Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (10 page)

I went back to the front desk to drop off my badge. The guard who’d been there earlier was gone. In his place was a young woman with dark curly hair and a wide red-lipped smile. She laughed when I told her why I was there. When I said it was ironic that an inmate now slept in the same room that Harry and Bess Truman once slept in, she corrected me: “No,
three
inmates do!” Like many American prisons, this one is overcrowded: it is about 25 percent over capacity.

The warden joined us, suddenly looking much more relaxed. He chatted a bit about the facility, the goal of which, he explained, is to help inmates “successfully reintegrate into the community.” Besides working or going to school, they are required to attend substance abuse treatment programs if necessary. A lot of people in Decatur were concerned when the ATC opened in 1979. But the facility has proven to be a good neighbor. Inmates set up and take down the stages at the city’s annual street festival. They pick up trash along the streets. They participate in Operation Green Thumb, a gardening program. They raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association and help out at the city’s annual Christmas party. They prepare and serve a Thanksgiving dinner for the needy.

Since they are so close to their freedom, the inmates at the Decatur ATC have a strong incentive to behave, yet a quarter of them are returned to higher-security prisons for disciplinary reasons. Still, this is one of the safest prisons in Illinois, if not the country. In 2003, for example, there were no assaults reported at the facility.

It would have been nice to rest my head where the Trumans rested theirs in Decatur, but, absent the commission of a felony, that wasn’t feasible, so I found the next closest motel. It was less than a mile up 22nd Street. It was called the Tri-Manor.

Opened in the early 1950s, the Tri-Manor is a vestige of the golden days of motels. On its roof is a giant red neon sign that reads, simply,
MOTEL
. But the sign doesn’t work. At night not a single letter is lighted. The Tri-Manor has seen better days, much like Decatur itself, a city named after a War of 1812 hero who was mortally wounded in a duel. As he lay dying, Stephen Decatur is said to have cried out, “I did not know that any man could suffer such pain!” His namesake city could say much the same thing about itself.

When the Trumans came here in 1953, Decatur was a thriving agricultural center, the self-proclaimed “Soybean Capital of the World,” home of the food-processing giants Archer Daniels Midland and A. E. Staley. The city also had a broad manufacturing base. General Electric made television sets here, and a host of smaller companies produced everything from pumps and valves to potato chips. In 1954 Caterpillar opened a heavy-equipment factory on the edge of town, and, nine years later, Firestone began making tires here.

But time was not kind to Decatur. The global economy changed. Free-trade agreements were signed. Companies began to cut jobs, close, or move. Labor strife ensued. At one point in 1994, more than 6 percent of the city’s workforce was either on strike or locked out as the result of separate disputes at Bridgestone/Firestone, Caterpillar, and Staley. Later that year, ADM was implicated in a global price-fixing scandal. In 1996 two tornadoes hit the city within twenty-four hours. In 2001 Bridgestone/Firestone announced it was closing its Decatur plant.

“People who live in small towns, or even medium-sized ones, tend to be pleasantly surprised when they venture out of state and encounter big-city dwellers who can summon salient facts about the travelers’ home towns,” Mark Singer wrote in a
New Yorker
profile of the city in 2000. “Residents of Decatur, Illinois, though, have learned not to get all that thrilled.”

When the Trumans were here, Decatur was a Norman Rockwell town. Now it feels more like Norman Bates. Which brings me back to my motel.

When I checked into the Tri-Manor, the manager, a short, plump woman with a large scab on her face, told me it was a good thing I hadn’t come two years earlier. “Back then it was all druggies and hos,” she said. Camps of crime, indeed. “But,” she hastened to reassure me, “we’ve cleaned up since then.”

My room at the Tri-Manor was anything but manorial. It reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The door had no deadbolt or chain, just a simple lock in the knob. It didn’t shut tightly either. This I discovered in the middle of the night, when the wind blew it open, scaring me senseless. The bathroom door had a large hole at the bottom, apparently from a kick. The furnishings were worn, and the walls were bare and thin. I wouldn’t have wanted to shine a black light on the bedspread for all the money in the world. And the color on my TV was off: all the people were purple. At $37.85 a night, the room seemed radically overpriced.

