by Don Voorhees
AFFLUENT ABE
Abraham Lincoln may have been born in a log cabin in Kentucky, but his father was in the top 15 percent of taxpaying property owners in his community.
PRESIDENTIAL PRECURSORS
James Garfield was a preacher before becoming president.
Benjamin Harrison once was a town crier for the federal court in Indianapolis, walking the streets and declaring announcements from the court. The job paid $2.50 a day.
Harry S. Truman once worked as a railroad timekeeper, sleeping in hobo camps near the line. He also worked in the mailroom of the Kansas City Star newspaper.
William Henry Harrison at one time ran a distillery, but closed the business out of concern for what liquor did to his customers.
Herbert Hoover had a degree in geology and worked as a mining engineer for many years.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the first former Boy Scout to become president.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was a teacher before entering politics.
Ronald Reagan was president of his college class.
Reagan began his career in show business broadcasting University of Iowa football games on the radio for ten dollars. He then moved on to announcing Chicago Cubs baseball games for a Des Moines, Iowa, radio station, doing play-by-play from accounts that came to the station over the newswire.
Reagan served several terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Gerald Ford washed dishes to help pay his way through college.
When he lived in Indonesia, Barack Obama had a pet ape named Tata.
As a teenager, Obama worked at a Baskin-Robbins. He now claims to dislike ice cream.
Bill Clinton sang in a chorus and played rugby in his younger days.
George W. Bush was head cheerleader at the all-male private boarding school he attended.
Like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush played rugby in college.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
William Howard Taft, who was appointed chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court after he left office, was the only former president to have administered the oath of office to another president and sit on the high bench with other justices that he had appointed.
Andrew Johnson served in the U.S. Senate after he left the White House. He is the only former president to do so.
After he left office, Ulysses S. Grant lost all his money to a swindler he had invested with. William Vanderbilt bailed Grant out with a $150,000 loan.
After leaving the White House, Theodore Roosevelt went on an African safari to collect specimens for the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History. His hunting party killed some 11,397 animals of all types and sizes. (Roosevelt loved to kill animals, study, and stuff them. At a young age, he had his own little museum from his collection.)
THE SPORTING LIFE
Woodrow Wilson was the first president to throw out an opening pitch at a World Series baseball game and the first to watch a movie in the White House: The Birth of a Nation.
Wilson holds the record for rounds of golf played by a president while in office—one thousand. He would have the Secret Service agents paint his golf balls black so he could find them while playing golf in the snow outside the White House.
Teddy Roosevelt came in second in the Harvard boxing championship.
George H. W. Bush was the captain of the Yale baseball team and played in the first two College World Series.
Gerald Ford was the starting center and linebacker on the 1932 and 1933 Michigan football teams that won national championships. After graduation, both the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers offered Ford contracts.
CALL OF DUTY
Calvin Coolidge was initially sworn into office as president after President Harding’s sudden death in 1923, by his father, who was a notary public, at 2:37 a.m. He took the oath and promptly went back to bed. He was later sworn in by a judge.
LBJ was the first president sworn into office by a woman—federal judge Sarah T. Hughes, aboard Air Force One, two hours and eight minutes after JFK was assassinated.
There was no Bible with which to swear in Johnson, so a Roman Catholic missal found on the plane was used instead.
HEROIC HOOVER
Herbert Hoover is credited by some as having saved more people than any other person in history, when the relief agency he headed provided food to 10.5 million Russians during the Russian Famine of 1921–23, one of the greatest human disasters in Europe since the Black Death.
Herbert Hoover was the first president born west of the Mississippi River, in Iowa.
HIGH SCHOOL HIGH JINX
John F. Kennedy blew up a toilet at his private high school.
Barack Obama’s high school yearbook picture has the inscription “Thanks Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.” “Choom” was the local slang term for marijuana. His pot-smoking buddies were the Choom Gang.
NIX THAT IDEA
Richard Nixon applied for a job at the FBI. He was actually accepted, but due to budget cuts, he was never hired.
Nixon was turned away by two Manhattan apartment buildings in 1980 before finally buying a co-op. He later moved to a home in New Jersey.
MELTDOWN MAN
While serving in the U.S. Navy, Jimmy Carter helped to dismantle a nuclear reactor that had melted down. Along with others, he took turns being lowered into the reactor in a special suit for a few minutes at a time to disassemble the unit.
Carter taught Sunday school throughout his life.
ALSO RANS
In high school, Sarah Palin led her basketball team to the state title and was known as “Sarah the Barracuda.”
In high school, Mitt Romney was on the pep squad and the glee club and was manager of the hockey team and chairman of the homecoming committee.
Al Gore is worth $300 million. That’s $80 million more than Mitt Romney is worth.
