The Case of the Missing Dinosaur Egg (12 page)

“Because we have a present for you.” Nate held out the basket.

Professor Bohn started to say, “Aw, you didn't have to—” but then he wasn't expecting the basket to be so heavy and almost dropped it on his foot. “What in the world . . . ?”

“Don't try to eat that egg,” Tessa warned him. “Seriously.”

The oversized chocolate egg nestled among the jelly beans in the green Easter grass. We had asked the White House pastry chef to add a few pastel frosting flowers that morning, so the egg really did look nice.

Professor Bohn stared down at it, and his jaw dropped. “It's the right size, the right shape, the right weight, but . . . it can't be!”

“Yeah, it can,” Tessa said.

“But this is wonderful!” Professor Bohn said. “I must contact the museum at once. They'll want to make an announcement, and—”

Tessa crossed her arms over her chest. Nate shook his head. My voice was stern: “No, no, no, no,
no
.”

“We never gave this to you,” Nate said.

“It just appeared, you don't know how,” said Tessa. “It's a matter of national security.”

“But still—good luck with your research,” I said.

“And”—Tessa wagged her finger—“be sure to share with Professor Rexington! Even though you think she's wrong about how the dinosaur's related to the birds and all, scientists have to play fair just like everybody else.”

First Kid Tessa Parks can be forgiven for thinking an eggroll is something you eat at a Chinese restaurant. An eggroll really is a Chinese-style appetizer. Less well known is an egg roll—two words—a game in which competitors use a serving spoon to push eggs across a lawn. The tradition of egg rolling around Eastertime comes from England and is still popular in some places there.

With one exception, egg rolling is not so common in the United States. But that exception is a big one: the White House Easter Egg Roll, which takes place the Monday after Easter.

While some people say it was First Lady Dolley Madison who started the egg roll tradition in Washington, there is no proof of this. In fact, the first recorded egg-rolling activities there seem to have been spontaneous. After the Civil War, children enjoyed rolling hard-boiled eggs from their lunch pails on the slopes outside the Capitol in the spring. The local newspapers wrote about this, also noting approvingly that these children playing together were from all races and classes.

That kind of integration was unusual in nineteenth-century Washington. As a side note, you would have to fast-forward all the way to 1953, when Mamie Eisenhower was First Lady, before African-American children would be invited to attend the official Easter Egg Roll at the White House. More than fifty years after that, President and Mrs. Obama made a point of including same-sex couples and their children on the guest list.

The Easter tradition moved to the White House in 1878. That spring, Congress had outlawed games of any kind on the Capitol grounds to save the lawn. President Rutherford B. Hayes learned how disappointed local children were one evening when he was taking a walk. According to Hayes's journal, a boy approached him and shouted, “Say! Say! Are you going to let us roll eggs in your yard?”

The surprised president was from Ohio and didn't know about the local tradition. When his staff explained, he and his wife, Lucy, decided that yes, they would let the boy—and all the other children of the town—roll eggs on the White House lawn. Thus the White House Easter Egg Roll was born.

By 1889, when Benjamin Harrison was president, the event was so well established that vendors selling fruit, waffles, peanuts, balloons, pinwheels and sweets set up shop outside the White House gates to serve the people waiting in line.

The vendors weren't the only ones who saw the egg roll as a business opportunity. Since adults were not allowed to attend without children, clever kids figured out they could get paid for escorting childless adults. Once on the grounds, the children doubled back to wait for their next customer. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, an eleven-year-old boy told a reporter the five quarters he earned that day would help pay his family's rent.

While the Easter Egg Roll has always been a hit with kids, it has not always been popular with the First Family. President Theodore Roosevelt's wife, Edith, wanted to call it off entirely because it was hard on the lawn and she didn't like the smell of leftover eggs. First Lady Pat Nixon had the same problem when she tried using hard-boiled eggs for an old-fashioned Easter egg hunt. The eggs that weren't found remained rotting outside for days—
pew!

President Gerald Ford tried using plastic eggs, but it was President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan who came up with the most enduring solution: painted wooden eggs. Now thousands of colorful wooden eggs, stamped with the president's and First Lady's signatures, are given away every year as keepsakes.

Mrs. Reagan can claim an additional egg roll distinction. She not only hosted the event when her husband was president in the 1980s, but she also attended
as a guest of President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge when she was a child during the 1920s.

As a guest in 1927, the future First Lady might have seen the glamorous Grace Coolidge parading among the partygoers, carrying one of the best-known White House pets, Rebecca Raccoon. At the 1922 event, President Warren G. Harding's photogenic Airedale, Laddie Boy, sniffed kids, shook hands and did tricks. Eleanor Roosevelt brought first dogs Meggie, a Scottie, and Major, a German shepherd, to the 1933 egg roll.

Like the fictional Hooligan in
The Case of the Missing Dinosaur Egg
, the Obamas' Portuguese water dog, Bo, has appeared wearing pink-and-white bunny ears—and looking slightly embarrassed. Since the Nixon administration in the 1970s, the Easter Bunny himself has also stopped in, usually played by a White House staff member.

Today, in spite of the name, egg rolling is only a small part of what goes on at the annual event, which attracts about 35,000 people. Activities may include basketball, tennis and yoga, as well as cooking demonstrations and storytelling by celebrities. In recent years, J. K. Rowling has read from her Harry Potter books, President Barack Obama has read
Where the Wild Things Are
by Maurice Sendak, and actress Reese Witherspoon has read
The Best Pet of All
by David LaRochelle.

Among recent performers are Justin Bieber, Fergie, and the cast of
Glee
. On hand since 1889 has been “The President's Own” United States Marine Band, whose repertoire includes a John Philip Sousa song called “Easter Monday on the White House Lawn.”

Most of the guests at the White House Easter Egg Roll get tickets through a free lottery conducted online. If you want to try your luck, go to
www.recreation.gov
to sign up a few weeks before Easter, usually early in March. In 2012, about one in eight people who wanted tickets got them. To keep the crowds manageable, guests are assigned a time slot and permitted to stay only about ninety minutes.

If you want more information on the White House Easter Egg Roll today, a good source is
www.whitehouse.gov
. For more on the event's history, check out a great article by C. L. Arbelbide in the spring 2000
Prologue
, a publication of the National Archives, “With Easter Monday, You Get Egg Roll at the White House.” It is also available online at
www.archives.gov
.