But there was also something appealing about it, in that it was refreshingly un-corporate. This was how motel rooms might have looked before Kemmons Wilson took the element of surprise out of the roadside lodging business. This was how Harry and Bess’s room might have looked.

But something tells me the Tri-Manor won’t be welcoming any ex-presidents any time soon.

While the Trumans napped at the Parkview Motel in the early evening hours of June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing. Julius went first. He was strapped into the electric chair at 7:04 Eastern time. The current was applied, and, for fifteen seconds, 2,450 volts of electricity passed through his body. At 7:06 he was pronounced dead. Just five minutes later, Ethel was led into the death chamber. She hadn’t been told of her husband’s execution, but she must have known: the unmistakable stench of his charred flesh was still heavy in the air.

Ethel did not die as easily as Julius. She was a short woman, and the chair, known as Old Sparky, was built for an average-sized man. The helmet and straps were too large for her, so the electrodes, apparently, made poor contact with her body. It took three applications of current over five minutes to kill her. Witnesses reported seeing smoke rising from her head. At 7:16 she was finally pronounced dead. Fifteen minutes later, the last rays of the setting sun disappeared behind the horizon at Sing Sing, signaling the beginning of the Sabbath. The Rosenbergs remain the only American civilians ever executed for espionage. For fear of being ostracized, no close relatives were willing to take in Michael and Robert Rosenberg. After a stint in an orphanage, the children were adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol. Abel Meeropol was a liberal activist and songwriter who, under the pseudonym Lewis Allen, wrote “Strange Fruit,” the classic anti-lynching anthem made famous by Billie Holiday.

About forty-five minutes after Ethel Rosenberg was pronounced dead, Harry and Bess Truman emerged from their motel room, appearing, according to one account, “much refreshed.” The reporters camped outside his door asked the former president to comment on the executions. His reply was enigmatic: “My actions in the Rosenberg case speak for themselves.” In fact, Harry Truman had taken no actions in the case.

In any event, it was time for dinner. Harry and Bess drove to Grove’s, a popular diner in a long, low-slung building on the north side of Decatur. A police car led the way, and several cars filled with reporters and gawkers followed the Trumans, forming an impromptu motorcade. It was not the kind of inconspicuous outing that Harry had hoped for.

The diner fell silent when the Trumans entered. Every eye in the place followed them as they were seated at a table with their unwanted bodyguards, Francis Hartnett and Horace Hoff. Harry ordered roast beef, potatoes, and salad. Bess ordered the same thing. They ate under the constant gaze of their fellow diners, which seemed to make Bess, at least, uncomfortable. “Mrs. Truman spoke in low tones to her husband during their meal,” reported the appropriately named Harold Stalker in the
Decatur Herald.
“[She] glanced around occasionally when she noticed that they were attracting attention in the café.” They didn’t stay for dessert. The bill came to $1.72. Harry also picked up the tab for the two cops. As Truman walked back to his car, Stalker attempted to interview him but was cut off. “There’s nothing to be said of importance anyway right now,” Truman snapped, clearly growing a little weary of the constant attention in Decatur.

Grove’s is gone, but another restaurant now stands in its place—a McDonald’s. Nothing distinguishes it from the other thirty thousand McDonald’s in the world. I stopped in for a cup of coffee, taking a seat in a booth with my copy of that day’s
Decatur Herald & Review
(“Decatur Man Breaks Record for Weight Lifted at His Age”). In the booth behind me sat a woman roughly the same age Bess was when she and Harry came to this very spot more than fifty years earlier. The woman was sitting alone, talking on a cell phone—not in the low tones of Bess, but very loudly—about a doctor’s appointment she’d had that morning. “They found another lump below my thyroid,” she announced, oblivious to her fellow diners. “But he don’t think it’s cancer ‘cause it’s not hard.”

It made me wonder what Harry Truman would think of cell phones. A nineteenth-century man stuck in the twentieth, Harry was a bit of a Luddite. He didn’t like using the telephone. He wrote letters instead. And he wrote them in longhand, with a distinctive slashing script. Even the typewriter was a technology he could not bring himself to adopt.

The cell phone would not be suited to Harry’s personality. He was preternaturally affable and thrived on human interaction. He liked being around people. The human race, he once said, was an “excellent outfit.” Whether playing poker with his cronies or riding in the car with Bess, conversation—face to face—was his raison d’etre. A cell phone isolates its user from those around him. That’s why people on cell phones are comfortable discussing, for example, the explicit details of a doctor’s appointment in a roomful of total strangers. They feel like they’re alone.

