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

by Matthew Algeo

  Yet, as the twentieth century began, the town had no proper hotel. “Every night,” a local historian lamented, “the tourists were taken into private houses in all sections of the town.” In November 1920, frustrated community leaders organized an effort to build a hotel, which would be named after the town’s namesake. They formed the George Washington Hotel Company and sold stock at fifty dollars a share. They raised more than six hundred thousand dollars in a month. Local banks loaned the company another six hundred thousand, and construction began at the corner of Main and Cherry the following August.

  The ten-story George Washington Hotel opened on Washington’s Birthday in 1923 with a special reception for its eight hundred or so stockholders. It was said to be the finest hotel on all the National Road. Each of its 210 guest rooms had a private bath and a telephone, and its ballrooms were as fine as those in any hotel in the country.

  It was the George Washington Hotel that Harry and Bess Truman checked into on the night of July 5. It had been a long day. They had driven nearly four hundred miles. As usual, word of the famous couple’s arrival quickly spread through town, and soon the lobby was filled. A reporter from the local paper, the Observer, called the Trumans’ room. Harry answered the phone, but he wasn’t in a talkative mood. “We had a very pleasant trip here from New York City,” he said, “but we are tired and do not care to grant an interview.”

  Instead of ordering room service for dinner, the Trumans went down to the hotel’s Pioneer Grill, but only after the manager promised they “would not be molested while eating.” Still, their meal was interrupted several times by the usual assortment of well-wishers and autograph seekers. After dinner, a photographer for the Observer asked them to pose for a picture. Harry pleaded that they were too tired, but the photographer snapped one anyway. In it Harry and Bess, looking uncharacteristically haggard, are standing in the hotel elevator, impatient for the door to close. The photograph, accompanied by a brief story, appeared in the paper the next day. But somehow—perhaps because it was a holiday weekend—the wire services missed it, which is why, outside Washington, Pennsylvania, nobody knew where Harry and Bess were that night.

  To get from the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Washington, Harry and Bess took Route 31. Today you take Interstate 70, but you still pass through many of the same towns, including some with the best names in all of the Keystone State: Hunker, Lover, Glyde, and Eighty Four (the last supposedly named to commemorate Grover Cleveland’s election in 1884).

  The George Washington Hotel is now an apartment building. Remarkably, however, the lobby is still largely intact, complete with a lovely, massive, spindly chandelier. The ballrooms are also intact and can still be rented for wedding receptions and other functions.

  12

  Columbus, Ohio,

  July 6–7, 1953

  After their long drive the day before, Harry and Bess took it easy on Monday, July 6, driving only a little over 150 miles along Highway 40 from Little Washington to Columbus, Ohio. Around noon they checked into the Deshler, a thousand-room hotel on the northwest corner of Broad and High streets in downtown Columbus, catty-corner from the Ohio statehouse. When it opened on August 23, 1916, the Deshler was hailed as “the most beautifully furnished hotel” in the country. The table service was gold. The massive Oriental rug in the lobby cost fifteen thousand dollars. (To spare it the ravages of rowdy football fans, the rug was rolled up on Friday nights before Ohio State home games.)

  By 1953, however, the Deshler had grown a bit threadbare, and, just a week before Harry and Bess checked in, Conrad Hilton bought the hotel, promising to return it to its rightful place as “one of the finest hotels in the United States.” Nobody doubted Hilton would do it. He’d been in the hotel business since he was a boy, helping his father run a boardinghouse in San Antonio, a tiny mining town in the New Mexico Territory. Returning from service in World War I, Hilton bought his first hotel in Cisco, Texas. His sixteenth was the Deshler.

  Hilton seemed to have the Midas touch, turning every property he owned into a moneymaker. His secret was simple. He called it “digging for gold.” He would squeeze revenue out of every square foot of his hotels. At the Palmer House in Chicago, he converted a newsstand (monthly rent $250) into a bar (yearly revenue $490,000). At the Plaza in New York, he rented out a small showcase in the lobby for eighteen thousand dollars.

