Impress this 4th of July with Presidential Trivia

  • George Washington is the only President to be elected unanimously
  • Both of James Madison’s Vice Presidents died in office.
  • John Quincy Adams was the first President born as a U.S. Citizen.
  • James Polk’s wife, Sarah Childress, banned dancing in the White House.
  • Abraham Lincoln was the first President born outside of the original 13 colonies.
  • Ulysses S. Grant was once fined $20 for speeding on his horse.
  • James Garfield entertained friends by writing Latin with one hand and Greek with the other.
  • Gerald Ford was an assistant football coach at Yale, played football at the University of Michigan, and turned down offers to play for the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears.
  • William Henry Harrison was inaugurated on a bitterly cold day and gave the longest inauguration speech ever. He promptly caught a cold that soon developed into pneumonia. Harrison died exactly one month into his Presidential term, the shortest in U.S. History.
  • John Tyler fathered 15 children (more than any other President); eight by his first wife, and seven by his second wife. Tyler was 70 years old when his 15th child was born.
  • Often depicted wearing a tall, black, stovepipe hat, Abraham Lincoln carried letters, bills, and notes in his hat.
  • The Teddy bear derived from Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt’s refusal to shoot a bear with her cub while on a hunting trip in Mississippi.
  • The letter “S” comprises the full middle name of Harry S. Truman.  It represents two of his grandfathers, whose names both had “S” in them.
  • There have been 7 left-handed Presidents (Herbert Hoover, Harry S. Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama).   Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan were reportedly ambidextrous, both right and left-handed.
  • The oldest elected President was Ronald Reagan at 69 years old.  The youngest elected President was John F. Kennedy at the tender age of 43.  Theodore Roosevelt, however, was the youngest man to become President; he was 42 when he succeeded McKinley, who had been assassinated.
  • Fourteen vice presidents have become president, 8 because of the death of a president.  vice presidents who became president were John Adams (VP for Washington) , Thomas Jefferson, (VP for John Adams) Martin Van Buren (VP for Jackson) , Richard M. Nixon (VP for Eisenhower) and George H. W. Bush (VP for Reagan) . Of these six, all but Nixon were elected president immediately after serving as vice president. Nixon was defeated in 1960 but ran again and won in 1968
  • These eight so-called ‘accidental presidents’ were John Tyler (VP for W, H. Harrison) Millard Fillmore (VP for Taylor) Andrew Johnson (VP for Lincoln), Chester A. Arthur (VP for Garfield) , Theodore Roosevelt(VP for McKinley) , Calvin Coolidge (VP for Harding) , Harry S. Truman (VP for F.D. Roosevelt), and Lyndon B. Johnson (VP for Kennedy).  Vice-president Gerald Ford (VP for Nixon) took office because of President Nixon’s resignation.
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