List of Presidents I've seen in person

Richard Nixon - In October of 1980, I was working as a caseworker with intellectually-challenged adults in Phoenixville and was entering the Phoenixville Hospital to visit one of my "clients" as they were called then who had just had her first baby. As I walked toward the front door, I saw a commotion of sorts coming toward me including TV lights, cameras and 10-15 people. To my surprise, walking right toward me was the disgraced ex-President Nixon. Turns out, he was visiting his first granddaughter, born to Julie and David Eisenhauer, that same day. He was talking with anyone who would listen, about the Phillies 1-0 loss to the Astros in that afternoon's playoff game. With all that is happening now under this current abomination of a Presidency, it's hard to convey how much we hated disliked didn't care for hated Nixon. And here he was in front of me, with my one chance to tell him all the awful things I had said or thought about him during his time in office. Nope. I put out my hand, he shook it and we went on our separate ways. Opposite ways, of course.

Gerald Ford - In October of 1976, I was living on Front Street in Philadelphia with an old Quaker lady named Beatrice Kirkbride, who had agreed to let me stay on the 3rd floor of her house for the three months of my time on Earlham's Philadelphia program (where I interned as a sportswriter at the Germantown Courier and as a producer of Pete Silverman and Howard Eskin's sports news shows on WCAU-AM radio. Pete eventually became the executive producer of Flyers telecasts and hired me as the statistician sitting next to the announcers in the TV booth, starting in 1980 and ending in 2001.) 

One day, as I walked toward Center City for a class called Urban Studies (I think) with Andrea Mitchell, then a reporter at KYW and eventually on NBC (and who married Alan Greenspan who went on to become chair of the Federal Reserve), I noticed a group of 5-10 people gathered at the end of a street that was blocked off by the police, who were also standing guard.

I asked them what they were waiting for and they told me that Gerald Ford was staying in a a rowhome there on Delancey Street and was due to leave any moment to go to the Walnut Street Theatre to practice for the next evening's debate with Jimmy Carter. I asked one of the secret service men standing inside the blockaded area when he might come out and he would neither confirm nor deny who or why they were there but leaned closer and said in a low tone, "probably in the next ten minutes." 

About 15 minutes later, his limo came by and there the man was, looking out the window, giving us a perfunctory wave and then he was gone.

Jimmy Carter - I first saw President Carter from afar at Game 7 of the 1979 World Series in Baltimore, but seeing as how his seat was a little closer to the action that mine, I could only barely make him out. But here is the full story of my interaction with him: https://jmcvickar.blogspot.com/2015/05/brush-with-greatness-ii-james-earl.html 

Ronald Reagan - I don't actually remember ever having seen him in person.

George HW Bush - He attended the same volunteerism event referenced in the Jimmy Carter story above as did...

Bill Clinton - I also went to his inauguration on January 20, 1993 and saw him briefly as he rode by enroute to the White House for the first time as the most effective President in my lifetime. So far at least. 

I also saw him give a spellbinding speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte in 2012 where he was called the "Secretary of 'Splainin' Things." 

George W. Bush - I don't actually remember ever having seen him in person either.

Barack Obama - We saw him give a speech about 10 minutes down the road from us at Great Valley High School on April 9, 2008. If you watch this video, you'll see Lissy at the 2:29 mark, and here you can see her in the red blouse sitting behind him.

I also saw him at the 2012 convention, of course, and then again at a rally for Kamala Harris in Philly (also with John Legend and Bruce Springsteen).

Donald Trump - Oddly enough, I saw him way back in the late 1990's at a Flyers-Rangers game, arriving quite late and sitting in the front row on the blue line all by himself. He watched the game with some, but not much, interest and I never once saw him interact with a single person the whole game. And I'm embarrassed to admit that I could barely take my eyes off him for much of the game.

Joe Biden - I must have seen him speak at the 2012 Convention but I don't remember it. 

And that covers it so far!

 My observation:

Democrats focus too much on asking questions and then obsess over considering all the possible answers without agreed on conclusions.

Republicans focus too much on accepting answers regardless of their defensible merit so they can move on to the next issue.

