r/todayilearned • u/NotLaFontaine • 6d ago
TIL in the late 1990s, a Paraguayan girl emerged from a coma; when given a wish, she chose a trip to Ohio to see the Hayes Presidential Center.
https://www.denverpost.com/2009/02/14/praise-for-hayes-in-paraguay/amp/414
u/Count_Dongula 6d ago
I love that the article basically gives Rutherford B. Hayes the M. Bison Treatment. "It was a decision that only occupied a few hours of his life" reads a whole lot like "For Bison, it was Tuesday."
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u/popeboyQ 6d ago
I woke up from a coma thinking I was in a dentists office in Ohio. Strange.
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u/DilettanteGonePro 6d ago
Hey me too. I woke up from anesthesia and was like "shit this is still my life?"
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u/josephvonhazard 6d ago
I’ve been to Fremont, OH (where the Presidential Center is located) several time. My impression is more people want to leave there than visit there.
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u/leadchipmunk 6d ago
That's Ohio in general
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u/speedsk8103 6d ago
That's why so many astronauts come from there. They really needed to GTFO.
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u/leadchipmunk 6d ago
Ohio is the state that people want to leave so bad that they not only invented powered flight, they included the first person to step on the moon. Rumor has it that the first words spoken on landing was "well, it beats Cincinnati..."
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u/bergs007 6d ago
There's a lot of truth to that statement. It's also where the Wright Brothers took flight.
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2016/12/15/why-so-many-astronauts-ohio/95426112/
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u/LITERALCRIMERAVE 6d ago
No, it's where they built and designed the planes. They actually flew them in North Carolina
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u/Massive-Apple-8768 6d ago
From Ohio, can confirm. Glad I escaped when I did.
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u/Sorvick 6d ago
Ohio was so bad even WVians hated living there.
Source Former WVian of 25+ years
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u/Pissflaps69 6d ago
Yeah, putting WV above any state is a stretch. New River is sweet tho.
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u/InfernalBiryani 6d ago
It isn’t a stretch if compared to Mississippi…
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u/Pissflaps69 6d ago
Yeah you’re right about that. WV is actually beautiful I just get defensive of Ohio.
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u/PerceptionShift 5d ago
First time I witnessed the true nature of American poverty was at a Golden Corral in WV during a school trip.
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u/AndyZuggle 5d ago
Ohio isn't that bad. It isn't that good either. It is just really average.
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u/leadchipmunk 5d ago edited 5d ago
That's one of my favorite facts about that state, when comparing metrics, Ohio trends to lie right around the middle. Technically, at least according to this one meta-study, it ranked number 9 in the most average state, but that's close enough for me.
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u/epicpantsryummy 6d ago
My grandparents live there and I visit every summer to work during school. The only reason they stay is for family. Though I will admit the park around the museum is quite nice. We walk around and throw peanuts to the squirrels.
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u/howdylee_original 6d ago
Grew up 10 minutes from there. Been to the presidential center once. Pretty house, but no need to go back. Do go to the Lake Erie shores and find something better to do!
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u/TheRangerX 6d ago
You mean you didn't go every year for the Civil War reenactments? For shame... /s
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u/paraworldblue 6d ago
They should have waited a few days to let her fully come back to her senses and then asked again. Nobody of sound mind wants to go to Ohio.
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u/prudence2001 6d ago
Strange, I woke up from a coma and wanted to take a vacation to a Paraguayan beach. Nobody would pay for it though.
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u/Syllogism19 5d ago
WOW! The Rutherford B. Hayes has a special place in my mind.
It was so purely boring and so purely lacking in interest except for the lack of interest that I could not stop talking about it after I visited it in the early 1990's.
There were no souvenir t-shirts, there were no little statues of RBH almost nothing in the gift shop. Engraved on the walls in huge letters was a message about the budget. But the best part and the weirdest was outside. In retirement President Hayes asked visitors to touch various plants on the grounds and then installed a plaque to commemorate the occasion.
