For those who are asking: yes, I did watch the vice presidential debate last night.
I thought both candidates did what they needed to do: look competent, show that they agree with and follow the lead of their presidential candidate, and not do anything too egregiously stupid. They were both there to re-assure those who have already decided which way they’re voting that that decision was the correct one.
Both candidates, it seems, let pass several opportunities to attack the other. Again, I think that’s because they weren’t there to look terribly combative (well, more combative than they have been on the campaign trail). That wasn’t the goal of the debate.
I don’t think either candidate swayed any votes, but that doesn’t really matter, and wasn’t their goal. Glancing at several post-debate analyses, it seems one thing they all had in common was a difficult time finding enough undecided voters to put together a meaningful panel.
Actually, the most surprising part of the debate, to me, is the universal agreement that “my” candidate did great, totally won the debate, and wiped the floor with the other. I haven’t seen/heard anyone say anything positive about the other candidate, or anything negative about their own. So, like our reliance on social media for news for the past decade, we continue to live in echo chambers in which differing points of view, if they’re noticed at all, are immediately dismissed as “fringe”.
Frequently, in my talks and writings about the presidents, I have mentioned that John Tyler (1790-1862), who was president from 1841 to 1845, is the earliest president to still have living grandchildren. Tyler’s first wife — with whom he had eight children — died while he was president, and he married a woman thirty years his junior while he was president. After his presidency, Tyler and his second wife, Julia, had seven children. One of the sons from his second marriage, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, also married twice, the second time to a much younger woman, and had children with both wives. Two of Lyon’s children with his second wife, Susan Ruffin, were born in the 1920s, and made John Tyler the earliest-serving president with living grandchildren.
On September 26, one of those grandchildren, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., died. Born on January 3, 1925, he was 95 years old. He served in the Navy during World War II, earned a law degree and practiced law, and then in the 1960s he earned a doctorate in history and became a teacher.
With Lyon’s death, his younger brother, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born in 1928), is the last living grandchild of President Tyler.
Off-the-top-of-my-head theorizing regarding the late-breaking news about President Trump’s health. Happy, light thoughts: rational Republicans are ecstatic that the president has a legitimate external reason to skip or cancel the upcoming debates. Darker, more sober thoughts: the president has another reason to push for a “delay” in the election.
Caveat: in addition to being a political scientist, I’m a science fiction writer, so I often theorize far beyond the probable.
For those who haven’t heard the news: senior presidential advisor Hope Hicks tested positive for Covid-19 Wednesday. About 1am Friday, President Trump Tweeted “Tonight, [Melania] and I tested positive for Covid-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately….”
At the moment, I’m watching CNN live and occasionally jumping to the other news channels. More data in this CNN article.
Today is October 1, 2020, retired President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter’s 96th birthday. Happy birthday, Mr. President! (Chief Justice William Rehnquist was born the same day, though he died in September 2005.)
President Carter is the longest-lived president in US history. He is the first to reach this milestone birthday (actually, he was also the first to reach the milestone birthday of 95, but I didn’t write this piece last year). He has been the oldest living president since the death of George H.W. Bush on November 30, 2018, and the longest lived president since March 21, 2019 (Bush, who was president eight years after Carter, was born 111 days before him). At the other end of that spectrum, Jimmy Carter was the youngest living president from the date of his inauguration (January 20, 1977) for 16 years (until Bill Clinton was inaugurated, on January 20, 1993).
Jimmy Carter is also the longest-retired president in US history. We elected him our 39th president in 1976, and turned him out of office in the election of 1980, so he has been a retired president for nearly 40 years (from January 20, 1981). Before 2012, the longest-retired president was Herbert Hoover, who served from 1929 to 1933, and died October 20, 1964.
Rosalynn Carter
His marriage, to Rosalynn Smith Carter, is the longest presidential marriage. They married on July 7, 1946, and eclipsed George H.W. and Barbara Bush’s record of 73 years, 102 days on October 17th of last year. Rosalynn was born in August of 1927. She is the senior living, and fifth longest-lived, First Lady.
