Terry: Presidents' Day still relatively new holiday

Anybody remember a time before there was a Presidents’ Day?

I do.

Growing up in the 1960s, on each side of the blackboard (it really was a black board and the teacher wrote on it with chalk) was a portrait of George Washington on one side and Abraham Lincoln on the other. I said the pledge of allegiance every morning under the watchful scowling eyes of these two founding fathers.

Karl Terry

As I remember, we didn’t get a school holiday for either man, but that was in the days before high-speed ski lifts and gondolas were invented, which is where Presidents’ Day is celebrated nowadays.

We studied each of them in turn as their respective birthdays rolled around and we had a few things we did to observe the days. On Lincoln’s day we made a stovepipe hat out of black construction paper and on Washington’s birthday we ate cherry pie in the lunchroom.

As I grew older we pitched pennies with Lincoln’s profile on them for each other’s milk money. I wasn’t the best at pitching pennies so I often had to eat my cherry pie the next week without a carton of milk to wash it down.

When my wife couldn’t even remember what day the birthdays of these two greatest presidents actually fall on I knew we were in trouble. Most of us learned in grade school those days were Feb. 12 for Lincoln and Feb. 22 for Washington.

What we didn’t learn back in the ‘60s was that George Washington probably never really chopped down a cherry tree and he probably did tell a lie now and then, especially over a tall glass of his own whiskey, and he was actually born on Feb. 11.

That’s right, Washington was born on Feb. 11, 1731, because the British Empire was still using the outdated Julian calendar until 1752. That wacky calendar had no Leap Year days added and had fallen behind by about 11 days by the time the father of our country was born. Most American-born subjects of the Empire, including Washington, celebrated their birthdays on a date converted to the new-fangled Gregorian calendar.

I’m betting if I had thrown that little factoid out in Miss Tate’s third grade class the fight would have been on with the ol’ gal.

Washington’s Birthday or Washington’s Day finally became a federal holiday in 1879, when it was proposed by Sen. Stephen W. Dorsey, a carpetbagger from Arkansas. For those of you who were asleep that week in history class, a carpetbagger was a northerner who packed his “carpetbag” and moved to the South during Reconstruction after Lincoln won the Civil War. They sought influence and a quick dollar and lots of them were elected to Congress.

I’ve never had the chance to tour the White House, which Washington began building and Honest Abe still has a famous bedroom. I have, however, toured the Dorsey Mansion, built by Stephen Dorsey and touted as probably the biggest house in Eastern New Mexico in the 1800s. It’s big, but it’s no White House or Monticello. Disgraced by scandal, Dorsey’s mansion fell into disrepair over the years and his holiday was supplanted by a generic federal holiday in 1971 that has come to honor all presidents.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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