Nancy Reagan passes away at 94

Former first lady Nancy Reagan as died at the age of 94. President Ronald Reagan died in 2004. Best wishes to the family.

George H W Bush in hospital

Yesterday, former President George H W Bush suffered a fall in his summer home in Maine and remains hospitalized. He broke a neck vertebrae, according to family spokesman Jim McGrath.

Best wishes to him and his family. He turned 91 in June and until now has remained very active.

State Dining Room redecoration

Obama State Dining Room, 2015 Obama State Dining Room, 2015The Obamas have completed a terrific redecoration of the State Dining Room.

This comes close on the refresh for the smaller Family Dining Room on the same floor.

Ford photos

Jack M pointed me to a nice clutch of photos on the Gerald Ford Library Facebook page, including one of Peter Graves playing the clarinet with the Marine Corps Band.

Clinton bedroom

Brent L sent me an image from a Clinton Library video that featured President Clinton talking in and about various rooms. But early one, there was a brief walk-thru of a few rooms which happened to include the master bedroom. There was even a very brief glimpse of the Living Room, but not clear enough for a screen capture.

As far as I know, there have never been any official photos of the Clinton master bedroom and living room published, so this video was a bit of a shock. Still, it’s quite low quality and only really shows the color of the room and basic decor, particularly that the walls were covered in a large, strong pattern of wallpaper in place of the Reagan bamboo forest wallpaper. Very interesting.

Thanks, Brent!

If anyone knows of a higher quality version of this video and can get a better screen cap, I’d be grateful.

Blueprint sponsorship

I haven’t had much to do in the White House Museum lately. I make small corrections when someone points them out, but the Obama administration hasn’t released much in the way of interesting photos of White House spaces, and I haven’t come across any interesting cache of old photos for a while.

However, I’m grateful to Patrick Phillips-Schrock, who donated again to fully sponsor the Green Room blueprints. He is working now on a second book about the White House. I think there are probably some photos and information in his first book that I should try to incorporate into the site as well.

Other sponsorships are still available, and of course donations of any sort are always welcome. The site it not especially expensive to maintain, but the blueprints were costly, and finding a way to preserve them (and, hopefully, make copies for sale) will be a challenge. One day, I hope to see them hang in a proper museum.

Perhaps in the meantime, I’ll photograph parts of them and post those on the blog here.

More Kennedy photos

I’ve posted dozens of photos from the Kennedy Library in the last few days. Most are terrific color pictures that fill in areas for that period that I didn’t have good photos for already. An additional few also replace inferior versions of the same photos that I’d found in books and elsewhere.