< PREVIOUS ] [ 1993 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Banks, government offices and many schools were closed yesterday in honor of -- in honor of what?
One teen-aged daughter said school was out for Great
Americans Day,
according to her teachers. The other
insisted that it was Presidents' Day.
The World Almanac, normally authoritative in such
matter, didn't exactly settle the issue: Feb. 15 (3d
Monday in Feb.) -- Washington's Birthday, or Presidents'
Day, or Washington-Lincoln Day.
Well, at least we've eliminated Great Americans. Abraham Lincoln was born Feb. 12, 1809, and George Washington was born on Feb. 11, 1731 or Feb. 22, 1732, depending on which calendar you use.
So a February holiday in their honor makes some sense, especially if you happen to own an inn near a ski resort -- typically it is the industry's biggest weekend.
This inspired further thought. If we are going to have a day to honor all presidents, what day should it be?
Thanks to modern desktop computers, it was fairly easy to enter all the presidential birthdays and compute an average, from the Jan. 7 of Millard Fillmore to the Dec. 29 of Andrew Johnson.
Lo and behold, it was July 4, birthday of the nation, as well as of Calvin Coolidge in 1872, and the day, 46 years earlier, that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died.
Surely this must hold some great and cosmic numerologic significance. But the line was busy when I tried to call one of the local dingbats who could relate this to the sum of the facets on a quartz crystal and the quantity of blocks in the pyramid on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States.
Back at the machine, more number-crunching revealed that if you take the average of any reasonable number of random dates, you'll generally arrive at or near the Fourth of July. July 2 is the mid-point of the year, averages cluster near the middle, and I could explain more if I had ever passed a statistics class.
Besides, July 4 is already a holiday; to make it Average Presidential Day as well as Independence Day would serve no one.
Back to the numbers. George Bush was the only president born in June, and William Howard Taft holds a similar distinction for September. But six presidents were born in October.
No presidents have been born on the 3rd, 17th, 21st, 25th, 26th, or 31st of the month. The most popular day is the 29th, with four.
Thus we could set Oct. 29 aside as Modal President Day. It isn't any president's actual birthday (John Adams on Oct. 30 and Theodore Roosevelt on Oct. 27 are closest), and so we would be honoring them all. Just why we would want to honor Warren Harding (Nov. 2) and Richard Nixon (Jan. 9) as well as Washington and Lincoln is beyond me, but I can't make all the decisions for this great republic.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1993 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >