On the White House Beat

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"I just read this morning in the paper about a needy family in New York that is being put up in a hotel and the cost to welfare just for the rent of the hotel room is $37,000 a year. And I wonder why somebody doesn't build them a house for $37,000."

--President Ronald W. Reagan at his news conference of November 20, 1986.

WELL, HEY, I WONDER TOO, and so I decided to call around a little to see if I could find out the answer for our President. Otherwise, the poor guy will be spending half the afternoon tossing and turning before he finally manages to get to sleep.

It turned out the story was from The New York Times, which the White House has somebody read every morning to pick out the good stuff and boil it down for the President. That way Reagan doesn't have to wade through a lot of yawners about ballistic missiles and the War Powers Act.

But they must have boiled it wrong this time, because what the Times really said was it cost $27,600 for the hotel rooms, with the rest of it for food. I decided to stick with the $37,000 figure, since from what I hear it is very hard to get the President to change an anecdote once he gets it down pat.

"What kind of a place could you throw up for $37,000?" I asked the first contractor I called.

"Sorry, pal," he said. "That kind of money wouldn't even pay for what my dog throws up." Comedy I don't need, not when I'm on White House business. I hung up and called another contractor.

"For 37K I could dig you a nice cellar hole," he said. "Unless it turns out we have to blast."

"Dream on, buddy," said the third guy I called. "These days you couldn't even buy the building inspector for $37,000."

Well, by now I was good and worried. I didn't like to think that our President had been maybe coming to us from some different dimension entirely, but come to think of it I did remember a sentence from his last State of the Union speech: "As they said in the film, Back to the Future: `Where we're going, we don't need roads.'"

Was it possible that the old trouper had gone where we don't need roads, just for a moment during his press conference, and found a $37,000 house there?

THEN IT CAME TO ME that Harvard itself had built a house for even less, as recently as 1983. So I called the firm that had brought in Harvard Yard's gingerbread guardhouse for a mere $25,000--J.W. Rockbottom & Sons. I got old J.W. himself.

It turned out that the Johnston gate guardhouse was five feet square, which worked out to a construction cost of $1,000 per square foot. So for $37,000, Rockbottom said, he could put up a building six feet square and have $1,000 left over to buy a toilet seat from the Air Force.

I told him not to break ground till I got the actual o.k. from the White House, but that six feet on a side sounded plenty roomy enough. The oldest of the four kids in the family was only 12, and six feet should be plenty long enough for a kid that age to stretch out in.

"Particularly if the kid was raised on food stamps, huh?" Rockbottom said

"Food stamps?"

"Yeah, I heard they stunt your growth."

"They do?"

"Sure. Didn't you hear the one the President told on his radio broadcast last week? The one about the welfare queen and the seven dwarfs."

I said I hadn't, so he went ahead and told me, and it was a good one sure enough. When he wants to be, the President can be funnier than James Watt.

Jerry Doolittle is an Expository Writing instructor and the author of four books, of which three are non-fiction. He was a speechwriter for both President Jimmy Carter and Democratic Presidential candidate Walter Mondale and was a reporter for several daily newspapers.