While crying over spilled milk is frowned upon, crying over dropped cake is perfectly understandable. Somehow President Harry Truman kept it together after a cake mishap during a celebration of his 61st birthday in 1945.
President Donald Trump marked his 71st birthday earlier this month, a perfect opportunity to look back at other presidential birthdays.
You can learn a lot about how a person by how he or she handles crises, and the cake mishap — which you can see in the photo above — showed Truman’s true colors. Upon closer inspection, this was clearly not a delicate, quiet, non-embarrassing event. It isn’t clear if Truman or the man stooped over the cake was the clumsy culprit, but everyone noticed.
Truman seems to be a good sport about the whole thing, leaning in to help clean up. The man on the floor almost looks like he’s taking a taste.
Few could blame him.
The best part is that these men are cleaning up a cake while wearing full suits. The ’40s were a different time.
This photo was taken on May 8, less than a month after Truman took office and just three months before the US dropped atomic bombs in Japan.
Truman had more than two decades’ worth of birthdays to make up for the cake commotion.
He died in 1972 at age 88.
