After 100 Years, Accidental President Is Easy to Forget

--Tuesday marked a small milestone in American history. It was the 100th anniversary of Chester Alan Arthur’s death. Chester who? Pennsylvania State University American history professor Gerald Eggert acknowledges that the 21st President never had what you would call a high profile, and he ascended to the nation’s highest office in 1881 merely by chance. Arthur was vice president under Republican James A. Garfield, who was shot by an assassin after just four months in office and died two months later. “He was a one-term President by accident and no one, Republicans or Democrats, considered him for renomination,” Eggert said of Arthur. Nevertheless, Eggert said, Arthur was a “relatively good President” who is credited with beginning the building of the modern Navy after the Civil War.

--Legion are the hunters and fishermen who talk wistfully about the one that got away. Three hunters in Michigan, however, are still talking about the one that wouldn’t leave them alone. Fourteen-year-old Brad DePew of Traverse City was looking for deer but instead came on a 500-pound wild boar. “It started chasing me, and I ran about 30 yards, shooting it five times with buckshot until I ran out of shells,” Brad recalled. “Then I threw the gun down, made it back to the cabin and got the others.” Brad’s brother, Barry, 19, and cousin, Shawn Lang, 23, of Flint, grabbed their guns and joined the hunt for the boar, which they said left tracks the size of a buck deer. “We were tracking it and thinking, ‘Man, this could be anywhere,’ when we saw it about six feet away under some pine trees,” Barry said. It charged them, and they ran until it trapped them in a stand of trees. Desperate, they fired. In all, it took 18 shots to bring the animal down. The hunters were allowed to keep their trophy because the state has no laws governing wild boars--there aren’t supposed to be any in Michigan. Officials speculated that it had escaped from a private shooting preserve.

--Cedar Lake near Cogar, Okla., used to be a 75-acre man-made lake. Now it doesn’t even exist. Geologists know where it went, but they can’t figure out why. The water dropped 22 feet in 37 hours, draining through a crevice in the lake bed and traveling about a quarter of a mile underground before coming out the side of a hill. It flooded a county road and forced the evacuation of two homes. Dale Phenis, one of the 600 stockholders who own the lake, said a cavern in the dry lake bed is big enough to “bury a bus in . . . . It gives you the willies when you look at it.”