Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip

by Matthew Algeo

  “Dad,” the twelve-year-old shouted, “Harry Truman’s out in front. Do you want me to have him move his car?”

  He thought she was mistaken, of course, but when Bud looked for himself, he saw that it was indeed Harry Truman.

  Bud told Toni to call her sister, nineteen-year-old Mary—and to tell her to bring a camera.

  Bud went outside and introduced himself to the Trumans. The two men talked for a few minutes about the weather, with Harry claiming, “I’ve seen it hotter.” Truman was a master of small talk. He could chat with anyone about anything. It was a gift, and, according to journalist Charles Robbins, it was part of his “humanness.” “[H]e went out of his way to treat others not as ‘bodies’ or digits but as fellow human beings,” Robbins wrote.

  Mary arrived with her little Kodak Brownie camera. She asked Harry if she could take a picture of him. Truman struck a deal with her: he told her she could take a picture after he and Bess finished lunch—but only if she promised not to tell anybody else they were in town. Mary agreed, and the Trumans went into Osborne’s.

  Bud Toben didn’t make them move their car.

  Inside the diner, Harry and Bess seated themselves. Amid the din of the lunchtime rush, with waitresses harried and dishes clanging, nobody gave them a second glance. They were, by all appearances, a perfectly ordinary, middle-aged couple. They ordered fruit plates and iced tea and enjoyed their lunch in complete anonymity. “We thought we were getting by big as an unknown traveling couple,” Harry wrote. But, just as they got up to pay their bill, a voice shouted from across the room: “Why, there’s Judge Truman!” An old Marion County judge had recognized Harry Truman—not as a former president, but from his days on the Jackson County bench thirty years earlier. “The incog[nito] was off,” Truman wrote, “and then every waitress and all the customers had to shake hands and have autographs.”

  Harry standing next to his New Yorker in the parking lot of Bud’s Golden Cream in Hannibal, Missouri, June 19, 1953.

  “They seemed to be having a good time,” John Osborne, the owner of the diner, told a local newspaper. “They were taking their time.” Eventually the couple escaped to the parking lot in front of Bud’s Golden Cream, where Mary Toben waited with her camera. She snapped a picture of the ex-president and her father engaged in more small talk, Truman in his white suit, Bud Toben in a white T-shirt and dungarees.

  After he finished chatting with Toben, Truman slid behind the wheel of the Chrysler and, with a wave, he and Bess pulled away from Bud’s Golden Cream. They continued east on Highway 36, which ran right through the middle of Hannibal.

  If the Trumans visited Hannibal today, they’d get lost. Highway 36 has been rerouted north around the town. A Dairy Queen opened just up the street from Bud’s in the early 1970s, and Toben finally closed his stand in 1974. He took out an ad in the local paper to mark the occasion. “We will discontinue operations … after 25 short, successful seasons,” it read. “These have been, indeed, most enjoyable years for us…. Our Christmas Tree Services will be taken over by the Optimist Club.”

  A KFC now stands where Bud’s once stood.

  Osborne’s Café went out of business around the same time as Bud’s. It’s been replaced by an Italian restaurant called Cassano’s.

  Passing through Hannibal in 1953, at the corner of Third and Hill, Harry and Bess would have seen on their right a simple, white, two-story house—a house that still stands there today. It was the boyhood home of perhaps the only Missourian more famous than Harry Truman himself: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

  He never went to college, but Harry Truman was as well read as any president. “From the time I was ten years old,” he wrote, “I had spent all my idle hours reading.” His reading list is impressive, to say the least: Plutarch, Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, every Shakespeare play and sonnet, the Koran. But his favorite author, his “patron saint” of literature, was Mark Twain. One of Truman’s prized possessions was a twenty-five-volume set of Twain’s works, which he bought for twenty-five dollars in 1910—the year Truman turned twenty-six and the year Twain died at seventy-four. As president, Truman kept a framed copy of his favorite Twain quote on his desk in the Oval Office: “Always do right! This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” In Twain’s books, however, Truman heard no echoes of his own youth in Missouri. Frail and bespectacled as a child, he never identified with Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. “I wasn’t in that class,” he told an interviewer once. “I was kind of a sissy growing up.”

