Happy Ending

The honor of your presence is requested at the ceremonies attending the Inauguration of the President of the United States, January 20, 1937. Please present the enclosed card of admission.

When this handsomely engraved official invitation from the Inaugural Committee's Chairman Gary T. Grayson turned up on his desk one day last week, President Roosevelt let out a roar of delight, seized a pen, scrawled across the bottom a note to Chief W. E. Rockwell of the White House Social Bureau: "Please regret this invitation. I will be too busy."

Back from Chief Rockwell came a sheet of White House stationery on which the White House's veteran penman, Adrian Barclay Tolley, had traced in spidery Spencerian the following message:

The President regrets that because of the rush of official business, he is unable to accept the courteous invitation to be present at the ceremonies attending the Inauguration of the President of the United States, January twentieth, nineteen hundred thirty seven.

With another roar, the President again took pen in hand, squiggled across the bottom a note to Rear Admiral Grayson: "I have re-arranged my engagements & work & think I may be able to go. Will know definitely Jan. 19. FDR."

P: President Roosevelt made history last week by sending to Congress his great plan for Governmental reorganization.

P: The week included the annual White House reception to the Supreme Court, the dinner for the Speaker of the House, and a talk with David Lilienthal about TVA. President Roosevelt ended in highest spirits a First Administration which had begun amid national gloom. At the Speaker's dinner he leaned toward Maine's Senator Frederick Hale, solemnly declared that the chief of protocol had had great difficulty in seating the evening's guests because of the presence of the "Ambassador from Maine." At his press conference next day a jesting newshawk asked if the Navy's two new battleships would be named "Maine" and "Vermont." The grinning President replied that the law requires battleships to be named for states "in the Union."

P: At 1 p. m. on Friday a parade of some 2,000 Relief malcontents straggled up to the White House in the rain, sent in a delegation to demand a 20% wage increase. Franklin Roosevelt was not there. An hour before, he had closed his office, gone into seclusion to work on his Second Inaugural Address.

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