Even before I was anywhere near old enough to vote, I have always been interested in the United States Presidents. I think it started when I was in the fourth grade, at St. Jerome’s School in Brooklyn, New York, and I won a class spelling bee. The prize was my choice of any book from the bookcase in the back of the classroom. I chose a book about the U.S. Presidents that I used to like to look at during reading period. I remember being glad that I won, and got to take the book…what if someone else won and took that book? Then I’d not get to look at it anymore!

It wasn’t the most up-to-date book…it only went up to LBJ. This was 1970, and Nixon was President by then. But they had newer books at the library (pictured here), and I loved to go there and borrow them.

This picture is of the Clarendon Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, located on Nostrand Avenue near the Farragut Road intersection. We lived on Nostrand Avenue back in the early 70’s, only about a half a block away from this library. So I used to go there all the time, I loved the place.

One day, I got the idea to make my own Presidential scrapbook. So I guess I was a scrapbooker even back then, long before it became the hobby that it is today, long before you could buy all sorts of nifty supplies, embellishments, and other cool stuph. My scrapbook consisted of a ten-cent folder, the kind that had metal clips inside it in which to hold pages. I did have vinyl page-protectors, though.

What I did was go to the library and use their copy machine to make photocopies of pictures of Presidents from books. I think it was a nickel a copy back then…I didn’t have a lot of money, but I gave up an awful lot of penny candy so that I could make a few copies a week. I made a scrapbook page for each President, using the pictures, and, in my own words, I wrote a short bio for each.

A cool thing that I was able to add to my pages were these milk bottle cap things. We used to buy milk in these half-gallon glass bottles from John the grocer across the street…this was when there was a bottle deposit, and you actually had to return the empties to the store, John would give them back to the milkman when he came each day with his delivery, and the bottles would be re-used by the dairy. Anyhoo, the dairy…forget the name of it now, started putting these little discs under the bottle caps, each one had a small picture and brief info about a President. I thought this was the coolest thing, and of course, I had to collect them all and put them into my scrapbook.

The only thing that put a damper on my fun was my father. He thought that there was something seriously wrong with me for making that scrapbook, and for being interested in Presidents at all. He said that it wasn’t *normal*, that girls my age were supposed to collect pictures of movie stars, not U.S. Presidents.

I was always the bane of his existence, starting from the day that I was born a girl. He couldn’t stand that…he figured that if he *had* to get married (yep, it was a shotgun wedding, that’s what was done back then), the kid had better at least be a boy. Too bad for him that it didn’t work out that way.

But not only was I a GIRL, but I couldn’t even be arsed to be a *normal* girl. In addition to collecting pictures of Presidents, I was also interested in playing and watching baseball. I had Barbies and paper dolls and girly stuph like that, and I played with them, but I was more interested in the more non-girly things. I might also add that I had gotten interested in collecting coins and postage stamps…some of them have Presidents on them, you know. I still have a stamp collection, not my original one, but I started a new one. I haven’t kept up with it lately, but I have a whole shelf-full of albums of U.S. and foreign stamps. The only coins I collect anymore are the state quarters.

My father figured that if he was going to be stuck with a girl, that I should at least be a *normal* girl, and wear frilly pink dresses, rather than my usual attire of jeans and a New York Mets T-shirt and baseball cap. He kept telling me that if I kept being the way I was, that no one would want to marry me.

But he was also forever beating the shit out of me and my mother, something that I thought was normal behavior in all homes at the time. If this was what it was like to be married, I wasn’t sure that I wanted any part of it. I’d much rather have been the first female player for the Mets…or President, or maybe both. I knew what the rules were for being eligible to be President…all they say is that you have to be at least 35 years old (which seemed like a LONG way off to me at the time, now it’s getting to be a long way off in the opposite direction…LOL!), and a natural-born U.S. citizen. Nothing there that says you have to be a man. I wonder how old Hillary was when she first learned of this fact. Did she have dreams of being President when she was a young girl?

Anyhoo, I no longer want to be President, but I’m still very much interested in it all. I was able to vote in my very first Presidential election in 1980, at age 20. I voted for Jimmy Carter, who lost to Ronald Reagan, who, by the way, was a movie star…what I SHOULD have been collecting back when I was a kid. And I’ve voted in every Presidential primary and general election ever since…I stand behind what I say about *bitching rights*. If you don’t bother to vote, then don’t complain about who gets elected.

This year’s election is very exciting to me. First of all, it means The End Of The Chimp. Remind me to get a beer later and drink a toast to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was elected to four terms, but died during his fourth term. After that, a Constitutional Amendment was passed saying that no President shall be elected to more than two terms. So, no chance of Duhbya getting re-elected. I’ll be happy when he leaves office and goes back to Texas, and can’t do any more damage.

Also, it’s history in the making here! Now we know that the Democrats will be nominating either a woman or an African-American man. That’s something that has never been done before. We did once have a woman VP candidate in a major party (Geraldine Ferraro, who was Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984, they lost big-time to that movie star guy). But, come November, there is a very good chance that we could be celebrating the election of the first woman or African-American President. This is good news to me, because either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama are people that I could vote for. I’m a Hillary supporter, but if Obama gets the nom, I’ll be sending my vote his way.

It’s kind of a sad world we live in today, though. I keep reading about studies where school children today don’t even know who the President is now, never mind who else ever held that office. I mean, there was this one study where some kids thought that Joseph Stalin was the President after FDR died. It was actually Harry S. Truman.

I wonder if my father would have been happier if I’d been such an airhead. Probably not, because he also used to beat the crap out of me for getting a B instead of an A. Nothing ever made that man happy, and that’s why I have had nothing to do with him for almost 30 years now.
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If you’ve read this far…thanks! Now, just for fun, here’s a little quizzie that will test your Presidential knowledge. Please leave your answers in the comments with your blog’s URL…after comments on this post close, I will randomly pick someone and they will win a free BlogAd, for three months, in my sidebar. It won’t matter how many answers you get wrong or right, this is just for fun.

1. Which President served the shortest length of time?
2. Which President once got stuck in a bathtub?
3. Two Presidents have been impeached. Who?
4. Which President served two terms, but not consecutively?
5. Who was the only bachelor (never married) President?
6. Who was President the when I was born? (there is a clue to this in this post, and my birthday is in April)
7. Who was the youngest President to take office?
8. Name three Presidents who died from being assassinated.
9. Which President couldn’t *walk and chew gum* at the same time?
10. Now this is a guessing game question: who did I vote for in 1992? The choices are: Daddy Bush, Bill Clinton, or Ross Perot?

Good luck, and have fun!