Everyone argues about the best and worst presidents, but nobody talks enough about the weirdest, and it is not close. Calvin Coolidge was a deeply strange little man, and I mean that with love. Start with the raccoon. In 1926 some supporters in Mississippi mailed a live raccoon to the White House so the Coolidges could kill it and eat it for Thanksgiving. Instead Calvin took one look, decided this animal ruled, named her Rebecca, had her fitted with an embroidered collar that said White House Raccoon, and let her roam the building. The First Lady would take her out on the town like a socialite. They gave her her own little house on the grounds. Rebecca was not even the strangest pet. The Coolidge White House was basically a zoo. He had lion cubs, a wallaby, a black bear, a bobcat, and a pygmy hippopotamus named Billy that he eventually gave to the National Zoo, where Billy went on to father a huge chunk of the pygmy hippos in American zoos. This man had a hippo. Then there is the morning routine. Coolidge liked to eat breakfast in bed while a valet rubbed petroleum jelly into his scalp. Vaseline, on the head, over eggs, as a wellness ritual. Nobody fully knows why. He also loved to press the buzzers that summoned Secret Service and staff, then run and hide so he could watch them come sprinting in looking for a president who wasn't there. He thought this was hilarious. And the whole time, this is Silent Cal, the man so famously quiet that when a woman told him she bet a friend she could get more than two words out of him, he looked at her and said "you lose." The quietest president we ever had was privately running a petting zoo and pranking his own bodyguards. Weirdest one in the building, easily.