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

explained, when the Park Service took over the property in 1983, it was in such poor condition that the repairs cost several hundred thousand dollars. It was said that only the paint was holding the house together.
    When they left the White House, there was speculation that the Trumans might move to Key West, where they had often vacationed when Harry was president, or New York, where Margaret lived. But they returned to Independence, partly out of principle. As Harry liked to say, “I tried never to forget who I was and where I’d come from and where I’d go back to.”
    There were practical advantages, too, to moving back to Independence. It was near the Truman farm in Grandview, Missouri, where Harry hoped to build his presidential library. And nobody made a big fuss over them. Visitors from out of town would occasionally come to the house, asking for an autograph or a handshake, a request Harry always obliged. But, by and large, the locals would leave the Trumans alone. Bess could drive to the library or push her cart around the supermarket without causing a stir. Harry could take his morning walks unmolested, often accompanied by Mike Westwood, an Independence cop assigned to the former president part-time.
    But the Trumans also came back to Independence because they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. They already owned the house on Delaware Street. Given their limited income, it just didn’t make sense to move anywhere else.
    Back in Independence, Harry soon settled into a routine. He awoke every morning at five-thirty, dressed, read the morning papers (on the back porch when the weather was nice), picked a cane from his collection of a hundred or so, and took his walk. His route varied. Sometimes he would walk down to the town square, passing the Jackson County Courthouse, which had been built in 1934, back when he was the county’s presiding judge. Other times he would meander through the residential neighborhoods around his home. An old newsreel shows Truman enjoying one of his walks when a small boy in a cowboy costume suddenly jumps out of the bushes and “shoots” the former president with a toy gun. Truman laughs and pats the irrepressible tyke on the head. Today, a Secret Service agent watching the film would likely suffer a heart attack, and the unlucky youngster who attempted such an ambush would perish in a hail of gunfire.

     
    Harry headed out for one of his morning walks, November 18, 1954. “I was always a walker,” he said. “I never did believe in being afraid to go on foot to the corner store, the way a lot of people are.”
     
    Back at the house, he had breakfast at the kitchen table with Bess (who did not share his penchant for early rising). Around nine he went into his office, a three-room suite on the eleventh floor of the Federal Reserve Building in Kansas City. Sometimes Mike Westwood drove him, but often he drove himself. “Harry S. Truman” was painted in black letters on the opaque glass of the door to the suite, just like a detective agency in a pulp novel. (Truman claimed the only reason he’d even put his name on the door was because people kept mistaking his office for a restroom.) He had two assistants: his private secretary, Rose Conway, who had served him in the same capacity when he was president, and Frances Myers, a receptionist who had also worked in the Truman White House. He paid their salaries out of his own pocket. Much of his day was spent answering mail. He received more than seventy thousand pieces in the first two weeks after he left the White House, and as many as a thousand a day thereafter: notes from well-wishers, invitations to everything from church suppers to national conventions, autograph requests. Budding politicians wrote him asking for advice (or endorsements). The founder of a new cult tried to recruit him. When Truman casually mentioned in an interview that he was looking for a silver dollar minted in 1924, the year of Margaret’s birth,