The Glorious Burden

A lifelong interest in U.S. presidents, plus a few new family updates

As a child, I was always intrigued by the things my parents said I could not do. If they told me, “Don't touch the hot light bulb,” or “Please don’t run up the stairs,” I did it anyway. And as I often found, as in the case of the light bulb, they were correct.

Fortunately, my parents reserved most of their “don’ts” for the stuff that resulted in some type of physical danger. In terms of intellectual pursuits, I was lucky: They never tried to prevent me from reading a book because of its subject matter, or because a character/plot point did not match their world view.

Some 50 years ago, I asked my mom about the two men whose names adorned the elementary school where she taught and I attended. Mom pointed me to the set of encyclopedias and told me to look them both up.

Being the curious type, I did.

A Lifelong Fascination

Given how conservative my hometown seems to have become, it now seems odd that Roosevelt-Wilson Elementary School in Texas City, Texas, was named after two Democrats: Woodrow Wilson (a leader of the Progressive Movement) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (author of the New Deal).

But in 1973-74, I wasn’t thinking about that. Instead, I was developing a lifelong fascination with the U.S. presidents.

I memorized the 37 who, up to that point, had been in office, learned the years they served, and the parties they represented. Before long, I could tell you small, arcane bits of trivia, like the fact that William Henry Harrison (President #9, serving only a month) was the victim of his own long-winded inauguration speech, or that Warren G. Harding (the president after Wilson) was the biggest crook we had seen to date.

Little did I know what was happening, or what was to come.

My grandmother, who was glued to the television for the Watergate hearings, told my great Aunt Elizabeth the story about me learning all about the presidents. Elizabeth, who worked as a receptionist at the front desk at the Longview newspaper, told one of the writers and they asked for an interview.

On June 23, 1974, there was an article and picture of 9-year-old me in the Longview News-Journal looking very seriously at my copy of the Warren Report on John F. Kennedy’s assassination. (Apparently 9-year-olds who held the Warren Report in high esteem were few and far between.)

My parents got extra copies of the newspaper article and had it laminated. They were so proud. I was too and thought my classmates would be as well. I didn’t know that showing off the article at school would stamp the word “nerd” — a term made popular around this time by the hit TV show “Happy Days” — on my forehead for generations to come.

My grandmother also helped me write a letter to the White House about my hobby. I thought it was awfully kind of President Nixon to send me a signed letter and a black and white picture when obviously he had so many other things going on at the time.

I can’t find the picture or the letter today. Like so many things, it was lost somewhere along the way.

Six weeks after the article appeared, Nixon resigned.

The Brick Doorstop Book

I thought it was appropriate to share the above story given that it’s Presidents’ Day weekend, the federally sanctioned three-day respite that comes between the MLK holiday and spring break for schoolteachers (unless it’s a weather-related make-up day on the calendar) and others.

As I’ve mentioned in previous essays, we were fortunate to live across the street from Fran and Bill Waranius, a childless couple who “adopted” me and my sister as their own. Fran was a librarian for the Lunar and Planetary Institute, a research arm of NASA, and her house was covered in books.

In addition to the Snoopy drawing by Charles Schulz that we have framed in our home, Fran gave me a book one Christmas that I will never part with: a signed author’s edition copy of Stefan Lorant’s The Glorious Burden, which recreates every presidential election from 1788 to 1976 in a detailed narrative as well as photographs, drawings, political cartoons, and election statistics. It is a brick-sized book I poured over countless times, nerddom be damned.

Over time, being able to name all of the presidents — I can still do the last names of all 46 in under a minute — became my party trick. And while I did not go into politics — outside of writing about them — having that foundational knowledge from age 9 on has greatly helped in understanding societal, political, and economic trends our nation has faced throughout time.

At different points, I’ve thought The Glorious Burden also would be a fitting title for our family’s story, should I ever decide to ditch the “Our Reality Show” theme. But perhaps that’s a bit too dramatic.

Then again, maybe it’s not.