Background
for the teacher:
The people who move and shake society have made the Mission Inn a favorite haunt ever since it opened its doors in 1903. Presidents, social leaders, entertainers, and other celebrities have all left their mark, making it the center stage of Riverside’s public life for over a century.
Those who served as President of the United States and visited the Inn have been commemorated by oil portraits, painted by Riverside artist Bonnie Brown, that hang in the main lobby. William McKinley registered at the Mission Inn’s predecessor, the Glenwood Inn, while still a Ohio Congressman in May, 1881. He later became the twenty-fifth American president. Benjamin Harrison, while serving asthe twenty-third president, stopped outside the Mission Inn in April 23, 1891, and accepted a basket of flowers from Frank Miller’s daughter, Allis. Theodore Roosevelt, while twenty-sixth President of the United States, stayed at the Inn from May 7-8, 1903. He transplanted one of Riverside’s two famous parent navel orange trees in the Courtyard of the Birds. These trees launched a citrus economy that made Riverside the richest American county of the 1890s. The twenty-seventh American President, William Howard Taft, briefly attended a banquet at the Mission Inn on October 12, 1909, where he was provided with a custom-made chair ordered by Frank Miller and specially constructed to accommodate his 300 pound-plus frame. The chair still can be seen in the lobby today. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover also visited the hotel while en route to choose a site for the Boulder Dam in March 19, 1922. He was later elected the thirty-first President, and then returned to the Inn in March, 1939, after his term in office had expired, to help Republican Party officials plan for the elections of 1940. John Fitzgerald Kennedy attended the Institute of World Affairs at the Mission Inn in December of 1940 when only twenty-three years of age shortly after authoring the best-selling book Why England Slept. He was elected the thirty-fifth President nineteen years later. He bears the distinction of being the only Democrat to have a presidential portrait hung in the main lobby. Richard Nixon married Pat Ryan in the Inn’s Presidential Suite in June, 1940, although he had probably visited the hotel numerous times previously as a teenager. A bronze plaque in the main lobby today memorializes the wedding. Nixon went on to be elected the thirty-eighth President in 1968.
The Mission Inn continued to be a vital conference site for national figures in the second half of the twentieth century, as well. President of the Screen Actor’s Guild and future fortieth President of the United States Ronald Reagan married his bride Nancy Davis at the Little Brown Church in the San Fernando Valley, then drove fifty miles to spend his wedding night with her in the Mission Inn, on March 4, 1952. Former President Gerald Ford, our thirty-eighth chief executive, visited the hotel in March, 1998, over a decade after he vacated the Oval Office, to attend a fund raiser for Congresswoman Mary Bono. George W. Bush attended a fundraiser in September 29, 1999, before winning the 2000 election and becoming the forty-third President. He returned in 2003 to see his friend and supporter, Mr. Duane Roberts, the Keeper of the Inn.
Other statesmen and government officials visiting the Inn include Crown Prince Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Japanese Prince and Princess Kaya, Grand Duke of Russia Alexander Milhailovich, Vice Presidents Richard Cheney, Dan Quayle, and Charles W. Fairbanks (served under T.R. Roosevelt). Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, CaliforniaGovernor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Congressman Newt Gingrich, L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, and North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole have also visited.
The list of social leaders making stops to the Mission Inn include Susan B. Anthony, one of the major movers and shakers in the ratification of the 19 th Amendment, guaranteeing women the vote. She not only lodged at the Glenwood Inn (predecessor to the Mission Inn) on June 13, 1895, but was also entertained by her distant cousin Frank Richardson, co-manager of the Inn and brother-in-law of Frank Miller. Other visiting social leaders include industrialists Andrew Carnegie,John D. Rockefeller, Collis and Henry Huntington and Henry Ford, social commentator and scientist Albert Einstein, newspaper magnates Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst (prior to building his castle), pioneering historian Hubert H. Bancroft, publisher Harry Chandler, civil rights advocate Booker T. Washington, crusading journalists Ida Tarbell and Charles F. Lummis, disablities advocate Helen Keller, and Sierra Club founder John Muir.
A complete list of the entertainers who were guests or visitors of the Inn is similarly exhausting, but some on such a list would include: Barbara Streisand and James Brolin, Chuck Norris (uncle of Kelly, Mrs. Duane Roberts), The Osbournes, Drew and Ethel Barrymore, Merle Haggard, Betty White, Oliver Stone, Tears for Fears, The Cast of Extreme Makeover, Glen Campbell, Stephanie Edwards, James Coco, Raquel Welch, Spencer Tracy, Eddie Cantor, Charles Boyer, Fess Parker, Clark Gable, Madame Helena Modjeska, Judy Garland, Mary Pickford, Jack Benny, Cary Grant, Lillian Russell, Sarah Bernhardt, Harry Houdini, W.C. Fields, Bette Davis, and Ginger Rogers.
It is no exaggeration to characterize the Inn as a magnet for “movers and shakers”, a key nexus where Riverside, California has been molded into an important location for social change on the local, national and international level.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Hall, Joan. Through the Doors of the Mission Inn, Vol. I. Highgrove Press, Riverside: 1996.
Hall, Joan. Through the Doors of the Mission Inn, Vol. II. Highgrove Press, Riverside: 2000.
“Hoover visited in Riverside.” Riverside Press Enterprise. October 22, 1964.
Screen Actor’s Guild web page http://www.sag.org/history/presidents/reagan.html
“Sec. Hoover Here for Short Visit.” Riverside Daily Press. Monday, March 20,1922.
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