February 21, 2000
Monday

Today is Presidents’ Day, a holiday cobbled up in 1971, I think, to combine Lincoln’s Birthday (February 12) and Washington’s Birthday (February 22) into one Monday holiday. I don’t honestly know if it’s meant to honor all Presidents of the United States, but I do suspect that its creation had political motivations — an effort to eliminate one of two federal and state employee February holidays and ensure that the consolidated one would never occur in the middle of the week, which can be disruptive to work flow.

I peg the year to 1971 because in that February my route from home to work and back took me past a modest clapboard row house beside a railroad overpass in the east end of the city. On February 12 (a Friday that year) there appeared on the porch a large sign with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Hi. My name is Abraham Lincoln and today is my birthday.” A few days later, on February 15, the third Monday of the month, I saw a new sign. It had pictures of Lincoln and George Washington, with the caption, “Hi! We are Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, and today is not our birthday.” And a week later, on Monday, February 22, there was still another sign, this one Washington alone proclaiming, “Hi. I am George Washington and today is my real birthday!”

I guess some people just can’t cope with change.

Yesterday at church our “get acquainted” question was “Who is your favorite president?” Lynn was stumped by this. She was in first grade when Bill Clinton defeated George Bush. At dinner on the eve of the election she offered a political opinion.

“I think George Bush should stay the president,” she said.

“Why?”

She considered this for a moment. “Well,” she said, “his wife is very nice. She helps kids learn how to read.”

Ron and I agreed that that was as good a reason as anybody else had to vote for anybody. I told her that I intended to vote for Clinton. When he won, Lynn warned me that we all had probably made a mistake, since George Bush already knew how to be the president and Clinton would have to start doing it without any practice. (Last year Ron reminded me that I had once said I would follow Bill Clinton through the gates of hell. “Well,” he said, “here we are.”)

Lynn doesn’t know enough or care enough about American history right now to have a favorite president. I have more experience in this area, having lived under ten of them and voted faithfully since 1968.

In truth, my favorite president is not one from my own era. It is William Henry Harrison, pictured at left. The “Tippecanoe” of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!” (for his victory over Tecumseh’s army at the Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana in 1811), he was nominated as the Whig party candidate in a hotel on Market Square in Harrisburg in 1840. He won by a narrow majority, and journeyed from his home in Ohio to Washington for his inauguration in March of 1841.

His inaugural address lasted more than two hours (the longest on record, not likely ever to be surpassed in this age of the sound bite). As a result of that experience, he developed pneumonia, and died on April 4, 1841. Thus he became the first president to die in office. His wife, Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison, who had been too ill to make the trip in March and was at that time packing for her projected arrival in May, was thus a First Lady who never even saw the White House.

But how could a President who served a scant thirty days, who was ill most of that time, whose presidency produced neither legislation nor policy and who is remembered only for his campaign slogan be anyone’s favorite?

The answer lies in Mrs. Sara Parks’s American History class for honors eleventh graders at Bishop McDevitt High School in the spring of 1964. The country had just acquired (by tragic accident) its 36th president (actually the 35th individual to hold the office — this numbering problem is all Grover Cleveland’s fault — don’t ask!) in Lyndon Baines Johnson.

As luck would have it, there were 35 students in the class. Mrs. Parks decided that a neat project might be a presentation from each of us on the administrations of the presidents. This was not to be some lame “report” on their lives, she warned us, but an analysis of their leadership and their contributions to the development of the country, minimum five pages with at least three sources, at least one of which must be a scholarly article (that is, in a periodical that doesn’t have any pictures).

So there would not be fighting over who got to do the “good” presidents — that is, the ones who had a lot written about them, like Lincoln and FDR and the now-sainted JFK — Mrs. Parks put each man’s name on an index card, shuffled them up, and passed them out.

I got William Henry Harrison.

I remember going to the State Library with some friends to work on this project. I was appalled when I learned the circumstances of the administration I was given to deal with. I informed Mrs. Parks of the difficulties. She said, well, the assignments are made and somebody has to do this guy.

I filled up a whole page with a grainy photocopy of (almost certainly) the portrait included above, produced then on an early Xerox model that used coated paper that curled as it cooled. I made a lot of the Harrisburg connection and really stressed the unfortunate circumstances that limited the legacy of what would surely have been a fine president.

It was my first experience using words to make something out of nothing. I have no recollection of the grade I might have earned, but I’m confidant it was satisfactory — it was chemistry that caused me grade point problems at the time, never the humanities.

And what I retain, 36 years after the assignment and almost 160 years after William Henry Harrison’s unfortunate end, is a peculiar fondness for the man, but also a sure conviction that students must always be allowed to choose their own topics.