August birthdays
ISSUE NO. 25 // A FUN ISSUE — AND I’M NOT LYIN’ 🦁
Happy birthday to The POTUS Notice.
And also Barack Obama.
Ok, so Obama’s birthday is August 4 and The POTUS Notice’s birthday is August 7. But close enough.
Today we’re looking at a handful of presidents born in August.
In the words of the birthday boy himself, “I gotta keep moving.” Let’s get to it.
Presidential Doodler
Lookin’ at the Leos
I totally purposefully Venn-diagrammed the crap out of the presidents born in August who are Leos.
I definitely didn’t unintentionally leave LBJ out of this animation, only to discover when past the point of return as I reviewed the quiz I included in the last issue in which mentioned five presidents born in August. And I definitely didn’t include an endless run on sentence here to convince you that everything is fine. It’s totally cool. I know what I’m doing.
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Herbert Hoover was active with the athletic program at Stanford. He had to go through the crowd to collect the entry fees at baseball games. Former President Benjamin Harrison hadn’t paid and Hoover was the only student brave enough to ask him for his admission. Harrison paid $1 and told him to keep the change… but Hoover replied it wasn’t a charity and gave him the difference.
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Barack Hussein Obama II was named for his father.
Did you know about the II?! I did not.William Jefferson Clinton was born William Jefferson Blyth III
His father died tragically three months before he was born. His mom remarried and Clinton took his stepdad’s last name when he was in high school.It was all about the Benjamins in Harrison’s family.
President Harrison was number VIII in a long line of illustrious Benjamins Harrison. (The name didn’t always travel from father to son.)
From William Henry Harrison by Gail Collins. My Family Trees post provides more detail, if you want more than this doodle but less than reading an actual book.
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Did you know that Herbert Hoover’s vice president, Charles Curtis, is the only person ever to hold an executive office in the U.S. with verified significant Native American ancestry?
Kurt Deion’s book Presidential Grave Hunter: One Kid’s Quest to Visit the Tombs of Every President and Vice President reminded me of this fact recently. And inspired me to dig a bit more. Fascinating.
Please excuse the unfortunate juxtaposition of President Andrew Jackson (you know, of the gross Indian Removal Act) and Charles Curtis.
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Hawaii
Guess what? Hawaii’s birthday is August 21! Kinda. It marks the day Hawaii became a state and it happens to be the day after Harrison’s birthday… Harrison, the who tried to annex (ahem, steal?) Hawaii because business and money and stuff. It’s a tragic and complicated story. For more, check out my Mega Maps Medley.
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Lookin’ at Lyndon
Ok, so we all agree that I didn’t just forget about Lyndon entirely in my group of August presidents. It was clearly a deliberate, carefully thought out curation of information. But if anyone is curious, here’s how Lyndon stacks up against the other August babies.
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PS
I trimmed a lot of good stuff out of this post because it got out of hand. If I gather up all the stuff on the cutting room floor, do you want it to appear in your in bin in a couple of weeks? If so, comment below.
Follow along on Instagram for more doodles and presidential trivia.
