Florence Harding shouted. Officials entered, led by the Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Vice President Coolidge, at home in Vermont, was sworn in overnight.
The Olympic Club, which has held five United States Opens and is the scheduled site of the 2028 P.G.A. Championship and the 2032 Ryder Cup, opened two courses in 1924.
Across Lake Merced from the Olympic Club, on what may be the finest property of them all, a design by Willie Watson and Sam Whiting was nearly two years from opening when President Hardings train rolled into San Francisco in the summertime of 1923.
About 6 weeks after Hardings death, San Franciscos Harding Memorial Committee chose that the best method to honor the president was with a half-built golf course. Lake Merced Golf Links ended up being Harding Park.
” Nothing could be more proper as a homage to President Harding, as he was a fantastic lover of outdoor leisure,” Herbert Fleishhacker, a popular businessman and the head of the citys parks, stated at the time.
The course constructed a much better credibility. It rapidly played host to nationwide amateur championships and became a house course for the San Francisco City Championship, whose winners consisted of Ken Venturi, whose moms and dads ran the Harding Park pro store for years.
Harding Parks eminence was torn by local spending plans and disregard. The P.G.A. Tour left, and for many of the next 30 years, the course was enjoyed for its history more than its condition. Throughout the 1998 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club, Harding Parks fairways worked as parking lots.
The reason for Hardings death was initially ruled “apoplexy,” but rumors spread– about poor care from his physicians, about his lots of other disorders. Some still think that the first woman poisoned her husband, possibly as vengeance for his adulteries. She declined to enable an autopsy.
Many historians today believe he had a heart attack. Hardings body was drawn from the Palace Hotel, positioned aboard a train back to Washington, D.C., and interred in his home town, Marion, Ohio.
There are not a lot of things called for Harding nowadays– schools, mostly, and Harding Township, N.J., amongst them– though there is a Harding Golf Course in Los Angeles that opened in 1923. (It is next to Wilson Golf Course, opened in 1927, and named for Hardings presidential predecessor, who passed away about 6 months after Harding.).
In San Francisco, the most significant acknowledgment of Hardings location in city history is at a now-famous golf course that he never ever played or checked out. But it does help keep his name alive, rarely more than today.
The golf course being built 7 miles from the presidents deathbed 97 years earlier was soon christened Harding Park, during a bygone age when calling things for presidents was done with little dispute or consideration.
Harding Park became one of golfs terrific, enduring layouts, strangely enough named for the most disrespected of American presidents.
Harding was required to the Palace Hotel and put in the governmental suite.
” He was ill and weak however his condition had actually improved to a motivating degree,” The New York Times reported as Harding arrived on July 29.
Hardings doctor, a homeopath named Charles Sawyer, supplied updates. For a couple of days, Harding was in “grave” condition.
Still, he and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, won 60.3 percent of the popular vote. The Democratic prospect, James M. Cox (with Franklin D. Roosevelt as the vice-presidential nominee), earned simply 34.1 percent.
Hardings administration corresponded with a boom in American golf and golf-course building. The games appeal hit hard in San Francisco, which had actually considered its small, peninsula setting too valuable to hold cemeteries (it had been tossing out the dead for several years), however perfect for golf, specifically amid the oceanside dunes near Lake Merced.
Alister MacKenzie, the renowned Scottish course architect, called it “the finest playing golf territory I have actually seen in America.”
Harding, 57, was a vigorous traveler, a master of the photo chance. He checked out Yellowstone and Zion national parks, where hemorrhoids made torment of a horseback flight. He went to a mine, drove a wheat binder, went to a commemoration of the Oregon Trail and, eventually, boarded a U.S. Navy transport ship in Seattle to tour the Alaskan territory.
He happily watched as the ships gunners fired shells into the Taku Glacier to create huge splashes from portions of falling ice.
Then whatever turned south.
His golf getaway in Vancouver was limited to a couple of holes. (His check out made a long lasting effect; there remains a Harding memorial in the citys Stanley Park.).
Ominously, the Navy ship mistakenly rammed an American destroyer in Puget Sound fog. Harding summoned the energy to give a speech in Seattle, however a weekend in Portland, Ore., was ditched so the entourage could rush to San Francisco to get the president medical attention and rest.
