Meet the Presidents

[copied from dland]

The U.S. Mint started issuing these coins this week. There's going to be a dollar coin for every president, except any still living, because there's a law against putting living presidents on currency. (Who knew?) I have been collecting those state quarters because, apparently, I am a huge dork. (Really, what are my grandchildren going to do with my stupid set of state quarters? And the Hubs'?) But the quarters, at least, are in circulation; you get them in normal change. Nobody uses dollar coins, so I'm not really sure how I'm getting my hands on these. I guess I'll have to go to the bank when each one comes out and trade in a dollar bill for the one I want. But I must have them.

When I was a kid, my most favorite all-time game was

Mine was a few years older than this one, and had a different picture on the box. I can't believe that of all the things I've saved from my childhood, I don't still have it. (The box actually fell apart ages ago, but I saved the parts for years.) The game board was a big map of the United States, with circles all over where you could insert your game pieces when you got a question right, just like in one of those booklets where you keep coins. Because the game pieces were little silver-colored coins, each one with the image of one of the presidents on it. There was also a big, complicated wheel thing that you would turn -- I forget the actual rules -- and it would ask questions about the presidents, and if you got it right -- the wheel showed the answer someplace -- you could put one of your tokens into the map. There were levels of difficulty for the questions; I always played the easiest level because I was, like, nine years old. My grandfather played the harder levels.

I never played this game with anyone but Grandpa Sam. It was the highlight of any visit he and Grandma made to us. (They lived in the Bronx at this time, which was maybe a half-hour bus ride to us, tops, so we saw them once a month, or maybe every six weeks.) Grandpa and I would sit in the little den downstairs and play Meet the Presidents. It was our thing, man.

I've certainly written about Grandpa Sam before, but I can't get the entry to come up, so I can't link to it. My grandpa was a very magical being. His appearance was entirely ordinary, maybe even less than ordinary. He was about 5'2", which made him the tallest male his family had produced up to that point. (His son, my Uncle Sol, was about 5'4".) Grandpa Sam looked like the most ordinary little man in the whole world.

But he had this amazing, quiet charisma. It did him no good in the world at large; he was never a success at any business he tried, and sometimes, employers would take advantage of his good nature. He was, by trade, a glovemaker, when the style in the world was that all ladies and gentlemen wore leather gloves. Whenever he lost one of his businesses -- he had a candy store, at one point -- he would go back to glovemaking. (He was a cutter; he used a giant hot press to cut the leather pieces and then they went to a stitcher.) During the Depression when gloves weren't selling so well, he took whatever job he could find to feed his children.

His magic was that everyone who knew him -- other than the above-mentioned occasional employers -- liked him immediately, wanted to befriend him, wanted to hang out with him. He and Grandma were unbelievable social butterflies. They had lots and lots of friends, and made new friends wherever they went in an instant, because of him. The magic he exerted over children cannot be described; every child gravitated towards him and he would play with them, talk to them as if they were real people. I was lucky because as the youngest grandchild, he spent more time with me, because he retired not long after I was born.

He had only gone to school long enough to learn to read and write in English; he came here as an immigrant when he was 13. But once he learned to read, he kept on going. He had three favorite topics to read about, learn about, and remember every detail about: opera, baseball, and American history. His most special thing was that he loved everything about the presidents. Our favorite trick was for him to recite the list of all the presidents, Washington to ... well, I first heard him do it with Kennedy, but could ultimately do it up through Nixon. No mnemonic devices here. He just knew them.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my presidential dollars, and they are gold-colored, not silver, but I may just stack them up on the edge of rolltop here at my desk in little piles, like Scrooge McDuck, and ask myself presidential trivia questions from time to time. Andrew Johnson never went to school, didja know that? Who was the only bachelor president? (It was James Buchanan.) These were questions on the wheel, my friends, and Grandpa Sam knew the answers. And so do I.


WATCHING THE HISTORY CHANNEL :: ENTRY #1379