Sunday, April 18, 2010

grover cleveland



Fun Grover Facts:

1) Cleveland is the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms (1885–1889 and 1893–1897) and therefore is the only individual to be counted twice in the numbering of the presidents (he's #22 and 24).

2) President Most Likely to be Confused with Detective Andy Sipowicz.

3) His first name was Stephen but he preferred to go by his middle name, Grover. I repeat, he preferred the name Grover.

4) He married Frances Folsom, the 21 yr old daughter of an old friend of Cleveland's, when he was President (Cleveland's the only President to get married in the White House). Folsom is the youngest First Lady in U.S. history, and I'm pretty sure that record's not gonna get broken anytime soon.

5) In 1893 Cleveland had a portion of his upper jaw and hard palate removed during a risky operation to get rid of a cancerous lesion on his upper left jaw--the surgery was performed on a yacht sailing just off of Long Island. The surgeons performed the entire operation inside the mouth without making a single external incision. A vulcanized rubber plate was made for the President, which restored his speaking voice so well that when he reappeared in public no one could detect that an operation had taken place.

6) In a 1905 article in The Ladies Home Journal, Cleveland weighed in on the women's' suffrage movement, writing that "sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by men and women in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence." Not a very good pick-up line, that.

1 comment:

Margie said...

Grover picked up his old friend's daughter? Awkward ...

And experimental surgery on a yacht seems like a great idea.