Extremely early TLS, one page, 8.5 x 11, The Brief of The Choate School letterhead, April 10, 1935. Kennedy, as business manager of The Brief, writes to Arthur Goldsmith about renewing an advertisement. In full: “I am writing you again to ask if you and your brother would be kind enough to renew the advertisement you have placed in The Brief for the past several years. I hate to ask you this favor again, as you have been so generous to Joe and myself in previous years, but as we are behind this year, I thought you would be able to help us. I have enclosed four contract blanks and a rate card for your convenience. Hoping to hear from you in the near future, and thanking you in advance.” Under his signature, Kennedy adds a handwritten postscript which reads: “P.S. Want to thank you for the use of your apartment the night I was in New York.” In fine condition, with a rusty paperclip mark to top edge and a few edge dings and creases.
In September 1931, young JFK enrolled at the Choate School, a private university preparatory boarding school for boys in Wallingford, Connecticut for 9th through 12th grades. At the school (as in life), he followed in the footsteps of his elder brother, Joe Jr., who was two years ahead of him. The letterhead used here by Kennedy is that of the school’s yearbook, with the publication’s young business manager asking Wall Street stockbroker Goldsmith, a Harvard classmate of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and dropping a subtle reminder of how Goldsmith had been “so generous to Joe and myself in previous years, but as we are behind this year, I thought you would be able to help us.” Kennedy graduated from Choate in June 1935, with his yearbook entry selecting him, appropriately enough, as the one ‘most likely to become President.’ A scarce and unusually early piece of correspondence from the young Kennedy. Pre-certified John Reznikoff/PSA/DNA and RRAuction COA.
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