To mark President Carter’s birthday, I want to mention a few things that are younger than he is. I think he has enough of a sense of humor to appreciate it:
Commercially available sliced bread (beyond which many things are “the greatest since”) first came on the market in 1928, four years after Jimmy Carter. Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, built a prototype of the first single loaf bread-slicing machine in 1912, but it was destroyed in a fire. In 1928, he finally got a working machine into production, and its first commercial use, by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, came on July 7, 1928. Betty White, to whom the machine has been frequently compared of late, was born January 17, 1922 (nearly three years before President Carter).
On the day of his birth (five years before the onset of the Great Depression), in the Roaring ’20s, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 104.08 (on September 30, 2020, the DJIA closed at 27,781.70). For a closer comparison, using a simple inflation adjustor, $1.00 in 1924 is worth approximately $14.85 today (meaning that 104.08 in today’s dollars would be approximately 1,545.59).
Jimmy Carter is older than nearly half the companies that make up the 30 stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (though those component companies have changed more than 50 times since the Average was first calculated in 1896). Those companies include: Amgen (founded in 1980), Apple (1976), Caterpillar (founded about six months after Jimmy Carter was born, on April 15, 1925), Cisco (1984), Home Depot (1978), Intel (1968), McDonald’s (1940), Microsoft (1975), Nike (1964), Salesforce (1999), UnitedHealth (1977), Visa (1958), and Walmart (1962). Dow component The Walt Disney Company was founded on October 16, 1923, less than a year before Jimmy Carter was born.
In 1924, the price of a gallon of gasoline was about 11 cents. A loaf of bread, about 9 cents. And a first class stamp (remember, no email or texting back then) was 2 cents. Today, gasoline is about $2.00 a gallon, a loaf of bread is $2.99. And first class postage is 55 cents.
Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, was born April 21, 1926, a year and a half after Jimmy Carter. She has been Queen since 1952 (since the administration of Harry Truman). She is the longest-lived, longest-reigning English monarch. Her husband, Prince Philip, was born June 10, 1921.
In 1924, the US cent had the same portrait of Abraham Lincoln that we see today on the obverse, making it the only coin design that is still in use. The reverse, however, has gone through two redesigns; in 1924, it was two stalks of wheat surrounding the large words ONE CENT. The nickel had an Indian on the obverse, and a bison on the reverse. The dime had Mercury on the obverse, and a fasces on the reverse. The quarter had a standing image of Liberty on the obverse, and a flying eagle on the reverse. The half dollar had a walking Liberty image on the observe, and a standing eagle on the reverse. The dollar coin, known as the Peace Dollar, had the Goddess of Liberty on the obverse, and an eagle at rest on the reverse. At the time, the US was also minting gold coins for general circulation, in the denominations of $2.50, $5.00, $10.00, and $20.00 (the last was the classic St. Gaudens double eagle). Gold coinage ceased in 1933.
In 1924, a few months before Carter’s birth, the first Winter Olympics were held, in Chamonix, France. George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” premiered. On April 1, 1924, Adolf Hitler was sentenced to five years in jail, for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch (though he would serve only eight months).
First Lieutenant Russell L. Maughan earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for a flight that took place on June 23, 1924. According to the commendation, he “departed from Mitchel Field, Long Island, New York, at 2:58 a.m. Eastern standard time, in a modified service type pursuit airplane on [a] dawn-to-dusk flight, and landed at Crissy Field, San Francisco, California, at 9:47 p.m. Pacific time, the same date. He flew over 2,540 miles in 21 hours and 48 and a half minutes, thereby making the fastest time ever made by man between New York and San Francisco.” Commercial flight time today from New York’s JFK Airport to San Francisco International is about 5 hours and 45 minutes.
Nellie Tayloe Ross
In November, 1924, Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming was elected as the first woman governor in the United States.
The top grossing movies of the year were The Sea Hawk, Girl Shy, The Thief of Bagdad, and Secrets. The first Academy Awards were handed out in 1929.
Six months after Jimmy Carter was born, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion. Television was not yet a thing when Carter was born.
Yuri Gagarin, the first man to fly in space, was born in 1934. His trip took place in April 1961.
At the time of Jimmy Carter’s birth, there were only 48 stars on the US flag. Alaska and Hawaii didn’t become states until 1959 (their stars were added to the flag, one in 1959, one in 1960).
