The Curse of Tenskwatawa

_____

Today marks the forty-fifth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, and there isn’t a great deal I can add to the dialogue at this late date, my feelings at the time were pretty much the same as any eight year-old.

 But there is this:

I remember a few weeks later, I think when I was home alone during the holidays, when one afternoon I was looking through my mother’s semi-forbidden “adult” bookcase for something to read (for a Catholic woman she had very strange reading tastes: The Big Love, Florence Aadland’s tangy account of her teenaged daughter’s affair with Errol Flynn, was on her shelf, as was A History of Orgies and Milton’s Paradise Lost) and found her entire collection of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! paperbacks.

I have to explain that they weren’t really books, simply compilations of the newspaper feature that the superb illustrator Robert Ripley made so famous. The books were mass-market paperbacks and old even in '63, practically crumbling around the edges, I remember.

But on to the item I ran into.

I flipped through the various illustrated stories—a man with a candle stuck through his head, a man who blew himself up with playing cards, the haunted Winchester House, etc—when I found a chart and the anecdote that went with it. The anecdote is that a Shawnee medicine man named Tenskwatawa put a curse on the American presidency, causing a president to die in office every twenty years:

1840 ... William Henry Harrison

1860 ... Abraham Lincoln

1880 ... James A. Garfield

1900 ... William McKinley

1920 ... Warren G. Harding

1940 ... Franklin D. Roosevelt

The last on the list read:

1960 ... ???

Whoa. It gave me a couple of spooky bedtimes, but after the holidays I brought the book to school to show the kids at recess and became the star of the moment.