KILLING LINCOLN
Major Henry Reed Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, were present with Abraham and Mary Lincoln in the box at Ford’s Theatre the night the president was shot. Rathbone struggled with Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, as Booth tried to jump from the box to the stage, and was severely injured by knife wounds from Booth in the process.
Rathbone was never mentally stable after the assassination and later killed Clara, his wife, with a knife and stabbed himself in a suicide attempt.
The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Springs, Maryland, houses the bullet that killed Lincoln and a fragment of his skull.
The museum collection, which contains 25 million objects, also features a piece of President James Garfield’s spine and the bullet that pierced it when fired by Charles Guiteau. Guiteau’s brain is also on display.
PRESIDENTIAL PREROGATIVE
Since 1881, American presidents have vetoed an average of one bill every twenty days.
Grover Cleveland had the highest veto average—one every five days.
Barack Obama had the lowest average in his first term—one every 490 days.
George W. Bush averaged one every 244 days.
FDR vetoed one bill every seven days.
NO JUSTICE
Only four U.S. presidents didn’t get to make any appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court—William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. Carter was the only one of the four to serve a full term.
George Washington appointed ten justices and FDR appointed eight.
Ronald Reagan appointed the most federal judges of any president—376.
THREESOMES
Twice in American history three presidents have served in the same calendar year. The first time was in 1841, when William Henry Harrison succeeded Martin Van Buren and then died thirty days into his office, making way for John Tyler to occupy the Oval Office. The second time was in 1881, when Rutherford B. Hayes was succeeded by
James Garfield, who was assassinated and replaced by Chester A. Arthur.
TRAINS, PLANES, AND AUTOMOBILES
Air Force One (the president’s plane) costs $179,750 an hour to operate.
FDR had a secret train terminal built deep beneath Grand Central Station in New York, so he could enter and leave the city without the public becoming aware that he was crippled from polio. The terminal still exists today and is heavily guarded and at the ready if a visiting president needs to make a quick, covert exit from the Big Apple.
FDR used an armored car confiscated from Al Capone by the Treasury Department when he was driven from the White House to give his “Day of Infamy” speech before Congress after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There were rumors that Japanese assassins would attack him, but there was no money in the budget for an armored car for the president.
The hearse that carried President John F. Kennedy after his assassination sold for $160,000 at auction.
A sixteen-cylinder Cadillac convertible, used as a presidential parade limousine by Franklin D. Roosevelt, sold for $270,000.
HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?
Politics today may be dirty, but it pales in comparison to elections of the past:
• The election of 1800 pitted President Thomas Jefferson against Vice President John Adams. Jefferson wrote that Adams was a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams countered with “Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames . . . female chastity violated . . . children writhing on the pike? Great God of compassion and justice, shield my country from destruction.”
• In the election of 1828, between President John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, accusations flew that Jackson was a murderer and an adulterer and that his wife was a bigamist, who was a “dirty black wench” and prone to “open and notorious lewdness.”
• Adams was accused of serving as a pimp to the czar of Russia for providing his wife’s maid as a concubine and of having a government-funded billiard table in the White House. Jackson won the election, and his wife Rachel died before the inauguration from the stress of the campaign. Jackson blamed his enemies for her death and refused to meet the outgoing President Adams as was customary, and Adams refused to attend Jackson’s inauguration.
• In the 1860 election between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, Douglas called Lincoln a “horrid– looking wretch, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper and the nightman,” as well as the “leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame.” Lincoln, for his part, referred to Douglas as “about five feet nothing in height and about the same in diameter the other way.”
• In 1928, Herbert Hoover faced Catholic New York governor Al Smith. The Holland Tunnel was just being completed at the time, and Hoover supporters claimed that the tunnel would go all the way to the Vatican and that the pope would have a say in all presidential decisions if Smith were elected.
FIRST FOIBLES
Bill Clinton has admitted to having adulterous affairs with Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers. Numerous other women have accused him of sexual harassment or rape. He paid Paula Jones $850,000 to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit she had brought against him.
In 1976, George W. Bush lost his driver’s license for two years because of a DUI conviction.
PRESIDENTIAL PERIL
In 1776, future president James Monroe was shot in the shoulder during the Battle of Trenton. Surgeons could not remove the bullet. In 1785, during a visit to Mississippi, Monroe contracted malaria, from which he would suffer recurring bouts for the rest of his life. In 1830, he developed what is thought to have been tuberculois and died the next year.
In 1841, William Henry Harrison developed pneumonia after giving his inauguration speech in the rain. The lack of heating in the White House may have contributued to his death thirty days later.
While president, Teddy Roosevelt boxed regularly in the White House, until a sparring partner detached his left retina. He also liked to skinny-dip in the Potomac during the winter.
