Monday was Presidents' Day. It was also the first day of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, which crowned a beagle grand champion last night.
In honor of those two subjects, I thought it might be fun to discuss the pets owned by our two youngest presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
Presidential pets have had lots of publicity since the terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had a dog named Fala. We've heard about Bill Clinton's dog Buddy and his cat Socks. George Bush's dog wrote an autobiography with help from Barbara Bush. And most people know about the speech Richard Nixon gave when he was vice-president about his dog Checkers.
But nobody enjoyed pets more than Teddy Roosevelt and JFK. Each had small children in the White House, and each had a menagerie.
Roosevelt had a Chesapeake Bay retriever named Sailor Boy, a Pekingese named Manchu, a mutt called Skip, two terriers named Jack and Pete, cats named Slippers and Tom Quartz, a badger called Josiah, a pony named Algonquin, a macaw named Eli, a piebald rat called Jonathan and a garter snake known as Emily Spinach. But those are just the ones with names. The Roosevelts also had 12 other horses, five bears, five guinea pigs, two kangaroo rats, an owl, a flying squirrel, a raccoon, a coyote, a lion, a hyena, a zebra, and various snakes, lizards and roosters.
Kennedy's pets weren't quite as exotic, but there were a lot of them. In addition to a cat called Tom Kitten, there was Robin the canary, Zsa Zsa the rabbit, Sardar the horse, ponies called Macaroni, Tex and Leprechaun, parakeets named Bluebell and Marybelle, hamsters called Debbie and Billie, a Welsh terrier named Charlie, and other dogs named Pushinka, Shannon, Wolf, Clipper, Blackie, Butterfly, Streaker and White Tips.
I don't have much else to say about the presidential pets except to point out that 67 percent of Americans sleep with at least one pet in bed, and while 14 percent of men claim the animal is a better nighttime partner than their spouse, 55 percent of women claim the same thing.
Also, William Howard Taft kept a cow at the White House named Pauline Wayne. Taft liked fresh milk.
