A hundred years ago today, a man who was personally friends with Abraham Lincoln was still alive. Not a distant relative of someone who knew him. Not a historian who'd studied him. An actual, living friend and advisor.

John Aikman Stewart had just turned 104. Born in 1822, during James Monroe's presidency, he grew into a close personal friend of Lincoln's and served as Assistant Treasurer of the United States during his presidency. Decades later, under Cleveland, he organized a private banking syndicate that bought fifty million dollars in government bonds to shore up the country's gold reserves, a separate act entirely from his earlier government post.

He'd quit smoking at twenty and kept moderate habits the rest of his life. He hadn't set foot in his own office in four years, but still tracked international banking news daily out of habit. On his hundredth birthday, he announced he'd give no more interviews. Reporters actually respected it, and for four more years he lived quitely, still checking the stock report every day as habit.

He lived until December of that same year, 1926, at 104 years old.

So, if you do the math. If someone in your life is over 100, their life overlapped his. And his overlapped Lincoln's. We're somehow still only three handshakes away from Abraham Lincoln.

Elsewhere in the day's papers, two phone company employees posed for one of the more delightfully staged photos of 1926. Long distance rates were about to drop on October 1st, and someone decided the way to announce it was with an axe, a phone book, and a headline pun nobody could resist.

A syndicated cartoon imagined what commercial air travel might eventually mean for the country's drifters, hitching a ride under the wings of a fictional "Chicago-Frisco All Daylight Flyer" instead of riding the rails. No dust, no brakemen, just a magnificent view. The cartoonist was clearly having fun imagining a future that, decades later, actually arrived.

A team from Chicago's Field Museum was preparing to sail for a region so unexplored that one scientist on the expedition called it "as completely isolated as if surrounded by 500 miles of ocean." Their letter of safe passage came directly from Ras Tafari, the prince regent then ruling in the emperor's stead, a name history would come to know much better a few years later, when he was crowned Haile Selassie I. This one I definitely had to look up on the map…

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources:
The Evening Star, September 2, 1926
The News, September 2, 1926
Moses King, Notable New Yorkers, 1899 / Internet Archive