PLAY A GAME OF HOOVER-BALL

Invented by President Hoover’s personal physician to keep the commander-in-chief svelte, Hoover-Ball was played by President Herbert Hoover with his “Medicine Ball Cabinet” on the White House lawn nearly every morning during his four years in office. A mix of volleyball and doubles tennis, the game involves throwing a 4-to-6 pound medicine ball over an 8-foot volleyball net. The game worked: Hoover lost 25 pounds while in office. If you practice, maybe you’ll make it to the 29th National Hoover-Ball Championships this August in West Branch, Iowa.

EAT!

Maybe grouse doesn’t tickle your fancy as much as it did for one-month-president William Henry Harrison, who named his house Grouseland after the fowl, but cheese is always a crowd-pleaser. For the most presidential of cheddars, try to track down some of Vermont’s Plymouth Cheese. John Coolidge, father of future president Calvin, founded Plymouth Cheese in Plymouth Notch, VT in 1890. Still operational today, it’s the second oldest cheese factory in the United States and the site of Silent Cal’s final resting place. Even if you can’t get your hands on some Plymouth, any cheese will do. Best not to talk with your mouth full, so while you eat, you can honor Coolidge — and your dining companions — in the most fitting way possible: staying quiet.

DRINK!

If you’d like to raise a glass to your favorite president, there’s no better place to do so than Buffalo’s Founding Fathers pub, which is covered in presidential memorabilia and where the man slinging drinks — owner and proprietor Michael Driscoll — is a fount of presidential trivia. Elsewhere, at the bar in Richmond, VA’s Jefferson Hotel, you can order the special Milk Punch, “with vanilla bean, sugar and apple brandy,” to honor Lincoln, because “one of President Lincoln’s favorite beverages was milk.” You may not want to emulate poor Franklin Pierce, however. In the final months of his single, unsuccessful term as president, he decided “there’s nothing left to do but get drunk.” It took New Hampshire, his home state, almost half a century to stop voting down a statue to remember him by.

BUT MAYBE SKIP DESSERT

You’ve quietly gorged yourself on cheese and you’re ready for something sweet. Zachary Taylor, however, would probably tell you to skip dessert. His is among the odder presidential deaths: legend has it he was killed by a bowl of iced cherries and milk. Whether the cherries were the real culprit is unclear, but we do know that it wasn’t arsenic that killed him. He was disinterred in 1991, and tests done on his fingernails and hair revealed that he had not been poisoned. Either way, better safe than sorry.

WEAR BLACK

Mourn the dead presidents by wearing black. Obvious, yes, but black fabric has been crucial in how the country mourns presidents. When William Henry Harrison died, the White House was draped in black fabric. These days, we’ve dialed things back a bit, and instead only drape a black cloth over the president’s White House portrait. When Washington died, however, some parts of the country mourned the first president’s death so deeply that there were shortages of black cloth for months. (Pity the goths of the 18th century.)

TAKE A DRIVE

You’re paying tribute to president #34 every time you roll down a U.S. highway; officially, the system is called the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. While you’re on the road, you may as well visit a presidential grave. Or take a trip to Rapid City, South Dakota, which calls itself “the most patriotic city in America” and proves it with a full set of life-size presidential statues. While you’re in area, don’t miss Mount Rushmore, which is perhaps slightly more famous than Rapid City.

PUT ON A TOGA…

In 1832, on the centenary of George Washington’s birth, lawmakers commissioned a statue of George Washington from the sculptor Horace Greenough. The statue took Greenough ten years to complete, and when he brought the finished work to the Capitol Rotunda, his version of Washington — clad in Roman-style clothes, shirtless and in sandals — did not go over as intended. Instead of seeing a timeless Washington as heir to the ancients, visitors saw the beloved Father of Their Country in a toga, as if “entering or leaving a bath,” per architect Charles Bullfinch. The statue was removed from the Rotunda and eventually ended up in the hands of the Smithsonian.

…AND DO THE ROBOT

There is, of course, Walt Disney World’s Hall of Presidents, with 43 animatronic presidents programmed and ready to explain the history of America. But off the beaten path, two more robot presidents await you: a joke-telling robot LBJ at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, and a robot McKinley (and a robot first lady Ida McKinley) at the McKinley museum in Canton, OH. Tell a bad joke and you’re already on your way to perfecting your robot LBJ impression.

FINALLY: BUY DEAD PRESIDENTS

No better way to celebrate all the presidents than reading about the weird and wild ways we choose to remember them. Dead Presidents is in bookstores everywhere.

“The funniest and most entertaining book about death you’ll read this year.”—A. J. Jacobs

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound | Powell’s