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

by Matthew Algeo

  The Independence made its most famous presidential flight in October 1950, when it flew Truman to Wake Island for his historic meeting with Douglas MacArthur. In all, Truman flew more than 135,000 miles on sixty-one trips during his presidency.

  When Eisenhower took office in 1953, he didn’t want Harry’s hand-me-down airplane. He ordered a new one, a Lockheed Constellation, which he dubbed Columbine II. (The plane he had used as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe had been named Columbine, after the official flower of Mamie Eisenhower’s home state of Colorado.) Later that year, Eisenhower’s plane, which went by the call sign “Air Force 8610,” found itself in the same airspace as Eastern Airlines flight number 8610. The resulting confusion prompted the air force to designate any plane carrying the president “Air Force One.” The named presidential airplane went the way of the named highway.

  After they were retired from presidential service, both the Sacred Cow and the Independence continued to be used by high-ranking military and government officials. The Independence, in fact, made a brief cameo as Air Force One. On April 27, 1961, with his regular plane undergoing maintenance, President Kennedy flew the Independence from Washington to New York. On board, Kennedy marveled at the quaint instruments on the wall of the stateroom.

  The Sacred Cow was permanently retired in 1961, the Independence four years later. Both planes are now on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson, along with several other presidential airplanes, including the Boeing 707 that flew Kennedy to Dallas on November 22, 1963 (and returned his body to Washington that same day).

  The presidential airplanes are stored in a hangar separate from the main museum, so visitors have to take a shuttle bus to see them. My lovely wife and I happened to be visiting in early February, which, based on our experience, is not the peak tourist season in southwestern Ohio. Apart from the driver and a chaperone (it being a military base, after all), we were the only two people on the bus, which was fine with us, because we had the run of the place.

  The Sacred Cow and the Independence have been restored to their original appearance inside and out, and you can actually walk through them, though everything inside is walled off with Plexiglas, leaving a narrow passageway that claustrophobics are wise to avoid. (We were told that larger visitors have been known to get stuck.) Seated in the stateroom of the Sacred Cow is a mannequin of FDR in a tuxedo, looking a bit like he’s waiting for somebody to bring him a drink. A replica of his wheelchair is parked near the elevator specially installed for him.

  Inside the Independence there’s a mannequin of Harry sitting at a small table in the main compartment, but it’s not a very good likeness. He’s too skinny and his clothes don’t seem to fit. The jacket is too small. If the real Harry saw it, he’d be mortified. But his eyes would brighten at the sight of the newspaper lying on the table in front of the mannequin. It’s a copy of Stars and Stripes with the banner headline “MacArthur Relieved of Command.” Farther down the narrow Plexiglas corridor is a small room marked “Presidential Dressing Area/Lavatory.” It must have disappointed Harry that the Independence, unlike the Sacred Cow, could not discharge its waste in flight.

  There’s another sight at Wright-Patterson that is connected to Truman, though it is very much off-limits to the public. The remains of crashed UFOs and their occupants are stored inside the secret “Blue Room” in Hangar 18. Or so the story goes. It makes sense, in a way, since Wright-Patterson is where Project Blue Book was based. (Though, it must be noted, Blue Book concluded that there was “no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ were extraterrestrial vehicles.”) Supposedly the debris from Roswell was taken to the Blue Room where, according to some of the wilder accounts, it was personally inspected by Truman. That’s highly doubtful. Even the president would have had difficulty gaining entrance to the Blue Room. “I once asked General Curtis LeMay if I could get into that room,” Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater told the New Yorker in 1988, “and he just gave me holy hell. He said, ‘Not only can’t you get into it but don’t you ever mention it to me again.'”

  On the shuttle bus to the presidential planes hangar, I asked our chaperone, half-jokingly, if it would be possible to see Hangar 18, too. All he would say is, “They don’t want us to talk about that.”

  13

  Richmond, Indiana,

  July 7, 1953

  On the morning of Tuesday, July 7, Ora Wilson, the sheriff of Wayne County, Indiana, got a call from a friend at the Ohio State Highway Patrol. His friend advised Wilson that Harry and Bess Truman were headed his way, and helpfully supplied a description of their vehicle and an ETA. Like Glenn Kerwin, the police chief in Decatur, Illinois, Ora Wilson was anxious to “look after” the Trumans while they were in his jurisdiction. He also wanted to get his picture in the paper. So he recruited one of his deputies—his son Lowell—to help spring a trap for the Trumans. Father and son sat in a cruiser parked on the east side of Richmond, the county seat, and waited to intercept the couple as soon as they came into town. In the backseat was a photographer for the Richmond Palladium-Item.

  Richmond, Indiana, population forty thousand, sits on the banks of the Whitewater River, just across the Ohio border. Founded by Quakers in 1806, it was a center of the abolitionist movement. The Wright Brothers grew up here, and Wilbur attended Richmond High School before the family moved to Dayton. It’s also where the Reverend Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple, went to high school. But Richmond’s two enduring claims to fame are curiously paradoxical: in the 1920s, the city played a key role in the rise of both the Ku Klux Klan and African American music.

