The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 72
On the afternoon of June 8, 1922, Elizabeth, my sister, had gone downtown and Elizabeth Ann and I were alone in the apartment. I had been taking a bath and had gone into my bedroom for something, and when I came back to the bathroom I found the baby had locked herself in. She was always at my heels, but I did not know that she ever even so much as touched the lock on the door. As the door could be opened only from the inside, and as the baby could not open it, I became frantic. She was then only two-and-a-half years old.
I called in to her, telling her what to do to release the lock, but it was a difficult one to turn, more easily locked than unlocked. There was a note of fear in the tiny voice when she inquired "How do I do it?" I called down from the back porch to the lady who lived on the first floor and she suggested that I call the fire department. I put the call in immediately. Between the time the baby had locked herself in and the time the fire department arrived, I played "post office" with her, sitting outside the door on the floor and pushing innumerable envelopes, papers, blotters, etc., under the door which she in turn would push back with a giggle. I had quieted her and that quieted me somewhat.
Evidently the fire department didn't often have calls to rescue babies who had locked themselves in bathrooms, and the fire chief was quite annoyed. However, they hoisted the ladder, and a fireman climbed through the open bathroom window, unlocked the door, and allowed a very calm and undisturbed Elizabeth Ann to walk forth.
This proved to be too unusual a thing for the ubiquitous newspaper reporters to pass up, and within ten minutes after the 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.