William H. Perkins, Jr., of Berwyn, Illinois, has sent us not one interesting photo but ten. They depict Mr. Perkins and family members with every American President from Truman to Clinton, and they unintentionally encapsulate nearly forty years of changing sartorial and hair styles. Mr. Perkins told us how he got started:

“In October 1932 Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Springfield, Illinois, as a presidential candidate. One of our Illinois congressmen, William Dieterich, was running for the Senate, and since my father knew Dieterich, he asked him to introduce us to Roosevelt. I was off on my quest to see history firsthand. I was eleven.”

In 1936 Perkins won a contest selling newspaper subscriptions for a county weekly. The prize was a trip to Washington, D.C. Again his father called on Senator Dieterich, this time to arrange what would be Perkins’s first Oval Office encounter with a President. He has no pictures of either meeting with Roosevelt. He met Harry Truman first at a political rally in 1944 and later when Truman became President and they both were at a United Nations conference, Perkins as driver to Lord Halifax. The Truman photograph was taken in Independence in 1964. In the group is eleven-year-old Gary Perkins, who had already shaken hands with former President Eisenhower at a political function in Illinois in September 1962 and with President Kennedy at the Oval Office five months earlier, when Kennedy was in the midst of a battle with U.S. Steel about a threatened price increase.

“President Kennedy asked Gary about his interests,” the father recalls. “Tm a Democrat,’ he replied. The President said, ‘Regarding your political views, stay just like you are and don’t get any smarter,’ and then patted him on the head.

“The photograph with Lyndon Johnson dates from April 13, 1964. Gary and I were accompanied for that one by Clark Clifford, a long-time friend of mine who later became Johnson’s Secretary of Defense. The President asked Gary if he would like to have his picture taken with the three of us sitting on a sofa in the Oval Office. The kid said he’d rather pose outdoors, so he could have the White House in the background.

“In April of 1971 we were introduced to President Nixon by Alexander Butterfield, of Watergate fame; he was the person who first told Congress about the taping system in the Oval Office. John Anderson, another longtime friend and a congressman at the time, arranged our visit with President Ford, on May 13, 1975. This was right in the middle of the crisis caused by Cambodia’s capture of the Mayaguez . Gary and I spent several very interesting hours waiting for the President and watching him, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of