rescue the doorbell rang. The Chicago Tribune wished to take my picture and that of the baby together! Yes, perhaps right there before the bathroom door would be the best, the reporter said.
I was so nervous that the possibility of any publicity frightened me because I knew what Mr. Harding would say. I refused flatly to allow them to take any pictures at all. "All right, madam, then we'll make up our own story!" the reporter threw back at me as I closed the door upon him. I opened it again and called him back, explained that I had been ill and that things like that made me very nervous. In the end he promised not to make a great ado about it in his paper, but Elizabeth, my sister, came up the stairs almost simultaneously with another more persistent reporter, from the Hearst headquarters. "They want my picture and the baby's" I cried hysterically. Elizabeth turned calmly to the reporter. "Can't you come back in the morning?" she smiled, after she had learned what it was all about. They consented. Elizabeth promised that they might snap the baby's picture alone if they would return in the morning. And so it was.
I have the picture clipping which appeared in the Hearst daily on June 9, 1922; it is headed, "Fireless Rescue." It shows the side of the apartment building, with ladder, faked in pen and ink, against the apartment, and a child's arms extended from the window above toward the rescuing fireman. Below is a good-sized picture of Elizabeth Ann Willits, a very excellent likeness of her, quite Harding-like.
My baby was ill. As I try to recall now the exact time of her illness my memory fails me—even to the month. But the memory of the terror of that experience shall stay with me forever.
