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When electing Presidents of the United States, Americans haven't been partial to one type of man. Commanders in Chief of all kinds -- tall and short, handsome and homely, well-educated and barely schooled, scoundrel and saint -- were sent to Washington to serve. Even the most obscure of the bunch (does anyone really know anything about Franklin Pierce?) has left his mark. The following questions delve behind the formal portraits of our nation's Presidents to reveal their idiosyncrasies, oddities and ironies. The answers may challenge your perceptions of the men and the highest office in the land they held.
Q. Which President's son was personally affected by three Presidential assassinations?A. Abraham Lincoln's oldest son, Robert Todd, was at his father's side after the 16th President was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in 1865. Sixteen years later he was at the Washington rail depot where the 20th President, James Garfield, was shot and killed in 1881. In 1901 Lincoln was in Buffalo at the Pan-American Exposition, where 25th President William McKinley was assassinated. Thereafter Lincoln avoided functions where a President was present.
Q. Who was the first President to go to his party's convention to accept its nomination in person?
A. Perhaps nominees wanted to avoid those infamous smoke-filled rooms, but for whatever reason, it wasn't until 1932 that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then governor of New York, attended the Democratic convention in Chicago. Roosevelt would go on to become our 32nd President.
Q. Four state capitals are named after Presidents. What are they?
A. In order of the states' admittance to the Union, they are Jackson, Miss.; Jefferson City, Mo.; Madison, Wis.; and Lincoln, Neb.
Q. Which President, while living in the White House, regularly skinny-dipped in the Potomac River?
A. Between 1825 and 1829 there was a "moon" on the Potomac around 5 a.m., when John Quincy Adams stripped down and took his morning constitutional.
Q. Which President, as a parlor trick, would write a Greek sentence with one hand, while writing a Latin sentence with the other?
A. James Garfield, also the only minister elected President.
Q. Which President was shot during a speech and kept on speaking?
A. Theodore Roosevelt was shot by an insane stalker, John Schrank, in October 1912 in Milwaukee, Wis. At the time, Roosevelt was running for President on the Progressive Party ticket, having lost the Republican nomination to William Howard Taft. The bullet hit T. R. in the chest, but the eyeglass case and speech manuscript in his pocket slowed the bullet. Despite being shot, T. R. delivered his hour-long speech.
Q. Which President was also a King?
A. Gerald Ford. Born in 1913 as Leslie L. King, Jr., his mother divorced and remarried. His stepfather informally adopted him, renaming him Gerald R. Ford.
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