2 or 3 posts ago, I listed some thoughts I imagined sharing with my middle school students (but never did), and the last few were about judgement, specifically:

- Are we more interested in judging someone or being curious about them?

- If you don’t believe in judging people, don’t judge people who do.

Then last week, the NY Times published this article, titled:

How to Stop Being So Judgy

Here’s what you should do instead.

It gave three specific suggestions on what to do instead and the third one was:

"Swap judgment for curiosity and empathy."

I love those - two such powerful and often challenging practices in trying to replace judgement, but both helpful and productive both for oneself as well as the person we may be tempted to be "judgy" about. 

Maybe I'm not writing enough about sex

Recently, I received an email from Google Analytics (for the first time ever), showing me that this blog had received 82 visits in the past month, up 12.33% from, well, I don't know - it didn't say, and they were all from "new users".

Sort of impressive to have 82 new people come here considering I never reference it publicly and no one reads blogs anymore. 

Not as impressive? The "average engagement time" on my blog: 1 (ONE) second!

And that is down 95.14%, meaning they used to spend nearly, but not even, 2 seconds on the site?

Not surprising? All 82 users were new which means that no one who had ever been here ever came back. 

A few months back, I posted my thought about recognizing people who had been underrecognized for their accomplishments. 

Since then, I've found a few more and will link to them below, but there certainly is a common theme: almost all of them are female or belong to an ethnic or racial minority. And since the NY Times recently did an entire piece on women who had changed history over the past 100 years, I'll make this my last post on the subject, but since I had been collecting these, I might as well add them here.

- A pioneering paleontologist and avid fossil collector, Mary Anning’s discoveries have contributed significantly to modern-day science. But until recently, she was relatively unknown.

- Gladys West, a mathematician whose modeling of the Earth’s shape played a critical role in the development of GPS worked in near obscurity. She was almost 90 before she received any recognition for her work.

- A comedian's take on The Grapefruit Ladies of Ireland who helped end apartheid in South Africa.

And finally, my favorite, a story about a Philadelphia woman named Caroline Rebecca LeCount, who preceded Rosa Parks, but performed the same action, and whose name was almost lost to history.  

LeCount’s work is frequently likened to that of Rosa Parks. But, many officials celebrated her work as a basis for Park’s later work. 

“It has been suggested that Caroline LeCount was the Rosa Parks of her time, but since Caroline came before Rosa, I like to think that Rosa Parks was the Caroline LeCount of her time,” said Marianne McQuaid, a senior designer on Maps & Schedules with SEPTA. 

 

This was my assignment to my 8th grade Language Arts classes this past Friday to complete this next week over Spring Break (after they had finished the actual assignment their teacher had left for them).

They asked for an explanation and after I told them more about it and how it aligns with my philosophy of life, one student asked me to validate Them. I thought for a moment and told them that I appreciated how well they all got along with each other so well and seem to not only like each other but how they support each other so well.

Then I added that I hope that by now they realize that as annoying as school can be, they are no longer there to impress their parents or their teachers or their friends and that there is only one person they need to impress. I paused, a second or three passed and I heard a chorus of "ME!" One girl said in a sense of wonder, "wow, that actually makes me want to take this more seriously." And a boy said "That was like a Kobe Bryant message!" Another said "That is actually so motivating."

Two students simultaneously then related it to their class assignment that day which was to identify an archetype in the book they are reading - Hunger Games. They asked if I am a mentor, like an archetype mentor.

After three years, my favorite day of (substitute) teaching so far. 

I've been kind of collecting some quotes and some of my own random thoughts over the past month or so and instead of, or maybe in hopes of, trying to make them go together in some coherent way, I'm going to throw these here morsels into this blog stew and see how it tastes in the end.

They are mostly related to things I would want to convey to the students I am honored and thrilled to teach when I get the chance. Whether or not I'll ever actually pass any of them along, I don't know.

 -Your test score is a snapshot in time, not a prediction of your future.

- When you feel anxiety, ignore the condescending cliche "Go touch grass"...but do it anyway. Go outside. Feel the vibe. Touch trees. Really feel them. Listen to them. Breathe deep. Now do it again and as many times as you need. You'll never ever regret it.

