Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip Read Online Free Page A

tony Westchester County, New York (mainly so his wife could run for the Senate).
    But when Harry Truman left the White House in 1953, he returned to the same rambling, slightly ramshackle, two-and-a-half-story Victorian that he and Bess had lived in since their marriage thirty-four years earlier. It had been painted white when he became president in 1945, and hadn’t been painted again since. There was no air-conditioning. The only indication that it was the home of a luminary was the iron fence that surrounded the property. It had been erected in 1949 at the behest of Herbert Hoover, who had warned Truman that souvenir hunters would “tear the place down” otherwise. (Hoover said the doorknobs had been stolen off his childhood home in Iowa. Presumably he suffered no such thievery at the Waldorf.)
    Known locally as the Gates-Wallace home, the house on Delaware Street was built, in fits and spurts, by George Porterfield Gates, Bess’s maternal grandfather, between 1867 and 1895. Bess, her three brothers, and her mother, Madge Gates Wallace, moved into the house in 1904 after Bess’s father committed suicide. After he married Bess, Harry moved into the already-crowded house as well. It was in their second-floor bedroom that their only child, Margaret, was born during a snowstorm on February 17, 1924. After Madge Gates Wallace died at age ninety in 1952, Harry and Bess bought out her brothers’ shares of the property, and, for the first time in their lives, the Trumans owned their own home. They would never own another.
    Today the Truman home is managed by the National Park Service as part of the Harry S Truman National Historic Site in Independence. (Truman had no middle name—the “S” was meant to honor both his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young—so the period after his middle initial is optional. The Park Service does not use one, unlike the National Archives and Records Administration, which runs the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Truman himself claimed to be neutral on the matter, though he usually used a period when signing his name.)
    More than thirty thousand people visit the Truman home every year, but on my tour there were just two other people, a thirteen-year-old girl and her grandfather. The girl claimed her favorite subject was history, but thought the Germans had bombed Pearl Harbor and was unable to name Truman’s predecessor in the White House. Her grandfather seemed unusually interested in the home’s bathroom fixtures. Maybe he was a plumber. Our guide was a friendly ranger named Norton, who looked exactly like Santa Claus with a ponytail and a Smokey Bear hat. The house looks much as it did when Harry and Bess returned from Washington in 1953. The kitchen is painted a bright apple green with cherry red accents. Against the wall is a small red Formica table where Harry and Bess took most of their meals, a Proctor-Silex toaster standing sentinel on top. The furnishings throughout the house are simple, almost Spartan. A small reading room is lined with bookshelves sagging under the weight of history tomes and murder mysteries. There are two well-worn upholstered chairs—his and hers. On the end table next to hers lies a Dorothy L. Sayers novel. In the front parlor, a massive black-and-white television set is parked incongruously against one wall, near a piano. Norton, our guide, explained that Bess liked to watch baseball games. (Bess was a good athlete in her own right. Harry liked to brag that she was “the best shortstop they ever had in Independence.”)
    The Trumans were frugal, a blessing to the home’s preservationists. Norton pointed to a water-stained patch of wallpaper in the front parlor. It was being replaced by extra paper that Harry had saved and stored in the attic. In fact, the paper from the attic was so well preserved that it would have to be artificially aged before replacing the stained bit. But the Trumans’ frugality had a downside, too. As Norton