Maggie Rogers’s handwritten
notes.
Lillian Rogers Parks Papers, Kiplinger
Library, Historical Society of Washington,
D.C.
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A
White House maid remembers a moment
of panic
For evening receptions, Grace Coolidge favored gowns with trains. Columnist Vylla
Poe Wilson remarked in January 1926, " Mrs. Coolidge does not let
the fact that she wears a train . . . interfere with the careful line of the
gown itself. . . . [It] is never allowed to drag the gown."1
Maggie Rogers, who served as Grace Coolidge's maid, regularly ensured that the
First Lady's costume was in order before the Coolidges greeted their guests.
One night, as Mrs. Coolidge came down the grand stair, the first lady tossed
her train over her arm. Rogers could not see the train. She was seized with anxiety,
fearing that it might be caught on something, or that it had been left upstairs.
Just then, Mrs. Coolidge let the train fall to the floor. Rogers straightened
the flowing fabric, and the Coolidges went into the Parlor. But the experience
left Rogers "[panicky] for the rest of the evening."
Howard
Chandler Christy painted this portrait
(to right) in 1924. It hangs in the China Room
of the White House. Mrs. Coolidge wears a red
dress with a train. The First Lady presented
this dress to Maggie Rogers; her daughter,
Lillian Rogers Parks, wore it often.2 |
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1 Vylla Poe Wilson, "Fashions of Capital
Women," Washington Post, Jan.
17, 1926: S5.
2 Lillian Rogers Parks, My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House (New
York, Fleet, 1960), 189. |