  He would sink more than two million dollars into it, but, alas, even Conrad Hilton couldn’t save the Deshler. It was too late. In 1948, something called a “shopping center” had opened in the Columbus suburb of Whitehall. Another one was on the drawing board for Berwick, with enough parking for two hundred cars. Why bother driving downtown, where parking was a hassle anyway? Businesses began to flee for the suburbs. Suddenly, a thousand-room hotel in downtown Columbus was anachronistic, obsolete.

  In 1964 Hilton sold the hotel to Charles “Curly” Cole, a flamboyant businessman who sank his own millions into the Deshler, turning it into a 275-room luxury hotel, where scantily clad women swung from a trapeze in the lobby. Cole’s room, 1212, was decorated in a rain forest theme, complete with artificial thunder and lightning. In 1966 Cole threw in the towel and sold the Deshler to Fred Beasley, an auto dealer and horseman who knew nothing about running a hotel but shared Cole’s enthusiasm for the outlandish. Beasley, legend has it, once rode one of his show horses through the lobby and into an elevator, demanding to be taken to his room. By the summer of 1968 the Deshler was hopelessly in arrears. Beasley was delinquent in real estate taxes by nearly sixty-five thousand dollars. His overdue sewer and water bill amounted to $13,421.39. At one minute after midnight on July 31, the Deshler closed its doors. The wrecking ball came a little more than a year later. Other historic buildings in downtown Columbus, most notably Union Station and the Neil House, another hotel, would meet the same fate in the following years.

  For fifteen years, the site of the Deshler was a parking lot, a macadam metaphor for the fall of downtown Columbus, right next to the statehouse. In 1985 a new office building called One Columbus Center was erected on the site, part of a revitalization effort that has met with mixed success. On the ground floor of One Columbus Center there is, of course, a Starbucks. I stopped in and had a cup of coffee and a piece of lemon cake. It was as close as I would ever get to spending a night in the Deshler.

  When they checked into the Deshler, Harry and Bess were greeted in the lobby by dozens of squealing teenage girls. They weren’t ex-presidential groupies. The hotel, it turned out, was hosting the annual convention of the Future Homemakers of America. The FHA was founded in 1945 by Edna Amidon, a home economics teacher whose mission in life was to teach girls how to cook and sew and clean. Edna wasn’t being sexist. She was being prudent. Surveys at the time indicated that most American men wanted wives who would be “good housekeepers.” (Women, for their part, wanted husbands who were “industrious.”) So, for young women, learning how to keep house was essential to finding a mate—and, given their limited employment opportunities outside the home, essential to their economic security as well.

  More than two thousand girls from forty-five states attended the convention in Columbus. Speaking at the opening session on Friday, July 3, Edna warned the girls that “more families are on the move due to changes in industry, armed forces’ requirements and other causes,” and that they needed to learn how to “make a good home anywhere” and “put down roots quickly in any community.”

  The unexpected appearance of the former president and first lady at their convention three days later practically sent the girls into delirium. They nearly tore the hotel drug store apart in their rush to purchase film for their Brownie cameras. “Man, the place was really jumpin',” was how one of the girls described the Trumans’ arrival to a reporter. Said another of Bess, “She was wearing a black dress and didn’t look as old as we thought she would.”

  “We’re just on our way home,” Harry said as he and Bess checked in, “and frankly we’re pretty tired. We’re just g
oing to sit down and rest.” They went up to room 1663 and asked for room service menus, which the hotel’s concierge, Fred Riedal, delivered to them.

  “Hiya, captain,” said Truman when Riedal came to the door.

  “Hello, Mr. President,” replied Riedal with great formality.

  The Trumans ordered yet more fruit—this time with cottage cheese. Harry had iced tea. Bess had iced Sanka. When Harry tried to pay for the meal, Riedal refused. “No, sir,” he said, “it’s on the house.” Harry didn’t press the issue.

