Today marks the 300th birthday of Benjamin Franklin. I’ve read his Autobiography, but I plan to jump back into it again today in honor of his 300th.

After leaving the Y this morning, I stopped at Starbucks to hang out/work/look busy and I did something I’m not in the habit of doing: I read the New York Times PRINT EDITION! (I gotta tell ya…I love reading the news digitally, but there will always be a certain charm, if you will, about thumbing through actual pages and getting the ink smudges on your fingers.)

Anyway, I read a pretty neat little op-ed contribution by Stacy Schiff all about Dr. Franklin.

Here are some clips…

Franklin was, too, the founder who came the furthest. He alone spent six decades as a British subject before embracing the revolutionary cause, to which he applied the zeal of a convert. He neither hailed from an elite nor subscribed to one.

For all his ingenuity he was less a manufacturer of ideas than a purveyor of them…

Where it is unclear if James Madison even had a personality, Franklin is all pluck and charm. Irony was his natural idiom.

He was equal parts Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Bugs Bunny.

Schiff includes this rather obscure, but still apropos quote from Franklin himself…

We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature. Glorious it is for the Americans to be called by providence to this post of honor.

More from Schiff’s article…

A few years later he offered up what may be the best one-line definition of this country. The New World, he asserted, judged a man not by who he was, but by what he could do. And what Franklin could do was staggering. His legacy is not a political philosophy but a protean existence, act after act of bold curiosity, brash risk-taking, raw ingenuity. Once those constituted a definition of the American character. Today they would more likely be termed “hypomania,” a fair diagnosis for any individual who manages single-handedly to found a library, fire company, police force, hospital, university, insurance company, sanitation department and militia.

Schiff concludes with this…

How dear is he to us? Well, who would you rather have in your wallet, George Washington or Ben Franklin? He makes us feel rich.

Happy 300th, Ben! You do indeed make us all feel rich…