Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (8 page)

A few months after he left the White House, Harry spotted a crew working on a road near his home in Independence one day. He went down to take a look.

“A shovel (automatic) and a drag line were working as well as some laboring men digging in the old fashioned way,” he wrote in his diary. “The boss or the contractor was looking on and I asked him if he didn’t need a good straw boss. He took a look at me and then watched the work a while and then took another look and broke out in a broad smile and said, ‘Oh yes! You
are
out of a job, aren’t you.'”

When he woke up on Friday, June 19, 1953, Sylvester “Bud” Toben had no idea he would meet a former president of the United States that day. He only knew that it was going to be hot out—very hot—which meant business would be brisk at Bud’s Golden Cream, his soft-serve ice-cream stand at the junction of Highways 36 and 61 on the western edge of Hannibal. Bud served five-cent cones in three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and the flavor of the day (usually strawberry). His specialty was a giant banana split called the Pig’s Dinner, which he sold for sixty-nine cents. If you finished it, Bud gave you a little yellow and red button that said, “I made a pig of myself at Bud’s.” It was, quite literally, a nickel-and-dime operation, but Toben excelled at it. The stand opened every year on March 19—St. Joseph’s Day; Bud was a good Catholic—and closed on Christmas Eve. After Thanksgiving Toben sold Christmas trees, too.

To help him out at the stand that hot June day, Toben enlisted the aid of his daughter, Toni. Toni spent much of her summers “waiting on trade” at one of the stand’s two windows, watching cars pull in and out of the tiny parking lot all day. As a result, she knew more about automobiles than the average twelve-year-old girl. So she was suitably impressed when, a little after noon, a shiny black car with chrome-wire wheels pulled up to the stand. “That Chrysler was beautiful,” Toni remembered. “That’s what impressed me when it pulled in, because there were very few people who had a Chrysler like that.”

When the driver emerged from the car, Toni immediately recognized him as Harry Truman.

Harry went around to the other side of the car and opened the door for Bess. The couple then began walking to Osborne’s Café, a diner next door to Bud’s. Toni knew her father didn’t like Osborne’s customers using his lot.

“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.

Decatur, Illinois,
June 19–20, 1953

A
bout 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 three 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.