These People Deserve a Day

In honor of President’s Day, I thought it might fun to learn a little bit about the presidents. I don’t mean learning about stuff they did as president. Although I find that stuff fascinating, I’m sure some of you find it boring. And one of the things I’ve learned as a writer is if the reader falls asleep while reading my work, I’m probably doing it wrong.

So, in an effort to have some fun with presidents, while also preventing you from falling asleep, here are some presidential facts that you probably didn’t learn in school.

Teddy Roosevelt took over the presidency in 1901 after McKinley was killed. He remained president until 1909, when he decided to retire and the country elected his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft as president. But, by 1912, Roosevelt wanted to be president again, so he ran as a third party candidate. In October 1912 Roosevelt went to Milwaukee to campaign. While leaving his hotel an immigrant bartender shot him in the chest.

So did Roosevelt go to the hospital? No! The dude gave his speech! He spoke for more than an hour and showed the folded-over pages of the speech that helped slow the bullet down before it entered his chest.

And the would-be assassin? He claimed that McKinley’s ghost told him to do it. He spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital.

The other interesting Roosevelt tidbit is that his mother and wife both died on the day his daughter was born in 1884. The day?

Valentine’s Day!

Speaking of deaths, three of the first five presidents—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe—died on the same day of the year. The day?

July 4. Adams and Jefferson actually died the exact same day, in 1826, 50 years after the Declaration was signed.

What do you know about John Tyler? Probably nothing, right? Maybe “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”

Here’s something you won’t forget. John Tyler, who was born in 1790, before the Bill of Rights was ratified, has a grandson who is still alive today. Not a great, great, great, great grandson, as we might expect, but just a plain old grandson.

How is that possible?

The Tylers are an amorous bunch.

John Tyler had 15 children. The thirteenth of those children was Lyon Gardiner Tyler, born in 1853, when John Tyler was 63 years old, and married to his second wife, who was thirty years younger than the former president. And that baby, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, went on to have six children, three of them with his second wife, who was thirty-six years younger than him. Two of those children, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr, born when his dad was 72, and Harrison Tyler, born when his dad was 75, are still alive today, aged 89 and 85, respectively.

Astonishing.

One my favorite tales relates not to a president, but to a man between presidents. John Scott Harrison is the only man ever to be the son of one president (William Henry Harrison) and the father of another (Benjamin Harrison). John Scott Harrison died in 1878.

At the time there was a black market for cadavers, and the Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati regularly purchased their cadavers from that market to use in training medical students. While John Scott Harrison was being buried, a young man’s family discovered that his grave in the same cemetery had been robbed. The next day, one of John Scott Harrison’s sons, John Harrison, joined the young man’s family on a trip to Ohio Medical College to see if the young boy’s body was there.

They obtained a search warrant, examined the few bodies being held at the College, but did not find the young man’s body. Just before leaving, John Harrison saw a pulley with a rope leading down to a basement. He suggested they see what was on the end of the rope. So the party lifted the rope and found a body at the end of it. They unwrapped the cloth from around it to reveal not the body of the young man, but rather the body of John Scott Harrison, the only man to be son of one president and father of another!

Grave robbers had stolen his body during the night!

Oh, and I almost forgot: a thirty-nine-year-old Andrew Jackson challenged a man to a duel after the man insulted his wife. The man shot Jackson in the chest, but Jackson didn’t fall. He returned fire, sent a ball through the man’s abdomen, killing him. Jackson walked off the battlefield, feet sloshing in his own blood, the bullet from his chest never removed.