To the “Young Republic” postings of a week or so ago, Rev. George Rutler, the unofficial chaplain of this happy Corner, offers these addenda:

Item: When he was a boy, Fr. Rutler shook the hand of a man whose grandfather had shaken hands with Washington.

Item: Fr. Rutler once knew a man whose father had heard the Gettysburg address. A farmboy in Gettsyburg, the man’s father had helped erect the platform on which Lincoln and the other dignitaries were seated—and had then positioned himself underneath as they addressed the crowd. The man’s father maintained for the rest of his life that Lincold did not say “of the people, by the people, and for the people” but “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Item: Earlier this morning, Fr. Rutler paid his monthly visit on a parishioner who is now 102. He found her in a state of agitation, annoyed that this past November the New York Times had failed to recognize Armistice Day. As a teenager in Rhode Island, she explained, she had marched in a parade in Providence on the very first Armistice Day, November 11, 1919. “The sacrifice those boys made is very easy to forget,” she said.

When discussion turned to presidential politics, the old parishioner noted that her father had been “quite, quite devoted to Garfield. And McKinley. Wasn’t that a shock?” She confessed to a certain difficulty in forgiving FDR for what he had done to the Roosevelt name, and she explained that, finding Ike insufficiently opposed to the New Deal, she had joined the effort to draft Taft.

“This time around?” she said. “Why, Father, I think I’m a Romney girl.”