ASPPA Connect Observes Presidents Day

In observance of Presidents Day on Monday, Feb. 18, the ASPPA offices will be closed. Accordingly, ASPPA Connect will not be published on Feb. 18. ASPPA Connect will reappear on Wednesday, Feb. 20.

Everyone is familiar with the pantheon of U.S. presidents, but there is more to them than that they held the highest office in the land. Here are some of those unusual aspects.

• When James Madison (1809-17) and his wife Dolley left the White House (then called the Executive Mansion) as the British were marching on Washington, DC in August 1814 during the War of 1812, they left in such a hurry that the British found a meal still on a table.
• James Monroe (1817-25) is one of only two presidents to run unopposed (in 1820; the other was George Washington).
• Martin Van Buren (1837-41) is the first president who was born a U.S. citizen, having been born in 1782, six years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
• William Henry Harrison (1841) is the only president who studied medicine.
• James Buchanan (1857-61) is the only president who never married.
• Abraham Lincoln and his second Vice President and then successor, Andrew Johnson, both never attended a formal school.
• Andrew Johnson (1865-69) was apprenticed to a tailor as a young man.
• Ulysses S. Grant’s (1869-77) efforts as a farmer in the mid-1850s in Missouri failed, and for a time to earn money he sold firewood on a street corner in St. Louis and pawned his gold watch to pay for Christmas gifts.
• James Garfield (1881) was the last president to be elected while he was a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
• Grover Cleveland (1885-89, 1893-97) underwent a secret operation on a boat in the Potomac for mouth cancer early in his second term.
• Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), a widower, was the last president to marry in the White House (to his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt, in 1915).
• Herbert Hoover (1929-33) led humanitarian and food relief efforts to assist Europe in recovering from the devastation of World War I.
• Harry Truman (1945-53) is the last president who never attended college.
• Gerald Ford’s (1974-77) name at birth was Leslie Lynch King, Jr.; he was renamed when his mother remarried.
• Seven presidents - George Washington (1789-97), Zachary Taylor (1849-50), Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77), William Howard Taft (1909-13), Herbert Hoover (1929-33), Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61) and Donald Trump (2017- ) had never been elected to a public office before they were elected president.