John Coolidge; Son of President, Retired Executive

John Coolidge, 93, a former railroad executive and dairyman who was the oldest living offspring of an American president. The son of President Calvin Coolidge, John Coolidge was born in Northampton, Mass., and graduated from Amherst College in 1928. Coolidge was taking military training in the summer of 1923 when his father became president upon the sudden death of Warren Harding. “I didn’t know anything about it,” Coolidge recalled years later. “The next morning I was standing in line for breakfast when a captain came by and asked me if I’d seen the morning newspapers. When I told him no, he said, ‘Your father is president of the United States.’ ” The elder Coolidge’s change in status did nothing to affect his son’s lifestyle. “I guess a lot of people expected me to rush off to Washington,” John Coolidge later said, “but I stayed and finished training. Father wouldn’t have it any other way.” As taciturn as his father, Coolidge spent much of his life in the Northeast, where he was an executive with the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad and president of Connecticut Manifold Forms Co., a small manufacturer of business forms. In 1960, he reopened a small dairy business under the name of Plymouth Cheese Corp. in Plymouth, Vt. On Thursday in Lebanon, N.H., of respiratory failure.