  As he drove by Twain’s house that day, Harry probably contemplated the author’s role in another president’s life. It was Twain who helped Ulysses S. Grant, penniless and near death from cancer of the throat, complete his memoirs. It has been suggested that Twain even ghostwrote some of the memoirs, which were a critical and commercial triumph. Truman’s own memoirs—three hundred thousand words—were due to be delivered to Doubleday in two years, on June 30, 1955. Harry planned to start working on them in earnest as soon as he got back home. The task weighed heavy on his mind. By his own admission, he was no writer.

  How he must have wished old Sam Clemens were still around to help him.

  Shortly after they passed Twain’s boyhood home, the Trumans crossed the Mississippi—the river, as Harry called it—and entered Illinois. They kept cruising eastbound on Highway 36, their black Chrysler slicing through waves of green cornfields at precisely fifty-five miles per hour. It was about one o’clock now, and the heat was positively stifling. A few miles east of the town of Jacksonville, they crossed the ninetieth meridian—one-quarter of the way around the world, as a road sign notes today.

  Around here, in the middle of nowhere, the car radio crackled with the news: President Eisenhower had denied Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s appeal for clemency. “The execution of two human beings is a grave matter,” Ike announced. “But even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what these spies have done.” The Rosenberg children, ten-year-old Michael and six-year-old Robert, were staying with friends of their parents at the time. Michael was watching his favorite baseball team, the Yankees, play the Tigers on TV when the game was interrupted by a bulletin announcing Eisenhower’s decision. “That was their last chance,” the youngster whispered.

  4

  Decatur, Illinois,

  June 19–20, 1953

  About two hours after leaving Hannibal, the Trumans passed through Springfield, the capital of Illinois and the home of Abraham Lincoln. Harry saw a lot of himself in Old Abe, who was one of only two Republican presidents he admired. (Teddy Roosevelt was the other.) “Lincoln,” Harry wrote, “set an example that a man who has the ability can be president of the United States no matter what his background is.”

  Harry and Bess drove past the soaring, silver-domed statehouse, where statues of Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas grace the grounds. The statues were financed by the state legislature through the same appropriation in 1913 and dedicated on the same day in 1918. The Lincoln statue cost fifty thousand dollars—twice as much as the Douglas statue. Of course, Lincoln was at least a foot taller than Douglas, who was known as the “Little Giant.”

  In 1858, Douglas defeated Lincoln for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Two years later, Douglas, running as the Northern Democratic candidate for president, faced Lincoln again. (Southern Democrats ran their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge.) Douglas received nearly 1.4 million votes in that contest but lost, of course. Staunchly pro-Union, he became an unlikely ally of Lincoln’s after the election. Douglas attended Lincoln’s inauguration, and stunned the audience when he took Lincoln’s hat and “held it like an attendant” while Lincoln delivered his inaugural address. (Hats have clearly played an important but underappreciated role in presidential inaugurations.)

  Even if he’d won the election, Douglas’s presidency would have been inconsequential. He contracted typhoid fever and died on June 3, 1861—less than t
hree months after Lincoln took office. He was forty-eight.

  In all probability, it was not Stephen A. Douglas but rather a different failed Democratic presidential candidate who was on Harry Truman’s mind as he drove through Springfield that day. Less than a year earlier, Democrats had nominated Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson for president. It was a choice that Truman supported. “You are a brave man,” he wrote Stevenson shortly after the convention. “If it is worth anything, you have my wholehearted support and cooperation.”

  But almost from the moment he was nominated, Stevenson did everything he could to distance himself from Truman, whose popularity was at rock bottom. Stevenson replaced Truman’s head of the Democratic National Committee, Frank McKinney, with his own man, and he moved the party’s headquarters from Washington to Springfield, where he lived in the governor’s mansion. He wanted to “disown any connection with the Truman administration,” according to Matthew Connelly, one of Truman’s aides. “Stevenson actually was running against Truman. He did not want to get involved with any aspect of the Truman administration.”

