When fire swept the Willard Hotel’s top-floor ballroom on April 23, 1922, Vice President Calvin Coolidge was among the guests caught in the commotion. The fire later acquired a wonderful story about someone mistaking him for the hotel’s vice president. The newspapers have their own good stories, including a senator’s bath and a guest’s missing teeth.
Calvin and Grace Coolidge were living at the Willard because the vice president had no official residence. The hotel at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue was their Washington home, so this was more than an interrupted overnight stay.
The morning after the Gridiron dinner
The evening before, President Warren Harding, Coolidge and other Washington officials had attended the Gridiron Club’s spring dinner. The newspaper men put on skits and poked fun at their political guests. By Sunday morning, the ballroom where they had entertained them was burning.
In its April 29 report, Editor & Publisher said the cause had not been determined. Local authorities suspected cigarette butts left by the diners.
The Washington Herald put the fire across the top of its April 24 front page. Its account described firefighters hauling hoses up ladders and struggling through smoke to reach the ballroom. Water poured into the floors below, and the paper reported two severely injured firefighters and a guest with pneumonia taken to the hospital suffering from shock.
You can see what was left of the room in the photograph above. With the roof exposed and debris everywhere, can you imagine the dinner there just hours earlier?
A bath, a derby and a missing set of teeth
Alongside the main story, the Herald ran a column about the guests’ escape. Senator T. Coleman du Pont of Delaware told the reporter that he took a bath and dressed before going out to help. He then carried luggage and tried to calm people in the dripping corridors.
His invitation, as the paper recorded it, was “Come on out, the water’s fine.” That is quite a greeting from a man whose hotel is on fire.
Other guests were less pleased with their morning. A Los Angeles attorney reached safety without his removable teeth, and police would not let him return for them. Another man appeared in the lobby wearing a derby but no shoes. He was equally unhappy with the policeman who kept him from going back for his footwear.
Guests gathered with their pets in the hotel’s Peacock Alley corridor, while volunteers helped bring luggage downstairs. The Herald also described hotel employees knocking on doors and calmly asking people to leave their rooms. Their manner, the reporter thought, helped prevent panic.
Coolidge appears in that account without the famous punch line. The paper said he was already up when the first engine arrived, roused Grace and dressed. Grace went to the home of his secretary, while the vice president remained at their suite. It is a quieter scene than the one usually told about him.
Which vice president?
In a later telling, a hotel manager tells Coolidge to evacuate. Coolidge identifies himself as the vice president, and the manager initially lets him stay before asking: vice president of what?
Versions differ about whether the other man was a fire official or the hotel manager. In a PBS interview, author Jared Cohen told the manager version, ending with: “I thought you were the vice president of the hotel.”
It is a great Washington joke about the limits of an impressive title, but we have not established that exchange from contemporary coverage. It belongs here as a later telling, rather than a transcript of what happened that morning.
The Herald did preserve another exchange involving the newspaper men who hurried over to help. One woman thanked them, then pointed out that they ought to be helping anyway because the fire had followed the Gridiron dinner. Even with the ballroom burning, the press was not getting away without a little criticism.
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