Summer Sports

Royal coachman, black gnat, grizzly king, professor! If Calvin Coolidge never again has sport he will at least remember the summer of 1928 as the time when he learned his fly-book by heart, casting on the brown Brule stream. As July petered out and the level of the waters dropped a little in the dry weather, the Brule's inhabitants grew hungrier and hungrier. There came an evening when the President canoed home to Cedar Island Lodge with no less than 26 trout. This was one more than Wisconsin's legal limit but Wisconsin took no action. From trout-fishing, the President, one evening, turned to "plugging" for black bass. Guide John Laroque piloted him over the glassy sunset surface of Island Lake, 20 miles from the Lodge. Mrs. Coolidge and the secret-service men watched and applauded. The President caught ten. Another new sport was clay-pigeon shooting. The President was presented with some handsome shotguns and a set of traps for whirring out the dark four-inch discs with yellow circles on their backs. The secret-service men showed him how to stand at the butt, get set, cry "pull!" and blow the sailing "pigeons" to dusty smithereens. There was also baseball--the opening game of the annual tournament of the Head-of-the-Lakes semiprofessional baseball association. The field was beside the railroad yards in Superior. Long freight and ore trains trundled by constantly. President Coolidge threw in the first ball and the first battery knocked it out-of-the-lot.* Mrs. Coolidge munched chocolates and watched vivaciously. John Coolidge, though there were many hits, errors, wild throws, etc., looked badly bored. The President left after the third inning--his baseball custom.

P: From Secretary Wilbur, last fortnight, President Coolidge heard that Augustino Sandino, the Nicaraguan "rebel" leader, in whose suppression the U. S. Marines have been engaged for nearly two years, had at last become discouraged and had "disappeared;" that his forces were retreating from Nicaragua toward the Honduran border. Two days after this Wilbur report came news that a squadron of five Marine airplanes had thoroughly "strafed" a rebel camp, near where Nicaragua ends and Honduras begins. P: In President Coolidge's name, congratulations were cabled to President Charles Dunbar, Burgess King of Liberia, on the 81st anniversary of that Republic's independence; and to President Senior Augusto B. Leguia of Peru on the latter's 107th anniversary. P: In Manhattan, for Calvin Coolidge from Benito Mussolini arrived a heavy parchment-bound book, two feet square, entitled La Basilica di San Francesco d' Assisi, full of pictures of that famed church. At Cedar Island Lodge arrived four curiously wrought pieces of iron with holes punched in them. They were left by one A. H. Kellerman, 70-year-old Wisconsin farmer, who said: "Just give these to the President and ask him if he knows what they are." President Coolidge took one look and said: "They don't fool me. I know what they are. They're ox shoes. I've nailed many of them myself." P: To represent the U. S. as "observers" at the International Telegraph Conference next month in Brussels, the President appointed Charles Henry Shedd of Chicago (Swift & Company), Vice President John Goldhammer of the Commercial Cable Co., Manhattan) and U. S. Minister to Sweden Leland Harrison. P:The President went to Cannon Falls, Minn., and delivered a dedicatory speech at a monument to the late Col. William Colvill, leader of the charge at Gettysburg in which the First Minnesota Volunteers lost 215 of their 262 men. "In all the history of warfare," the President said, "this charge has few, if any, equals. . . . It probably saved the Union Army from defeat. We may well stop to consider on this Sabbath day what Power it was that stationed these men at this strategic point on this occasion. . . . We can only infer that it was the same Power which guided the path of the Mayflower . . . Franklin and Washington . . . George Rogers Clark . . . Lincoln and Grant . . . Fields of France." The last half of the speech dwelt on present-day Prosperity in the South, on union in the Nation.

* But because of the fence it was not a home-run. The ground rules permitted only two bases.