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

by Matthew Algeo

  Truman later said he was “impressed with the way the highway over the mountains had been improved from the old blacktop hairpin curves” that he had driven as a senator. If that’s the case, I can’t imagine what traversing the Alleghenies on Highway 40 was like back when Harry was in the Senate, because even today it can be downright scary. The road is twisty, with transmission-killing, ear-popping climbs and hair-raising, brake-burning descents. The car I was driving (my father’s) had just turned a hundred thousand miles back in Ohio, and I felt sorry for having to make it work so hard. It was a far cry from my drive across Illinois, where I could have nodded off at the wheel safely.

  I am told there are spectacular views of verdant, tree-covered mountains unfolding under azure skies, but I barely caught a glimpse of any of that, focused as I was on not hurtling off the side of a mountain. It surprised me how precarious the drive was, but U.S. highways are not built to the same standards as interstates, where the maximum grades are generally 6 percent and the minimum design speeds are seventy-five miles per hour in rural areas and fifty-five in mountainous and urban areas.

  Near Grantsville, Maryland, I reached the highest point on the old National Road, and the highest point on all of Highway 40 east of the Mississippi: Negro Mountain, elevation 2,827 feet. Local legend has it that the mountain was named after Nemesis, an African American who died fighting for the British in the French and Indian War and was buried on the mountain. The June 10, 1756, Maryland Gazette mentions a “free Negro who was … killed” in a “smart skirmish” with local Indians. (On the same page are “ran away” ads, listing the names and detailed physical descriptions of escaped slaves.) But little else is known about Nemesis.

  Rosita Youngblood, a state lawmaker from Philadelphia, wants to change the name of the mountain, which extends into Pennsylvania. Youngblood told the Philadelphia Daily News her granddaughter discovered the name while working on a seventh-grade class project. “My granddaughter said, ‘Grandmom, is this true?’ I said, ‘There’s no such thing as Negro Mountain.’ Then I learned it was true.” Youngblood has introduced a resolution in the Pennsylvania House calling for the formation of a commission to study the issue. “If they decide to call it Nemesis Mountain,” she said, “I’d be happy with that.”

  Youngblood’s crusade baffles lawmakers from rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where part of the mountain is located. “I never knew ‘negro’ was a bad word until she mentioned it,” said State Representative Bob Bastian.

  7

  Frostburg, Maryland,

  June 21, 1953

  Around twelve-thirty the Trumans pulled into Frostburg, a small coalmining town on the eastern slope of Big Savage Mountain in far western Maryland. Looking for a place to eat, Harry had just turned onto a side street when he saw a man in a suit waving him down. Bemused, he stopped the car. The man was Martin Rothstein, the town doctor. Doc—as everybody in Frostburg called him—approached the Chrysler. He recognized the former president immediately.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Truman,” Doc said a little sheepishly. “But you’re going the wrong way.”

  “What do you mean?” Truman said.

  “This is a one-way street,” Doc explained, “and you’re going the wrong way.”

  Bess leaned across the front seat to the driver’s side window.

  “He never listens to me,” she said to Rothstein. “I thought he was making a wrong turn.”

  Truman thanked Doc and asked him if there was any place in town open for lunch.

  “Yeah,” Doc answered, “there’s one right around the corner. The Princess.” It was Doc’s favorite restaurant. He ate there all the time.

  Truman was familiar with the Princess. He’d stopped there a couple times when he was a senator making the trip between Independence and Washington. It was owned by George Pappas, a Greek immigrant who’d come to the United States in 1907 with fourteen dollars in his pocket. Pappas opened the Princess in 1939. Originally it was a confectionery, but over the years he began serving soups and sandwiches, and by 1950 he had turned it into a full-service restaurant.

  Harry and Bess sat in a booth near the front and ordered the Sunday supper special: roast chicken with stuffing, lima beans, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, rice pudding, and coffee—for seventy cents.

  George Pappas Jr., the owner’s son, was working the grill that day, and when the Trumans’ waitress, Grace Felker, brought their order back to the kitchen, she told Pappas, “That looks like Harry Truman out there.”

