworn in as President of the United States by his father – a notary public – preferably by candlelight as that might be more picturesque. My stepmother was greatly annoyed with CW for “burying poor Mr. Harding before he was even dead.” But CW was adamant. He was positive Harding was going to die – and, of course, he did. Calvin Collidge was sworn in as President of the United States by his father – and by candlelight at that.

At one point during his presidency, President and Mrs. Collidge came to lunch with CW at Cohasset. They arrived on the presidential yacht, the Mayflower, which required deeper water than that provided by Cohasset Harbor. So the Mayflower had anchored offshore and the presidential party had arrived by launch at the dock on CW’s property. Mrs. Collidge was all charm and animation, but the President was his usual dour self. The lunch consisted of boiled lobsters that CW knew were a particular favorite of the President’s. The other guests began to argue about the rise and fall of the tides at Cohasset Harbor, while Secret Service men lurked among the shrubbery outside the windows. Some people thought the tide rose six feet, others have said seven. At that point, the President put down the lobster claw he was cracking and announced in a surprisingly loud voice, “Nine feet!” Needless to say he was right.

One of the stories current during Coolidge’s term was that once, when he had opened his mouth a moth had flown out. I heard him tell my father that he had decided he could either talk or be President. He couldn’t possibly do both. On several occasions, however, I heard him not only talk but tell very amusing stories in his dry, New England way.

CW had a photograph of Henry Ford given to him by Ford himself. It was an unusual picture with a kind of golf finish that made it gleam as if it were actually illuminated. CW, noticing the President looking at it rather crossly, began to explain its history, when Mrs. Coolidge interrupted saying, “Calivin doesn’t like Henry Ford! He gave him a maple sugar bucket for the Wayside Inn and Ford used it as a wastebasket!” Collidge nodded and, without change of expression, said. “That’s right!”

…In the last years of his life CW was subjected to increasingly sever attacks of bronchitis. Consequently, because of the severity of Boston winters, he spent the winter months on his houseboat, the Edna B., among the Florida Keys. On several occasions I went down to spend some time with him and play “bumble-puppy.” “Bumble-puppy” was his name for a kind of idiotic bridge he would play when he had as a guest someone from whom he was trying to extract a story for The Wall Street Journal. When playing “bumble-puppy,” CW would play bridge as if he were a complete idiot, carrying me as his partner, and playing for extremely high stakes He would whistle and hum, trump his partner’s ace, seem astonished when he lost a trick, and all the time amid the whistling and humming, shoot sudden questions at his victim. I was amazed at how well this strategy worked. I watched him get information out of W.C. Durant of General Motors on one occasion and out of the head of the Whelan Cigar Store chain on another, information that I am sure neither man realized he was revealing until he read later what CW had wrote about him in The Wall Street Journal.

What really made life enjoyable that first year in New York (1928) was that CW kept an apartment at the Ritz and was often in town. His death in the autumn of 1928 was a terrible blow to me. My only consolation for his loss was that he had been spared all knowledge of the stock market crash of 1929. I’m afraid that it would have broken the heart of one whose faith in the economy of this country was literally boundless.

“But remember that facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie!”

– C.W. Barron

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