ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 10, 1996 TAG: 9603080002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RITA REIF THE NEW YORK TIMES
The rocking chair, the most American of all furniture forms, has been a favorite of statesmen since the 18th century.
Benjamin Franklin added metal bends to the base of his outsize library chair to make it rock, and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while sitting in a Victorian rocker that had been installed at Ford Theater especially for him that night.
John F. Kennedy's rocker, of course, became an icon of his White House years.
Now, a footnote will be added to the story of the American rocker when two of the 12 identical ones that Kennedy owned are auctioned in April at Sotheby's in New York.
The chairs, from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, are expected to bring $3,000 to $5,000 each.
No one knows the exact origins of the rocking chair. But by the 17th century, wooden bends like those on cradles were being added to ladder-back and Windsor chairs on both sides of the Atlantic, often for nursing mothers.
Some experts say Franklin invented the rocking chair, and, by 1785, the one in his library was much admired.
Rockers were not produced in quantity until 1825, when a spindle-back version, the Boston rocker, appeared. As its popularity spread, other styles were developed, including lavishly tufted ones with scrolled arms that made the rocker suitably fancy for Victorian parlors. (It was in such a chair that Lincoln was sitting when he was shot.)
John Kennedy was a young senator from Massachusetts when he began buying rocking chairs in 1955. He had suffered from severe back problems since the early 1940s, and in 1954 he underwent surgery on his lower back.
While recuperating, he visited the office of Dr. Janet Travell, where he sat in a Carolina rocker, a bulky oak-frame chair with a woven rattan seat and back. He found it so comfortable that Travell suggested he buy one. (Despite his origins, he chose a Carolina rocker over a Boston one.)
In 1961, when Kennedy took office and Travell became the White House physician, the president's rocker from the Senate Office Building was installed in the Oval Office. But Jacqueline Kennedy changed its look: the blond frame was stained walnut and the seat, back and arms were upholstered in foam rubber and covered with white Naugahyde.
That May, the president aggravated his old back injury at a tree-planting ceremony and acquired more rockers.
Eventually, he installed several rocking chairs in the White House; the others were sent to the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., and the Kennedy family homes in Palm Beach, Fla., and Hyannis Port, Mass.
He also left them at hotels he frequented and aboard Air Force One. Photographs of Kennedy sitting in a rocker, conferring with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson as well as foreign dignitaries, became world famous.
``President Kennedy once told reporters that the rocker was his favorite piece of furniture,'' said William C. Page Jr., an owner of the P&P Chair Co. of Asheboro, N.C., which made all the Kennedy rockers. ``Back then, the chair didn't cost much - $30 or $35. And President Kennedy gave rockers as presents to many people, including the president of Mexico.''
Carolina rockers, or porch rockers, like those owned by Kennedy, have evolved on their own in the South, Page said. The rocker, developed in the mid-19th century, had by the 1880s been exported to Europe, where it was sold as the American rocker.
In the 1920s, Page's father, a founder of the company, modified the basic form: He bent the back posts inward so that the chair hugged the small of the back. Each chair was stamped with the company name under one arm, a practice that continues. ``It's our leading item,'' Page said. ``We've made thousands.'' Prices for the chairs are seven or eight times what they were in the 1950s and early '60s.
One of the largest outlets for the chair, L.L. Bean of Freeport, Maine, has sold 8,000 to 10,000 of its presidential rockers since 1985. They are $270 each.
Upholstered versions of this rocker are sold for $475 by a McLean, Va., company founded by Larry Arata, who made the upholstery for the rockers bought by Kennedy.
One such rocker presented to Kennedy by the crew of the carrier Kitty Hawk, bearing an official seal on the back, was in the Oval Office at the time of his death. It is now on exhibit at the museum of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.
``I have the same Carolina rocker,'' said Ted Sorensen, a Manhattan lawyer who was special counsel to the president. ``President Kennedy much preferred informal to formal meetings. So his rocker remains a symbol of traditional values and the informality prevailing at the White House.''
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