Sketchbook cameos
Occasionally, I pop up in my presidential sketchbooks. From time to time, other far more interesting people make appearances, too. Here are a few cameos because I like packaging up random things and sharing them.
My cameos
I was shocked to learn that Zachary Taylor was Jefferson Davis’ father-in-law. What was it like for Sara to be the daughter of a former President and also the wife of the Confederate president. Was Sara conflicted??
She was not.
She was dead.
Here’s the story: Jefferson Davis served under Zachary Taylor. He was Taylor’s admin, so he was around a lot starting when Sara was 18. She was vivacious and well-educated and her peers “noted for her exquisite hands and feet” which seems like a weird thing to be noted for but ok. Sara and Davis fell in love, which was inevitable what with all the exquisite feet. Taylor wasn’t having it. He barely knew his own kids because of his military career and didn’t want that for Sara. He sent Davis away on missions to keep the two apart.
It didn’t work.
They secretly got engaged… Davis left the military. They got married. Taylor came to terms with it. Two months later, the newly married couple got malaria. Davis got better. Sara died less than three months after their wedding. She had no idea her husband would turn out to be a traitor.
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Martin Van Buren’s biography described his colorful wardrobe, making me wish that color photography had been invented and also that I hadn’t confined my sketchbooks to only black ink.
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Try as I might, I just cannot get into reading about tariffs. It’s too taxing.
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I will never not giggle when I encounter old timey people talking about all the intercourse they are having or want to have.
Stephen Colbert
Joe Biden cautioned “Listen, Buddy, you call me a nice old man one more time and I will personally come down there and kick your ass.” … to which Stephen Colbert replied “Don’t worry. I won’t call you a nice old man, because clearly you’re not that nice.”
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Helena Bonham Carter
Winston Churchill’s best female friend was Violet Bonham Carter, Baroness Asquity of Yarnbury and grandmother to Bellatrix Lestrange Helena Bonham Carter.
But that’s not all! In The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War by Catherine Grace Katz, I learned that Churchill’s daughter’s middle name is Hermione. And Sarah Millicent Hermione Churchill stood with him aboard HMS Sirius. Who played both Sirius Black AND Winston Churchill?
Gary Oldman.
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Tweety Bird
Rosalynn Carter was embarrassed to serve Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State, water from a Tweety glass.
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Cosmo Kramer
I drew Kramer upside down partially because of space constraints in my sketchbook. And partially because I thought it might be less obvious when the drawing stinks. In any case, check out his run in with The Van Buren Boys.
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Bob Hope
At the 1944 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, Hope joked “Mr. Roosevelt has been president so long that when I was a boy my father said to me ‘Bob, maybe some day you will grow up to be vice president.’”
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Dave Matthews
I couldn’t find a reference for New York City mayor David Mathews, so I drew Dave Matthews instead. He came out looking more like Adam Levine than anything but it’s not like you know what David Mathews looks like anyhow.
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Muhammed Ali
Muhammed Ali’s great-great-great grandfather, Archer Alexander, escaped slavery in 1863. He warned the army that his enslaver planned to destroy a bridge used by the Union Army. He’s also the man in the statue Emancipation, with Abraham Lincoln.
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Willie Nelson
Nelson would sometimes run five miles with President Jimmy Carter. (NOTE: this is one of my earliest presidential doodles. Before I started looking up references when I drew. You’ll notice I forgot he had a beard.)
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Rick James
Buried in the same cemetery as Millard Fillmore.
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Sammy Davis, Jr.
He was kicked out of the lineup of JFK’s inauguration performers when he married (white) model May Britt. Frank Sinatra tried unsuccessfully to intervene.
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Eva Gabor
Actress Eva Gabor’s fifth husband, Frank Jameson, hired Spiro Agnew … Richard Nixon’s disgraced and crooked vice president. Jameson claimed “There’s no pancake so thin it doesn’t have two sides.” His board disagreed and Spiro stepped down.
Side note: Spiro went from dog-whistling to trying to get paid, well, as an “influential American anti-Semite for hire” sooooo… yeah. I don’t think there were two sides to that pancake. That pancake was just a dangerous evil asshole.
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Minion
It’s rare that I’m on Andrew Jackson’s side about anything, but the Peggy Eaton affair was one of the exceptions. Furious, he said “this scene loses all its horrors when compared with the recent slander of a virtuous female propagated by the minions of power for political effect.” He probably wasn’t referring to Gru’s yellow minions, but who can know for sure… especially since they’ve been around since the dawn of time.
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Abner Doubleday
The guy erroneously credited with inventing baseball was part of Lincoln’s funeral procession in Washington, DC. Thirty five years later, he was in Grant’s funeral procession in NYC.
