Sheet music for Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 presidential campaign song, “Keep Cool with Coolidge” In the summer of 1924, Calvin Coolidge was finishing his first year as president.  He ascended to the White House after the untimely death of President Warren Harding the previous August.  Coolidge is remembered by most historians as a president who didn’t do a whole lot while in office, who did not care to talk to the press, and who preferred to let others do the heavy lifting of government.  The eager young Herbert Hoover was always willing to take on whatever job the president would ask him to do, and President Coolidge allowed it, despite his personal feelings toward Hoover not being particularly warm. One phrase that is associated with President Coolidge is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  It’s not hard to see where he was coming from.  Coolidge’s time in office saw a prosperous economy heat up.  The Roaring 20s really roared while he was in the White House.  The most one c

Edmond Halley (1656-1742) saw his namesake comet when he was 26 years old. If you were around in 1986, you might remember the excitement surrounding the return of Halley’s Comet.  Halley’s Comet hadn’t been seen since 1910, and 76 years later, it was getting ready to make another pass by Earth.  Many who were excited probably wound up feeling a little disappointed. I’ll admit I was. I was sixteen, and was eager to see a bright ball in the sky with a burning tail lighting up the night.  All we got to see was a small, faint, comet-shaped light in the sky. It turned out that in 1986, the comet passed when the Earth was on the other side of the sun, so there wasn’t much to look at. We knew it was coming, though.  We’ve known this since 1705, when Edmond Halley predicted the comet would return on Christmas night, 1758.  Halley died in 1742, so he never got to see that he was correct—but he was correct. Halley’s calculations show that the comet will pass by Earth every 74 to 79 y

What's the lesson here? For nearly the entire run of Charles Schulz's Peanuts  comic strip, one running gag has been the football gag.  The gag is simple: Lucy Van Pelt kneels down on the grass, holding a football in place, and tells Charlie Brown to kick it.  Charlie Brown gets a good running start, ready to give it a good, solid kick, but at the last minute, Lucy pulls it away.  The final panel usually has a miserable Charlie Brown laying on the ground while Lucy looks over him, holding the football, telling him in one way or another that he obviously shouldn't have trusted her. The gag first appeared on November 14, 1951, when the strip was just over a year old.  In the first occurrence, the football was not held by Lucy but by Violet Gray, another little girl in Charlie Brown’s neighborhood.  (Violet would later become a minor character in the strip, and Lucy would become a major one.   Lucy wouldn’t appear in the strip until the following year.)  The f