The Visitor

In Washington, where tourists were thick as the pink blossoms on the Japanese cherry trees last week, a shabby, middle-aged woman attracted no attention when she entered the line of sightseers winding through the White House one morning. Tucked under her arm was a folded newspaper; in the fold were three matchboxes, a crumpled packet of cellophane and paper napkins.

While the rest of the tourists enjoyed the elegance and peeked around hopefully for a glimpse of the tenants, Mrs. Hilda Marie Marks leaned over a velvet guide rope in the chandeliered Red Room, dropped the newspaper on a chair and tossed a lighted box of matches on it. Moments later a guard saw the flame crackle up and snuffed it: there was no damage, no fire alarm, no report to the President at work in his office a hundred yards away. There was also, when the guard had the fire out and looked around to see who caused it, no sign of Hilda Marks. She had moved with the line to other rooms; so engrossed were the sightseers around her that none noticed her at work.

Forty minutes later, in the Executive Office Building across West Executive Avenue from the White House, Hilda Marks lit a small fire in a fourth floor library: less than an hour later she had two more going in lavatories--all three were small, and none caused damage. But they drew a brigade of police; as Hilda started a fifth fire in a second floor restroom, a woman detective nabbed her.

While she was questioned, Mrs. Marks tried to light two more fires; to Secret Service agents she explained that she had a lot of trash and wanted to burn it. The agents determined that she lived in St. Clair Shores, Mich., had arrived in Washington two days earlier by bus, that since 1932 she had periodically been in mental hospitals. She was packed off to Gallinger Hospital for observation because, as Presidential Press Secretary Hagerty explained it, she was "not quite lucid."

The 6,675 visitors who toured the White House that day with Hilda Marie Marks brushed closer to history than they realized. As far as could be determined, no one else had come to set the place afire since the British put the torch to it in 1814.

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