Calvin Coolidge photo

Excerpts of the President's News Conference

May 08, 1925

I have a couple of rumors. One is that the President is searching for a man to reorganize the Veterans Bureau and that General Hines is leaving. The other one is a question as to what I can say about the report that General Hines is about to retire from the head of the Veterans Bureau and that Colonel Arthur Woods is going to succeed him.

I was thinking that perhaps this rumor was a mistaken rumor, and that they meant Major Haynes, the prohibition enforcer—which reminded me a little of a story that Governor [Wm. C.] Sproul [Rep., Pa.] told when he came up to Northampton to celebrate with the neighbors my election as Vice-President. He spoke about some experience he had with some of his friends in Pennsylvania. He went out somewhere to make some inquiries about a spaghetti factory, asked a man on the street if he knew where the spaghetti factory was, and the man said "no." Then the man followed him up the street a ways and said, "Perhaps you mean the noodle factory." And he said, well perhaps it was the noodle factory. And the man said, "Well, I don't know where that is either."

Source: "The Talkative President: The Off-the-Record Press Conferences of Calvin Coolidge". eds. Howard H. Quint & Robert H. Ferrell. The University Massachusetts Press. 1964.

Calvin Coolidge, Excerpts of the President's News Conference Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/349107

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