Harding was at the right place at the best time to be linked, improbably, to something as distant as a major professional golf tournament in 2020.
The very first significant guyss golf championship of the coronavirus era has shown up, belatedly, in the kind of todays P.G.A. Championship– a fan-free, made-for-television occasion scheduled to start Thursday, starring Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, the two-time defending champ Brooks Koepka and the world No. 1 Justin Thomas, among about 150 others.
The name that assures to be said most across the international airwaves this week is Harding.
” President Harding appears to have actually passed the crisis,” The Times reported atop its front page on Aug. 1. “His physicians will not say that he is out of risk, but even through their mindful comment it is plainly perceptible that they believe that there is long shot of a recurrence of the unsafe symptoms which threatened the life of the President last night.”.
That made the Aug. 3 heading in the San Francisco Chronicle so sensational.
” HARDING DEAD” it checked out in big letters.
Florence Harding had actually been reading aloud to her other half a short article from The Saturday Evening Post about him entitled, “A Calm View of a Calm Man.”.
” Oh, thats excellent,” the president allegedly stated about one passage. “Go on.”.
Those were his last words, obviously.
” Suddenly and without caution, a shudder passed over the Presidents body,” the Chronicle reported. “He raised one arm, but not a word came from his lips. The arm hung back and the President lay still.”.
That this most somber of summertimes ought to be connected, even tenuously, to Harding and the strangeness of 1923 feels about.
Harding, a previous Republican senator from Ohio, had little in the way of a platform when he ran for the White House in 1920 other than a “go back to normalcy.” He was considered as a tax-cutting, anti-immigrant nationalist who, in the wake of World War I, did not want the United States to be part of the postwar League of Nations. He was rumored to have had affairs (and a minimum of one out-of-wedlock child) and was quickly surrounded by scandal throughout his administration. (Curious? Start by Googling “Teapot Dome.”) He was not thought about a deep thinker and was prone to rambling. He liked to play golf.
The good news is, the course is in much better shape than Harding was.
(His go to made a long lasting effect; there remains a Harding memorial in the citys Stanley Park.).
Hardings medical professional, a homeopath named Charles Sawyer, provided updates.
SAN FRANCISCO– Had President Warren G. Harding not been bedridden in those midsummer days of 1923, he might have left his eighth-floor suite at the Palace Hotel and headed to the southwestern edge of the city, where a brand-new golf course called Lake Merced Golf Links was under building and construction.
Harding was a golfer, after all, and he had actually taken a trip thousands of miles by train and ship on his summer-long “Voyage of Understanding.” It was meant to be three months and 15,000 miles of promotion stops. He had actually played golf only days before, in Vancouver, British Columbia.
But Harding never left the Palace Hotel alive again.
Whatever good will that he hoped to stimulate on his trip, whatever hopes he had of winning re-election the next year, ended 2 and a half years into his largely forgotten presidency.
” Most historians rank Harding as the worst of all American presidents,” according to the University of Virginias Miller Center, a nonpartisan think tank committed to presidential history.
It rapidly played host to nationwide amateur championships and ended up being a house course for the San Francisco City Championship, whose winners included Ken Venturi, whose moms and dads ran the Harding Park professional shop for years. Throughout the 1998 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club, Harding Parks fairways served as parking lots.
Fixed up and resumed in 2003, and still a community course (September tee times for city residents can be had for just $64), Harding Park attracted big occasions once again. That included the W.G.C.-American Express Championship in 2005 (won by Tiger Woods in a playoff over John Daly) and the Presidents Cup in 2009 (won by the United States).
This weeks P.G.A. Championship is Harding Parks first significant. Amongst all the popular names to be uttered worldwide throughout its 4 rounds will be that of a long-ago president, most likely without explanation or context. The good news is, the course is in better shape than Harding was.
He had actually left Washington in June, in a 10-car train filled with cabinet members, dignitaries, employee, press reporters and the very first woman, Florence Harding.
Hardings speech in St. Louis was one of the first presidential addresses to be broadcast live on radio. The train then rolled through Kansas City, Denver and Salt Lake City, amongst other cities, as it carried the president west.
