Dave Emge was not invited to the wedding of Patricia Nixon and Edward Cox, held at the White House on June 12, 1971, but he has three pieces of wedding cake from those nuptials. You could probably eat them, but he says you probably shouldn’t.

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       People collect all sorts of things. Dave collects things connected to the White House, specifically the ephemera related to social events at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW.

       Dave used to volunteer there, starting when Richard Nixon was president. He was just 17 when he started coming down from Linthicum, Md., where he still lives, to help out at big events: placing flower arrangements, checking place cards, running errands, etc.

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       That’s how he found himself in the White House kitchen some time after Tricia Nixon’s wedding.

       Remembered Dave: “The chef one day said to me, ‘Would you like some cake?’？”

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       They walked into a freezer, where a shelf was packed with little white cardboard boxes, each entwined with a silver cord, and adorned with the letters “P” and “E” and the date of the wedding. These were wedding leftovers, still in their souvenir sarcophagi.

       Dave later bought two other pieces of Nixon-Cox cake from a collector. This year, like the Nixon-Cox marriage, those bits of cake turned 50.

       Tricia and her mother had opted for a lemon-flavored pound cake: four tiers of real cake and two tiers of cardboard covered in icing. The whole thing weighed 350 pounds and was nearly eight feet tall. It was decorated with life-size lovebirds, each holding a wedding ring in its beak. At the top was a tiny Rose Garden gazebo made of sugar.

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       Like so much that happened during Nixon’s presidency, the wedding cake managed to become controversial. Chef Henry Haller had given out the recipe earlier, and several newspapers had baked it with disappointing results. The New York Times said the cake was “mush on the outside and soup on the inside.”

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       The Washington Post’s Sarah Booth Conroy wrote: “No matter how you slice it, Tricia Nixon’s wedding cake has already given indigestion to food writers across the country.”

       It turned out Heller had shared a scaled-down recipe that did not translate well to home kitchens. He clarified that bakers needed to put a two-inch-wide brown paper collar around the top of a 12-inch pan, a detail that did not mollify citizens who had already committed the whopping 21 egg whites required to make cake and icing for 25 people.

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       But Post food writer Mary Laster gave it a try and said the cake came out to perfection. (If you want the recipe, send me an email, and I’ll send it to you.)

       There were 400 guests at the wedding. The cake was meant to serve 600 people. The Post noted that “there will be souvenir boxes of cake in addition, for the guests to take home.”

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       And that’s what Dave has.

       Royalty and cake seem to go together. Let them eat it, said Marie Antoinette. A piece of fruitcake from the wedding of Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, sold for $7,500 in 2014. In 1998, cake from the 1937 wedding of Edward VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson sold for $29,900.

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       I asked Dave how much he’d take for a piece of Tricia’s cake. He said in the $500 to $1,000 range.

       “People might think that’s a little high,” he said.

       Dave is 67 and semiretired. Most of his career has been spent working at a bank. As a young man he announced he would run for president in 2000. That didn’t happen, but he did run, unsuccessfully, for the Anne Arundel County Council in 1982.

       “What became the big interest to me was protocol,” he said. Dave became fascinated by the planning and execution of official events, the written and unwritten rules, the memorabilia, the memories.

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       He visited women’s groups to deliver a presentation he called “Host to the World.” In it, he described official White House dinners, from the time the invitations are sent out until the First Couple’s last wave from the North Portico.

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       One thing has eluded Dave: “After working on those dinners, I’ve never been invited to one,” he said. “That would be on my bucket list.”

       Life's an itch

       In my Tuesday column, I quoted Gene Kritsky, a biology professor at Ohio’s Mount St. Joseph University, who said oak leaf itch mites feeding on cicada eggs could drop from trees. Does that mean you’re in danger of suffering from their chigger-like bites?

       Well, it depends where you are. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Tracy Leskey said nearly all U.S. reports of Pyemotes herfsi have been in the Midwest: Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, Ohio, etc. The closest confirmed sighting to Washington was Lancaster County, Pa.

       “But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be here, it just appears that it has not been recorded here,” she wrote in an email.

       Twitter: @johnkelly

       For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.