  “I looked out,” Pappas remembered, “and I said, ‘It sure does.’ And it was. It was old Harry.”

  While the younger Pappas prepared the Trumans’ meals, telephones all over Frostburg began ringing. At the time, the town had no direct-dial service, so all calls had to be routed through an operator. It didn’t take long for the word to get out. Howard Ward, the Frostburg correspondent for the Cumberland (Maryland) Evening Times, was at home changing out of his Sunday best when he got a call from a friend telling him that the former president and first lady were in town.

  “Yeah, right,” said Ward, thinking it was a prank. But after he hung up, his curiosity got the best of him. He put his suit back on and headed for the Princess.

  “Townspeople started to drop in for a Coke,” Ward reported in the next day’s paper, “and one bystander estimated the restaurant did a bigger soft drink business in the time the Trumans were there than in any other similar period.”

  The Trumans did not enjoy a quiet repast. Children badgered Harry for his autograph. The adults weren’t much better behaved, constantly interrupting the couple’s lunch to shake hands.

  “Through it all,” Ward reported, “they remained gracious and were not annoyed.”

  “We lunched at Frostburg,” Truman later recounted, “at the Princess Restaurant, which is run by an old Greek who is a damn good Democrat. I had been there before, but in those days they didn’t make such a fuss over me. I was just a senator then.”

  George Pappas died in 1963. George Pappas Jr. took over the restaurant and ran it until 1981, when his own son, George W. Pappas, took over. George Jr., a spry eighty-six, still puts in occasional shifts in the kitchen.

  “My boy does a good job” running the restaurant, George Jr. told me when I visited the Princess. “My dad would be proud of him.”

  George Jr. served eighteen months as a mess sergeant in the South Pacific during World War II. He said it was an honor for him to have served his former commander in chief lunch.

  “He was a good old fellow,” he said of Truman. “Good president too.” Like many of his generation, George Jr. gave Truman credit for ending the war.

  “That was really a tough decision, for that man to drop that bomb on all them people.”

  The Princess Restaurant still looks much as it did when Harry and Bess ate there in 1953. Along one wall is a soda fountain, with a long counter and fixed, round stools. Along the opposite wall are a dozen booths, each with a small, coin-operated jukebox, one song for ten cents, three for a quarter.

  George W. Pappas in the Truman booth at the Princess Diner, Frostburg, Maryland, 2008.

  A plaque above the booth in which the Trumans sat commemorates their visit:

  MR. & MRS. HARRY S. TRUMAN

  ATE DINNER IN THIS BOOTH

  FATHER’S DAY

  SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 1953

  The booth is not original. It was replaced during a remodeling about fifteen years ago. George W. Pappas kept the old one in his garage for several years, until his wife suggested that the space might be better utilized by a motor vehicle. George called the local historical society to see if it was interested in this unique piece of local history, but, alas, it didn’t have any room for the booth either. So, reluctantly, George put it out with the trash one day.

  George sat down to talk with me in the remodeled Truman booth. A lifetime of diner food clearly had not affected him adversely. He was fifty-seven but looked at least a dozen years younger. He spoke with the a
ccent common to this part of Maryland. “Power” becomes “pyre.” “The Princess” is “the prince’s.”

  George is the middle of three children. Neither his older sister nor his younger brother ever evinced much interest in the restaurant business, but George was fascinated by it from the start. When he was in the first grade he would come into the Princess every morning at five, just to “hang out” until it was time to go to school at eight. He went to work at the restaurant full time in 1969. His father paid him the minimum wage: $1.30 an hour.

  I asked George if he was a “damn good Democrat” like Truman said his grandfather was. He laughed in a way that indicated he was not.

  “Granddad and I talked about a lot of things, but we never talked about politics,” he told me. George said he thought taxes were too high, and that the government made it too hard to run a small business like the Princess. He complained, for example, that his soda fountain license cost more than his restaurant license (twenty-five dollars vs. ten dollars), even though his might be the last soda fountain in Allegany County.