  During the Roaring Twenties, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence known as the second wave, exploiting white anxiety over the influx of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the mass migration of African Americans from the South to the North. In 1924 there were four million active Klan members, including some five hundred thousand in Indiana—the largest single state contingent. In Richmond roughly half the city’s adult white males belonged to the Klan, including the mayor, the county sheriff, and the county prosecutor. On the evening of Friday, October 5, 1923, the Klan staged a spectacular parade through Richmond. It featured more than six thousand hooded and robed Klansmen, as well as marching bands, floats, and, of course, many “fiery crosses.” In “magnitude and impressiveness,” the Richmond Palladium-Item reported the next day, the parade “has had few equals in this city.”

  The Klan’s Svengali in Indiana was David C. Stephenson, a former printer’s apprentice and Socialist Party activist who was said to pocket two dollars of each Klansman’s ten-dollar membership fee (“klecktoken,” in Klan vernacular). It was Stephenson who undoubtedly organized the Richmond parade. By 1924 his power and influence in Indiana were unmatched. That fall he threw his support (and the Klan’s money) behind the Republican gubernatorial candidate, a fellow Klansman named Edward Jackson.

  Jackson won the election in a landslide. At Jackson’s inaugural ball, Stephenson met Madge Oberholtzer, a twenty-eight-year-old former schoolteacher who ran a state anti-illiteracy program. A little more than two months later, on March 25, 1925, Stephenson invited Oberholtzer to his house on the pretext of discussing state business. He drugged her, forced her into a car, and drove her to Union Station in Indianapolis, where they boarded a train bound for Chicago. In a Pullman compartment, Stephenson attacked Oberholtzer, raping her repeatedly and biting her breasts and genitals so viciously that her flesh was torn. They got off the train in Hammond, Indiana, where Oberholtzer tried to poison herself with mercuric chloride. Stephenson took her back to her parents’ home in Indianapolis, dropping her off with the warning, “I am the law and the power.” Oberholtzer died a month later, either from the poison or from an infection resulting from her wounds. In any event, Stephenson, in a spectacular and lurid trial, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He fully expected his fellow Klansman, Governor Jackson, to pardon h
im. When he didn’t, Stephenson, enraged, exposed the Klan’s machinations in Indiana politics to the Indianapolis Times, helping the paper win a Pulitzer and bringing the Klan’s second wave to an inglorious end.

  Until Stephenson’s downfall, the Klan’s political influence was extraordinary, not only in Indiana but throughout the Midwest and, of course, the South. Back in 1922, when he was running for Jackson County judge, Harry Truman himself had paid the ten-dollar initiation fee to join the Klan, membership seeming to be a prerequisite for political success at the time. Informed he could not hire Catholics if elected, Truman, who had commanded many Catholics in World War I, withdrew his application and got his ten dollars back. Later, he claimed he and his old army chaplain, a Dominican priest named Curtis Tiernan, had busted into “many a meeting of the KKK” in Missouri and confronted the speakers. “We were ejected from some of the meetings, but we broke many up.”

  At the same time Klansmen were parading through Richmond in the 1920s, down in a hollow west of town, in a shack by the Whitewater River, African American jazz and blues musicians were making some of the most epochal recordings in the history of American music.

  Back in 1872, an Alsatian piano maker named George M. Trayser, with the help of two local businessmen, Richard Jackson and James Starr, opened a factory in Richmond. The Starr Piano Company, as it came to be known, quickly became one of the country’s leading piano manufacturers, at a time when the piano was a status symbol akin to the iPhone today. In 1893, the company was acquired by Henry Gennett, a Nashville businessman who moved to Richmond to oversee his new business.

  By 1915 Starr was selling fifteen thousand pianos a year. The business seemed impregnable.

  Then the phonograph came along.

  Thomas Edison had invented the cylinder phonograph in 1877, but it wasn’t until a German immigrant named Emile Berliner invented a machine he called the gramophone that the recording industry began to develop. Berliner’s invention played music recorded on flat discs instead of cylinders. The discs were easier to duplicate and store, and, since both sides could be used, they held more recording space than cylinders. Berliner’s invention touched off a war between the two formats not unlike the Beta/VHS and Blu-ray/HD DVD wars of more recent generations. When the dust finally settled in the late 1910s, Berliner’s format had prevailed.

  Back in Richmond, Henry Gennett, the owner of the Starr Piano Company, followed the phonograph wars with intense interest. He knew the phonograph would replace the piano in respectable parlors, and he wanted a piece of the action. By 1916 the company was already manufacturing its own brand of phonograph players. It also established a record division to produce seventy-eight-rpm discs for its (and, of course, other companies') phonograph players. The recording label was named Gennett.

