Recruited from an "exclusive New York employment bureau", she became the first female chief servant in White House history.
[1][2] One of Jaffray's earliest, and most controversial, moves was to order the segregation of dining among White House staff.
[4] According to Major Archibald Butt, the aide de camp to President William Howard Taft, Jaffray claimed to have "seen and felt" the ghost of a child she believed was William Wallace Lincoln on several occasions in 1912, around the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
[5] Jaffray used horses as a means of transport longer than anyone else at the White House, continuing to be chauffeured in a brougham for her daily shopping excursions into the mid 1920s.
Grace Coolidge expressed relief at Jaffray's departure, musing that "she has come to consider herself the permanent resident and the President and his family transients".