Rutherford
Birchard Hayes
* Hayes was the first President to use a telephone while in office.
The first telephone was
installed in the White House in 1879.
* Of the five presidents who served in the Civil War, Hayes was the
only one to be wounded.
* He won the presidency by only one electoral vote.
* Hayes was the first president to visit the West Coast while in
office.
* His wife, Lucy Hayes, banned alcohol, smoking, dancing, and card
playing from the
White House. She was the first presidential wife to be called "First Lady
of the Land."
* Hayes and his wife conducted the first Easter egg roll on the White
House lawn. It was held
April 2, 1879. The presidential tie to the egg roll began when Congress
abandoned its own
long Easter Monday children's festival and declared in 1878 that the western
slope of
Capitol Hill and the Capitol's lawns and terraces could no longer be used
as "playgrounds
or otherwise." Then on Easter Monday in 1879, Capitol police refused to
admit the children
to the grounds. They went to the grounds of the National Observatory and
the
White House, apparently at the invitation of the president.
* He was named after his father, Rutherford Hayes, and his mother,
Sophia Birchard.
* Hayes never knew his father, who died a few months before he was
born.
Stephen
Grover Cleveland
* He was the only president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms.
* Cleveland was the first executive movie star. In 1895, Alexander Black
came to
Washington and asked Cleveland to appear in "A Capital Courtship", his
photoplay.
He agreed to be filmed while signing a bill into law. "A Capital Courtship"
was a big
hit on the Lyceum Circuit.
* Cleveland was the only president to be married in the White House and
was the first to
have a child born there.
* The Baby Ruth candy bar was named after Cleveland's baby daughter, Ruth.
* He acted as executioner while sheriff of Erie County, New York. He personally
pulled the
hanging trap on two convicted murderers.
* He and the first lady would shake hands with as many as 8,000 callers
at a New Year's
Day reception. Crowds entered through the doors and the East Room windows!
* Cleveland used his veto powers 584 times during his two terms. This is
the highest total
of any president except Franklin Roosevelt, who served three terms.
* Grover Cleveland went sailing during July 1893 for what people thought
was a fishing trip,
but he was really having surgery for a strange growth in his mouth. The
operation was
kept so secret that nobody found out about it until 1917!
* Cleveland answered the White House phone, personally.
* "Death and Destruction" was the name that Grover Cleveland gave to his
favorite hunting
rifle.
* Cleveland was a draft dodger. He hired someone to enter the service in
his place, for which
he was ridiculed by his political opponent, James G. Blaine. It was soon
discovered,
however, that Blaine had done the same thing himself!
* He was named after the Reverend Stephen Grover, whom Cleveland's father
has succeeded
as minister in Caldwell, New Jersey.
QUOTES:
"When a thing is
funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth."
--George Bernard
Shaw
"A man gazing on
the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road."
--Alexander Smith
"The game of golf
would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed
on the putting green."
--Ernest Hemingway
"I know I'm getting
better at golf because I'm hitting fewer spectators."
--Gerald R. Ford
Humor is just another
defense against the universe.
-- Mel Brooks
When humor goes,
there goes civilization.
-- Erma Bombeck
A pun is the lowest
form of humor -- when you don't think of it first.
-- Oscar Levant
The only problem
with golf is that the slow people are always in front of you and the fast
people always end up behind you.
"I'm all in favor
of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with
typewriters."
--Frank Lloyd Wright
"People demand freedom
of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom
use."
--Søren
Kierkegaard