Snooping unearths some interesting facts

There’s one in every generation, the child that snoops. No corner, drawer, trunk, cupboard, desk, box or closet is safe from the family snooper. They give themselves away, unknowingly, when one of their parents is trying to remember where some object was placed for safekeeping and a little voice says: “it’s in the upstairs closet.”

I was that little voice in my house. While my younger brother thought that getting to read my diaries was a goal to achieve, I was more interested in the pictures contained in my mother’s trunk tucked under the roof trusses of the attic room. I could never properly search her cedar chest because re-folding and neatly placing items back in the correct order was beyond my abilities, but the trunk stuffed full of miscellaneous mementos was fair game!

I’m thinking most snoopy kids end up being the family genealogists. Our desire to know “everything” about the mystery of our family history had to originate when we rummaged through the “secrets” of our parent’s lives. We seemed to understand that they had lives before we made our appearance and demanded to be the center of their universe.

When people ask me where I find all the information I use in my articles….well, I snoop. I can start out with a valid research question and end up questioning my research which has expanded like a balloon about to explode.

Since we are inaugurating a new United States President this week, my snooping brought me to some interesting facts about our previous presidents. History is always good to review and helps put things into prospective. We are not the first generation to experience this, and we won’t be the last.

Three previous presidents refused to attend the inauguration of the incoming president. The first, John Adams, was never formally invited by Thomas Jefferson to attend, but also is said to have not wanted to provoke violence between the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties. His son, John Quincy Adams, left the White House the night before Andrew Jackson’s inauguration after a particularly contentious election. Andrew Johnson, having been impeached, was refused the opportunity to share a carriage from the White House to the Capitol by incoming president, Ulysses S. Grant, and instead stayed at the White House signing legislation.

Four presidents died in office of natural causes: Harrison, Taylor, Harding and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Harrison served only 31 days in office, Roosevelt served over 4,000 having been our only president to be elected to four terms.

Four presidents were assassinated while in office: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy. Interestingly, McKinley was shot while in a reception line at the Pan American Expo by Leon Czolgosz, an avowed anarchist who managed to get off two shots before an African American man, James “Big Jim” Parker, stepped out of the waiting line punching Czolgosz and preventing him from firing a third shot. The only surgeon available to operate was a gynecologist but he performed well, suturing McKinley’s stomach back together in what appeared to be a successful surgery. Seven days later blood poisoning took McKinley’s life, catapulting then Vice President Theodore Roosevelt into the presidency on September 14, 1901.

Our President, Joseph Biden, becomes the 46th president to serve, however, only 45 men have held that office since Grover Cleveland was elected to two non-consecutive terms and therefore is the 22nd and 24th president of the United States. Of those 45 men, nearly two thirds were never elected to a second consecutive term proving that holding two elected terms in office is not the norm. Time will tell if President Biden will be elected to a second term.

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