President Calvin Coolidge stands beside his father's grave in the tiny Vermont hamlet of Plymouth, having rushed from Washington for a funeral marked by stark New England simplicity. Colonel John Coolidge, the President's 80-year-old father who had spent his entire life among the rugged mountain folk, was buried Saturday with no pomp or parade—just six National Guard privates carrying the plain grey casket and a brief Episcopal service read from the Bible. The only touch of color came from White House flowers banked in the old-fashioned living room where the body lay. Meanwhile, a massive nationwide newspaper poll on Prohibition delivers stunning results: some 3.5 million Americans cast votes in what became the largest unofficial referendum in the country's history, with "wets" winning by a crushing 6-to-1 margin demanding changes to the dry laws. No city over 100,000 population favored Volsteadism, while Anti-Saloon League officials dismissed the results as liquor propaganda, claiming satisfied drys simply didn't bother voting.

These stories capture America's fundamental tensions in 1926—between old rural values and modern urban life, between traditional morality and changing social norms. Coolidge's simple Vermont funeral embodies the small-town, Protestant work ethic that defined much of 19th-century America, even as his son governs a rapidly modernizing nation. The Prohibition poll reveals the growing chasm between urban and rural America, with cities overwhelmingly rejecting the moral crusade that rural areas had imposed. This cultural divide would only deepen as the Roaring Twenties accelerated toward their dramatic conclusion.

• A 16-year-old Ball Band factory worker named Mildred Neitson ran away to Chicago over a forbidden love affair, got robbed by the motorists who gave her a ride, then spent her last coins calling her mother for train fare home
• Frank Carter, Omaha's 'phantom sniper,' actually fought his own defense attorney in court, insisting he was sane and demanding the death penalty rather than face life in an asylum
• A husband laughing at his wife's cake-baking attempts and calling her 'a hell of a wife' does NOT constitute grounds for divorce, Michigan's Supreme Court ruled
• Dr. David Reiter's will left his wife exactly one dollar of his $15,000 estate—with a recommendation that she hang herself after 25 years of nagging
• A Chicago burglar was caught with a 'miniature social register' listing 200 wealthy residents, complete with detailed house plans and elaborate footnotes for his heists

• The South Bend News-Times boasted a paid circulation of 24,798—remarkable for a city of just 70,000, showing how thoroughly newspapers dominated information in pre-radio America
• That National Guard funeral detail for Colonel Coolidge reflected the era's military reverence—these were the same guardsmen who'd recently been called out to break strikes and maintain order during the Red Scare
• The massive Prohibition poll involved 425 cooperating newspapers across the country—a coordination feat that wouldn't be possible again until the rise of wire services and modern polling
• Frank Carter's insanity defense battle foreshadowed the famous Leopold and Loeb case's psychiatric arguments, as America grappled with new ideas about criminal psychology
• Those silk pajama bathing suits appearing in Palm Beach were part of the revolutionary sportswear trend that would make fortunes for designers like Coco Chanel