  Naturally, this irritated Truman. In another longhand spasm, a letter he wrote to Stevenson but never sent, Truman said he had “come to the conclusion that you are embarrassed by having the President of the United States in your corner.” In another unsent letter to Stevenson, Truman wrote, “Cowfever could not have treated me any more shabbily than you have.”

  Still, Truman was nothing if not a loyal Democrat, and he campaigned hard for Stevenson, even harder, some said, than he’d campaigned for himself four years earlier. It was another exhausting whistle-stop campaign, with Truman crisscrossing the country in the Ferdinand Magellan. (Stevenson campaigned by airplane.) “He … put everything he had into trying to help Stevenson,” said Matthew Connelly. But it was for naught. Eisenhower carried thirty-nine of the forty-eight states. He even won Illinois and Missouri.

  Springfield held no special place in Harry Truman’s heart.

  The Trumans didn’t stop in Springfield, but I did. I wanted to visit the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a ninety-million-dollar complex in downtown Springfield that opened in 2005. Unlike most other presidential libraries, it is not run by the National Archives. Instead, the state of Illinois runs it.

  With Harry’s library, the museum component was practically an afterthought. The original design included just two main exhibit rooms. When it was proposed that one of the rooms be dedicated to telling the story of Truman’s life, the former president vetoed the idea. As Wayne Grover, the head of the National Archives, explained at the time, “Mr. Truman … would be offended by anything that looked too much like an advertisement for him.” In fact, the museum would not include a comprehensive exhibit on Truman’s life until the late 1990s.

  The Lincoln Library, on the other hand, suffers no shortage of exhibits dedicated to its namesake. The museum, which was designed by HOK, the same architectural firm that designs “retro” ballparks like Baltimore’s Camden Yards, has been described as “cutting edge” and “state of the art.” It features life-size replicas of Lincoln’s boyhood home (a log cabin, of course), his law office in Springfield (which is kind of superfluous, since the real thing is just a few blocks away), his White House cabinet room, his box at Ford’s Theater, even his funeral cortege. Each of these replicas is inhabited by mannequins that are very lifelike (except when deathlike is more appropriate) and a little creepy. Gathered around the table in the cabinet room were Lincoln, seven members of his cabinet—and one real live human being dressed in period costume. He gave me quite a start when he said hello.

  The museum unabashedly attempts to be hip. The 1860 election is covered by a videotaped MSNBC news report in a room made to look like a modern TV control room. Of course, it’s all very interactive as well. One wall is completely covered with Civil War–era photographs. The corresponding captions can only be retrieved by touching a computer screen.

  The museum does have some cool stuff: a signed copy of the Thirteenth Amendment, a ticket to Lincoln’s second inaugural, a schoolbook containing the earliest known example of his handwriting, a photograph of Fido, the family dog in Springfield. But on the whole it seemed too flashy, designed less to educate or entertain than to simply keep visitors from being bored.

  Personally, I like my museums the same way I like my martinis: very dry. Apparently I’m not alone. Historian John Y. Simon has dismissed the Lincoln Museum as “Six Flags over Lincoln” or “Lincolnland.” It’s a far cry from the “research center” that Harry Truman envisioned for his own library. Yet it has proved immensely popular. The museum welcomed its one millionth visitor in 2007, less than two years after it opened, and (it claims) faster than any other presidential museum. Take that, Harry!

  Around five o’clock the Trumans pulled into a Shell station on the outskirts of Decatur, Illinois. Harry asked the attendant to fill the tank. Truman had stopped at this particular station many times back when he was in the Senate. “The old man”—the attendant—“kept looking at me as he filled up the gas tank,” Truman recalled. “Finally he asked me if I was Senator Truman. I admitted the charge.”

  Harry paid the attendant. Then Bess carefully recorded the purchase on the small card Harry kept in the glove compartment to track the car’s mileage. It would become something of a ritual on the trip, a small ceremony observed at every service station.

