Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - President Tyler’s Grandsons (Redux)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey everyone, I'm out of town this week, so instead of doing encore episodes, I thought I'd do something different. This week, I'm running full encore episodes as they were originally released, but at the end, where I normally read a review, I'll be providing an update to the episode. So make sure to stay tuned all the way to the end of the show. This episode was originally released on August 2nd, 2020, and it was the second podcast I ever recorded. You may notice that the sound is a bit different as I was recording in a room with hardwood floors, and there was a refrigerator running just a few feet away from me. With that, enjoy the incredible story of the grandsons of President John Tyler. President John Tyler was the 10th President of the United States. He was born in 1790,

Starting point is 00:00:46 and is widely considered one of the lesser presidents in American history. If you've never heard of him, don't worry, you aren't missing much. This episode isn't about him, however. This is about his two grandsons. His two grandsons who are still alive in the United States, who are still alive in the year 2020, 230 years after the birth of their grandfather. Learn more and try not to get a nosebleed thinking about it on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may

Starting point is 00:01:34 have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us. every week on the Throughline podcast from NPR. John Tyler isn't the best known U.S. President. In fact, he's best known as being the second half of the phrase Tippy Canoe and Tyler, too, which most American students learn in history class.

Starting point is 00:02:02 And I should note that most people who have heard that phrase have no clue what it means or who it's referencing. His other claim to fame as being the first vice president ever to ascend to the presidency after the death of a president. John Tyler was the vice president under William Henry. Harrison, who died 31 days after becoming president. In fact, when it happened, people weren't even really sure if he could become president. It had never happened before, and people weren't totally sure what was supposed to happen when a president died. Many people assumed he

Starting point is 00:02:31 would just be the acting president, not the actual president of the United States. He was often referred to as his accidentity, and many people would only refer to him as the acting president. But as I said, this is not an episode about John Tyler. This is an episode about John Tyler. This is an episode about John Tyler's grandchildren and how two of them are still alive today. This could all be explained in four simple words. Old men, young wives. However, if I left it at that, it would make for a pretty boring podcast. To get into details, John Tyler was a very fecund man. He had 15 children in total, which is the most of any U.S. President. His first wife was Latita Christian, who was the same age as Tyler. They married in 1813, and together they

Starting point is 00:03:16 had eight children. However, she died of a stroke in 1842 while she was first lady. In 1844, at the age of 54, Tyler married Julia Gardner, who was 30 years younger than her. It was, in fact, the first sitting president ever to be married while in office. Together, they had seven children. One of those children was Lyon Gardner Tyler, was born in 1853 when President Tyler was 63 years old. Lion Tyler followed in the family tradition of having children late in life. His first wife died in 1921 when he was 68. He then took a second wife, Sue Ruffin, who was 35 years his junior. With Sue, he had three children, two of whom lived into adulthood. Lion Gardner Tyler Jr. who was born in 1924 when he was 71, and Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who was born when he was 75, in

Starting point is 00:04:08 1928. Both of those men are still alive today at the ages of 96 and 92 respectively. So, just to recap, a man born in 1790 has a child at the age of 63, who then has children in his 70s, and those children live into their 90s. That is how you can get three generations which span the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. If you're curious, and I, I was, and want to take this one generation further, President Tyler's father, John Tyler Sr., the great-grandfather of the two men in question, was 44 when President Tyler was born. He was born in 1743, 277 years ago, over a quarter millennium ago. To put this into perspective, it is not uncommon for children to know their great-grandparents

Starting point is 00:05:03 today. Families with extremely long generations, such as the Tyler's, are uncommon, but not unheard of. One contemporary example of this would be the current king of Saudi Arabia, King Salman, who is currently 84 years old. His father was the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, King Abdullahiz, also known as Ibn Saud. Ibn Saud was 60 years old when Solomon was born. Ibn Sao was born in the year 1875, during the reign of Queen Victoria and during the Ulysses-S. Grant administration in the United States. That was before Thomas Edison had ever filed the patent on the light bulb. And just to cap this discussion off of really old fathers, I had to find out who was the oldest man on record ever to have a child. And that distinction

Starting point is 00:05:50 is held by a man in southern India named Ramjit Raghav, who had a son in 2010 at the ripe old age of 94. And then followed it up two years later by having another son at the age of 96. After the second child, Mr. Raghav said he wasn't going to have any more children. I'm guessing that you can see why I've never run this episode as an encore before. The way I do podcast has significantly changed over the last 1,300 episodes. The big update to this episode is that President Tyler's oldest grandson, Lyon Gardner Tyler Jr., passed away in October 2020 at the age of 95. 175 years after his grandfather died and 230 years after his grandfather's birth.

Starting point is 00:06:43 And just to put this into perspective, in the course of my travels, I once met a woman who was 48 years old and was a great-grandmother. As of this recording, his brother and the last surviving grandson of President Tyler, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, is still alive at the age of 95. However, reports are he's not doing well. He's currently living in a nursing home and has been suffering from severe dementia for several years. These people who have lived very long lives and are connected to major figures have been called by some time wormholes. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes served on the Supreme Court in the 19th century.

Starting point is 00:07:23 He personally shook hands with President John Quincy Adams and President John F. Kennedy. He lived to the age of 93 and told stories his mother told him about watching continental soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and he passed away in 1935. There are probably some people alive today who met Oliver Wendell Holmes when they were children, which means that there are only one person removed from his mother who was witness to the Revolutionary War. Another case involved a man named Samuel Seymour, who in 1956 appeared on the television. game show, I've Got a Secret. His secret is that he was the last surviving witness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He witnessed the event when he was five years old, and he lived to the age of 96. This topic of people who are time wormholes is one that's always fascinated me, and one that I might do a full episode on sometime in the future.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - President Tyler’s Grandsons (Redux)

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