 - Who is the one person, the only person you need to impress? Yourself. Not your teachers, parents, or friends. Just you. And when you do, revel in it, but part of impressing only yourself means...keeping it to yourself. If someone else notices and compliments you? Yeah, go ahead and revel in that too. 

 - Give more validation than you want to receive.

- The real value of a good education isn't how much you know, it's how you choose to share what you know.

- How many of us spend our lives afraid of looking foolish? And how many of us make sure to always support someone who has said or done something foolish, even if it was at our expense?

- Are we more interested in judging someone or being curious about them?

- If you don’t believe in judging people, don’t judge people who do.

My friend since 11th grade, Terry Lefton, forwarded me this photo, which is appropriate both because he is in it, more or less alongside me, and because without him, I wouldn't have been at this game.

As I may have noted previously, besides family-related events, this was the happiest day of my life for reasons that are neither particularly explainable or defensible. 

The date was May 19, 1974 and the event was the Flyers winning the Stanley Cup. One would have to look it up to see how important it was to the city of Philadelphia, but the quote I remember that may have explained it best came from the Flyers back-up goalie Bobby Taylor who actually came to be a friend of mine just 6 years later when I joined him in the broadcast booth as the statistician for the telecasts thanks to Pete Silverman. Pete had been my boss when I interned at 1210 WCAU-AM on the Philadelphia program my junior year at Earlham. 

"It took a bunch of Canadians to come in here to blow away a big dark cloud from over the city of Philadelphia."

Anyway, this photo shows the celebration on the ice at the Spectrum as the NHL Commissioner handed the Stanley Cup to Bobby Clarke and Bernie Parent for them to skate it around the ice as was the tradition for decades in the NHL. When the buzzer had sounded and the Flyers had won 1-0, Terry and I hugged - first time I had ever hugged another male - and when we saw fans starting to climb over the plexiglass onto the ice, we looked at each other and didn't need to say a word. We were going too!

And so...if you zoom way in to the guys I circled in green, yup - the guy on the right with the light brown jacket is Lefty and the guy on the right with the light blue shirt and white pants, well, guess who.

Yup. This guy.

In a comparison that would probably upset fans of both of these artists, the Venn diagram intersect consisting perhaps of only me, it came to me the other night that there are a few things that Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift have in common, besides their obvious success.

Firstly, I think they both tapped in, early in their careers in particular, to perspectives that hadn't previously been represented in music: teenage girls and teenage boys. 

Sure, lots of songs appeal to young girls, but they aren't usually written from their point of view like Taylor Swift has, albeit from a heteronormative idealized view, with Love Story and You Belong with Me being the most obvious examples (and happen to be great songs and videos, BTW.) 

And well, I don't think I need to list all the Bruce songs that are written from the young male POV and most noteworthy, not in terms of girls but about their hardscrabble, working class lives. There have been so few songwriters over the years that have even tried to write from that perspective, but Bruce did it often and he did it brilliantly.

Secondly, I also think they, more than any other artists I'm aware of, have had a great connection with their fans, Taylor even more than Bruce. He shows it in the length and quality of his legendary live performances. But no one has the connection Tay-tay does and it's been a big reason for her overall success.

Oh, and it doesn't hurt that they both are unparalleled musical storytellers.

I've had various inspirations over the years for websites. One of them was to track people who had never gotten the credit they deserved for some important contribution to history, especially if more credit was given to someone else. 

So instead of a whole website, I'll just list them here as I find out about them:

Claudette Colvin died last week. Her refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., came months before it was overshadowed by a similar act of resistance in the same city by Rosa Parks. But local civil rights leaders decided not to make Ms. Colvin their symbol of discrimination. She was, she later said, too dark-skinned and too poor to win the crucial support of Montgomery’s Black middle class. 

And...

We all know the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. While the poetry and prose were all his, the “I have a dream” motif actually came from Black activist and minister Prathia Hall.

Hall delivered a prayer during a service commemorating the Mount Olive Baptist Church, destroyed by the KKK. She spoke directly to God about justice and equality, saying over and over, “I have a dream.” King, in attendance, didn’t hide his inspiration. He told Hall outright he wanted to iterate on her metaphor.

