Americana & the U.S.

In 1968 while still Kent State U. student, with school newspaper press pass, I traveled to Cleveland, Ohio for Bobby Kennedy Presidential campaign appearance. I’d hoped to meet Kennedy, but tight security made it impossible. With my press pass I did crash a post-appearance gala fund raiser, where I did seek out and met one of the most remarkable women I had ever come in contact with in my life. She was Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Longworth, who at age 84 still had a razor sharp satiric wit! When I told her I was a collector of objects related to historic stories, Alice said without hesitation “Leave your address, I’ll send vou an original photo of my husband holding historic object, I’m going to tell you it’s story!”

This is the story Alice Roosevelt Longworth shared with me in Cleveland, at 1968 fund raiser gala for Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy: “One morning in the early 30s in Washington DC home, Nick (her husband Nicholas) was full of rage about all the lawlessness of gangsterism and bank robbery gangs which was sweeping the country, saying ‘When they convict the bastards, ought to take them right out and shoot them!’ Then that same evening Nick comes home excited as a little boy Christmas morning because Harry Hawes (Senator from Missouri) had presented him with ‘the grandest object!’

“Well, when he pulled out with childlike joy that pistol which had belonged to Jesse James; I angrily reminded him of his morning tirade about rash of organized criminal activity in America, and irately suggested his attitude toward that gun represented in those criminals, American boys who’d grown up in a country which glorifies in books, films and museums such murderous men as Jesse James and his gang of outlaws! What Nick never knew, Jimmy… one evening not long after that, on my way to meet my husband at a Washington event; I had the chauffeur pull over and I took that murderous weapon I’d removed from his study, and threw it into the Potomac River!”