Know your First Ladies?

Everyone has a favorite quiz, and I thank Gene from Kansas City, and inasmuch as I like them, too, put on your thinking cap, It’s all about our First Ladies. Here goes. and thanks again to Gene. And I can’t help but wonder how he ran onto my blog. Welcome, Gene, keep it up.

1. Who was the wife of one President and the mother of another?

2. Which First Lady was ‘President’ when her husband became incapacitated?

3. Which one lived the longest?

4. Jackie Kennedy re-married, who was the other to do so?

5. Who was the niece of one President and the cousin and wife of another?

6. Which one suffered epileptic seizures?

7. Which was the first college graduate?

8. Which two First Ladies were divorcees?

9. Can you name the one who was both a geologist and a linguist? Yeah, the wife of a president.

10. Which one taught her husband to read and write?

11. Three were widows before marrying the future President. Name them.

12. Which First Lady never set foot in the White House?

13. Nancy Reagan was the second to act in films. Name the other.

14. Which one was committed to a mental institution?

15. Can you name the First Lady who was cross-eyed?

16. Who was the only one born on foreign soil?

17. When she first laid eyes on her husband-to-be he was in his underwear. Who was she?   And he?

18. Two were proposed to on their first dates, and said, NO, at first. Name them.

We’ve had a colorful set of First Ladies, and some of these are easy and some are not. I don’t know when these were gathered, but Lyndon Johnson is the most recent one mentioned. Take a chance with them all. It’s fun.

1. Abigail Smith, wife of John Adams and mother of John Quincy Adams.

2. Edith Galt Wilson. When Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke, she went through official papers and alone decided which were ‘important’.

3. Bess (Mrs. Harry Truman) died at age 97 in 1982.

4. Mrs. Grover Cleveland. Both she and Mrs. Kennedy waited five years after their husband’s deaths before remarrying.

5. Eleanor Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt, her uncle, ‘gave the bride away’ when she wed her fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

6. Ida Saxton, (Mrs. William) McKinley).

7. Lucy Webb (Mrs. Rutherford) Hayes, graduated from Wesleyan Female College.

8. Florence (Mrs. Warren) Harding and Betty (Mrs. Gerald) Ford.

9. Lou Henry (Mrs. Herbert) Hoover was the first woman to take a degree in geology, at Stanford, helped translate a 16th century test from Latin to English, and also spoke Chinese. (Wow)

10. Eliza McCardle (Mrs. Andrew) Jackson. He could neither read or write when they married.

11. Martha Washington, widow of Daniel Park Custis; Dolley Madsin, widow of John Todd; and Edith Wilson widow of Norman Galt.

12. Anna Symmes (Mrs. Wm. Henry) Harrison. She planned to join her husband, but he died afer only one month in office.

13. Pat (Mrs. Richard) Nixon, appeared in pictures, but never a speaking part .

14. Mary Todd Lincoln. The sorrow of loved ones fighting on both sides in the Civil War, the assassination of her husband; and the deaths of two sons were all too much for her already unstable mind. She was committed for three months.

15, Julie Dent (Mrs. Ulysses S, ) Grant.

16. Louisa Johnson (Mrs. John Quincy) Adams was born in London, the child of an American father and an English mother.

17. While watering her flower garden one day, Grace Goodhue glanced up at the window of a boarding house next door, and saw 31 year old Calvin Coolidge shaving, wearing long-johns and a hat!

18. Lady Bird Taylor said “NO” to the first-date proposal by Lyndon Johnson, and Pat Ryan thought Richard Nixon was ‘crazy’ when he proposed two hours after meeting her.

What wonderful questions. I doubt if many of them could have ‘survived’ in today’s relentless and often cruel media coverage. Maybe publicity was more understanding in the former days. Who now knows????

 

All right, next week back to serious stuff.  ethelbrad@comcast.net