I recall a time (more years ago than I am ready to admit) when we celebrated the birthdays of significant presidents. Typically in the month of February we set aside times to remember George Washington (the Father of our country) and Abraham Lincoln (the Great Emancipator) because (1) they had birthdays in the month of February, and (2) they held certain distinctions as presidents of the Union.

Then someone got a burr under their saddle (look it up) and decided that we should honor all of our past presidents. The school boy in me said, "Cool, now we'll get more holidays!" But alas, what the decision-makers decided was that, instead of celebrating all of the presidents' birthdays, we could lump them all together into one. Consequently we went backward in the number of holidays we received, from 2 in February, to 1 in February and none in the other months which held birthdays of past presidents.

Be that as it may, today is the special day designated to honor our presidents, so here's something I couldn't do from memory -- list the presidents:

1. George Washington, 1789-97
2. John Adams, 1797-1801
3. Thomas Jefferson, 1801-9
4. James Madison, 1809-17
5. James Monroe, 1817-25
6. John Quincy Adams, 1825-29
7. Andrew Jackson, 1829-37
8. Martin Van Buren, 1837-41
9. William Henry Harrison, 1841
10. John Tyler, 1841-45
11. James Knox Polk, 1845-49
12. Zachary Taylor, 1849-50
13. Millard Fillmore, 1850-53
14. Franklin Pierce, 1853-57
15. James Buchanan, 1857-61
16. Abraham Lincoln, 1861-65
17. Andrew Johnson, 1865-69
18. Ulysses Simpson Grant, 1869-77
19. Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 1877-81
20. James Abram Garfield, 1881
21. Chester Alan Arthur, 1881-85
22. Grover Cleveland, 1885-89
23. Benjamin Harrison, 1889-93
24. Grover Cleveland, 1893-97
25. William McKinley, 1897-1901
26. Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-9
27. William Howard Taft, 1909-13
28. Woodrow Wilson, 1913-21
29. Warren Gamaliel Harding, 1921-23
30. Calvin Coolidge, 1923-29
31. Herbert Clark Hoover, 1929-33
32. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933-45
33. Harry S Truman, 1945-53
34. Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953-61
35. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1961-63
36. Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1963-69
37. Richard Milhous Nixon, 1969-74
38. Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr , 1974-77
39. James Earl Carter, 1977-81
40. Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1981-89
41. George Herbert Walker Bush, 1989-1993
42. William Jefferson Clinton, 1993- 2001
43. George W. Bush, 2001-9
44. Barack Obama, Our current president