Jimmy Carter is older than 124 of the 193 member nations of the United Nations. Carter is also older than the UN itself, which was formed in 1945.
At the time of his birth, there was no Vice President. A year before he was born, in August, 1923, President Warren Harding died, and Vice President Calvin Coolidge assumed the presidency (the 25th Amendment, providing for filling a vacancy in the Vice Presidency, was not adopted until 1967). A month after his birth, the election of 1924 gave Coolidge his own term as president.
In 1924, 67-year-old William Howard Taft was the senior living president, having served from 1909 to 1913. But at the time, he was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (which still met in the Capitol Building; the Supreme Court building wouldn’t be built until 1935).
President Woodrow Wilson had died in February, eight months before Carter’s birth.
Herbert Hoover (1929-33) was the US Secretary of Commerce.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45) was recovering from losing the Vice Presidential election of 1920, and from an attack of Guillain–Barré syndrome, which at the time was assumed to be polio, and which cost him his ability to walk.
Harry Truman (1945-53) was serving as County Court judge of Jackson County, Missouri (about to lost his bid for re-election and begin selling auto club memberships), and taking night courses at the Kansas City Law School.
Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61) was a major in the US Army, serving in the Panama Canal Zone, and about to attend the Command and General Staff College.
John Kennedy (1961-63) was 7 years old. Lyndon Johnson (1963-69) was 16. Richard Nixon (1969-74) was 11. Gerald Ford (1974-77) was 11. Ronald Reagan (Carter’s successor, 1981-89) was 13. George H.W. Bush (1989-93) was 111 days old.
Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr.
President John Tyler, the earliest serving president (by far) to still have living grandchildren, had been dead for 62 years. But his youngest grandchildren, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. (also born in 1924), and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born in 1928), are still living today. President Tyler was born in 1790, served as president from 1841 to 1845, and died in 1862.
Harrison Ruffin Tyler
Jimmy Carter’s successors in the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, predeceased him (Reagan in 2004, Bush in 2018). Three of his living successors were born in 1946 (the first year to see the births of three US presidents), nearly 22 years after Carter (Bill Clinton on August 19, 1946; George W. Bush on July 6, 1946; and Donald Trump on June 14, 1946). Barack Obama is the youngest living president; he was born on August 4, 1961.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have four children, 11 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Once again, happy birthday, President Carter!
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in 2016.
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I was listening to a conversation between my mother and my niece. My mother was trying to be a teacher, while my niece was trying to be obstinate. I don’t think either one came away from the conversation satisfied.
During their conversation, my mother used the proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” It got me thinking and wondering: would the proverb have nearly as much currency if the noun for the creature and the verb for acquiring the creature were different words? For instance, if it was “give a man a chicken…” or “give a man a vegetable…”? Or if the verb were “reel” or “cast”?
I’m not questioning the concept, but wondering if anyone would ever think or say it if the word fish weren’t both a noun and the verb one uses to acquire the noun.
“(G)et rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very … there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.” —Donald Trump, announcing the end of American democracy on September 23, 2020.
If there were no ballots, we wouldn’t have to worry about a transfer of power, because we wouldn’t be changing presidents. We wouldn’t be voting, apparently in Donald Trump’s America, ever again. That is an incredibly clear statement of how little he values the Constitution he laughingly swore to “preserve, protect, and defend.” Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the United States of America. He is forcing me to vote a straight Democratic ticket for the first time in my life. I urge you to do the same, to protect our Constitution, our system of government, our way of life.
On Tuesday, September 29, the two oldest people ever are going to square off in a debate as candidates for President of the United States of American.
Donald Trump
Before Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan was the only person to pass his 70th birthday before being inaugurated as president, and at that, it was Reagan’s re-election (he first took office 17 days before his 70th birthday, in 1981). But now, we’re looking at an election in which whoever wins (ignoring the chance of a third-party candidate winning),
Joe Biden
we’ll be inaugurating the oldest person ever to take the oath of office. On Inauguration Day 2021, Donald Trump will be 74 years 220 days old. That same day, Joe Biden will be 78 years 61 days old. And yes, Reagan is—at the moment—still the oldest president ever, having retired at the age of 77 years 348 days.