I think it’s safe to assume that Harry Truman would detest cell phones.

(On a subsequent visit to Decatur, I noticed that the McDonald’s had been torn down and was being replaced by another McDonald’s, presumably bigger and better than the old one.)

After dinner, the Trumans returned to the Parkview and went to bed.

Later that night, Floyd Zerfowski, a thirty-three-year-old Decatur police officer, reported for work at eleven o’clock as usual. But when he got to the station, he received an unusual assignment: he was to spend the night protecting Harry and Bess Truman. He and another officer, Ray Rex, were sent to the Parkview to relieve Francis Hartnett and Horace Hoff.

It was a boring assignment.

“We got out there and they were already in bed.” Zerfowski said of the pointless vigil. “We sat out in front of his room all night long. We found some lawn chairs and we sat out there and watched his motel door. It was sort of amusing. That was an easy job!”

Of the four cops assigned to Harry Truman’s unwanted security detail in Decatur, Zerfowski is the last survivor. Now in his late eighties, he lives alone in a tidy ranch house in a forty-year-old subdivision on the edge of town. His only companion is a police scanner, which he listens to all day. Thin and balding, he wears oversized eyeglasses that make him look a little owlish. In preparation for my visit, he had pulled out an old scrapbook filled with yellowed newspaper clippings documenting his law enforcement career.

Zerfowski joined the Decatur Police Department in 1949. Assigned to the graveyard shift, he walked different beats all over the city. “Whenever somebody was off, I usually worked their beat,” he explained. “I got to know Decatur pretty well.” Zerfowski said there wasn’t much crime in Decatur back then, but in his rookie year he was forced to fire his gun for the only time in his career. He interrupted a burglary in progress at a union hall. The burglar attacked him with a pipe. Floyd got off two shots, one of which pierced the burglar’s heart, killing him instantly. An inquest ruled the shooting justified.

Floyd retired from the police force in 1970 and went to work as a maintenance man for the Decatur school district so he could qualify for Social Security. He retired for good in 1986. His wife died suddenly of a brain aneurism just a year later.

After all those years of walking a beat, Floyd found it impossible to stop walking in retirement. Some days he would put in as many as fifteen miles inside the Northgate Mall, becoming a familiar and popular fixture among shoppers and workers there. When I first spoke with him in late 2006, however, he was recovering from a broken hip and feared his mallwalking days were over. “Now I just go there and drink coffee,” he said a little sadly at the time. But when I visited him a year later, he was feeling much better, and was back up to a mile a day at the mall. “I plan on living to be a hundred,” he told me.

The Trumans came out of their room at seven the next morning. Harry presented Floyd and his partner mechanical pencils bearing his name and picture—his usual token of appreciation. “Here’s a little gift to remember me by,” he told them. (Zerfowski saved his pencil and proudly showed it to me when I visited him.)

Then, once again accompanied by their unwanted entourage of cops and reporters, Harry and Bess went back to Grove’s for breakfast. “When he looked up and I saw who it was I almost dropped dead,” said their waitress, Helen Werve. “He was very pleasant and said everybody he had met on the way had been very nice.” Bess, she remembered, “had her hair all fixed real pretty.” Harry ordered scrambled eggs and sausage, Bess a plain omelet. Once again, Harry picked up the tab for his two bodyguards. The total bill came to $3.85. He left a thirty-cent tip and autographed Werve’s checkbook. “Truman 10-Per Cent Tipper” read a headline in that afternoon’s
Decatur Review.

Harry and Bess returned to the Parkview to pack their car. Around eight o’clock, they checked out. Floyd Zerfowski and Ray Rex escorted the couple to the Decatur city limits, at which point Chief Kerwin must have breathed a huge sigh of relief. Harry and Bess got back on Highway 36, which they would take to Indianapolis.

That day, a wire-service photograph of Harry unpacking the trunk of his car at the Parkview appeared in hundreds of newspapers nationwide. The caption explained that the Trumans were “motoring leisurely eastward.” For the first time, Americans learned just what their former president was up to. He was doing exactly what many of them did every summer. He was taking a road trip.