Most of us are influenced by our surroundings.

I recently visited Mission San Juan Bautista. It’s a beautiful mission—over 200 years old. There aren’t any pictures that do it justice. It looks strangely small in all the images I’ve seen but it’s huge inside. When you walk in, the atmosphere of the place just washes over you. It’s very strong and peaceful. I can’t think what to compare it to, except maybe a weighted blanket. And it remains with you. The Kimberly who walked in was not the same Kimberly who walked out.

Another example of this phenomenon is visiting a place where a significant event happened. In middle school, we went on a class trip to Washington DC. I don’t remember it very well except Ford’s Theatre where Lincoln was assassinated. It was such a catastrophic event, there are still vapors of it in the air.

Anyway those are extreme examples. Most places have a more subtle feeling or a vibration about them. Nevertheless we’re influenced by those feelings and they cause us to behave differently, depending on the way the place feels.

There are a few people out there who have such strong personalities that they are impervious to their surroundings. If anything, the force of their personality spills over into their environment. It seeps into the walls and the rug and infuses the air we breathe. Often it lingers long after they leave. Theodore Roosevelt was certainly one of this rare type of person.

His daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth once said of him, “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.” It was probably an apt characterization—and one that probably applied to Alice as well!

Today I saw a funny little cartoon by Albert Levering that depicted William Taft, as he entered the White House for the first time as president in 1909. The room has clearly been not only decorated by TR but his spirit has also infused it. Levering named his drawing “The Teddyfication of the White House.”

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TR was adventurous and brave, brilliant and optimistic. And he had a lot of sparkle. It would be hard for anyone to follow TR, who embodied the American spirit at the turn of the century. It was especially hard for Taft. He was a kind, even-tempered man but he was short on sparkle. I imagine this illustration was probably very close to the truth!

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