Truman (6 page)

Harry was fascinated by trains, and daily a total of twenty-three went by. He would sit alone on the roof of the coal shed behind the house counting freight cars, or, on winter nights, awake in his bed, listen for the eastbound Kansas-Nebraska Limited, which made no stop at Independence and began shrieking its warning whistle miles beyond town.

“Harry, do you remember how much you loved the trains?” his cousin Ethel Noland would ask years afterward.

“I still do,” he said.

First and second grade were at the Noland School on South Liberty Street, which was a long walk, but when the new eight-room Columbian School opened on South River Boulevard, he had only to go three blocks. He kept to himself more than most boys his age and in later years he would speak feelingly of the isolation of childhood. “It’s a very lonely thing being a child.” He seldom played games. He was afraid of the rough-and-tumble of the schoolyard and because of his glasses, felt incapable of any sport that involved a moving ball. He much preferred being at home.

To help with the cooking and washing, the family now employed a woman named Caroline Simpson, who was “black as your hat,” and who, with her husband, “Letch,” and four children, lived with the Trumans. Caroline Simpson taught Harry to cook on the big wood stove and talked to him by the hour. He liked the warmth and chatter of the kitchen, liked to look after his little sister. He would sit with her in a rocking chair for hours at a time, braiding her hair or singing her to sleep. No one was ever so nice to her as her brother Harry, Mary Jane would say in later years. Outside in the yard he never took his eyes off her, afraid she might hurt herself, as he once had. The cellar door had slammed on his foot and cut off the end of his big toe. Mamma had rushed to the rescue, found the severed piece, and held it in place until the doctor arrived to secure it with a coating of crystalline iodoform and a bandage.

For a small boy he was also abnormally neat and clean. John Truman was the kind of father who wanted everything looking just so—grass clipped around fence posts, horses “slicked up,” and his children turned out in like fashion. But in a photograph of Harry made in Kansas City when he was thirteen and about to enter high school, he looks not just spotless, every detail in order, but like a boy who will stay that way.

He was never popular like other boys, never one of the fighters as he called them. Reminiscing long afterward, he spoke of the teasing he endured because of his glasses. “To tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy,” he would say, using the hated word. He ran from fights, he admitted. Yet his brother Vivian had no memory of Harry being teased about his glasses, and to judge by the recollections of several boyhood friends he wasn’t considered a sissy exactly, only different, “serious,” as one recalled:

With girls of his own age he was so shy he could barely speak. His initial brush with other children in Independence was at Sunday School when the family first moved to town. Matt had sent him to the big, new red-brick First Presbyterian Church on Lexington Street, rather than to one of the Baptist churches, because the Presbyterian minister had been especially welcoming to her. At the Presbyterian Sunday School Harry met a blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl named Elizabeth Wallace and decided she was the most entrancing creature he had ever seen. But it was five years before he dared say a word to her. The only girls with whom he felt at ease were his cousins Ethel and Nellie Noland, the daughters of his father’s sister Ella and her husband, Joseph Noland.

His days passed largely in the company of women—Mamma, Caroline Simpson, his teachers, or Grandma Young, who came often to visit. He was surrounded by “women folk” and he got along with them splendidly, kidding and telling stories. His mother liked to say he was “intended for a girl” anyway, an observation he seems to have taken always in good spirit.

John Truman was getting on in the world. There was money now for servants, books, for studio photographs. As a surprise for the children he bought a pair of matched red goats, with custom-made harness, and a miniature farm wagon. The little rig became the talk of the neighborhood.

John was an early riser, an all-day striver, and thought to be “pretty ingenious” besides—because of his backyard gas well and various inventive ideas. He patented a staple puller for use on barbed-wire fences. For an automatic railroad switch that he devised, the Missouri Pacific reportedly offered an annual royalty of $2,000. When the Chicago & Alton topped that with an offer of $2,500, four times what most American families had to live on in a year, John asked for double the amount, with the result that both railroads turned him down and adopted another version of the same thing—pirated his idea apparently—and he wound up with nothing. It was a story told usually to show just how stubborn John Truman could be.

