THE BELL CURVE:

I was immediately hooked when the Los Angeles Times came up with a splendid reason for playing the name-dropping game.

As part of the festivities leading up to the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama next Tuesday, the Times invited its readers to submit for publication anecdotes in which the reader was directly involved with a president of the United States. Any president.

With a challenge like that on the table, I didn’t have to stretch for a column subject this week.

A lifetime that goes back to sharing this planet for seven years with the oldest son of Abraham Lincoln should have encountered some presidents along the way. Here are a few that come to mind.

I met up with George Bush the elder when he spoke to the members of the Orange County Business Council shortly after leaving his presidency.

But that was the second time. The first took place 40 years earlier when George Sr. and I jointly spent six months in Corpus Christi, Texas, learning to fly Navy aircraft for a war then going on.

OK, so we didn’t get to know each other, but we were only two pages apart in the yearbook put out by the Navy in 1943.

I also saw President Reagan speak to the business council, reading his speech word-for-word, but somehow making it sound fresh.

Mostly I connected with him when covering his campaigns for governor and president for the Christian Science Monitor.

My most memorable recollection of those often dreary assignments took place when a visiting Danish high school senior named Ebbe Skovdal became a delightful part of our family during an election year.

He was fascinated with American politics, so I took him with me to cover a Reagan speech at a senior citizen gathering. We were seated with the press, almost eye-to-eye with the speaker.

Reagan was late, and a very tough high school music teacher was brought to the platform to lead a restless crowd in singing patriotic songs.

Ebbe was bored and downright disgusted when the song became “What’s the matter with Reagan, he’s all right” — a sentiment he didn’t share.

So when he allowed his disdain to show, the teacher told him she was going to invite him publicly up for a solo if he refused to join the chorus. At this critical impasse, Reagan swept in, spread his cheer and possibly prevented bloodshed. Or at least a spell of after-school penance.

When Richard Nixon first crossed my life, he was serving his second gig as vice president under Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.

I was living in a frigid Chicago suburb from which I took my family and fled to Florida over the Christmas holidays for 10 years.

Early in that time, we stumbled on a new hotel on a previously undeveloped island called Key Biscayne.

We were greeted enthusiastically, a loyalty that continued while, in the years that followed, the hotel became a hang-out for entertainers like Jack Paar and pols like Sen. Joe McCarthy.

And for Nixon, whose best friend lived nearby and who could be seen daily in shirt and tie mingling with sun bathers and Secret Service agents.

He didn’t avoid the regulars, and my daughter Patt has a picture of him with his arm draped about her shoulder, which she insists she has lost ever since Watergate.

Jimmy Carter touched our lives briefly but emphatically one summer Sunday. We had taken my stepson, Erik, to Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and were driving to visit friends in South Carolina when we passed a crossroad with a signpost telling us we were 20 miles from Plains, Ga.

I turned around and we went there. We had no idea if Jimmy Carter, recently relieved of his presidency, would be at home.

He was, and we were told we would be welcome in his Sunday School class. And so we were.

His text employed a lot of appropriate political illustrations, and his style was humble. He answered our questions about both politics and religion with clarity and warmth.

I couldn’t help contrasting the route he had chosen with the other ex-presidents who were pulling down $100,000 and up for speaking engagements.

One of them decidedly was not Harry Truman, who helped me through college and introduced me to Winston Churchill. Honestly.

The country was still in the Great Depression when I graduated high school, and I had to work a year to save enough money to go to the University of Missouri, which was noted for its school of journalism.

This was possible only if I could avoid an out-of-state tuition by using the address of my uncle who ran a savings-and-loan in Jefferson City and served with Harry Truman in France in World War I.

When I screwed up and put my Indiana address on one of my school documents, I called on my uncle in a panic, and he told he to go back to the registrar in 48 hours. I did and found a telegram from Sen. Harry Truman extolling me as a native Missourian that enabled me to start college on schedule.

When I was able to thank him in person six years later, he was President Truman and I was about to graduate.

But I was also serving on an honor guard to meet the train carrying the president and Winston Churchill, who would make his famous “iron curtain” speech on the following day at nearby Westminster College.

I remember Churchill as surprisingly short and stocky, with a firm handshake and a jovial approach to the crowd seeking a look at him.

And I remember wondering how his own people could have rejected him so quickly after he had won their war.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.