  Besides, George explained, most of his friends are Republicans, and if he wanted to vote for them in a primary election, he had to be a Republican too, since Maryland’s primaries are closed. (In 2008 the McCain-Palin ticket carried the county with 62 percent of the vote.)

  Of all the small mom-and-pop businesses that the Trumans are known to have patronized on their trip, the Princess Restaurant on Main Street in Frostburg is the only one I found that has survived, more or less intact, in the same family. “Granddad was a hard worker and a thinker,” said George. “In 1949 he decided to stop selling beer to attract the ‘church crowd.’ Beer was a nuisance anyway. Business went up immediately.” George says his father was no less diligent. “They were both hard workers and they’d give you a good meal for a good price.”

  When the Trumans came to Frostburg in 1953, Main Street positively bustled with businesses, including Durst Furniture, Prichard’s Hardware, Maurice’s Department Store, Hohing’s Men’s and Boys’ Store, a G. C. Murphy’s five and dime, a Rexall, an Acme, and an A&P Besides the Princess there were a dozen other places to get a meal, ranging from drugstore soda fountains to white tablecloth restaurants: Al’s, Bob’s, Boney’s, the Duchess, Finzel’s, Peck’s. On Friday nights, coal miners from all over the county would bring their families to Main Street for dinner and a movie, to do a little shopping, or just to hang out. It could get a little raucous sometimes. It was what they did for entertainment.

  Today, all those businesses are gone. Except for the Princess.

  George took me outside. Standing in front of the restaurant, he pointed to a vacant building across the street.

  “That used to be the five and dime,” he said.

  “And that”—he pointed to another vacant building down the street—“used to be the furniture store.” There were at least five vacant storefronts on a three-block stretch of Main Street.

  What happened? Lots of things. Highway 40 was rerouted around the town, siphoning traffic from Main Street. Then Interstate 68 was built, siphoning even more. A mall opened down the road in LaVale, followed by a Wal-Mart Supercenter and other big-box stores.

  But there were less obvious factors. Technological advances made it easier to mine coal from the surface, which is cheaper than underground mining—and requires far fewer workers. Before Frostburg knew it, Friday nights on Main Street were a lot less boisterous.

  Furthermore, many of the businesses on Main Street were family-owned, and, as George W. Pappas well knew, it can be hard to keep a family-owned business in the family. He gestured toward the vacant building where Prichard’s, the hardware store, used to be. “The grandkids, they went up to Penn State. They didn’t want to come back. Why bother? It all came down to dollars and cents. When they found out Wal-Mart was coming, that was the icing on the cake. Why bang your head against the wall trying to compete with Wal-Mart? They didn’t want to go through that.” Prichard’s closed in the late 1990s.

  George has four children. He would like to see one of them take over the Princess someday, but he’s not holding his breath. His son graduated with a degree in culinary arts from Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. “But,” said George, “he’s talking about moving to South Carolina with his girlfriend.”

  Nonetheless, George has faith in the future of the Princess. In fact, he’s planning on enlarging it. When I visited, he’d just received the permits he needed to nearly double the size of the restaurant’s kitchen.

  “I’m loyal to Main Street,” he said. “You have to be passionate about it.”

  While in Frostburg, I had dinner at the Princess—in the Truman booth, of course. I ordered the same meal Harry and Bess had. It was delicious, although the roast chicken dinner that Harry and Bess enjoyed for seventy cents now costs $9.50—still, not a bad deal.

  While they were trying to enjoy their lunch at the Princess, a local Democratic Party activist named Bill Byrnes approached the Trumans and introduced himself. (Byrnes would later win election to the Maryland House of Delegates.) He asked the ex-president if he would be willing to visit his elderly mother, Elizabeth Byrnes, who had recently broken her hip in a fall and was bedridden.

  “My mother has been a Democrat for ninety-two years and she’s pretty sick,” Byrnes told Truman. “Will you please come over to the house and cheer her up?”

  “Who could say no to that kind of an invitation?” Truman recalled.

