Evening Times-Republican · Marshalltown, Iowa · 1915

The hat took a journey of several hundred feet before being overtaken

October 1915: the president and his fiancee head to the world's series, she wearing a new solitaire diamond and red roses, he freshly reunited with a hat that outran the Secret Service.

On October 9, 1915 the front page of Marshalltown’s Evening Times-Republican carried this dispatch from New York: “President Wilson and his fiancee, Mrs. Norman Galt, and their party left in a private car at 11 o’clock today for Philadelphia, where they will attend the world’s series baseball game this afternoon.” The same page reported the game itself under “Boston Wins Second Game,” so Iowa readers got the president and the score in one sheet.

The reporter’s eye was not on baseball. While in New York “the president purchased a solitaire diamond ring and today Mrs. Galt wore it proudly.” She was “modishly attired today in a new gown and fur trimmed hat of black and wore a large bouquet of red roses, a gift from the president.” The president was a month into his engagement and apparently in a giving mood.

The best paragraph belongs to the hat. What “excited the amusement of pedestrians on Riverside Drive and caused the president and Mrs. Galt five smiling minutes was the loss of Mr. Wilson’s hat. A gust of wind from over the Hudson blew it into the street. A secret service man from the car that followed jumped to the rescue, but the hat took a journey of several hundred feet before being overtaken.” Five smiling minutes is a lovely unit of time, and the nation’s security detail earned its pay chasing a hat down the avenue.