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First Posted: 1/30/2011

So, which president got stuck in the White House bathtub? • If you know that William H. Taft, at 330 pounds, was the portliest chief executive, you probably guessed correctly. • How did he get out? Lever? Pulley? Help from the National Guard?• “I don’t know. That I didn’t find,” said a chuckling Summer Belles, who is youth-services coordinator at the West Pittston Library.

Belles has been researching all sorts of presidential facts to accompany a display of life-size cardboard cut-out figures of all 44 United States presidents, from George Washington to Barack Obama.

The cut-outs were made in Wilkes-Barre by local businessman Steve Taren of Wet Paint T-Shirts Inc., who sells them over the Internet to collectors, history buffs and anyone else who might want them.

“It’s a niche market,” he said.

Taren will lend a complete set to the West Pittston Library, where they’ll be shown off during open houses at the nearby American Legion building on Saturday and on Feb. 12. Then the presidents will move to the Osterhout Free Library in Wilkes-Barre, where they will spend the last two weeks of February.

People typically think about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln when Presidents Day is observed (Feb. 21), but the collection will help library visitors learn about everyone who has held the nation’s highest office.

“Jimmy Carter was the first president to be born in a hospital,” Belles said. “The first several were born in log cabins.”

“Gerald Ford had an interesting medical condition where he was left-handed when he was sitting but right-handed when he was standing,” she continued.

By the time the display is set up, it will likely include information about everything from 19th-century economic problems to the political fallout when Ulysses S. Grant accepted expensive gifts from admirers.

But other facts are just plain fun.

One of the early presidents, Belles said, “would go skinny dipping in the Potomac and leave his clothes there. Once someone decided to take them. He had to send a boy to the White House to fetch some new ones.”

That particular president was not Taft, by the way, who solved his stuck-in-the-bath problem by simply having a larger tub installed in the White House.

Just walking past the presidential cutouts can make history seem more alive, librarians Elaine Rash from the Osterhout and Anne Bramblett Barr from West Pittston said as they looked over the cut-outs last week at Taren’s factory in South Wilkes-Barre.

“I like Woodrow Wilson with his white shoes,” Rash said. “He looks pretty sharp.”

The presidential display might well inspire people to learn the names and chronology of every one of the historical figures, Taren said. He believes that’s a rare feat.

“I asked my teenage son and some of his friends, can anyone here name every president in order?” Taren said. “Only one said he could, and he had the first 20 or so, but then he started losing it around Hoover.”

Future projects of life-size cutouts Taren has planned include Revolutionary War heroes and signers of the Declaration of Independence.

The figures are easy to make if the subjects were ever photographed, Taren said. For those who lived before photography was invented, he relies on paintings.

If the paintings show just the head and shoulders, Taren typically has to craft a body with clothing from the appropriate historical period. “Some of them have been ‘Frankensteined,’ ” he said with a laugh.

IF YOU GO

What: Open house to see life-size cardboard cutouts of American presidents

Where: Sponsored by West Pittston Library at the former American Legion Building, 316 Linden St., West Pittston

When: 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Feb. 12.

More info: 654-9847