  A reporter and a photographer came to the room, but Harry still wasn’t feeling very talkative. “I think I’ve said about everything anyway, haven’t I?” The photographer asked Harry to autograph a dollar bill, something he had done many times as president, but the now-ex-president demurred. “No,” he said, “there’s a five-thousand-dollar fine for doing that. When I was president, it was all right. I could even ask someone else to do it. But not any more.” (Harry was mistaken. While it was—and still is—illegal to deface currency “with intent to render [it] unfit to be reissued,” merely autographing a dollar bill hardly rises to the level of a felony. Harry was probably misinformed by his old army buddy, John Snyder—who also happened to be his secretary of the treasury, and whose signature appeared, quite legally, on every banknote issued from 1946 to 1953.)

  After lunch, Harry took a nap while America’s future homemakers stalked the corridors of the Deshler in search of him. The hotel stationed two security guards outside his room to keep the girls at bay.

  Bess, meanwhile, went down to the beauty salon in the lobby to get her hair done. While the salon manager, Mary Love, washed Bess’s hair and put it into pin curls, the two women, perhaps mindful of the future homemakers in their midst, discussed the merits of careers for young women. Bess doubted whether it was worth the trouble for women to pursue careers outside the home. “You have to work so hard to get to the top,” she said.

  Soon Bess had her hair up and was sitting under a big, dome-shaped dryer, reading The House of Moreys, a new book by the British novelist Phyllis Bentley. Here, alone, under the dryer, reading, Bess looked perfectly content. A half hour later she emerged, looking, the Columbus Dispatch said, “rested and stylish.” “Small curls covered her head,” the paper reported. “A fluffy bang topped her forehead.” Mary Love described the cut as a poodle, made popular by Mary Martin in the musical South Pacific. Bess, however, noted that she had been wearing her hair like that since long before Mary Martin appeared on Broadway. She said she kept it looking nice by washing it once a week—unlike Martin, who had to wash hers every night.

  The Trumans had dinner in their room that night and went to bed early. They checked out of the Deshler around nine the next morning, amid more pandemonium in the lobby. Harry said he’d had a “wonderful” time in Columbus—though he’d never even left the hotel. “Everyone here has treated us marvelously.” Then he turned to Bess and said, “Missy, let’s go.”

  They climbed into the New Yorker, which was parked under a canopy in front of the hotel. Harry turned the ignition and put it in gear. The car bucked twice, “like a Missouri mule,” according to one report. Then it stalled. A roar went up from the crowd that had gathered to send them off. A little embarrassed, Harry restarted the car and pulled away. He honked the horn twice as a final good-bye and headed west on Broad Street, leaving in his wake hundreds of future homemakers squealing in delight.

  Membership in the Future Homemakers of America peaked at more than five hundred thousand in 1965, when the group merged with the New Homemakers of America, whose members attended black schools in the South. As the times changed, so did the FHA. In 1973 it began to admit boys, and its mission gradually expanded to encompass “personal growth and leadership development.” In Teen Times, the organization’s quarterly magazine, articles like “Glamour for Gray Days” and “Milestones to Marriage” gave way to pieces about teen pregnancy and alcoholism.

  In 1999, after much debate, the organization changed its name to Family, Career and Community Leaders of America—the FCCLA. The change was prompted by concerns that the old name “conjured up images of stay-at-home housewives who cook pot roast and darn socks.” Today the FCCLA focuses on “character development, creative and critical thinking, interpersonal communications, practical knowledge, and career preparation.” In 2007 the group had nearly 230,000 members, 23 percent of whom are male.

  Just as the FHA has changed, so, too, have Americans’ attitudes toward prospective spouses. Recent surveys have found that both men and women now look for partners who are “intelligent” and “attractive.”

  About seventy miles west of Columbus, near Dayton, the Trumans passed Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. They didn’t stop at the time, but, were they to make the trip today, they most certainly would, for the base now houses Harry’s presidential airplanes.

  Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to fly in office when he took a Boeing 314 Clipper Ship to the Casablanca Conference in 1943. Named the Dixie Clipper, the plane was operated by Pan American Airways. After Casablanca, military leaders thought better of having their commander in chief fly commercial again, so the Army Air Forces specially modified a C-54 transport plane for Roosevelt and delivered it to him in 1944. Nicknamed the Sacred Cow by either the White House press corps or AAF personnel, the plane featured a small elevator behind the passenger cabin to make it easier for the president to get on and off the plane in his wheelchair.

