Presidential Trivia

Are you familiar with Encarta on msn.com? It’s an educational site with a dictionary, an atlas, an encyclopedia, and all kinds of resources for students, from kindergarten through grad school. It also has all kinds of trivia in the forms of lists and quizzes. And I love trivia. And lists. Ok, yes, and quizzes, but I think we’re quizzed out here these days.

So here, thanks to Encarta, are some things you might not know about U.S. presidents…

First U.S. president George Washington never shook hands with his visitors. Instead, he bowed to them.

At a time when tomatoes were thought by most people to be poisonous, Thomas Jefferson, the third president, was a pioneer grower of them.

In warm weather, sixth president John Quincy Adams normally went skinny-dipping in the Potomac River before dawn.

The ninth U.S. president, William Henry Harrison, gave the longest inauguration speech ever on a bitterly cold day. He then caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia, and Harrison died exactly one month into his presidency. It was the shortest term in U.S. history.

Zachary Taylor, 12th president, was a career military man who had never established a permanent address and had never voted when he won the presidency. And at a hot-weathered Fourth of July celebration in 1850, Taylor became ill after eating cherries and milk and died five days later.

The only unmarried man ever to be elected president was James Buchanan, the 15th U.S. president.

The 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, carried letters, bills, and notes in his stovepipe hat.

Andrew Johnson, 17th president, never attended school and learned to write at the age of 17.  He also only wore suits that he custom-tailored himself.

Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president, was the first to receive a raise in salary (the first 17 presidents earned $25,000 per year; Grant's presidential salary was increased in 1873 to $50,000). Grant was smoked about 20 cigars a day and died of throat cancer.

The 20th president, James Garfield, was multilingual and ambidextrous and could write Greek with one hand while writing Latin with the other.

Grover Cleveland, 22nd and 24th president, had the cancerous upper portion of his jaw removed during a secret operation aboard a yacht during his second term.

The teddy bear came about after 26th U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear with her cub on a hunting trip in Mississippi.

William Taft, 27th president, was 6-foot-2 and weighed more than 300 pounds, and he had a special oversized bathtub installed in the White House.

The 29th U.S. president, Warren G. Harding, was the first to ride to his inauguration ceremony in an automobile, to speak on the radio, and to have a radio in the White House. He also played poker at least twice a week, and his advisors were nicknamed the "Poker Cabinet" because they joined the games. Harding once gambled away a set of White House china.

Calvin Coolidge, 30th president, suffered chronic stomach pain and required 10 to 11 hours of sleep each night and a daily afternoon nap.

Herbert Hoover, the 31st president, was, in 1929, the first to have a telephone on his desk. Prior to that, the telephone was located in a booth outside the executive office. Hoover also published more than 16 books, including Fishing for Fun -- And to Wash Your Soul.

The 32nd president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was related to 11 former presidents by either blood or marriage.

The full middle name of the 33rd president, Harry S Truman is the letter "S," which represents his two grandfathers, both of whom had a name starting with that letter.

President number 34, Dwight D. Eisenhower, loved to cook and created an 894-word recipe for vegetable soup that includes the stems of nasturtium flowers as an ingredient.

Gerald Ford, 38th president, was a model and appeared in Look and Cosmopolitan magazines in the early 1940s.

The 40th president, Ronald Reagan, broke the Curse of Tippecanoe, also called the "20-year curse," in which, for 120 years, every president elected in a year ending in 0 died in office.

George W. Bush, 43rd president, and his wife Laura were married just three months after meeting.