Hillary Clinton
And the combined ages of the major party candidates so far outstrips any other election that it’s truly remarkable. Before 2020, the oldest combined ages of a two-candidate race was… well, in 2016, when 70-year-old Donald Trump defeated 69-year-old Hillary Clinton. But before that, we have to go back to 1984, when 73-year-old Reagan defeated 57-year-old Walter Mondale, and 1848, when 64-year-old Zachary Taylor (who died in office) defeated 66-year-old Lewis Cass.
John McCain
In fact, the only candidates who’ve run for the presidency in their seventies were Trump, Reagan, Bob Dole (who lost the election of 1996 at the age of 73), and John McCain (who lost the election of 2008 at the age of 72). That’s it. Out of 57 elections, more than 75 major party candidates, and only four (now five) candidates more than 70 years old.
Bob Dole
At the other end of the scale, everyone remembers that John Kennedy was the youngest president to be elected (he took office at the age of 43 in 1960), and all you trivia mavens also remember to correct that record, because Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency at the age of 42, upon William McKinley’s death in 1901.
William Jennings Bryan
But how many of you remember that the youngest major party candidate was actually 36 years old? Had William Jennings Bryan won the election of 1896 (the first of three in which he was the Democratic nominee), he would have taken office 15 days before his 37th birthday (he was born March 19, 1860). Instead, he lost to William McKinley, who was born January 29, 1843, and took office 34 days after his 54th birthday. (McKinley won the popular vote, 51.0% to 46.7%, and the electoral vote, 271 to 176.) So the election of 1896 was the youngest campaign in history. Bryan went on to run again in 1900, again losing to McKinley, and then suffering a further defeat, against William Howard Taft in 1908. Bryan died at the age of 65, in 1925.
George B. McClellan
The second youngest candidate was West Point graduate George B. McClellan, who was the commanding general of the Union Army early in the Civil War, and governor of New Jersey from 1878 to 1881. But when he lost to Abraham Lincoln’s re-election campaign of 1864, he was only 38 years old (he was born December 3, 1826). McClellan died at the age of 58, in late 1885.
The youngest campaigns were the elections of 1896, 1960, and 1860. In 1896, as I said, 54-year-old William McKinley defeated 36-year-old William Jennings Bryan. In 1960, it was the youngster John Kennedy defeating Vice President Richard Nixon, who was four years older than Kennedy.
On March 4, 1861 (Inauguration Day was March 4th, until the 20th Amendment changed it to January 20th, effective in 1937), Abraham Lincoln was 22 days past his 52nd birthday. In the election of 1860, he had defeated Vice President John C. Breckinridge (and also 64-year-old John Bell and 47-year-old Stephen Douglas—all four received electoral votes).
John Cabell Breckinridge
Breckinridge accomplished a great deal very early in life. Born January 16, 1821, he represented Kentucky in the House of Representatives from 1851 to 1855. In 1855, President Franklin Pierce appointed Breckinridge US Minister to Spain (and the Senate confirmed him), but he declined the appointment, and returned home to resume his law practice. In 1856, he was elected the youngest Vice President in US history, on James Buchanan’s ticket (he took office just after his 36th birthday). He lost the election of 1860 to Lincoln, but was elected to the Senate at the same time. He took his seat on March 4, 1861, but that summer, Kentucky seceded from the Union, and Breckinridge went with it. He was declared a traitor and expelled from the Senate on December 4, 1861. He served as a general in the Confederate army, and was the fifth (and final) Secretary of War of the Confederacy for a few months in 1865. After the war, he went into exile in Europe and Canada, and returned home in 1869, following President Johnson’s proclamation of amnesty. He died May 17, 1875.
Richard Nixon
The second youngest vice president to take office was Richard Nixon (he celebrated his 40th birthday 11 days before taking the oath of office). After serving two terms as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon lost the very close presidential election to John Kennedy in 1960, and then became the only former vice president to be elected president in 1968 (and the only president to resign, in 1974).