  Roosevelt used the plane just once, to attend the Yalta Conference in February 1945. When Truman became president, he inherited the Sacred Cow and, on June 19, 1945, a little more than two months after taking office, he flew to Olympia, Washington, on the plane. It was the first domestic flight in the history of the presidency.

  Whenever he flew, Harry liked to hang out in the cockpit and chat with the crew. He also liked to have a little fun. The plane’s pilot, Lt. Col. Henry Myers, said the president asked to be notified whenever the Sacred Cow flew over Ohio, the home state of Truman’s nemesis in the Senate, Robert Taft. In The Flying White House, J. F. terHorst and Ralph Albertazzie explained why:

  Duly alerted by Myers that the Sacred Cow was flying over Ohio, Truman would walk aft to his lavatory. Moments later, after the president had returned to his seat, Myers would get a presidential command over the intercom to activate the waste disposal system…. The discharged liquids, of course, evaporated quickly in the cold, dry air outside. But it was Truman’s way of having a private joke at Taft’s expense.

  By late 1946, the Sacred Cow was already showing its age, so the air force decided to replace it with a Douglas DC-6, the most advanced longrange airliner then in production. The new plane was even more luxurious than the Sacred Cow. Mounted on the wall of the stateroom were instruments—a compass, an altimeter, and a speedometer—that the president could monitor in flight. Powered by four 2,400-horsepower prop engines, it had a cruising speed of 320 miles per hour and a range of 4,400 miles. (The Sacred Cow, by comparison, had a cruising speed of 245 miles per hour and a range of 3,900 miles.) The new plane was also equipped with the most modern communications equipment, including a teletype system that could send and receive coded messages. It seemed to have everything—except a name.

  The White House and the air force had always hated the name Sacred Cow, which they regarded as undignified. Truman’s press secretary, Charles Ross, never failed to point out that “Sacred Cow was a nickname for which the White House had no responsibility.” According to Ross, Truman simply called the plane “the C-54.” The air force wanted to call the new presidential plane the Flying White House, or simply refer to it by its air force number (46–505). But Henry Myers, the pilot, suggested the Independence, a name that evoked the nation’s history and ideals. Of course, it also happened to be the name of the president’s hometown. The air force didn’t care for the name, but Harry liked it, and that was all that really mattered.

  The most striking thing about the Independence w
as its two-tone blue paint scheme. While the Sacred Cow looked like every other C-54 (on the outside anyway), its replacement was painted to look like an eagle. The nose was the beak, and the cockpit windows were the eyes. Stylized feathers swept down the fuselage. Douglas Aircraft had come up with the design for American Airlines, whose logo was an eagle. American rejected it, but air force officials who happened to see the design thought it would be perfect for the new presidential plane. The Independence looked unlike any other plane in the world. It was flashy, and Harry loved it.

  The Independence was officially commissioned on the Fourth of July in 1947. Two months later, Harry, Bess, and Margaret flew it to a conference in Rio de Janeiro. On the way home, Harry played a practical joke on Bess, whose fear of flying was well known. The plane had reversible propellers, a new technology that made it possible to land on short runways. Before landing in Belem, Brazil, pilot Henry Myers told Harry that he would have to use the reversible props, and that they would make a lot of noise. “I reminded him especially to warn Mrs. Truman in advance,” Myers remembered. “I knew it would worry her otherwise.”

  But Harry said nothing to Bess.

  The plane landed. Bess heard the strange noise.

  “Oh, my, what’s happening?” she said.

  Harry looked out the window and shouted, “The plane’s falling apart!

  The independence was Harry’s second presidential airplane. Its unusual paint scheme was originally designed for American Airlines. Today the plane is on display at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.

  But Bess could always tell when Harry was pulling her leg.

  “If that’s all that happens when this thing falls apart,” she said nonchalantly, “then it’s not as bad as I expected.”