As far as Carl Sferrazza Anthony knows, nothing else like it exists.
It doesn’t look like much, a small notecard with a black-and-white engraving of the North Portico of the White House framed by spindly, leafless branches of winter trees. But over the years, Anthony has doggedly collected the signatures of eight presidents and eight first ladies on the card — making it priceless.
“I just,” he stops for a moment to compose himself, “can’t believe I lost it.”
He had just picked it up from the White House, where it had been locked in a safe for a year and three months after he left it with first lady Jill Biden when she promised to get President Biden to sign it. Anthony was heading home.
“His signature is really, just beautiful,” Anthony said to himself when he picked it up on Monday, so chuffed to add it to his collection and to have the card back in his hands.
It’s not just a history geek’s version of a signed, World Series baseball. This is a living, evolving souvenir, growing more valuable with each presidency, rich with the stories of every encounter that resulted in a signature. Hallways, events, dinners, a former president’s Palm Springs living room.
It had surpassed any expectations he had when, on a whim in the early 1990s, he sprung for a rare engraving — given only to high-ranking White House officials — that was signed by President Ronald Reagan. He asked Nancy Reagan to affix her signature.
A native New Yorker who now lives in California, he worked as her speechwriter and went on to write books about first families — first ladies in particular — for decades. He was just wrapping up three weeks of speeches at historical societies and readings and signings for his latest book, “Camera Girl: The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy,” on the East Coast when the unthinkable happened.
Reeling, his mind clicks through the memories: the sunny day in Palm Springs he picked up autographs from Betty Ford and President Ford; when he was down to the wire as the Clintons prepared to depart the White House in 2001. He mailed it to George and Barbara Bush trusting they would sign and return it. They did, with a stern letter from the first lady scolding him for getting the signatures out of order.
The Carters signed it. So did the other Bushes. And he’ll never forget the helpful assistant who took the card from him at the White House gate and ran it up to the Obamas as they were eating dinner. They both signed it and he got it right back.
The Trumps? Anthony said he never had any connection to President Donald Trump and was never invited to their events, so that Richter-scale Sharpie scrawl was missing. (As a historian, he knew he’d work to get it — eventually. Let’s leave it at that.)
Jill Biden signed it at an event last year. And when he asked her for the president’s signature and she understood how precious the card — now bearing the signatures of three dead presidents and first ladies — had become, she promised to keep it safe for him until he could retrieve it with Biden’s signature.
“I think Elizabeth felt relief after handing it to me,” Anthony said, sensing the staffer exhaled after safely delivering the rare card.
He went straight to the teahouse near Lafayette Square, where he bought salt oat cookies and took the card out, admiring half a century of signatures. He took a quick photo of it. The first and only one he’d ever taken. Then headed back to his hotel.
Along the way, he stopped at St. John’s Church — known as the presidents’ church and the place he’d been confirmed. He sat in the cool quiet in Lincoln’s pew to catch his breath on a hot day, the card next to him in its plastic covering, inside a manila folder.
He then walked through McPherson Square, stopping to snap a photo of a flock of pigeons perched atop Gen. McPherson’s head.
He did the same at Scott Circle, juggling his phone to get a horizontal shot while keeping the folder closed. His dad, one of the original architects of the World Trade Center, was an amateur historian who caravanned the family to historic sites — it’s what led Anthony to his current profession. And it’s why he never stops taking photos of all those statues and monuments. And why he invested 30 years in getting those signatures on that card.
When he finally got back into the cool of his room in the Westin on 14th Street, he exhaled.
“And I said to myself, ‘Do not get any damn coffee or water on this thing,’” he said. “I was just so happy I wanted to look at it again, so I opened the folder. And it was gone.”
His heart sank and he darted out of the hotel room, retracing his steps to Scott Circle and McPherson Square, where he asked a panhandler if he’d seen the card. Nope. At St. John’s Church, they looked through their security footage to see any sign of the card left on the pew, the floor, footage of it slipping out of his folder. Nothing. Same thing at the tea shop, across Lafayette Square and at the White House gate.
It vanished.
Anthony boarded a plane Thursday night, happy to return to his home to his bulldog, Hooch, but heartbroken. He plans a reward for anyone who might return it, but isn’t sure what to offer for this piece of the past that should have a future.
While he tells himself that people lose far worse in floods and fires — “I know it’s just a piece of paper” — he had envisioned a record that would grow richer with time, as he collected all the presidents he’d live to see.
