Dear Editor:

March 25, 2015

I must take exception with an article entitled “Presidential Notes” which appeared in your January issue. For your information Richard Nixon played the electric guitar and not the cello as you repeatedly asserted. Also, Gerald Ford mastered the triangle while in gym class at Michigan, not while sitting in Congress. While you were correct in your assumption that Jimmy Carter played the harmonica you were remiss in your failure to mention his love affair with the washboard. It was at a washboard convention that he met both Teddy Kennedy and Walter Mondale in 1979.
The breakdown of Presidents and their musical instrument of choice follows a simple enough pattern. Some 22 Presidents, including Adams, Monroe, Tyler and Lincoln played the violin while another 30 enjoyed the piano. Teddy Roosevelt could really lay down some ragtime. Two played the tuba (Cleveland and Taft) and seven (including Bill Clinton) have chosen the saxophone as their preferred instrument. The only Chief Executive that did not play a musical instrument was Millard Filmore who was completely tone deaf and spent his brief two-year stint plowing through Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”, which he inadvertently left behind when driven from the White House. His successor Franklin Pierce could not make heads or tails of the book and subsequently gave it to his sister-in-law for her 50th birthday in 1853.
Thumbellina Etchabarron
Cimarron, CO