Dall-Boettiger

One day last week Presidential Secretary Stephen Early called White House newshawks into his office and advised:

"Better get ready to use the telephone, boys. The President and Mrs. Roosevelt announce the marriage of their daughter Anna Roosevelt Dall to Mr. John Boettiger."

Many a time Son-in-Law Charles John Boettiger (pronounced Bott-igger) had stood in that same office along with those same newshawks listening to Mr. Early's pronouncements. A strapping 6 ft. 2, he was just a plain high-school-educated newshawk covering police courts, bankers' conventions, scientific meetings for the Chicago Tribune until one day in 1930. Then another Tribune reporter, Jake Lingle, was shot in Chicago. Publisher McCormick of the Tribune put Boettiger on the case. He stuck to it, wrote the Tribune's stories on it, right up to the capture and conviction of Leo V. ("Buster") Brothers (TIME, Jan. 19, 1931). In 1932 when Franklin D. Roosevelt flew to Chicago to accept the Democratic nomination, Col. McCormick assigned John Boettiger to cover the Democratic Nominee. From that time he followed the Roosevelts, to Albany, to Hyde Park, to the Pacific Coast, to Warm Springs, to Washington. And soon other newshawks noted that he and Mrs. Dall got on well together. In November 1933, Boettigers wife, who had two children by a previous marriage, divorced him in Chicago. She charged cruelty, accused him of hitting her, breaking her thumb. Last July Anna Dall divorced Curtis Dall in Reno on grounds of extreme cruelty. Last month Boettiger quit his job as White House correspondent for the rabidly anti-New Deal Tribune, got a new and less embarrassing one with Cinema Tsar Will Hays.

All this, White House newshawks knew, but Secretary Early's announcement took them by surprise. Night before Mrs. Roosevelt had stood beside the President at the official, reception for the Supreme Court. Then she slipped away, caught a midnight train for Manhattan and at 9 o'clock in the morning, in the library of the Roosevelt house on East 65th Street gave her daughter in marriage to John Boettiger. A clerk from the Marriage License Bureau had brought a license to the house shortly after 8 a. m. There it was filled out by John Boettiger, 34, and Anna Roosevelt Dall, 28. Justice Frederic Kernochan, friend and fishing companion of the President, performed the ceremony. It was hardly over when the telephone rang and Father Roosevelt gave his congratulations to bride & groom. Fifteen minutes later the President's daughter was speeding away, her heart aflutter, in John Boettiger's automobile.

Ex-husband Curtis Dall, in Chicago, wired Mr. & Mrs. Boettiger: "Received your telegram here and am sending to you both my every good wish." Presently reached by reporters, he said: "Yes, I know Bottinger. He's a very nice chap.''

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.