Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth president of the United States, was born January 7, 1800. Were he still alive (he actually died March 8, 1874), he would be 209 years old. He served as president from 1850 to 1853, serving out Zachary Taylor's unexpired term. He was the only outgoing U. S. president to refuse an honorary Doctor of Laws from Oxford, as it was in Latin and he never accepted anything he couldn't read. He has an august institution of higher education, the Millard Fillmore Institute, named after him.
One day, 30-odd years ago, the Millard Fillmore Institute got a letter from the Millard Fillmore Birthday Party Society of Spring Valley, NY. I lived near Spring Valley at that time, and went to visit the MFBPS folks: two charming local ad men. Their shtick was to invite a famous person to Spring Valley each year to give a talk on Fillmore. Their walls were covered with wonderful letters of regret: "Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II regrets that affairs of state require her presence in London, but she wishes you well..." "His Holiness the Pope regrets that . . ." etc. etc. They said that one year, they were terrified when Lester Maddox, the racist governor of Georgia, actually accepted . . . but canceled out a few weeks later. But one year, they invited the West Point Drill Team and Marching Band, which did accept . . . and didn't cancel. A few days before Fillmore's birthday, they papered the town with posters, to come to the event on the junior high football field. At the appointed hour, three buses from West Point arrived. The West Point officers noted the dozen or so people sitting in the grandstand, shrugged, had their people march up and down the field once, got back on the buses, and went home. The Society repaired, as they always did, to the Fillmore Room at the local pizza parlor, for a celebratory meal.
Bruce: "...Of which my children are proud "graduates"..." John: Yeah, and if they continue to ignore the requests for donations to the alumni fund, we may revoke their diplomas. (Incidentally: many years ago, the Institute sponsored a contest to write an essay on how the world would have been different if it had not been for Fillmore. The most common entry was about how he allegedly installed indoor plumbing in the White House (turns out to have been an H. L. Mencken hoax); and how he sent Admiral Deway to 'open up' Japan (which might otherwise still be closed). The winner, in rather scholarly terms, explained how Fillmore's dithering and waffling on issues of slavery quite possibly delayed the Civil War by a decade or more, and therefore he was directly responsible for Lincoln's ascendancy.)
