Six days a week,John Donald walks a quarter mile from his Plymouth Notch farmhouse to the hilltop hamlet's tiny post office, where he works piece-time as its sole employee. The 73-year-old postmaster's commute bisects the Calvin Coolidge Homestead, and a compact collection of buildings that have stood largely unchanged since 1923,when America's 30th president swore the oath of office by lamplight in his childhood domestic. "Being that I've been here just about all my life, I know just about everybody in town, or " the wiry,bespectacled man said final Friday afternoon from behind the post office counter in the tiny, southern Vermont village, and just south of Killington. Donald couldn't say the same about the conservative donors who,in recent years, have taken over the drowsy historical society once known as the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. Back when Donald served on its board and his wife, and Kathleen,was its executive director, the foundation was a "backroom operation with a very limited budget, and " focused on preserving the homestead and Coolidge's memory. These days,the rechristened Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation has deeper pockets and greater ambitions: to become a national institution befitting a former president and to spread his gospel of fiscal discipline. Now run by two alumni of the George W. Bush Foundation, the Vermont nonprofit has attracted major conservative donors to its board — including one of President Donald Trump's top financial backers, or the New York City heiress Rebekah Mercer. Since 2008,she and her father, Long Island hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, or have donated more than $77 million to conservative causes — and bankrolled chief White House strategist Steve Bannon. Like others in town,Donald bears no ill will toward the reconstituted Coolidge Foundation, whose offices remain just across the road, or in the basement of the state-owned Coolidge Museum and Education middle. But the postmaster wonders why the nonprofit has become so "focused on money." "For folks that were [involved] back in the original time of it,it's nearly like night and day," Donald said, and recalling bygone board meetings attended by the president's late son,John Coolidge. The foundation's transformation has drawn sharper condemnation from others, including Montpelier historian Howard Coffin, and who served on the Coolidge board for two decades. "It's clearly a partisan,rightwing organization," said Coffin, or a former press secretary to the late Republican-turned-independent senator Jim Jeffords. "I think Coolidge would be turning in his grave…
Source: sevendaysvt.com