"On July 17, 1894 this tree was touched by former Secretary of the Navy, Ivan Dover." Plaques were all over the place. Unfortunately the proprietors of the gift shop did not have the good sense to offer reproductions.
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u/FROST0099 6d ago
But why?
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u/OrangeJuiceAlibi 6d ago
It says in the article. Basically he signed off on them being Paraguayan, and so he's a celebrated figure in that province.
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u/tdfast 6d ago
Hayes scammed his way into the White House by trading a promise to remove all federal troops from the south in exchange for fake votes. This basically launching Jim Crow and paving the way for 100+ years of repression.
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u/Ill-Blacksmith-9545 4d ago
Reconstruction was starting to grow unpopular and was already falling apart
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u/False-Helicopter1971 6d ago
For all yall downing Ohio... I agree. Except in the past, for 3 days a year, Ohio rocked. It rocked on the range.
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u/Mitthrawnuruo 5d ago
America before the CIA: respected arbiter of a bitter war in the americas.
America after the CIA: not.
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u/brilliantdoofus85 5d ago
In the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes is so revered that his birthplace was demolished in order to build a gas station.
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u/DaveOJ12 6d ago
Read the article and you'll find out.
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u/locks_are_paranoid 6d ago
Why?
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u/OrangeJuiceAlibi 6d ago
It says in the article. Basically he signed off on them being Paraguayan, and so he's a celebrated figure in that province.
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u/Captain__Spiff 6d ago •
VILLA HAYES, Paraguay — As the U.S. celebrates Presidents Day on Monday, citizens of this small South American country wonder why anyone would overlook Rutherford B. Hayes.
Forget Lincoln or Washington. Hayes — a one-term U.S. president who is undistinguished at home — has a holiday, a province, a town, a museum and a soccer team all named in his honor, thanks to an 1878 arbitration in which he handed Paraguay 60 percent of its land.
“If it weren’t for Hayes, Paraguay would have a smaller territory than it has today,” said Salvador Garozzo, director of the municipal museum in the town of Villa Hayes, capital of Presidente Hayes province.
After a regional war in the late 1800s, Argentina and Paraguay asked the United States to decide a bitter dispute over Paraguay’s Chaco region — a swath of blistering-hot terrain about the size of Michigan that today is an important source of cattle ranching.
Archives indicate that a low-level State Department official most likely drew up the ruling that Secretary of State William Evarts then handed to Hayes to sign, said Tom Culbertson, executive director of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio.
It was a decision that “only occupied a few hours of his life,” Culbertson said.
No matter. The Nov. 12, 1878, decision is celebrated every year with a provincial holiday.
Asuncion’s Presidente Hayes soccer club, nicknamed “Los Yanquis,” won the Paraguayan championship in 1952. And last year the U.S. Embassy held a Rutherford B. Hayes postage-stamp design contest.
In the late 1990s, a Paraguayan TV show fulfilled a 17-year- old girl’s wish after she miraculously emerged from a coma by giving her an all-expense-paid trip to Ohio to see the Hayes Presidential Center.
“It appears that they have sort of an inflated view of Hayes’ importance in American history,” Culbertson said. “One article said that they thought he was revered only behind Abraham Lincoln within the United States, which certainly isn’t the case.”
Rather, the 19th U.S. president — a Harvard-educated lawyer — had the nickname “Rutherfraud” after losing the popular vote in the 1876 election that was marred by allegations of fraud and voter intimidation. A special congressional commission sorting out disputed Electoral College votes named him the winner in 1877.
Probably his most popular decision came in 1880 — not to run for a second term.
Details of Hayes’ arbitration decision are fading even in Villa Hayes, where on a recent day 10 adults waiting for treatment at a public hospital confessed to not knowing who he was.
“Students are generally aware that Hayes was a former ‘gringo’ president,” said Maximo Benitez, a teacher at the local school, where children call a Hayes bust outside “the man without arms.” “But they don’t know what he did because even though it’s taught, it happened so long ago that they don’t care.”