Uncle Jumbo, so called because he was a big fat bastard, was the son of a middle class Presbyterian minister. His given name was Steven, but due to mean kids calling him Big Steven Cleveland, he changed it to Grover, which was definitely a much cooler name at the time. The mean kids then changed his nickname to Uncle Jumbo. Uncle Jumbo was a cheeky youth, often playing pranks on his friends and neighbors, as if he was some kind of chubby Dennis the Menace. After putting himself through college he worked for a time as a teacher for the blind, and then a lawyer. Not a lawyer for the blind, just a regular lawyer. When the Civil War broke out, Uncle Jumbo got drafted, but got out of having to fight by paying a Polish immigrant to take his place. He then went on to become a sheriff for a time, where he gained a reputation for hanging numerous people and getting drunk in saloons.
Growing bored of drunken executions, Uncle Jumbo went back to lawyering, but soon found himself in a dilly of a pickle. Possibly as some kind of bizarre team building exercise, all the partners in his law firm had been sleeping with the same woman. When the woman became pregnant, Uncle Jumbo, being the only bachelor, bit the bullet and started paying child support. This situation became more difficult as Uncle Jumbo began getting into politics, but he solved it by having the woman committed to an insane asylum and putting the baby up for adoption. In 1884, Uncle Jumbo was chosen to run for president because all the other possible candidates were somehow bigger jackasses than he was. Unfortunately, the question of his possibly illegitimate child came up again. Where most politicians would have lied, Uncle Jumbo took the unorthodox approach of just shrugging his shoulders and admitting that the baby might have been his, but he really wasn’t all that sure. And while this didn’t exactly set a precedent in truth telling for future candidates, he did win the election.
The first thing Uncle Jumbo did after becoming president was marry a college-aged woman twenty-seven years his junior named Frances Folsom. Frances was the daughter of one of Uncle Jumbo’s best friends. Uncle Jumbo had doted on the child since the day she born, bouncing her on his knee and buying her numerous gifts. When she was eleven, her father died, so he took it upon himself to supervise her upbringing. Looking back at all of this today, the creepiest part wasn’t the fact that Uncle Jumbo apparently groomed Frances from a young age to be his wife, but that pretty much the whole country was okay with it. Uncle Jumbo did other things during his presidency, such as vetoing more bills than all his predecessors combined, but holy shit, the man was basically Woody Allen if Woody Allen had somehow gotten himself elected president and gained 130 pounds.
Uncle Jumbo lost his bid for re-election in 1888, but not for reasons related to the fact that he was creepy as fuck. As Uncle Jumbo left the White House, his almost child bride swore they would be back in four years.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_Grover_Cleveland.jpg