dual personalities

Forty-eight years ago today the wedding of Tricia Nixon and Edward Finch Cox took place in the rose garden at the White House. You can read about it here.

I remember their wedding. I was just finishing up the ninth grade and I thought they were a very attractive pair.

C’mon, he was pretty cute. And she weighed 95 pounds–it said so in the NYT article about the wedding!

Fun fact: the “most famous Presidential bride of all,” 87‐year‐old Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, was a guest at the Nixon-Cox nuptials. I must say, it all seems very low key and tasteful (except for that cake) compared to the huge, lavish, overdone weddings these days with all the attendant media hype. Call me old-fashioned.

Here is a list of the 18 weddings that have taken place at the White House. They were not all children of sitting presidents. For instance, did you know that one of Hillary Clinton’s brothers was married at the White House in 1994? He was divorced a few years later.

The most shocking White House wedding, in my opinion, was the wedding in 1886 of President Grover Cleveland to Frances Folsom in the Blue Room. The bride was 21 years old! This marriage was also unusual, since Cleveland was the executor of the bride’s estate and had supervised her upbringing after her father’s death; nevertheless, we are told, “the public took no exception to the match.”

Sounds real sketch to me.

*Hall & Oates