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

by Matthew Algeo

  The Country House was a cut above most roadside eateries. In fact, Harvey winced when I called it a diner. It was a restaurant, he gently corrected me. The tablecloths were white. The menu included filet mignon and “choice seafood.”

  Harvey was washing dishes in the kitchen the day the Trumans unexpectedly showed up at his restaurant. “I finally got to talk to Harry after they were about ready to go,” Harvey said. “I didn’t want to bother him but I didn’t want to miss him either.” Harvey remembered Harry telling him he was “very happy” with his meal. Harry wasn’t just being nice either. For years afterward, he would recommend the restaurant to friends who were driving through central Pennsylvania. “After that we had a lot more customers from Independence, Missouri, than we had before,” Harvey said.

  The restaurant was successful; some days upward of a thousand meals were served. It was hard work, but Harvey and Helen enjoyed it. “What we liked about it was the results,” Harvey said—the financial results. But they had three kids, too, and it was hard to give them the attention they deserved. “We looked around and realized we weren’t spending enough time with the children.” So, in 1960, Harvey and Helen sold the restaurant to the Dutch Pantry chain. The Dutch Pantry closed in 1970, and the U.S. Postal Service bought the building a few years later. It was converted into a post office. The bell tower was removed.

  After they sold the Country House, Harvey and Helen took over his father’s farm full time. They finally retired in the late 1980s. The farm has since been turned into a golf course, a development that does not disturb Harvey in the least. “I think it was a good idea,” he told me. “Wish I’d done it myself, but I was too old.”

  Harvey slowly wheeled himself over to his desk, moving the chair with his feet. He reached for a framed picture and handed it to me. It was a color brochure from the heyday of the Country House, the kind you might have found on a display rack at a highway rest stop. “Authentic Country Dining!” it announced. “Come to the Country House and discover an atmosphere that is both intriguing and inviting.” I read the copy out loud. “You’ll relax in air-conditioned comfort in one of five handsomely appointed dining rooms.” Harvey smiled.

  “If it wouldn’t've been for the kids not getting enough attention,” he said, “we’d've probably still had it.”

  In Carlisle, the Trumans picked up the Pennsylvania Turnpike. For Harry, a certified road aficionado, this must have been a thrilling experience.

  When it opened in 1940, there was nothing like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Built on the ruins of an abandoned railroad line, it stretched 160 miles from Carlisle west to Irwin, over and, via seven tunnels, through the Allegheny Mountains. The turnpike was an engineering marvel, with two twelve-foot lanes in each direction, separated by what was then a spacious ten-foot median. (For a time it was fashionable to picnic in the grassy median, until the state police deemed the practice foolhardy.) Access was limited to eleven interchanges, and all intersecting roads passed over or under the turnpike, so there were no intersections—and no traffic lights—and no speed limits. Ten service plazas gave motorists a place to fill their tanks (and themselves) without having to leave the cocoon of the road.

  It cost seventy million dollars to build. Franklin Roosevelt, sensing its military value, prodded Congress to kick in $29.5 million. The rest of the money came from the sale of bonds, which would be paid off by collecting tolls of roughly a penny per mile for passenger vehicles. (Today the rate is about six cents per mile.)

  Critics derided it as a boondoggle and a “road to nowhere,” but the turnpike proved a stunning success. Traffic the first year was nearly twice as heavy as projected, and toll revenue exceeded $2.6 million, easily enough to meet expenses. (The accident rate was higher than expected, too, so a speed limit of seventy miles per hour was imposed.)

  The Pennsylvania Turnpike wasn’t merely a way to get from one place to another; it became a destination in its own right. Tourists came from all over the country to see the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Highway,” and the service plazas did a brisk business in turnpike souvenirs: postcards, glasses, mugs, plates, pennants, ashtrays, and countless other trinkets.

  Its success spurred other states to build similar toll roads: Illinois, Maine, Ohio, New Jersey, and New York. By 1957 it was possible to drive from New York to Chicago without even thinking about a traffic light. The feasibility of a nationwide system of limited-access highways was now indisputable.

