Monday, December 23, 2013

President John Tyler’s Grandson, on Still Being Alive

 

Re-post 2012

A few days ago, the website Mental Floss posted an amazing, seemingly impossible piece of American trivia, which then quickly spread around the web, to Yahoo, the Huffington Post, ABC News, Fox News, Politico, Kottke, the Daily Mail, and others: Two grandsons of President John Tyler — who was born in 1790 and served as tenth president of the United States — are still alive today.

"Thank goodness," says Harrison Ruffin Tyler, one of those grandsons, who spoke to us earlier this morning from Sherwood Forest Plantation, the historical Tyler family home in Virginia in which he resides. Harrison Tyler is not an immortal vampire, or a 160-year-old freak of nature, but a mentally sharp octogenarian with a soothing Southern drawl and a more favorable opinion of his grandfather's legacy than the ones held by most presidential historians.

No comments:

Post a Comment