A guy grows up and forgets what a great month February used to be for school kids.
You bet it was. Shortest month of the year, for one thing. Plus, it got to add a day every four years. None of the other months had a Leap Year thing going for them, not even the ones names for Roman emperors or gods. February started out with Ground Hog's Day, moved quickly to Abraham Lincoln's birthday and, before a guy could finish cutting out his construction-paper silhouette of Honest Abe, here came the birthday of the granddaddy of them all, George Washington, first president, father of his country and all that.
I liked having two presidents' birthdays to celebrate in a single month. It didn't occur to me to wonder why we didn't celebrate other presidents' birthdays during the school year. Maybe things were already becoming politically controversial with the presidents after we got past Lincoln.
I'll tell you this much: Washington and Lincoln had great profiles to make into silhouettes. Washington had that high forehead and prominent nose, Lincoln that craggy face and distinctive beard. I was born while Franklin D. Roosevelt was still president - the same year he won his fourth term, in fact - but by the time I started school, he had died and his vice president, Harry S. Truman, had taken office.
Now, Truman had a fairly distinctive profile of his own, with the solid jaw and the wire-rimmed eyeglasses. But none of my teachers ever asked the class to make a silhouette of Truman. In fact, the only time I remember talking about him was when I got in an argument with my first-grade friend over whether Truman was right to get rid of General MacArthur. Neither of us had a clue what we were talking about, of course, but that never stops 7-year-olds from arguing. To this day, I remember the fight during the ride home from school, and I've always been kind of proud that I defended the president. I'm sure he appreciated it, or he would have if I'd had a Twitter account to make it known.
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I'm a little surprised we didn't make a big deal out of FDR's birthday, since he served so long and was responsible for so many programs. But, then, a guy who did some fix-up work around the AP bureau when I was starting in news couldn't say the word "Roosevelt" without adding a curse word, so that particular president had a few detractors. The trademark cigarette holder and jaunty fedora would have made for an instantly recognizable grade-school silhouette, though.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was president by the time I really started to take notice of happenings in Washington, D.C. and around the world. I knew of Ike's war record, of course. I read a couple of biographies and saw him in a few war movies of the time.
If being in charge of the Allied forces that defeated Germany and Japan in World War II isn't enough to have your birthday celebrated in grade schools, why, I guess I don't know what is. But he never threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, either, or chopped down a cherry tree, and he never worked as a rail splitter or did his ciphers by the fireplace on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal, so maybe he wasn't that heroic.
In his defense, there probably weren't many opportunities growing up on the Kansas plains to chop down cherry trees. Besides, he didn't have all that great of a profile for a cut-out silhouette. He'd have looked like most any other grandpa of any kid in second grade.
Perhaps we lost something when we started to push the two separate presidents' birthdays into a single celebration of Presidents Day. It's true that we gained another Monday holiday, along with the opportunity for a holiday sale or two. But have we lost the story of the Potomac and the silver dollar?
I always liked that one, even though I was pretty sure it was untrue. What kid would throw away a perfectly good silver dollar?
