Happy Birthday, Mr. President

Happy President's DayEveryone loves a good presidential birthday, don’t they? Your social media feeds are loaded with them. Birthday music has been playing non-stop for the whole week. We can get top appliances for 30% off this weekend #stopthemadness!

But let’s not limit our focus to Lincoln, once a licensed bartender, whose birthday is today, or to Washington, who had to borrow money to make it to his inauguration and whose birthday is February 22. Let’s celebrate presidential birthdays all year long. Come on, ring those bells, citizens. Most of the truthful information in this post comes from randomhistory.com.

February holds two more presidential birthdays. William Henry Harrison was born on February 9, 1773. His inaugural address was 100 minutes long, which roughly 0.25% of his entire term in office. He died of pneumonia on his 32nd day as president.

Ronald Reagan was born February 6, 1911. He took up eating jelly beans as a way to stop pipe smoking, and he developed partial hearing loss in one ear one a movie set when a gun was fired next to his ear.

March continues the celebration with Andrew Jackson the Violent, born March 15, 1767. He was the first president to survive an assassination attempt and took up numerous duels for the honor of his wife, who was frequently the object of slander. Jackson carried two bullets from his duels, one in his chest, the other in his arm.

James Madison was born March 16, 1751. One time, he and Thomas Jefferson were arrested for taking a carriage ride through the Vermont countryside on Sunday, a violation of state law.

Grover Cleveland, born March 18, 1837, was named for the skinny blue monster on Sesame Street. Before he became president, he served as a hangman in Erie County, New York. In the original depiction of him on our $1000 bill, he has a noose in his hands.

John Tyler is the most obscure president to be remember by school children due to the hit single he wrote for his campaign with William Henry Harrison, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” He was born on March 29, 1790.

Thomas Jefferson, born April 13, 1743, was once arrested with James Madison when . . . what, have you heard this one? John Adams fought a bitter campaign against Jefferson. He said that if Jefferson was elected, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced.” In return, the Jefferson campaign said Adams was a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Presidents RaceJames Buchanan, the last president to serve before the Civil War, tried to launch a TV series called Presidential Bachelor, but he could not raise the funding to take the first step, which was to invent television. He was born on April 23, 1791.

James Monroe, as well as Buchanan and thirteen other presidents, was a mason. Many of the founding fathers and early American patriots were also masons, including Paul Revere. The society was flourishing in the colonies and Great Britain for a century or more. Monroe was born on April 28, 1758.

You think it’s cold today? It was so cold at Ulysses S. Grant’s presidential inauguration that the canaries which Dr. Doolittle had trained to sing a Mozart Allegro movement for the inaugural ball froze to death. Grant did not freeze, but died later of throat cancer, having smoked 20 cigars every day for many years. He was born on April 27, 1822.

Harry S Truman, born May 8, 1884, does not have a middle name. The “S” is just that, an alphabetic stand-in for a middle name. He once explained that it was a compromise between the names of his grandfathers, Shipp and Solomon.

John F. Kennedy campaigned on the forward-thinking concept that the character of the man does not indicate his ability to perform in bed. His birthday is May 29, 1917.

George H. W. Bush is the first president since Martin Van Buren to have served as vice president going into office. He is also the first since Van Buren to realize the snacks left in the vice president’s office are the month old leftovers from the presidential snacks. the Japanese fondly remember him for vomiting on their Prime Minister. In fact, they developed the word Bushusuru, “to do the Bush thing,” or to publicly vomit. He was born on June 12, 1924.

Calvin Coolidge, born on the Fourth of July, 1872, apparently joked around in the Oval Office. He occasionally pressed all the call buttons on his desk, hide, and watch his aides rush in to check on him. He was also an active member of the KKK, which was never a good joke.

John Quincy Adams, born July 11, 1767, had a habit of swimming naked in the Potomac. Presidents upheld this tradition until the establishment of the surveillance state in 1971.

President BushGeorge W. Bush established himself as the most powerful man in the world for far longer than his term of office, because many opinion writers still blame him for almost everything. Dana Perino remembered, “President Bush treated my dad like the king of England when he came for a state dinner – as if his eight years in the White House never would have been complete if Leo Perino hadn’t come for a visit.” Bush was born July 6, 1946.

Gerald Rudolph Ford worked as a model during the Depression era. That’s how bad it was, people. He was born on July 14, 1913.

Jesse Jackson used to hate Barack Hussein Obama. The power of that virtue alone swept Obama into the White House. His birthday is August 4, 1961.

The orphan Herbert Hoover’s first job was to pick bugs off potato plants in the shadow of the Hoover dam, for which he was named. He was born August 10, 1874.

Okay, I’m tired of this list. More to come tomorrow, if I feel like it.

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