As a livestock trader, he stood well in the community. He had “a good eye.” He could determine the age of mules or horses at a glance, seldom needing to examine their teeth, and though a quiet man, he had perfected a nice “line of trade talk.” More important, John Truman’s word was good. “A mighty good trader, John Truman,” recalled a neighbor, “…very stubborn, but on the square.”

Because of Harry’s obvious affection for his mother, his eagerness to please her, and the enjoyment he took from her company as time went on, much would be said later of her influence, the extent to which he was “his mother’s son.” But as time would also tell, he and his father had much in common, more indeed than either of them realized through much of Harry’s boyhood, and the influence of the father on the son would never be discounted by those who knew John Truman, or by anyone in the family, including Harry himself.

Small and compact, like a jockey, John had a weathered, sunburned face and crow’s-feet that gave a hint of a smile around the eyes. The grin, when it came, was the kind people warmed to and remembered, as they remembered the temper. Touchy about his size, his honor, he would explode at the least affront, “fight like a buzz saw,” as Harry would say. Once, at the courthouse, when a lawyer accused him of lying, John took after the man with his fists, chasing him out the door and into the street. On election day John Truman was nearly always in a fight. One boyhood friend of Harry’s, Mize Peters, who was also the son of a horse trader, remembered a man coming into his father’s place, his head covered with blood, saying he had had an argument with John Truman, who hit him with a whip.

To the town, such ferocity seemed a remarkable thing in someone so unprepossessing physically and so good-natured ordinarily. “A fiery fellow,” it would be said. “But a man of John Truman’s integrity and industry…you excuse a whole lot of things.”

Like many men of the time, John had a strong, sentimental veneration of women. “No one could make remarks about my aunts or my mother in my father’s presence without getting into serious trouble,” Harry recalled. Of the three children, Mary Jane was John’s favorite. Papa, it seems, was as partial to Mary Jane as Mamma was to Harry. That Harry spent so much time watching over Mary Jane was in part because he knew how much it would please Papa.

Unlike his own father, John was considered a “liberal” in religion. He professed great faith in God, but faith also in what could be accomplished through courage and determination. “He had no use for a coward,” according to a niece named Grace Summer. “He raised his children to have faith in themselves and their potentialities….”

Assisted by the black hired man, Letch Simpson, John did a little farming still on rented land south of town, and occasionally he dabbled in real estate. Possibly, too, by this time he had begun speculating in grain futures in Kansas City. He was looking always for the main chance, wanting desperately to get rich. Meanwhile, as Harry said, he would trade nearly anything he owned.

In 1895, when the boy was eleven, John traded their house for another several blocks to the north, receiving some $5,400 in the bargain. Though the new house had less property than the one on Crysler Avenue, it stood on a corner lot at Waldo Street and River Boulevard, a more fashionable neighborhood and within easy walking distance of the courthouse square. Crysler Avenue had never been the wrong side of the tracks, but for an ambitious man, 909 Waldo was unquestionably progress in the right direction.

A down payment was made on a new piano for Matt, who would be remembered playing for her own “amusement and amazement.” When Harry showed signs of interest, she first tried teaching him herself, then arranged for regular lessons with a young woman next door, Florence Burrus.

A piano in the parlor had become part of the good life in America, a sign of prosperity and wholesome home entertainment, and the Trumans had an upright Kimball, the most popular piano of the day, priced at about $200. (“Music for the multitudes” was the Kimball company’s slogan.) Customarily, piano lessons were for the young women of a household, but Harry took to it wholeheartedly, pleased by his progress and by the approval of both parents.

For Harry, no less than for his father, life was picking up. The new neighborhood was filled with children of his own age. He was making friends as never before. The Waldo Street years would be remembered, like those on the farm, as nothing but “wonderful times.”

He had a “gang” now. “Our house became headquarters for all the boys and girls around…. There was a wonderful barn with stalls for horses and cows, a corn crib and a hayloft in which all the kids met and cooked up plans for all sorts of adventures….” Mamma remained “very patient,” whatever went on.

