By Cathy Salter When Dwight D. Eisenhower was President of the United States and I was in the fourth grade, I memorized and could recite the names in full of every US President. I learned brief facts about the great ones and others who came and went from office having achieved little worth noting in my classroom history books. I’d recite— “There was Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison… Monroe, Quincy Adams, Jackson, Van Buren… Harrison, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor… Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, and Lincoln… Johnson, Grant, Hayes, and then… For only 200 days, there was James A Garfield (1881)….” But who was Garfield? Sixteen years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at the end of the Civil War, President James A. Garfield was shot in the back –just four months after taking office. He lingered for the next 79 days before dying at the age of 49 of blood poisoning and infections caused by the archaic, unsanitary and questionable medical practices of his doctor. When he died, his funeral was attended by more than had gathered for Abraham Lincoln’s funeral.
See more in this weeks Boone County Journal
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