How Reliable Is This?

[Eva Elisabeth]

Thanks, Toia, that's nice - never heard!

Roger, I just wanted to post exactly this photo and the following (sorry for redundancy) -
My favorite hair trivia:
Lincoln liked this photograph (as do I) taken by Alexander Hesler in 1857, calling it a "very true" likeness of himself, though his wife “and many others” did not agree. His comment: “My impression is that their objection arises from the disordered condition of [my] hair”, and that his judgment was “worth nothing in these matters.”

One story goes the disheveling was Lincoln’s own work, telling the photographer that he feared his friends wouldn't recognize him "without a bad tousle", but George H. Fergus, whose father was a Chicago printer and friend of Lincoln, recalled that he was in Hesler’s gallery when Lincoln entered and asked to have his picture taken. The photographer “looked at him and saw that his hair was plastered down on his forehead. Lincoln had evidently just come from a barber shop, and the barber had probably planned to prepare his patron for the event. But the arrangement of the hair did not please Hessler. He walked up to Lincoln, ran this hand through ‘Abe’s’ hair and mussed it all up. ‘Now you look natural,’ said Hessler.”

When a lithograph of this photo was rushed into print, Lincoln said that newsboys hawking it on city streets cried out: “'Ere’s yer last picter of Old Abe! He’ll look better when he gets his hair combed!”

(Sources in: M. Burlingame's "A Life", vol. I, + D. Donald's "Lincoln")