All The Presidents, Man: Interview with Will Bellaimey
Updated: Sep 2, 2022
By Elizabeth Gracen:
Will Bellaimey and I took a lovely stroll in Descanso Gardens not long ago to talk about history, Gen Z, and Will’s new podcast, All The Presidents, Man, produced and directed by his friend, Bianca Giaever. Will is a history teacher at a prestigious private school in Southern California. I met him over a year ago when we were both part of the Lineage Performing Arts Center production of Pippin, where we played mother and son, my conniving Fastrada to his ambitious Lewis. We had a blast and formed a fast friendship. During the production, he told me about his upcoming podcast, but I honestly wasn’t prepared for such an in-depth, entertaining listening experience when it finally launched late in 2019. Not only is the podcast incredibly funny, but Will’s ability to describe the presidents of the United States with such insightful detail and interesting slices of trivia provides a window into the zeitgeist of each era and an overall “big picture” of American history.
With no written notes to reference chronology or detail, Will begins All the Presidents, Man starting with good ‘ole George Washington and ending with Donald Trump. Bianca recorded over eleven hours and eventually cut the session down to eight hours to produce an informative and highly entertaining podcast, which is available on Spotify, iTunes or Pocket Casts.
Please Meet Will Bellaimey!
EG: So, Will, I’m in the process of listening to All the Presidents, Man and I just listened to Andrew Johnson, and I was like, "Oh my God. When you talk about Andrew Johnson, you’re talking about impeachment." And at this very moment in time, we’re right in the middle of an impeachment trial. Listening to the podcast, I immediately note that everything in history is just so repetitive. I mean, it's like we don't learn a damned thing from our mistakes.
WB: Sure. It happens again and again and again. You've just started, and you’ve got a wild ride ahead of you still.
EG: I haven't listened to all of it, but I’m wondering if there has ever been a period of time where it was just like kind of chill, when things weren’t that bad. Is that even possible in a complicated society?
WB: I think the short answer to that is “no.” The longer answer involves “chill for whom?” Because I think there have been long periods of time; for instance, there’s a whole myth about the 1950s being chill. Eisenhower being chill is based on a narrative whose focus is on the Don Drapers of the world.
EG: For white men.
WB: For white men the 1950s were pretty chill. But for everybody? It's never been chill.
EG: Right, of course it hasn't. Okay, tell me a little bit about yourself. You were a Political Science major. Where did you go to school?
WB: I grew up in Minnesota. My mom was very politically active and taught me a lot about politics growing up. A friend of ours ran for mayor. He was a journalist who was running a long-shot campaign. It was my mom's job to drive him to debates, and I used to sit in the backseat. He won and became the mayor. So that made me feel connected to politics. But also I was fascinated with the presidents, for some reason, in fourth grade.
EG: So, that's when your passion began.
WB: Oh, yeah. I got all those books that were fun facts. You can hear in the podcast whenever weird facts come up, that's me accessing that part of my brain. But it really helped me in my future education because I had this book called the Scholastic Encyclopedia of the Presidents and Their Times, and I read it probably ten times. This goes to my theory that all boys go through a stage of having Asperger's. Maybe some girls do too, but I think it's something in our culture where men are trained to become experts in something at a certain point, like trucks or cars or baseball. . . .
EG: Or airplanes or dinosaurs . . .
WB: And I had a powerful brain, and it happened at one point to fixate on the presidents, which gave me this baseline where I learned American history. I also had a good enough memory. So when I was in high school, taking U.S. history, I already knew all the dates, all the names, all that stuff that everyone else stresses out about. I didn't take any notes. I would just sit and listen and then argue with the teacher. But that meant that I was learning a depth of stuff then that other people didn't because they were trying to memorize everything. In college, I didn't take that much history, but I did take a lot of political science. And I think that gave me an understanding of the mechanisms behind the different historical moments.
EG: And then you eventually became a teacher. How long have you been teaching?
WB: I think this is my ninth year teaching. My first year, I was a Teaching Fellow in Boston at a K through eighth, and I taught seventh and eighth grade while I was getting my master's degree in Education. Then I taught in New York for five years, and I taught every grade from six to eleven there at a fancy private school in the Bronx.
EG: Has teaching always been your calling?
WB: No. At one point I wanted to be involved in politics, and I worked in a very low level capacity on Obama's campaign and on Al Franken's campaign. Then I spent the summer working for a lobbying firm in Washington, on Capitol Hill. I got a little bit of a sense of what D.C. is like, and I basically realized that I did not want to have bad people in my life. That was mostly in college, that was me spending my summers working in politics. By the time I left college, I was pretty certain that I didn’t want to stay in politics.
EG: That's so lucky that you figured that out before you got sucked into it all.
WB: I just came to the conclusion that that wasn't a life that I wanted to live. I think I very easily could have woken up at forty-five and been like, this is terrible. So, I'm glad that I changed my mind. Instead, I get to be a teacher, which has always been part of my family. My dad's a teacher, my brother's a teacher, both of my grandparents on my mom's side were professors. I've always liked working with kids. For me it's great because I get to think about and talk about politics all the time.
EG: You only teach history classes?
WB: I taught English a little bit at both of my previous schools. I'm still interested in teaching literature also, but at the moment, I only teach history. I teach one class that is AP government and politics, that's for seniors, and I teach a seventh-grade class that is about the history of Los Angeles.
EG: Let’s go back to the podcast. When was it recorded?
WB: In 2017. Honestly, I don't think I could do the podcast right now, at least not as well. I think that was me at peak performance because I was in the middle of teaching an American history course. It was actually this really cool course that was American history and American literature together. Me and an English teacher would teach it together. It was amazing. It was two hours a day, and we would just bounce off each other. And it also means that during that time, we read everything from Hawthorne to Tony Morrison to The Great Gatsby, which meant that our conversations about American history had this depth—it was American studies. So what you're hearing on the podcast is a brain that is, at that time, really invested in a lot of really deep questions about America and had been trying to figure out how to explain it to about 17-year-olds, which is a pretty good age to get a fair amount of depth.
EG: Tell me about your director/producer, Bianca Giaever.
WB: Bianca and I became friends in college.
She was a couple years below me, and we were in a similar circle of friends. This is Middlebury College
in Vermont. It's a small liberal arts college known for languages and cross-country skiing.
EG: How did you decide on that school?