HAYES, 19th, 1877-81

Rutherford Birchard Hayes was one of the most mediocre-looking men ever to run for President. He was short, rumpled in dress and wore a rat's-nest beard. He had no charisma. Henry Adams described Hayes as a third rate nonentity, whose only recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one.

His delicate health kept him from school in his early childhood, and he was as timid and nervous as a girl, with an aversion to the rough and mischievous ways of schoolboys. A journal entry states: "Welladay, more faults to cure. ...Trifling remarks, boyish conduct, etc., are among my crying sins. Mend, mend!"

Hayes and his sister Fanny had affection for each other that spilled over the customary bounds of sibling devotion. He wrote in a letter to Fanny, in 1840: "The only news here now is, the big monkey is dead and pussy has got the hydr- I forget the rest of the word." Even after Fanny's marriage, she wrote him constantly begging him to visit her and assuring him that he was "daily the object of my waking thoughts & utmost nightly of my dreams." When Fanny died in 1856 in childbirth, Hayes wrote to a friend, "Oh, what a blow it is! During all my life she has been the dear one!" Hayes wrote to his wife: "You are Sister Fanny to me now."

His wife, Lucy, was the first college graduate to serve as First Lady.

Hayes was the first President to have a telephone or a typewriter in the White House.

Hayes is also reputed to be the first President to have had his voice recorded, by Thomas Edison in 1877 with his newly-invented phonograph, but the recording is lost and this fact can not be verified. His last words were "I know that I am going where Lucy is."

d. January 17, 1893 (Fremont, Ohio) at 70 of a heart attack.