There’s a monograph to be written about U.S. presidents and South America. That’s the kind of thing that comes to mind sometimes for me, but it wasn’t an entirely random thought that popped into my head. (Though I get enough of those, too.)

My friend Kevin sent me an email today about a trivia contest he’d participated in recently. I don’t think he’d mind me reproducing our exchange here. The subject line was: Final Trivia Question Last Night – U.S. Presidents

Kevin: Without looking up the answer, would you have known the answer to this?

“When Eisenhower was in office, Alaska and Hawaii were admitted into the union. Before him, who was the last president to be in office when a new state was admitted into the union?”

Me: That’s an easy one: Wm. Howard Taft, president in 1912 when NM and AZ became states.

Kevin: Where were you last night when we needed you?

I had the states right in my mind and the time frame, but we put Teddy Roosevelt down. Off by one president.

Me: A harder question would be which state entered the union when TR was president? Oklahoma, 1907. 

Here’s another one: which president signed statehood bills for six states?

Kevin: Ya got me. Hayes or Garfield?

If you still lived in Westmont, you could be on our team.

We were doomed anyway. One of the categories was Alice in Wonderland. We got one right out of eight.

We generally do pretty good with the first round, which is a grab bag round. A little bit of everything. Six out of eight with that category.

They also have another grab bag round, but each answer started with the letter “R.” Seven out of eight for that category.

Me: Benjamin Harrison. The story about the Dakotas is that he closed his eyes when he signed their bills — they’d been approved by Congress at the same time — so that no one would know which was first. Others BH states were Montana, Idaho, Washington and Wyoming. No president ever signed so many statehood bills.

Hayes didn’t get any. But he was the father of a department in Paraguay, which is named after him.

Now that’s trivia. Unless you’re from Paraguay.

Kevin: Very interesting. I hope that comes up as a trivia question sometime.

I keep hoping they’ll ask who was president between Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms? Benjamin Harrrison! That one I know.

I might know more presidential facts than most, but I don’t expect anyone else to know that kind thing. Each to his own trivia. Sports fans would be well to remember that. Then again, sometimes “trivia” is really “facts every educated person should know.”

Can’t remember when I first heard about the Presidente Hayes Department, but it was quite a while ago. Guess the Paraguayans, being from a country that didn’t catch any breaks in the 19th century, were glad to get something from the international arbitration that Hayes oversaw.

Back to the U.S. presidents and South America monograph. There’s certainly enough material. There’s Hayes and Paraguay, of course. There’s also Teddy Roosevelt’s expedition to the Amazon basin (the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition of 1913-14) to explore the River of Doubt, known these days as the Rio Roosevelt. And one more that I can think of: the time when Vice President Nixon’s car was attacked and nearly overturned in Caracas in 1958. Sure, he wasn’t president yet, but he would be later, so it counts.