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Here are some little known facts about Valentine’s Day:
Americans send one billion Valentines cards each year, more than on any other holiday except for Christmas.
Approximately 35 million chocolate heart boxes are sold and 220 million roses are produced for that special day.
Twenty billion dollars are spent on Valentine’s Day which brings it to about $130 per person per year.
Whereas most amounts are spent on candy and flowers, 20 percent of purchases include jewelry. Apart from these findings, however, the most enduring legacy will continue to be enduring romance associated with Feb. 14.
Of special interest is the depth of emotion and passion associated with declarations of love expressed by some of our former presidents and founding fathers.
“Feb. 14 may be the date they observe and call Valentine’s Day, but that is for people of ordinary luck. I happen to have a Valentine’s Life, which started on March 4, 1952, and will continue as long as I have you.” Those words were written by Ronald Reagan to First Lady Nancy alluding to their wedding day.
Another time, while flying on Air Force One, he marked their 31st anniversary with a stirring missive, signed “your grateful husband,” that includes the following lines: “I more than love you, I’m not whole without you. You are life itself to me. When you are gone, I’m waiting for you to return so I can start living again.”
In 1938 Richard Nixon, long before anyone called him “tricky,” was seriously smitten with Pat Ryan, a high school teacher. We are told that he doggedly pursued Pat, even chauffeuring her to dates with other men in order to spend a little time with her. Eventually she relented, and he proposed to her on a scenic cliff and offered the engagement ring tucked into a flower-filled basket. The couple were wed in June 1940.
Harry Truman is said to have fallen in love with his wife at Sunday school when he was all of five years old. During the ensuing years, Bess kept rejecting the debt plagued farmer until shortly before he left to fight in World War I, carrying her photo in his breast pocket and gazing at it whenever he felt down.
Following the Trumans’ wedding in June 1919, they kept up their flurry of letters—even after Harry suddenly became president upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945. While in Potsdam discussing the administration of postwar Europe, for instance, Truman wrote the now 60-year-old First Lady, “It made me terribly homesick when I talked with you yesterday morning. It seemed as if you were just around the corner. I spent the day after the call trying to think up reasons why I should bust up the conference and go home.”
And while dear Bessie composed many letters to her husband, she burned most of them, reportedly over Truman’s objections and in order to safeguard her own privacy, in 1955.
Theodore Roosevelt became infatuated with the daughter of a wealthy Boston banker at the tender age of 20. He showered Alice Hathaway Lee with gifts and attention, and in October 1880, on his 22nd birthday, the pair wed. Through many missives from their courtship and marriage emerged a picture of Teddy as a syrupy romantic in thrall to his bride. The fairytale ended when Alice died after giving birth to the couple’s only child on Feb. 14, 1884, the same day Roosevelt’s mother succumbed to typhoid fever. Devastated by the loss of his pretty pink baby, Roosevelt wrote in his diary, “The light has gone out of my life.”
Though he would later remarry, he refused to speak of Alice publicly and could not even bring himself to mention her name in his autobiography.
Woodrow Wilson, the 28th US President will forever be remembered as a bookish intellectual and adroit statesman. Not everyone knows however that he excelled at using pen and paper to express his love—of not just one, but two women. He wrote hundreds of fervent letters while courting his first wife, Ellen Louise Axson, and throughout their 29 year marriage.
“Why, my darling, I can’t tell you how completely I am yours, in my every thought,” he declared in one ebullient example. “I did not know myself how much I loved you until I found out that you love me too.” Ellen died after a long illness in 1914, leaving Wilson, then a year into his first term as president, lost and despondent.
He perked up when he spotted Edith Bolling Galt, a widow also nursing a broken heart, while driving through Washington, DC, in February 1915. So besotted was Wilson that a Secret Service Agent described him as behaving “like a schoolboy in his first love experience.” The 58-year-old Wilson sent her eager notes that helped win her over. One invitation reads: “Please go to ride with us this evening, precious little girl, so that I can whisper something in your ear—something of my happiness and love, and accept this, in the meantime, as a piece out of my very heart, which is all yours but cannot be sent as I wish to send it by letter.” The pair married the next year.
John Adams and his wife Abigail were often separated for long periods of time. They corresponded through the mail for three decades. More than a thousand of their letters, chronicling everything from family business to the ratification of the Constitution, survive. Often portrayed as a humorless and crabby man, Adams displays a playful flirtatiousness in the earliest notes he, then a country lawyer, sent his teenage cousin, including an imitation voucher addressed to “Miss Adorable” that reads: “By the same Token that the Bearer hereof sat up with you last night, I hereby order you to give him as many Kisses, and as many Hours of your Company after 9 O’Clock as he shall please to Demand and charge them to my Account.”
Long after they married in 1764, John continued to fill his notes with yearning and admiration for his bride. “You are really brave, my dear, you are an Heroine,” he praised her on one occasion. “A soul, as pure, as benevolent, as virtuous and pious as yours has nothing to fear, but every Thing to hope and expect from the last of human Evils.”
In return, Abigail penned some of American history’s most memorable love letters, documenting the enduring intimacy she shared with her “dearest friend,” as she called her husband. “With an indescribable pleasure I have seen near a score of years roll over our Heads, with an affection heightened and improved by time,” she wrote in 1782. “Nor have the dreary years of absence in the smallest degree effaced from my mind the Image of the dear untitled man to whom I gave my Heart.”
Abigail also counseled John on political matters in her notes, famously telling him to “remember the ladies” while drafting laws for the newly independent United States.
A more recent version of a love letter would be one that Elizabeth Taylor wrote to Richard Burton during one of their separations:
Of note in this handwriting is the small size of the personal pronoun I in comparison with other capitalized letters. The very first capital M is drawn with double curved strokes that represent playfulness and a sense of humor. And the second M preceding Husband starts with a horizontal lead-in stroke, giving evidence of her frustration with the current status quo of their relationship.
The letters p in the words pure, pleasure and pride, show that she misses his presence and also that she will start an argument once he returns to her.
The overall impression of the writing however is that it was penned by an intelligent and accomplished woman of great beauty and talent, just the way we remember her.
Judy Garland, another beloved Hollywood celebrity wrote “For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.”
Alas, not all of us have the ability to write such eloquent declarations of love! There is however a great variety of greeting cards available for a special Valentine.
And let us not forget to bring along red roses and heart shaped boxes of candy. “All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt,” mused Charles M. Schulz, beloved creator of Peanuts.
Most restaurants offer special menus to make it a perfect day, even if we can’t find the right words to say.
Viva Amore!
Stories and quotes by former US Presidents have been reproduced here from the history.com site, and Elizabeth Taylor’s letter from inquisitr.com.
Skylar Khan lives on a vortex in Oracle. She is a Master Graphoanalyst and has been contributing articles to The Oracle Towne Crier about personality traits revealed through Handwriting Analysis. Her book “Handwriting Rocks” is informative and entertaining. For more information, please visit HandwritingAuthority.com
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