“Billy, will you be my Froggie?”
With these six words, Billy Clinton’s life changed forever. He was the new boy at Ramble Elementary School in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Till then, he had been known more for his strange catchphrase—“Hot dog!”—than for his exploits in the classroom. But one day Billy was chosen to sing the part of Froggie in a performance of the old English folk song “Froggie Went a-Courtin’.”
The song tells the story of a homely frog who asks a beautiful mouse to marry him. Playing the part of Miss Mousie was the prettiest woman Billy had ever seen: his fourth-grade music teacher. Entranced by the scent of her perfume, Billy swooned to the head of the class to begin their duet.
As he sang each line, Billy wasn’t thinking about mice or frogs. He imagined he was courting the beautiful, sweet-smelling woman standing beside him.
Billy wasn’t the only student who relished playing Froggie. All the other boys had a crush on their teacher too. But he took to the role with a gusto that few could match. From then on he was known as one of the most musical kids in his school.
Billy had discovered his love of music just in time. Like a lot of kids, he had trouble adapting to school. He was smart, but he talked too much in class, answering every question asked by his teachers—even the ones posed to other students. On his report card, he once got A’s in every subject but a D for personal conduct.
“Billy, when you grow up, you’re either going to be governor or get in a lot of trouble,” one teacher told him. “It all depends on whether you learn when to talk and when to keep quiet.”
Billy also struggled with his weight, which kept him from joining in a lot of games and sports. At the school Easter Egg hunt, he was the only one who failed to score an egg. He just couldn’t get to them fast enough. Just when he’d find one, another kid would swoop in and grab it.
But Billy could do one thing better than almost anyone else: perform music. He especially loved the songs of Elvis Presley. He collected Elvis records and played them in his room for friends. He even styled his hair just like “The King.” Sometimes, at parties, Billy would bring down the house with his hip-shaking Elvis impression. At last he’d found a positive way to stand out from the crowd.
The more Billy played and sang, the better he got. The better he got, the more opportunities he had to travel, make friends, and develop the leadership skills that would one day make him a president.
In junior high, Billy won awards for his saxophone playing. He performed at football halftime shows, marched in parades, and competed in band festivals across Arkansas. When he wasn’t playing, he was practicing. Some days he played his sax for twelve hours straight, until his lips were so sore he could barely move them.
In summertime, Billy attended band camp at the University of Arkansas. It was there that he made another important discovery: being good at music not only made him feel better about himself, it also made other people feel better about him. Soon he was one of the most popular guys in town.
Thirty years later, in the middle of his first presidential campaign, Bill Clinton appeared on a popular late-night TV talk show. But he wasn’t there to talk about politics. He was there to play the saxophone, electrifying the crowd with a rousing rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Many people say that performance helped Bill Clinton take the lead in that year’s presidential race. Without his killer sax solo, the American electorate may not have given the Arkansas governor a chance.
Bill Clinton seemed to agree. He once wrote: “I don’t think I would have been president if it hadn’t been for school music. Music has had a powerful influence on my life, helping me to learn how to mix practice and patience with creativity.”
After he made it to the White House, Bill Clinton had less time for music. He had a country to run, meetings to attend, and fewer hours in the day to practice.
But one day in 1994, the head of a company that manufactured saxophones went to visit him in the Oval Office. He brought a ceremonial gift: a shiny new sax, custom made with red and white stripes, blue stars, and pearl keys. “I never thought I’d see a patriotic saxophone!” the president exclaimed.
Bill Clinton planned to donate the instrument to a music museum in South Dakota. But when the time came for Clinton to hand over the horn to the state’s senators, he couldn’t bring himself to part with it.
He ran through the scales he’d learned as a child and played a few of his favorite jazz tunes—until his staff members reminded the president to get back to work!
As a boy, BENJAMIN HARRISON played an early form of baseball known as “town ball.” In fact, he was quite the sportsman. An 1892 biography lists his athletic interests as “snow-balling, town-ball, bull-pen, shinny, and baste.”
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To defend himself against bothersome bullies, THEODORE ROOSEVELT took boxing lessons from a champion prizefighter named John Long. He became so good at brawling that he won a lightweight boxing tournament when he was just fourteen years old. The trophy was a pewter mug worth about fifty cents. It became one of Roosevelt’s most cherished possessions.
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WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT may have become America’s heaviest president, but as a kid he was known to be light on his feet. He was an excellent baseball player, enjoyed ice skating, and even took dancing lessons twice a week.
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WOODROW WILSON founded his own baseball team, the Lightfoots, and was elected its first president. He wrote a constitution for the club and presided over team meetings in his family barn. The team mascot was a large portrait of the devil ripped from a poster advertising deviled ham.
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GEORGE H. W. BUSH may have been the most competitive of all the U.S. presidents. “Our family’s middle name was games,” his brother Prescott once declared. The family’s big backyard was the setting for epic touch football games in which George, Prescott, and their sister Dorothy all took part. In the winter, they used the yard as a makeshift toboggan run. When the weather turned really bad, they headed indoors for swimming races and ping-pong matches. They matched wits at the board game Parcheesi and the card games Go Fish and Sir Hinkam Funny Duster. Perhaps the most spirited Bush tradition was the family tiddlywinks tournament. One by one, the Bushes took turns to see who could launch the most small plastic disks—known as “winks”—into a cup. More often than not, the winner was George. He excelled at tiddlywinks, having figured out the secret formula for success: a special flick of the wrist that confounded his fellow players.
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GEORGE W. BUSH (son of the above-mentioned George H. W. Bush) was mad for baseball. He could recite the starting lineups of every Major League team from memory. He kept a massive collection of baseball cards, many of which he mailed to players for their autographs.
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When he lived in Indonesia, BARACK OBAMA played a game called kasti, which is similar similar to American baseball. Kasti is played with a tennis ball instead of a hard ball, the bases are called hong, and the players catch the ball with their bare hands instead of a glove. Barack Obama was known as an exceptionally courteous player. He used to field the ball and pass it to one of his smaller teammates, giving him the honor of throwing the runner out.