  Harry’s interest in fuel efficiency was largely financial. Like most Americans, he was concerned about skyrocketing gas prices. Why, just that day, Standard Oil had hiked prices a penny a gallon—to 27.1 cents. The company blamed the increase on rising crude oil prices, which were approaching three dollars a barrel. On Capitol Hill, though, some lawmakers accused the oil companies of collusion and price gouging. The House Commerce Committee had launched an investigation.

  Before pulling away from the station, Truman asked the attendant to recommend a good motel in town. “We’d never stayed at one,” Truman later explained, “and we wanted to try it out and see if we liked it.” It would also save them a little money. A night in a motel only cost about five bucks.

  The attendant recommended the Parkview Motel and gave Harry directions. Then, as soon as the Trumans were gone, he called the local newspapers.

  The Parkview was quiet when Harry and Bess pulled up. The clerk didn’t even recognize them when they checked in. But within minutes the motel’s parking lot swarmed with reporters, photographers, and curious locals. Harry, who had “expected to enjoy the pleasures of traveling incognito,” was dismayed by the carnivalesque atmosphere. It was just what his friends had warned him would happen.

  When Decatur Police Chief Glenn Kerwin learned the former president and first lady were traveling by themselves—without even a single bodyguard—he was aghast. What if something happened to them while they were in his jurisdiction? Kerwin immediately dispatched two officers, Francis Hartnett and Horace Hoff, to the Parkview. The Trumans, Kerwin ordered, were to be shadowed around the clock until they left the city. “I don’t need any protection,” Harry pleaded when Hartnett and Hoff showed up at his motel door. But orders were orders. The former commander in chief was outranked by Chief Kerwin. The cops stayed.

  Harry unloading luggage from his car outside the Parkview Motel, Decatur, Illinois, June 19, 1953. Harry rejected the suggestion that he be photographed reclined in an easy chair with Bess placing a pillow under his head.

  Harry signed a few autographs in the parking lot and sent a note to a child who was ill at the motel. He agreed to be photographed for the papers, as long as the pictures wouldn’t appear until the next day—after he and Bess had left town. One photographer suggested the Trumans pose in their room, with Bess placing a pillow under Harry’s head while he reclined in an easy chair. Harry vetoed that idea, offering to be photographed taking luggage out of the trunk of his Chrysler instead. Then he asked everybody to back off. He and Bess were exhausted from the long drive in the heat, he explained. They had tr
aveled 350 miles in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees. Now they were going to lie down and take a nap.

  By the 1920s it was possible for the first time to drive an automobile long distances over paved roads. But if you did, you had to be prepared to rough it. Hotels were concentrated in city centers, usually around train terminals. Outside urban areas just about the only accommodations available to travelers were squalid campgrounds or flophouses. Then, in 1925, an architect named Arthur Heinman opened what he called a “mo-tel”—a motor hotel—along Highway 101 in San Luis Obispo, California, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Heinman’s motel was the first in the world. It consisted of a series of two-room bungalows with attached garages that rented for $1.25 a night. The concept proved nearly as popular as the automobile itself, and soon motels of all shapes and sizes were springing up along roadsides from coast to coast. Even the Depression couldn’t stem the tide. In 1933, according to The Architectural Record, the construction of motels was “the single growing and highly active division of the building industry.” By 1940 there were twenty thousand motels in the United States. Nearly all were family-owned, with spectacular neon signs and quirky names like the Linger Longer, the It’ll Do, the Close-Inn, and the Aut-O-Tel. To attract guests, some incorporated kitschy elements of popular culture into their design, such as giant replicas of teepees or spaceships. No two motels were exactly alike.

  It wasn’t just weary travelers who frequented motels. Their remoteness and the relative anonymity they afforded made them perfect for illicit assignations. Bonnie and Clyde hid out in motels. So did John Dillinger. In 1940, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover denounced motels as “camps of crime … a new home of disease, bribery, corruption, crookedness, rape, white slavery, thievery, and murder.” But the negative publicity didn’t hurt business. Motels continued to proliferate after World War II. By 1960 there were sixty thousand. But by then the era of the independent, family-owned motel was already fading.