  The tolls on the Pennsylvania Turnpike were supposed to be lifted once the bonds sold to finance construction had been retired. Instead, however, the commission that operated the turnpike used toll revenue to finance new projects, setting in motion a constant need for tolls. By 1956 the turnpike stretched all the way across the state, 360 miles from Ohio to New Jersey, with a 110-mile extension from Philadelphia to Allentown and Scranton. (Apropos of Harry’s injunction against memorials to the living, a tunnel on the extension was going to be named after the chairman of the turnpike commission until he was convicted of attempting to defraud the commission of nineteen million dollars.) More recently, the commission has approved plans to expand large sections of the turnpike from four lanes to six.

  So-called perpetual tolls troubled some transportation officials, who said the fees would “stifle free transportation and injure the national welfare.” In 1950, the trade journal Engineering News-Record warned that never-ending tolls were “pernicious.”

  On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Harry Truman must have found it extremely difficult to abide by his wife’s prohibition against speeding. To his credit, he did—yet he still got in trouble.

  Harry was in the left lane, cruising along at fifty-five with a line of cars behind him, when Pennsylvania State Trooper Manley Stampler pulled alongside him and motioned for him to pull over. (At the time, state police cars in Pennsylvania had no emergency lights.)

  Harry later claimed the only reason the trooper pulled him over was to “shake hands.”

  That’s not how Manley remembers it.

  Now comfortably retired in suburban Phoenix, Manley whiles away the days penning cantankerous letters to the editors of local newspapers. (“It only cost $430 million to send the Phoenix Mars mission to the Red Planet. What a bargain. That money could have been spent to help the Hurricane Katrina victims …”)

  Manley was just seventeen when he dropped out of high school to enlist in the navy in 1945. After his discharge, he joined the Pennsylvania State Police. “It was kind of a romantic thing to do,” he told me. He was assigned to the barracks in Bedford, a town of three thousand in the rural south-central part of the state.

  Mostly he just patrolled the turnpike, an assignment he enjoyed. On his breaks he would stop at the Howard Johnson’s at the Cove Valley service plaza and flirt with a pretty waitress. When he asked her to marry him one day, she said yes.

  July 5, 1953, began as a “typical day,” Manley remembered. He was pulling an eight-hour shift on the pike. When he saw that big black Chrysler blocking traffic in the left lane, he had no idea who the driver was. He only knew the law was being broken.

  When he realized he’d pulled over the former president, Manley was flabbergasted. He hadn’t heard about the Trumans’ trip. “I just couldn’t believe that I had pulled this man over.” But he had a job to do. He gave Harry a brief lecture, the same one he delivered to countless other motorists.

  “I told him what he had done wrong and he said he didn’t realize it—that it wasn’t intentional. Then, I told him how dangerous the turnpike is and … wouldn’t he please be more careful.” Truman was smiling, Manley remembered. “He was very nice about it and promised to be more careful.” Bess leaned over and said, “Don’t worry, Trooper, I’ll watch him.” With that, Trooper Stampler told the former president and first lady they were free to go. The stop had lasted only about two minutes, though to Manley “it seemed a long time.”

  To this day there is no doubt in Manley Stampler’s mind that Harry Truman was
in violation of the law. “This guy was blockin’ traffic, so I pulled him over—that’s all there was to it.” But he let him off with just a warning. “I wasn’t going to give him a ticket—he was the president of the United States.” Here Manley paused for a moment. “Maybe some other presidents, but not Harry Truman.” As for Truman’s claim that he only pulled him over to shake hands, Manley laughed. “I don’t remember shaking his hand. Didn’t ask him for an autograph, either. Wish I had. Might be worth something today.”

  Back at the barracks at the end of his shift, Manley casually said to his desk sergeant, “You’ll never guess who I pulled over today.” The sergeant excitedly phoned the Bedford Gazette, and the next day the story appeared in newspapers nationwide. The press had a field day. “From the standpoint of the personal safety of one of America’s two living ex-presidents,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer in an editorial, “we hope Mr. Truman will exercise greater care in the future. Fortunately Private Stampler was forbearing. He didn’t give the ex-president a ticket. But the next time—who knows?”

