Two 94-year-old living former Presidents

[Orser67]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_age

The previous record was co-set by Ford and Reagan, who were in their early 90s. Before that it was Adams (90) and Jefferson (83). Hoover also lived to 90, but I think the oldest other president at the time of Hoover's death in 1964 was Truman (80).

I've always found Hoover's long life to be particularly interesting since he really transcended eras (Van Buren is another president who seemingly lived into another era). This anecdote from Hoover's Wikipedia page is mildly amusing:

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[Orser67]

What's the average post-office lifespan of the presidents? Excluding those who actually died in office, obviously.

Idk about the mean, but the median is about 11-12 years

[Orser67]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_age

The previous record was co-set by Ford and Reagan, who were in their early 90s. Before that it was Adams (90) and Jefferson (83). Hoover also lived to 90, but I think the oldest other president at the time of Hoover's death in 1964 was Truman (80).

I've always found Hoover's long life to be particularly interesting since he really transcended eras (Van Buren is another president who seemingly lived into another era). This anecdote from Hoover's Wikipedia page is mildly amusing:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

It's not too weird that Van Buren lived to see the Civil War if you know that he remained very politically active and apostatized from the Democratic Party in the 1840s (he ran an anti-slavery third-party presidential comeback campaign in 1848 that received 10% of the popular vote, but no electoral votes), so he really only lived for 14 more years after leaving politics, which doesn't seem too weird at all (though, yeah, very few prominent figures of the 1820s actually lived to see the Civil War break out as Van Buren did).

Well, I personally think of Van Buren primarily as the architect of the Second Party System, or at least the Democratic Party. But you're absolutely right about the 1848 election as a forerunner to the civil war. I read John Niven's biography of Van Buren about a year ago and it seemed like a lot of contemporaries were shocked that he left the party (and he left at least partly because he was pissed at Polk over patronage decisions). One other moderately interesting, era-spanning tidbit is that Samuel Tilden was his protege.

Another era-spanner is John Quincy Adams. He was probably the only semi-prominent official from the 1790s who was still around for the Mexican-American War.