PRESIDENTS DAY SALES EVENT! ⭐

ISSUE NO. 7 // PRESIDENTS’ DAY EXTRAVEGANZA

EVERYTHING MUST GO!

Nah, I’m not switching over to a hard sales pitch email format.

In honor of Presidents Day (and all the requisite mattress and car sales that inexplicably accompany it), this issue focuses on… mattresses and cars.

Yeah, that’s right.

Mattresses and cars.

This is the kind of sophisticated, high-quality content I’m sure you’ve come to expect by now.

Let’s dive in with my least favorite presidential mattress fact. After President James Garfield was shot, the obstinate Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss ignored the medical advancements of sterilization and poked his grubby little hands all over Garfield’s insides to find the bullet. (And no, that’s not a typo. His name was Doctor.)

Alexander Graham Bell knew there had to be a less invasive way. He built a metal detector and would have been successful if not for Dr. Doctor Doofus and his vast amounts of unearned conviction. He told Bell that Garfield wasn’t laying on a mattress with metal springs. And he only permitted Bell to search one area of Garfield’s body. (Spoiler: the mattress had metal. And the bullet was on the other side of Garfield’s body. Not to mention that if he’d just left the bullet alone, Garfield may have lived.)

Buckle up! This is another long one.

Presidential Doodler

PS President’s Day, Presidents’ Day, and Presidents Day are all accurate. How the apostrophe is used or not used depends on what you mean and where you live. This seems bizarrely arbitrary and unnecessarily confusing. I really couldn’t decide, so I’m going with all three and citing this article…lest any of you think I’ve made a typographical error. I most certainly have made a typographical error, but not in this particular case.

PPS Garfield’s story is fascinating. Read Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic for more.

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PLUS! Random facts only tangentially related to mattresses or sleeping!

[ gasp! ]

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I didn’t know one could punch a hole through a mattress.
But if anyone would do it, it would be Theodore.

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Taft regularly just … fell asleep while people were talking to him.

(Local friends: is it a coincidence that Taft Furniture has a Sleep Center…?)

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Reading through the presidents out of order provided an unexpected treat — I discovered certain similarities and contrasts that may have otherwise escaped notice. This is one of my favorites.

Jimmy Carter’s place of conception is commemorated with a plaque.
Meanwhile, FDR’s birth was so traumatic that his mom closed up shop after that — no more “physical relations” for the rest of her 18-year marriage. FDR was conceived in France, in case you’re curious. (Anybody else now have Lady Marmalade stuck in their head?)

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This blew my mind. Grant and cars seem very far apart to me.

(From Grant’s Tomb, by Louis Picone.)

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Calvin Coolidge wasn’t quite comfortable with cars. According to a reporter:

“It was as good as a show to watch him cross Fremont Street. He glanced, birdlike, up and down the street, measuring the distance to the nearest car, and if he thought he could make it, started to cross. If that car brushed his coattails, he would not run. He had faith in his calculation.”

Apparently, too much faith. (Or too little calculation?)

I’m sure it goes without saying that the Ford that hit him was not Gerald. And at the time, Ford was only 10 years old or so and still legally named Leslie King. His name wasn’t officially changed until a decade or so after Coolidge was hit by the Ford, thus proving both conclusively and unnecessarily that Gerald had nothing to do with it.

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Wilson was the first president to ride in a car during a presidential inauguration … but it was Harding’s inauguration. (This was also mentioned in a recent Presiquential episode. Very briefly. But worth a listen. There’s a “that’s what she said” joke in the episode that made me guffaw embarrassingly loudly… then look around nervously to make sure no strangers heard me.)

McKinley was the first president to ride in a car.

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Another fact I geeked out over. Crazy, right?? The Secretary of Defense under two presidents came up with seatbelts.

(If you want an in-depth look at a president and his car, check out Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip by Matthew Algeo. Both this fact and the one below come from the book.)