  So, after lunch—George Pappas “refused to take our money for the meal,” Truman remembered—the Trumans followed Byrnes out to his mother’s house in Eckhart Mines, about two miles from Frostburg.

  “She was bedfast and quite feeble,” Truman said. “My arrival was a surprise to her. She looked me over and then said, ‘Mr. Truman, you’re better looking than I thought you were.'”

  “We had a nice chat,” Truman continued. “That little detour to Eckhart, Maryland, may not sound like much, but it was the high point of our whole motor trip.”

  As Truman left, Mrs. Byrnes whispered to him, “May God bless you, Mr. President.”

  Harry and Bess had planned on spending just a few minutes at Mrs. Byrnes’s house, but they ended up staying half an hour, chatting with neighbors on the porch. It was two o’clock before they finally got back on the road.

  A few miles east of Frostburg, the Trumans passed through the Cumberland Narrows, a thousand-foot-deep gorge carved into the Allegheny Mountains by Wills Creek. It was through this narrow gap that the National Road was threaded, linking the East and the Midwest. This irregular bit of topography was God’s gift to Manifest Destiny.

  The Gulf station at the corner of West Patrick and North Jefferson in Frederick, Maryland, looked more like a rocket ship than a filling station. Behind the two pumps was a tall, slim deco building with soaring arched windows and a steeple on top. Behind that was a garage with two bays. Opened around 1940, it was said to be the most modern and innovative service station in Frederick County. The restrooms were sparkling. It even had an electric water cooler, the first in town.

  The Gulf station was also the neighborhood candy store, where children bought gumballs, popsicles, jawbreakers, and Hershey bars after school. And it was a political clubhouse of sorts.

  The station manager, Carroll Kehne, was a devout Democrat. His grease monkey, Albert Kefauver, was a rabid Republican. The two men discussed politics constantly, always amicably, often with customers and local raconteurs. “People who know me politically call me Mr. Democrat,” Kehne recalled in his later years. He started a Democratic Club in Frederick because he “saw men running for office bumming money from businessmen so they could run.” The club helped raise money for local Democratic candidates. Kehne firmly believed that politicians should be “settled” and attend strictly to politics. “You can’t do a good job running the government and making important decisions if you’re always worrying about your kids or girlfriends or whatever.”

  Aroun
d three-thirty on the afternoon of Sunday, June 21, 1953, a newspaper reporter came into the station and asked Albert Kefauver to help him fix a flat. “Then another newsman came in and I thought he was just going to talk to his buddy,” Kefauver remembered. But then another showed up. And another.

  One of the reporters asked to use the phone. Carroll Kehne asked him if it was a local call. “No,” the reporter said, “I want to call Margaret Truman to see when her father is supposed to get here.”

  “I didn’t believe him at first,” Kehne said. “But the next thing I knew, he”—Truman—“was driving up to the pumps in a beautiful new black Chrysler…. I didn’t know he was coming.”

  By now a dozen reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen were crowded around the pumps. Kehne filled Truman’s car with gas and checked the oil while his fifteen-year-old son, Carroll Jr., washed the windows. “When President Truman stepped out of the car,” the younger Kehne remembered, “he offered to shake my hand. I stated it was wet, but that didn’t faze him. He said, ‘That’s no problem!'”

  “I made up a ticket for his gasoline and made him sign it,” the elder Kehne recalled. “But I wouldn’t let him pay it. I just wanted to be able to say that I treated President Harry S. Truman to a tank of gasoline.”

  Harry went inside the station. “The Boss wants a glass of water,” he announced, “and I’d love a Coke.” Leaning on the counter, he spent about twenty minutes chatting with Kehne and Kefauver while he enjoyed his soft drink. “We was talking about everything in general,” Kehne recalled. “He was the kind of guy who could talk to you about anything, fixing cars or changing oil, or politics.” This event, Kehne’s son told me, was the highlight of his father’s life. “My dad was so very excited, as he truly loved Harry as a president. Being a Democrat made it even more pleasant for him.”