In honor of Monday’s federal holiday honoring the men who have landed in the Oval Office, take this little test. Some questions relate to their time in office; others may involve before or after their administrations. If you fail, go back to 5th Grade.
• Which president had the most children (15, by two marriages)?
• Which president traveled to San Antonio, where he interviewed and enlisted men who would serve in a volunteer cavalry regiment?
• Which president’s love for and interest in science helped bring about the founding of the Smithsonian Institution and proposed a national observatory as the “lighthouse of the skies?”
• Which president became a millionaire as a mining engineer before entering public service?
• Which president lost his youngest son (after having buried two other sons) in a train accident just two months before the president’s inauguration?
• Which president was born on the 4th of July?
--Which president’s wife earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas?
• Which president was elected to his second term after suffering a heart attack in his first term?
• Which president began his second inaugural address with the words, “With malice toward none, with charity for all?”
• Which president played baseball at Yale?
Bonus: Who is the oldest living child of a former president?
[ANSWERS: John Tyler (with one living grandson in 2023!); Theodore Roosevelt; John Quincy Adams; Herbert Hoover; Franklin Pierce; Calvin Coolidge; Lyndon B. Johnson; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Abraham Lincoln; George H.W. Bush; Lynda Bird Johnson Robb]
Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West Texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.
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