As Sen. Raphael Warnock says in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s excellent history, “The Black Church”: “People need to know that before it was Martin’s dream, it was Prathia’s prayer.”

Rather than diminish King’s accomplishment, to me, this underscores how the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t made by giants alone. It was built instead with countless people’s gifts, intelligence, ideas, labor, acts of resistance, works of art, words, deeds, sacrifices and, yes, prayers.

And bonus addition:

The woman who didn't get full credit for the discovery of the DNA double helix with Crick and Watson was Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose crucial "Photo 51" provided the key evidence for their model, but her contributions were minimized during her lifetime, and she wasn't eligible for the Nobel Prize awarded in 1962 because she had passed away in 1958. Her work, shared without her explicit consent, was foundational, leading to her being called the "dark lady of DNA" and a symbol of sexism in science. 

 

So heck, just out of curiosity, I just googled "people who didn't get the credit they deserved" and there was a whole list. So maybe this will be my last post on the topic, but...probably not.

 

 

I thought this was a really wise list of strategies from David Plouffe, who I think is as close a political genius as we Dems have.

Here's my summary of his ideas, though he explains many of them well in more detail:

A plan to bring down costs.

Democrats should

- promise to investigate and stop price gouging.

- Get rid of Mr. Trump’s inflation-inducing tariffs.

- Build millions more apartments and homes.

- Establish universal child care.

- Expand Medicare to cover home health costs for family caregivers.

If it can’t be communicated in an Instagram post or 10-second TikTok, go back to the drawing board. Make it about tangibly cutting the cost of living for people, not an ideological wish list.

A plan to create the jobs America needs.

- Candidates could be honest about their districts’ shortages of nurses, police officers, teachers, auto mechanics and plumbers.

- Through tax incentives, training, tuition assistance and a relentless focus on what’s needed, candidates should call for specific numbers of people to be hired over the next four years.

A plan for A.I.

- Force tech giants to be more transparent about their data and algorithms, about how they identify deepfakes and about their plans to mitigate the downstream negative effects of their products.

- Start with A.I.’s toxic stew of higher energy costs, job losses, chatbot mental health misuse and misinformation. Then consider how the revenue from these activities will go to the wealthiest people on the planet.

A plan for reform.

- Term limits and lifetime lobbying bans for members of Congress.

- A ban on stock trading.

- Rules for elected officials and their crypto holdings.

- Guardrails for prediction markets.

- Maybe even consider a constitutional amendment banning presidential pardons.

You can’t go far enough in this lane if you are an outsider candidate challenging the broken status quo.

- Democrats have come to be seen as the defenders of institutions that voters, especially young ones, feel are badly broken. It’s a deadly political place to be. The party can win a debate about how to reform and modernize government when it’s up against a MAGA worldview where there are no rules at all, especially for the powerful. But not if they continue to be seen as the standard bearers of a broken status quo.

Hold your own leaders to account.

- Democrats should call for new leadership and say that, if elected, they won’t support the current crop.

- Candidates should blow the whistle on a poorly performing program or a law or regulation that’s outlived its usefulness.

- If Democrats get better about focusing on results, cutting red tape and getting things done for people, on time and under budget — what’s become known as the abundance agenda — it makes the populist call for higher taxes on the wealthiest even more powerful.

It's become a "thing" to declare that we are allowed to have our own opinions but not our own facts.

I disagree. Numbers are easily manipulated to prove our own point. 

Good news! Last year, Trea Turner led the National League in hitting! 

    And made outs 70% of the time!

Good news! Tariff income raised about a quarter of a trillion dollars last year!

    Which accounts for just a fraction of the federal government's total revenue.

This was a fun article to read about a fellow who set out to walk around the world. 

One thing on particular stood out to me as a shared experience from my 1982 cross-country bike trip:

Bushby said he has learned a lot over the past nearly three decades, but one thing stands out: “99.99 percent of the people I’ve met have been the very best in humanity,” he said. “The world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems.”

Bushby said that anytime he was ill or down on his luck, a stranger would swoop in and help — either with shelter, a meal, financial support or guidance.