← Harold's Old Time Radio
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The rest of the story. Grace Anna Goodhue was a proper New England lady with a proper New England education, teaching at a proper New England school in Northampton, Massachusetts. So imagine Grace good use surprise when one morning, as she glanced up from watering the flowers in the proper flower bed beneath her classroom window, she beheld a gentleman shaving in his underwear. No, not right there among the petunias. Of course. That would have been most improper. Quite in fact, the gentleman was in a home across the way, his own, presumably shaving before the mirror, apparently utterly unaware that he was being observed through the open window. And surely he would have remained unaware where the proper Grace Goodhue of the proper Clark School, not in possession of one outrageous attribute. Her laugh. It was a laugh so lyrical, so remarkable that the distance across an entire thoroughfare would have been inadequate to smother it. And it was that Grace left her attention. Getting a laugh on this particular occasion may be demonstrated by the fact that it got the gentleman's attention. And yes, he turned from his shaving mirror. He squinted out the window in the general direction of its source, wondering what might have inspired such a lusty, hearty, happy thing. But the inspiration, it so happened, was not merely the sight of a gentleman shaving in his underwear. It was that this same gentleman, while shaving in the arguable privacy of his room, was also shaving with his hat on. Yet while the mystery of such a practice might have struck most of us first, it was the humor of it that occurred to Ms. Grace Goodhue. And so she laughed. And in laughing was she herself discovered. For the gentleman shaving in his underwear with his hat on, searching for the source of the laughter, locked eyes with its lovely author standing at the school's flower bed. And that is when Grace stopped laughing momentarily, only to start laughing all over again, this time even more riotously than before. Well, a note arrived at the school later that same day. It was a note addressed to the young woman watering the flowers this morning. A note in which the gentleman who shaved with his hat on introduced himself and requested a meeting. And Grace laughed once more when at that meeting, the gentleman explained about a particularly obstinate cowlick. A cowlick which tended to spring into his face while he shaved. And that's what the hat was for. That was to keep the cowlick on his head and out of his face. Once upon a strange encounter in the proper New England town of Northampton, there was a young teacher and a young lawyer, it turned out he was, who liked each other and saw more of each other and fell in love and married now. History most often meets us at our destinations. And yet you've witnessed the first sweet steps on a path leading all the way to the White House. For a proper New England lady named Grace Anna Goodhue. And a gentleman who shaved with his hat on. Calvin Coolidge. Now you know the rest of the story.