  After Manley Stampler pulled them over, neither wire services nor major newspapers made any mention of the Trumans until they checked into a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, at noon the following day, Monday, July 6. After all the attention their trip had received so far, it was almost as if they had fallen off the face of the earth for nearly a day. The 250-mile trip from Bedford to Columbus should have taken no more than five hours. When they arrived in Columbus, they were vague about their whereabouts the previous night. Harry would only say they’d stopped in a “small town east of Columbus.”

  What’s even more bizarre is that Harry and Bess went missing on the sixth anniversary of a most peculiar event—an event that undoubtedly piqued the curiosity of then-President Truman, who had more than a casual interest in the phenomenon it represented. The event has come to be known as the Roswell Incident.

  Although the precise chronology is still much disputed, many researchers believe July 5, 1947, is the date on which a rancher named Mac Brazel discovered some unusual debris on his ranch in southeastern New Mexico. The debris consisted of a metallic, aluminum foil–like substance that couldn’t be ripped or burned, and some pieces of wood inscribed with what looked like hieroglyphics. The next day, Brazel drove seventy-five miles to the nearest town, Roswell, and walked into the Chaves County Sheriff’s Office with two cardboard boxes filled with some of the debris. Sheriff George Wilcox agreed the stuff looked strange, and he contacted the local air force base.

  The next day the air force sent two men to Brazel’s ranch to collect the rest of the debris. On July 8, the base issued a press release, which was nicely summarized in the headline of that afternoon’s edition of the Roswell Daily Record: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” The wire services picked up the story.

  Unidentified flying objects were very much on Americans’ minds that summer. Less than two weeks before Mac Brazel took that strange debris into Roswell, a thirty-two-year-old Idaho businessman and private pilot named Kenneth Arnold had seen something strange in the sky while flying his small plane near Mount Rainier in Washington state. At 2:59 P.M. on Tuesday, June 24, 1947, Arnold saw nine disc-shaped objects moving in formation at a speed he estimated to be in excess of a thousand miles per hour. He said they looked like “flying saucers,” a name that stuck. On July 4, several dozen people attending an Independence Day picnic in Twin Falls, Idaho, reported seeing discs “flying in a ‘V’ formation.” That night, a United Airlines pilot and copilot flying a DC-3 out of Boise observed nine flying saucers at an altitude of seventy-one hundred feet over the town of Emmett, Idaho.

  The “capture” of the flying saucer near Roswell understandably caused some anxiety. Now aliens were after us! After communists, it seemed there was nothing Americans feared more than little green men.

  Not to worry, said the air force. On July 9 it issued a press release saying the debris recovered near Roswell was merely the remains of a crashed weather balloon. (In 1994 the Pentagon would say it was actually a top-secret listening device used to detect nuclear tests in the Soviet Union.) Still, the air force was determined to get to the bottom of the UFO phenomenon, and in the fall of 1947 it launched an investigation that would eventually spawn the famous Project Blue Book.

  On July 10, 1947, just two days after the flying saucer was reported captured near Roswell, President Truman was asked at a press conference if he had “seen any flying saucers.” “Only in the newspapers,” was all Truman said, prompting much laughter from the reporters.

  Truman, however, took the matter quite seriously. In 1948, he summoned his air force aide, General Robert B. Landry, to the Oval Office. Landry said the president told him “the collection and evaluation of UFO data … warranted more intense study and attention at the highest government level.” Truman ordered Landry to consult with the appropriate government agencies and report directly to him quarterly “as to whether or not any UFO incidents … could be considered as having any strategic threatening implications at all.” This Landry did for more than four years. “Nothing of substance considered credible or threatening to the country was ever received from intelligence,” Landry recalled.

