The woman is Ann Cox Chambers, media heiress and ex-ambassador to Belgium, and in her NYT obituary written by Douglas Martin, it is revealed that the father, James Cox, was the Democratic candidate for president who had an up and coming Franklin Delano Roosevelt on his ticket for vice president in 1920.
Cox and Roosevelt were solidly beaten by Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Mr. Cox had been a three-term governor of Ohio (non-consecutive two year terms), and despite Ann Cox Chambers being the subject of the obituary, becoming fabulously wealthy from her father's business interests, newspapers, radio stations, auto auction business, and the big one, cable systems, (Cox Communications) her father becomes a huge person of interest when it is revealed he was born in a log cabin.
Think of it. A woman whose last full day on earth was the next-to-last day in January, had a father who was born in 1870, who could tell her what the country was like in the post-Civil War era, and whose father (her grandfather) was alive when Lincoln was assassinated. That is some reach back into time. Parents don't tell their children enough, but surely she absorbed some stories from those who were really there.
The last president born in a log cabin was James Garfield, and that was 1831. If James M. Cox had beaten Harding, he would have advanced that "last-log-cabin" distinction to 1870.
You don't have to wonder, but I do, if in 1870 is was a modern log cabin. Like campers and RVs, did log cabins progress in creature comforts over the years? Was there running water provided by a well-water pump in the kitchen area? My guess is the toilet facilities were still an outhouse.
In the 1950s I accompanied my mother to visit her WW II army nursing buddy Gracie on the farm where she, her husband and daughter lived in Brushton, New York, very upstate, and fairly close to the Canadian border.
The house wasn't a log cabin by any means. It had running water, and an indoor toilet. but it did have a water pump handle in the kitchen next to the sink that could be primed and pumped to get well water. I remember the father, Hollis, preferring the well water that he drank from a ladle he scooped into the pail. A farm house version of Poland Springs with a no deposit bottle.
After the tangential distraction of learning about Ms. Cox's father, you can absorb her story of her anonymous wealth and very public philanthropy and political backing. She and her sister tried to fly under the radar. "The more anonymous you can be the better. Why, then you can just do about whatever you want."
It would have been a blast to have met her. She certainly lived an interesting life in what are always interesting times.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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