JD Vance, 2003 Graduate of Middletown High School, sworn in as Vice President

JD Vance, a 2003 graduate of Middletown High School, has officially been sworn in as the 50th vice president of the United States. Vance, the first millennial vice president, is the youngest to serve in the role since Richard Nixon served in the 1950s.

The vice president was born in Middletown in 1984 as James Donald Bowman. In 1990, the same year he enrolled for kindergarten at Middletown City Schools, his mother renamed him James David Hamel. This is the name Vance would go by for his entire time as a Middie.

Vance was elected vice president of his senior class at Middletown High School and graduated with an honors diploma in 2003.

After graduating from high school, Vance joined the United States Marines Corps and served as a public affairs marine in Iraq. He then attended Ohio State University, graduating in 2009. He graduated from Yale Law School in 2013.

Vance rose to national prominence in 2016 with the publication of his best-selling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," which was adapted into a Netflix film in 2020.

He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022 and began representing the State of Ohio in January 2023.

VP Vance Facts:

• Vance is the third-youngest vice president. (He is the youngest since 1953, when Richard M. Nixon, who celebrated his 40th birthday just days before the inauguration, was sworn in as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president. John C. Breckinridge, who was 36 when he assumed office in 1857 as James Buchanan’s vice president, holds the record for the nation’s youngest vice president.)
• He is the first millennial vice president
• He is the first vice president to have served in the Marine Corps

Ohio VP Facts:

Before Vance, the last Ohio-born vice president was Charles Dawes, from Marietta, who served from 1925 to 1929 under President Calvin Coolidge. Before that, there was Charles Fairbanks from Unionville Center, who served from 1905 to 1909, under President Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas Hendricks from Fultonham, who served in 1885, under President Grover Cleveland from March until his death in November.

While Dawes, Fairbanks, and Hendricks were all born in Ohio, they built their political careers elsewhere before becoming vice president. 

Ohio President Facts:

Ohio is sometimes referred to as the "Mother of Presidents" since seven U.S. presidents were born there:

• Ulysses S. Grant: Born in Point Pleasant
• Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Born in Delaware
• James Abram Garfield: Born in Orange Township, now Moreland Hills
• Benjamin Harrison: Born in North Bend
• William McKinley: Born in Niles
• William Howard Taft: Born in Cincinnati
• Warren Gamaliel Harding: Born in Corsica, now Blooming Grove 
• William Henry Harrison: Born in Virginia, but settled in Ohio