The Five Oldest Presidents
Considered by age at inauguration, the list runs as follows:
1. Donald Trump was 70 years 220 days old when he was inaugurated on January 20, 2017. If Joe Biden wins this year’s election, he will break that record at the age of 78 years 61 days.
2. Ronald Reagan was 17 days shy of his 70th birthday when he was inaugurated on January 20, 1989, and 17 days shy of his 78th birthday when he retired eight years later.
3. William Henry Harrison was 68 years 23 days old when he was inaugurated on March 4, 1841. The president who served the shortest term (31 days), he was the first to die in office, so he was only 68 years 54 days old when he left office.
4. James Buchanan was 65 years 315 days old when he was inaugurated in 1857, and 69 years 315 days old when he retired from office.
5. George H.W. Bush was 64 years 222 days old when he succeeded Reagan, in 1989, and 68 years 222 days old when he left office.
Considering age at the time the President left office, Dwight David Eisenhower moves into third place. He was only 62 years 98 days old when he was inaugurated in 1953, putting him seventh on the list, but serving two full terms (he and Reagan are the only two on this list to have served eight years as president), he was 70 years 98 days old when he retired.
The Five Youngest Presidents:
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution requires a president to be at least 35 years old.
1. Theodore Roosevelt. Born on October 27, 1858, he was 42 years 322 days old when he was inaugurated on September 14, 1901, after William McKinley was assassinated. To beat Roosevelt’s record as the youngest president in the election of 2024, the newly elected president will have to have been born after March 4, 1982.
2. John F. Kennedy. Born on May 29, 1917, he was 43 years 236 days old when he took the oath of office on January 20, 1961, after winning the election of 1960. To beat Kennedy’s record as the youngest president elected, the winner of the election of 2008 will have to have been born after May 29, 1981.
3. Bill Clinton. Born on August 19, 1946, he was 46 years 154 days old when he was inaugurated on January 20, 1993.
4. Ulysses S. Grant. Born on April 27, 1822, he was 46 years 311 days old when he was inaugurated on March 4, 1869.
5. Barack Obama. Born August 4, 1961, he was 47 years 169 days old when he was inaugurated on January 20, 2009.
In order to join this list (and knock Obama off), the president who wins the election of 2024 will have to have been born after August 4, 1977.
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In the days of LiveJournal, it was “three things make a blog post.” Well, today it was more than three, but it was very productive science fictionally, and felt quite good.
First, there was a productive session of editing a novel Fantastic Books will soon be publishing.
Then I took a very nice walk in the woods. Found an interesting group of green acorns on a fallen piece of branch, and saw a rabbit on the way back.
Then I looked at my email, and found a contract! It’s a story the editor had told me he was buying three months ago, but it didn’t feel “official.” Now, reading the contract, it feels much better, almost official. My next appearance in Analog will be a short-short story called “On the Rocks”!
Then I checked the other email account, and found two messages. One, telling me the panel I’d recorded for ConTinual way back when will finally be posted tomorrow morning, about 9:30. You can access ConTinual at Facebook.com/groups/ConTinual, and I’ll add in a link to the panel when it’s available. The panel was about the enduring and growing legacy of “The Eye of Argon,” with Keith R.A. DeCandido, Hildy Silverman, and Michael A. Ventrella. [Edited: here’s the link for the Facebook-hosted video: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ConTinual/permalink/690968394849069/ ]
The other message gave me my schedule for virtual Capclave (online on October 17). At 3:00pm Eastern time, I’ll be talking about “Writing Time Travel and Paradoxes” with Iver P. Cooper, A.T. Greenblatt, and James Morrow. And then, at 4:30, it will be “Centennial Superstars” with Walter H. Hunt and Barbara Krasnoff.
So, yes, it was a pretty good day.
P.S. – I still hate this new “blocks” editor for blog posts. I’ve read several articles, but still can’t figure out how to put the image in a paragraph of text and run the text around it (like I used to be able to). Instead (as you can see above), all I’ve been able to figure out is to post the picture as its own paragraph (“block”), which is just ugly.
We all strive for the big happinesses in life—winning awards, achieving financial success, finding mutual lust—but the little ones are no less sweet, though they are much easier to come by. There are a lot of little things which bring me joy that I rarely think about when I’m not actually experiencing them in the moment:
Going back to bed for another hour.
