It was the summer of 2009! (Sing the song in your head.) I had made a Twitter and one of the suggestions for who to follow was UberFacts. Me, being a person who strives for knowledge, eagerly followed the account and was awaiting the plethora of facts that I could add to my repertoire. Over the years I have blindly accepted these tweets as fact without them even citing their sources. So after 11 years, here I am, finally questioning things.
UberFact: “Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of the U.S., enjoyed calling for his bodyguards and hiding while they frantically looked for him.”
But where’s the math? The proof:
Well here it goes, and I figure I should start small. Yes, Coolidge was the 30th president¹ . Okay so they were correct there, but what about this man’s antics? According to Wikipedia, he was a small central government republican who said little and had a bone-dry humor. He was so quiet that he gained the nickname, “Silent Cal.” One of his most famous quotes was from when a woman sat next to him at a dinner party and told him, “I have made a bet, Mr. Coolidge, that I could get more than two words out of you.” To which he replied, “You lose.”² He was really a very boring president. He had laissez-faire methods and, being the roaring 20s where people lived in the ignorant bliss of inflation, things were running themselves. He had no opinion on prohibition or world politics. However, Coolidge has received praise on his stance with civil rights.
In trying to find the reports where he hid from his bodyguards I have landed upon a mystery of its own. It seems that the several articles I found speaking on this situation continue to cite the same single article from History.com. Yes, I would have loved to look into this further and read this article but it costs money (*which is suspicious*) and I’m not being paid for this so I refuse to do such a thing until I’m funded. Or you all can help by donating to my Patreon³. Until then we must continue to question this source and ultimately, UberFacts, and who they trust to report information from. I will continue to be a fact sleuth and keep you wonderful readers filled in.
Footnotes:
1. “Calvin Coolidge”, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge
2. “Miscellany” Lapham’s Quarterly,
3. No, we do not have a Patreon set up yet. But, please go donate and help save the animals.
