My mother liked to tell how our mailman once delivered me to her along with the mail. He had found me, age three or so, out in the street waiting for President Coolidge. There were two two-family houses on Massasoit Street. I lived in the one at #12. The President lived in the other at # 21, from 1909 to 1930.

Those of us who were children of the twenties on Massasoit Street remember the Coolidges primarily as visitors home from the nation's capital during his years as Vice-President and then President. Their arrival was heralded by the temporary closing-off of the street, followed by several large black limousines pulling up to the house. A small crowd, many of them children whom Mrs. Coolidge always acknowledged, usually collected to stand about for a while. A few photographers did their work, and soon all was back to normal. If Secret Service men were there, they weren't in evidence.

What my brother and I best recall of him were the shoe soles of the presidential feet. Coolidge was an inveterate foot-propper-upper, always had been apparently, and there he sat in the late afternoon or after supper, smoking his cigar, reading his newspaper, a straw hat tilted against the glare, feet on the porch railing much in the manner of our own fathers up and down the street.

We children actually had more contact with Mrs. Coolidge than did the grownups on our block, for she loved walking, and we met her as she walked her dog or hurried up to the mailbox at the corner of Massasoit and Elm Streets. The graceful, swinging stride of Grace Coolidge was unforgettable. She walked joyously and vigorously; at times she seemed about to skip. At the approach of our rattling tricycles she stepped aside for us as lightly as a young girl. She encouraged us in our reckless roller-skating and peered politely at the grubby occupants of our doll carriages. Scarcely recognizing who she was, we went out of our way to attract her notice. She was one of those adults whose attentions delight rather than vaguely repel children.

Sometime during the summer of 1924, the kids of Massasoit Street learned the Coolidges had lost a son down in Washington. For years, perhaps the rest of our lives, we would never observe the onset of a blister without remembering the tragic death of young Calvin from "blood poisoning." "When he died," said Calvin Coolidge, "the power and the glory of the presidency Went with him."

On a cold, slushy March day in 1929, his presidential term over, the Coolidge family returned to their old neighbors--the high school principal, a grocer. an optometrist, two elderly maiden ladies, the Methodist minister, the local postmaster, a street railway official and ourselves. Before long a steady stream of motorized gawkers began cruising past the two-family house. By May, Dr. Plummer, who lived on the other side of the Coolidge house, estimated that a car cruised past every six seconds. Finally, the Coolidges gave up and, about a year later, sought the privacy of a larger house with fenced-in grounds in another part of town. Massasoit Street was quieter--and duller.

The former President didn't live long after his return to Northampton. While he did, it was a quiet routine existence. Each day he went to his old law office in the Masonic Building at the foot of Main Street. Occasionally we would see him sitting erect, pale and sober, in the rear seat of the blue Lincoln he had used in his last year in Washington and purchased for his personal use, being driven slowly through town. Until fairly recent years, his name in gold lettering could still be made out on the window of his second-floor office. Now it is gone.

On a January morning in 1933, Calvin Coolidge left his office in midmorning and was driven home. There he fetched a glass of water from the kitchen, exchanged a few words with a hired man at work in the cellar, and then went upstairs to die in much the same manner as he had lived through his long political career--quietly, tidily, privately.

Some of us children were taken up into the belfry of the First Baptist Church to peer down at the stream of dignitaries hastening through the bone-chilling rain into the nearby Edwards Congregational Church for the Coolidge funeral. Excitedly we spotted such familiar figures as Chief Justice Hughes and President Hoover. Someone pointed out to us the tall figure of Eleanor Roosevelt, representing her husband, himself about to be inaugurated as a President of the United States. We youngsters did not know it that day, but we were marking the end of an era, the end of our own childhood as well as an end to the peace and plenty we had known as children on Massasoit Street in the golden '20s.