Using my back scratcher to get just the right spot.
That moment when I’m mixing the dough, and it suddenly turns from a variegated pile of ingredients—a lump of this, a splash of that—into a smooth, homogenous mixture that’s all the same color and texture, just like I need it to be.
When the swimming pool is precisely the right temperature.
Taking an extra little slice of pie, an extra cookie, or a just little bit more dessert.
Lying down in bed, and pulling the top sheet over me, and it billows and slowly settles onto me, lightly touching me here and then there…
Sneezing.
The last hiccup (if only I knew it was going to be the last).
When I go outside in the morning, and I look down the sidewalk, and my vision (even though I wear glasses) is absolutely, totally sharp and clear. I feel like I can see forever: every individual leaf on each tree, separate blades of grass, all the way down past the intersection, and past the next intersection… the most perfect vision possible, it almost feels hyper-real, and I don’t want to blink because then my vision will go back to normal.
A nice, cleansing rain, and the smell of petrichor.
Learning a nifty new word, like petrichor.
When I wear shorts and no shoes, it’s normal. When I wear pants and socks and shoes, that, too, is an unremarkable feeling. But there’s an uncommon feeling of comfort, of being at home and relaxed, when I wear long pants and no socks or shoes, like if my socks got wet, so I took them off.
Wearing that super comfortable sweater or sweatshirt the first day it really feels like autumn.
Arriving precisely on time without really trying.
Seeing a few dollars in the tip jar at the end of the day.
So, what surprising little things bring you that frisson of joy?
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Commercially available sliced bread (beyond which many things are “the greatest since”) first came on the market in 1928, four years after Jimmy Carter. Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, built a prototype of the first single loaf bread-slicing machine in 1912, but it was destroyed in a fire. In 1928, he finally got a working machine into production, and its first commercial use, by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, came on July 7, 1928. Betty White, to whom the machine has been frequently compared of late, was born January 17, 1922 (nearly three years before President Carter).
In 1924, the price of a gallon of gasoline was about 11 cents. A loaf of bread, about 9 cents. And a first class stamp (remember, no email or texting back then) was 2 cents. Today, gasoline is about $2.00 a gallon, a loaf of bread is $2.99. And first class postage is 55 cents.
In 1924, the US cent had the same portrait of Abraham Lincoln that we see today on the obverse, making it the only coin design that is still in use. The reverse, however, has gone through two redesigns; in 1924, it was two stalks of wheat surrounding the large words ONE CENT. The nickel had an Indian on the obverse, and a bison on the reverse. The dime had Mercury on the obverse, and a fasces on the reverse. The quarter had a standing image of Liberty on the obverse, and a flying eagle on the reverse. The half dollar had a walking Liberty image on the observe, and a standing eagle on the reverse. The dollar coin, known as the Peace Dollar, had the Goddess of Liberty on the obverse, and an eagle at rest on the reverse. At the time, the US was also minting gold coins for general circulation, in the denominations of $2.50, $5.00, $10.00, and $20.00 (the last was the classic St. Gaudens double eagle). Gold coinage ceased in 1933.
In 1924, a few months before Carter’s birth, the first Winter Olympics were held, in Chamonix, France. George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” premiered. On April 1, 1924, Adolf Hitler was sentenced to five years in jail, for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch (though he would serve only eight months).
First Lieutenant Russell L. Maughan earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for a flight that took place on June 23, 1924. According to the commendation, he “departed from Mitchel Field, Long Island, New York, at 2:58 a.m. Eastern standard time, in a modified service type pursuit airplane on [a] dawn-to-dusk flight, and landed at Crissy Field, San Francisco, California, at 9:47 p.m. Pacific time, the same date. He flew over 2,540 miles in 21 hours and 48 and a half minutes, thereby making the fastest time ever made by man between New York and San Francisco.” Commercial flight time today from New York’s JFK Airport to San Francisco International is about 5 hours and 45 minutes.
At the time of Jimmy Carter’s birth, there were only 48 stars on the US flag. Alaska and Hawaii didn’t become states until 1959 (their stars were added to the flag, one in 1959, one in 1960).
Ian Randal Strock 