  Still, the sightings continued. In the summer of 1952, Truman’s own house was buzzed by flying saucers. It all began on a steamy Saturday night, July 19. On the top floor of the control tower at Washington National Airport, an air traffic controller named Joe Zacko saw a mysterious blip on his radar screen. Then he looked out the window and saw a bright light in the sky. He pointed it out to his partner, Howard Cocklin. “If you believe in flying saucers,” Zacko said to Cocklin, “that sure could be one.”

  Suddenly the bright light shot away at an incredible speed. “Did you see that?” Cocklin said. “What the hell was that?”

  Radar screens at two nearby air force bases also picked up unidentified blips that night, and a pilot reported seeing unusual objects in the sky near the capital, “like falling stars without tails.” Three days later the Washington Post reported on the “eerie visitation”—“perhaps a new type of ‘flying saucer,'” the paper helpfully speculated. Soon the sultry capital was swept up in a UFO frenzy. Up to fifty sightings a day were reported. A State Department employee saw a small light in the sky that “floated around in space” and disappeared. A radio station engineer saw mysterious lights near the station’s transmission tower.

  On the night of July 26—a week after the first sightings—controllers at National reported at least a dozen more unusual blips. This time the air force dispatched two F-94 jets to investigate. The pilots saw strange lights. One tried to give chase but couldn’t catch the lights—even though his jet was capable of speeds approaching six hundred miles per hour.

  Truman demanded answers, but the Pentagon was hard pressed to deliver them. An air force official said he was “fairly well convinced there is nothing in the phenomenon to indicate that it is a menace to the country,” but added that he could not “discount entirely that they are visitations from a foreign country or another planet.” “Perhaps it’s due to the heavy use of TV during the conventions,” a navy official speculated. (The Republican and Democratic national conventions took place around the same time as the sightings.)

  Eventually the Pentagon settled on an answer that seemed to satisfy both the president and the public: “temperature inversion.” A layer of hot air in the atmosphere had caused radar systems to mistake objects on the ground for objects in the air. “I’m satisfied in my own mind,” said General John A. Samford, the head of air force intelligence, “that the recent sightings here result from heat inversion.” Samford went on to reassure the public that a thorough analysis had found “no pattern of anything remotely consistent with any menace to the United States.”

  Of course, this theory did not explain how the lights had outraced an F-94, but the press, at least, bought it. Perhaps the explanation that the UFOs were the result of all the hot air in the nation’s capital
was too good to resist. In any event, the papers stopped reporting UFO sightings and the matter was soon forgotten—though, to this day, the sightings have not been fully explained.

  So Harry Truman was well acquainted with UFOs. Which is why his seeming disappearance on the very anniversary of the discovery of the Roswell crash is, to put it mildly, a rather interesting coincidence—or is it a coincidence?

  Alas, it is. Harry and Bess weren’t abducted by aliens—at least not on the night of July 5, 1953. Though it went unreported at the time, the Trumans spent that night in Washington.

  But not that Washington.

  Residents of Washington, Pennsylvania, often distinguish their town from the nation’s capital by calling it “Little Washington” (or, in the local accent, “Little Worshington”). Wedged in the southwest corner of the state, the town is the eponymous seat of Washington County. Chartered by the Pennsylvania legislature in 1781, it was the first county in the nation to be named for the Father of Our Country, who was still in his forties at the time and eight years away from becoming president.

  Ironically, Washington (the place) ended up giving Washington (the man) nothing but headaches. George Washington owned land in the county, but even as president he was unable to pry the rent from his tenants, so he ended up selling the nettlesome property. Then, in 1794, farmers in Washington County revolted against a new federal tax on whiskey. (Whiskey was a serious cash crop at the time. It’s been estimated that one in six farmers in the county operated a still.) The Whiskey Rebellion was the first serious test of the powers of the federal government, and Washington was forced to send more than twelve thousand troops to the area to crush it.

  The National Road was routed through the town of Washington, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was a center of agriculture, with crops and livestock being shipped east and west. But it was the discovery of coal and, later, oil, that turned Washington into a bona fide boomtown.