Sorry, Wrong Answer
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6. Of those listed and supposedly all other American presidents, the first one to be born in a hospital was President James Earl Carter.
7. As of 2009, the only U.S. president to be head of a labor union was Ronald Reagan, who was president of the Screen Actor’s Guild.
8. The first U.S. president to have an inauguration televised was President Truman on January 20, 1949.
9. The first U.S. president to speak live on radio was not FDR but Warren Harding.
10. The first U.S. ex-president to fly in an airplane flew in 1910, the year Theodore Roosevelt flew as a passenger in a four-minute flight in one of the early Wright biplanes. The first sitting U.S. president to fly was FDR in 1943.
11. J. S. Bach was most famous in his day not for composing music but for playing the organ and for having extraordinary knowledge of the instrument. It took nearly a century for him to gain a reputation for his compositions, many of which were seldom performed in his day. One obituary read: “Our Bach was the greatest organ and clavier player who ever lived.”
12. Jayne Mansfield was not decapitated, notwithstanding rumors to the contrary. According to the New Orleans Certificate of Death, the immediate cause of death was a crushed skull with “avulsion of cranium and brain.” In other words, the top of her skull and brain were torn or sliced away from the rest of her head.
13. The inscription on W. C. Fields’s grave is not “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” but simply, “W. C. Fields, 1880-1946.” Fields, though, did poke fun at Philadelphia in a 1925 Vanity Fair article, in which he proposed that his epitaph should read, “Here lies W. C. Fields, I would rather be living in Philadelphia.”
14. Ernest Hemingway was not a soldier in any war. When Hemingway tried to join the army during World War I, he was rejected because of his poor vision. He then decided to join the Red Cross as an ambulance driver and was sent overseas. When delivering candy and cigarettes to Italian soldiers in 1918, he was severely wounded by fragments from an Austrian mortar shell, causing him to spend several months recuperating in a hospital. After his hospital stay, he returned to his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, where he was treated as a war hero. In Oak Park, he stayed with his parents and spoke to civic groups about his war experiences. During the next decades of his life, he was a civilian correspondent in the Greco-Turkish War, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II. Again, although no one disputes Hemingway’s courage and knowledge of war, he never served as a soldier in war.
15. The person who discovered gold in 1848, sparking the California Gold Rush, was not John Sutter, although gold was found on his property. Sutter’s carpenter, in fact, discovered the gold while building a sawmill on the American River. Squatters had moved in and taken over Sutter’s land after Sutter’s workers had quit looking for gold. Sutter did not become rich from the discovery of the gold because he, though born in Europe, had become a Mexican citizen, and Mexico had ceded California to the United States. Because of the squatters and the cession of California to the United States, Sutter had only a questionable title to his fifty thousand acres under U.S. law. In fact, he went bankrupt in 1852 and lived off a small California pension until he died.
16. Mark Twain’s birthplace was not Hannibal, Missouri (where he grew up), but Florida, Missouri.
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Rod L. Evans, Ph.D., teaches philosophy at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is the author or coauthor of sixteen books, including The Gilded Tongue, The Right Words, Getting Your Words’ Worth, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge: The Book of Mnemonic Devices, and The Artful Nuance: A Refined Guide to Imperfectly Understood Words in the English Language.