Just before he was inaugurated president, Franklin Pierce, his wife, and his son were in a terrible train wreck in which Benjamin, his only living son, was decapitated in front of him.
Pierce was an alcoholic.
William Howard Taft was known as “Big Bill,” because of his insatiable appetite and severe obesity. This condition caused him to belch and fart uncontrollably at times.
In 1924, from playing tennis on the White House courts, Calvin Coolidge’s son, Calvin Coolidge Jr., developed a blister that became infected, killing him within days.
William McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. He was hit twice, and doctors were unable to find the second bullet in his body. Ironically, a new invention—the X-ray machine—was on exhibit at the exposition, but doctors were afraid to use it because they feared it might have adverse side effects.
Warren G. Harding had a nervous breakdown when he was twenty-four, and convalesced at the Battle Creek Sanatorium, run by the Kellogg brothers of cereal fame.
Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in 1896 that left him unable to write for a year. He suffered numerous smaller strokes after that, and a massive one in 1919 left him blind in one eye and wheelchair-bound.
FDR could not walk without assistance from 1921 until his death in 1945. He was terrified of being left alone, in case there was a fire and he could not escape.
Dwight David Eisenhower smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, until his doctors told him to stop. He quit cold turkey.
President Obama suffered a split lip from an elbow to the face delivered during a pickup basketball game in 2010. He required twelve stitches.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton fell down a flight of steps and needed a two-hour surgery to repair a damaged tendon in his leg.
As a teenager, Andrew Jackson acquired a scar on his hand and head from the sword of a British officer whom Jackson refused to polish the boots of while imprisoned by the British during the Revolutionary War. He also contracted smallpox while held by the British.
In 1844, President John Tyler was almost killed when the biggest naval gun at the time, known as the “Peacemaker,” exploded while he was onboard the USS Princeton. The accident killed the secretary of state, the secretary of the navy, several dignitaries, and Tyler’s slave.
DEPARTURE DEPARTMENT
James Monroe was the third president in a row to die on the Fourth of July, in 1831. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had died exactly five years earlier.
In 1848, John Quincy Adams, who was a member of Congress at the time, collapsed on the floor of the House of Representatives due to a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was taken to the House speaker’s office inside the Capitol Building and died there two days later.
John Quincy Adams lived long enough to know both the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln.
John Tyler is buried next to James Monroe in Richmond, Virginia.
Calvin Coolidge was born on July 4, 1872. He is the only president to have been born on Independence Day.
Just before his death, Chester Arthur had almost all of his personal and professional papers burned.
Woodrow Wilson, who was buried at the National Cathedral, is the only U.S. president interred in Washington, DC.
Ulysses S. Grant’s Tomb in Riverside Park, New York, is the largest mausoleum in North America.
After his death, Congress granted William Henry Harrison’s wife a payment of $25,000 and the right to mail letters for free.
FDR had a very close relationship with his secretary Marguerite “Missy” LeHand and his will stipulated that she would get half the income from his estate if he died before her. Sadly, she attempted suicide in 1941, a few weeks
after Roosevelt became close to Princess Martha of Norway and distanced himself from her.
Lyndon Johnson died at the age of sixty-four from a heart attack, on January 22, 1973, the day before the peace treaty ending the Vietnam War was signed.
Gerald Ford lived the longest of any U.S. president—ninety-three years and 165 days, besting Ronald Reagan by forty-five days.
YAK ATTACK
While modern-day U.S. presidents speak to the public almost daily, either directly or through surrogates, chief executives in the old days pretty much remained silent. George Washington averaged just three public speeches a year, John Adams and Andrew Jackson only one, and James Madison zero.
Calvin Coolidge had a very outgoing wife, and he was rather quiet in social settings, leading to his nickname “Silent Cal.” Although perceived as quiet, with a retiring nature, Coolidge actually gave more press conferences—529—than any other president.
Dorothy Parker once said to Coolidge, “Mr. Coolidge, I’ve made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you.” Coolidge famously replied, “You lose.” When Parker heard years later that Coolidge had died, she replied, “How can they tell?”
ALL IN THE FAMILY
George Washington never had any biological children. It is believed that he was sterile.
Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis, a wealthy widow who had four children from her first marriage, and he raised her two surviving kids as his own.
Washington had only met with Martha one or two times before asking for her hand.
John Adams married his third cousin Abigail Smith.
John Adams’s second cousin was Founding Father Samuel Adams (who has no connection with Samuel Adams beer).
Just like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson married a widow named Martha—Martha Wayles Skelton.
Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemings, who historians believe had a sexual relationship with him, was a half-sister of Martha’s, being her father’s daughter.
Only two of Jefferson’s six children lived to adulthood.