"Potato" or "Potatoe" - Dan Quayle's Dilemma

This day in 1992 Dan Quayle: misled a student to spell potato ''potatoe'' during a spelling bee; he was vice president of the US at the time. That the vice-pressy can’t spell became obvious. The press had a whale of a time, in fact, they went Quayle-hunting, with pens loaded with the yellow stuff.

During his term as Vice President, Quayle was made into a comedian by the media and derided as someone of inferior intellect. He received the satirical Ig Nobel Prize for "demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education" in 1991. In fact how he rose to become the veep was stuff of rumor mills.

His public statements are characterized by what one wag once called the disease of putting his foot in every time he opened his mouth. "We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward" and "The future will be better tomorrow" and "For NASA, space is still a high priority", or the fallacious "It's time for the human race to enter the solar system,” are only some of them.



Dan Quayle | United States | Vice President | NASA