As he started high school, the friendships meant even more. Paul Bryant lived on the other side of Waldo at little Woodland College for Women, where his father was president. Across the back alley was Fielding Houchens, the Baptist minister’s son. Elmer Twyman was the son of the Truman family doctor who had seen Harry through the siege of diphtheria and restored the severed tip of his toe. There was Tasker Taylor, who could draw better than anyone, and tall, shy Charlie Ross, who never missed a day of school and who, like Harry, read everything in sight.

Yet, as much as he liked them all, Harry had no best pal among the boys. His only close friends remained his girl cousins Ethel and Nellie Noland, who were as good-natured and well read as he, interested in everything, not at all vain (or pretty), and, importantly, devoted to him. Harry once calculated that he had a grand total of thirty-nine cousins, but Ethel and Nellie were the favorites and they would remain so all of his life. Ethel in particular would understand him as almost no one else ever did.

Just six months older than Harry, Ethel was a year ahead in school. Nellie, who was four years older, was very like a big sister to him. As a threesome they spent hours together after school and in the evenings, usually at the Noland house on Maple Avenue. In summer the girls were regular visitors at the farm on Blue Ridge. Harry was always considerate, always companionable, Ethel remembered. “Harry was always fun.” They read Shakespeare aloud, taking parts. After doing
Hamlet,
Ethel began calling him Horatio, brave Horatio, the staunch friend.

The Noland sisters knew, too, how much he still secretly cared for Elizabeth Wallace, who had been in his class from the time he switched to the Columbian School in fourth grade, and who, year after year, because of the alphabetical seating arrangement, occupied the desk immediately behind him.

Bessie, as everyone called her, lived on North Delaware Street, two and a half blocks from the Trumans, in a tall frame house, number 608, with a bur oak shading the front lawn. “If I succeeded in carrying her books to school and back home for her I had a big day,” he would later say, appraising how far he had advanced in overcoming his shyness.

She was his “ideal.” She was popular. She stood out in class, always dressed in the latest thing. A natural all-round athlete, she played baseball as well as a boy (as third baseman she had no trouble with the long throw to first). She could run faster than her brothers and beat them in tennis. She was better at tennis than almost anyone her age, as Harry knew from watching her on the courts at Woodland College. In winter he would stand and watch her race off on skates across the college pond. She could skate, she could dance, she could do so much that he could not, that he had never learned. She could even whistle through her teeth, as almost no girl ever could.

Her street, North Delaware, with its ample houses and sidewalks of hexagonal flagstone, was considered the finest street in Independence, the houses lending an air of dignity to the whole neighborhood west of the Square. The tall gray residence of her wealthy grandfather, George Porterfield Gates, up the street on North Delaware, was one of the show-places of town. Grandmother Gates was English. At Christmas, Bessie gave gifts to her friends wrapped in fancy paper and wore silk dresses to formal parties and dances of the kind to which Harry was never invited.

Besides, Bessie was a Presbyterian, which socially put her at “the top of the pole.” (Since the war, the Baptists had slipped to perhaps third or fourth place, below the Campbellites and the Northern Methodists and Southern Methodists, but were still ahead of the Lutherans, the Catholics, and the Reorganized Latter-Day Saints, those Mormons who had come back from Utah.) Asked long afterward whether she remembered Harry Truman hanging about the Wallace house in the years they were all growing up, Bessie’s close friend and next-door neighbor, Mary Paxton, responded emphatically, “No! No! Harry was a Baptist.”

It was, as people said, the kind of town where everybody knew everybody and everybody’s business. The population was six thousand and growing, but only slowly. Compared to Kansas City it was a sleepy backwater, churchgoing, conservative, rooted to the past, exactly as most residents preferred. Kansas City was a brassy Yankee town, “money-wise” and full of “new people.” Independence was southern in both spirit and pace—really more southern than midwestern—and very set in its ways.