  Gennett records were recorded in a small wooden studio that sat next to the railroad tracks that ran through the Starr complex in Richmond. Huge draperies were hung on the walls to afford at least some soundproofing, though many recording sessions were still interrupted when trains passed. Some audiophiles swear they can hear the sound of passing trains in the background of old Gennett recordings.

  Since the bigger record labels like Victor and Columbia signed the most famous names in the music business to exclusive contracts, Gennett recorded lesser-known artists who happened to be passing through town, usually on their way to or from gigs in Indianapolis or Chicago. Fortunately for Gennett, as well as posterity, some of the musicians who passed through Richmond in those days went on to become legends in jazz and blues: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Jelly Roll Morton. Their recordings for Gennett have become landmarks in American music.

  The performers were not lavishly compensated. Many received a flat fee of fifteen to fifty dollars per recording session. The Gennett label, however, flourished. The records, recognizable by a parrot logo on the cover, sold for about a dollar each in hundreds of stores nationwide. Advertised under the dubious slogan “The Difference Is in the Tone,” Gennett sold three million records in 1920.

  The emergence of radio, and later, the Great Depression, hit the Starr Piano Company hard, and Starr sold its recording division to Decca Records in 1935. The company was finally sold at auction in 1952, and the Richmond factory was closed.

  Around noon, Ora and Lowell Wilson spotted the Trumans’ Chrysler heading into Richmond on East Main Street. They pulled it over.

  “Sheriff,” asked Harry with some exasperation, “what did I do wrong?”

  “We just wanted to welcome you to Richmond,” said the elder Wilson, who added that it would be awfully nice if Harry and Bess would pose for a picture with him in front of the Madonna of the Trail statue. Harry had come to Richmond to help choose the site for the statue back in 1928, when he was president of the National Old Trails Road Association. He had been scheduled to return to Richmond later that year for the dedication of the statue, but, just a few days before the October 28 ceremony, he sent his regrets, saying he was “very busily engaged in politics” at the moment. Seventeen years later, on April 2, 1945, it was announced that Truman, now vice president of the United States, had accepted an invitation to speak at a soil conservation conference being held by the local Kiwanis club in Richmond on May 9. Again Truman would have to send his regrets. Roosevelt died on April 12. Instead of speaking about soil conservation in Richmond, Indiana, on May 9, 1945, Truman, now president, was in the Oval Office signing a bill extending the draft. He had announced the surrender of Germany just the day before.

  So, by stopping in Richmond (albeit involuntarily), Harry was making good on unfulfilled obligations. The Wilsons escorted the Trumans to Glen Miller Park, where the Palladium-Item photographer snapped a picture of Ora, Harry, and Bess posing in front of the larger-than-life Madonna. (The park was named after a local businessman, not the big band leader.) Afterward, the Wilsons escorted the Trumans to the Leland Hotel in downtown Richmond, where Harry and Bess had lunch. At their table, they posed for another picture for the Palladium-Item photographer. After the customary plea for “one more shot,” Harry turned to Bess and said, “This may break the camera,” bringing a wide smile to Bess’s face. Harry was in a jovial mood. He told the photographer that Manley Stampler, the state trooper who had pulled him over on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, “got the wrong man.”

  After lunch, the hotel provided the Trumans a room so they could rest a bit before resuming their journey.

  On the whole, Richmond treated Harry much better than it treated another former president who came to town. In June 1842, a little more than a year after leaving the White House, Martin Van Buren passed through Richmond on his way to Indianapolis. He was on a tour to gauge support for another presidential bid. He didn’t find much in Richmond, mainly because he had vetoed several bills to fund improvements to the National Road, which had been extended through Indiana in 1834. By the time Van Buren became president, the road had deteriorated so badly that Hoosiers called it a “buttermilk lane.” But Van Buren, like Monroe before him, did not believe it was the federal government’s responsibility to repair the road. David P. Holloway, the editor of the Richmond Palladium, did not encourage the town to roll out the red carpet for Van Buren. In an editorial ahead of the former president’s visit, Holloway wrote, “To welcome such a man whose official conduct has spread misery and desolation throughout the land and is seeking power again to enthrall the people is repugnant.” On June 9, Van Buren gave a speech in Richmond that Holloway dismissed as “cold and indifferent.” That night, a “mysterious chap” partially sawed through one of the crossbars underneath the former president’s carriage. The next morning, Van Buren was about two miles west of town when the crossbar snapped. The former president was forced to walk through deep mud for help. “Perhaps it might cure him of his oppositions for the old National Road’s completion,” sniffed Holloway. (Something similar is said to have happened to Old Kinderhook a little farther west in Plainfield, Indiana, as well
.)

  David C. Stephenson, who was so instrumental in the rise (and fall) of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920s, was released from prison in 1950, after serving twenty-five years for the murder of Madge Oberholtzer. He was arrested on a parole violation shortly thereafter and returned to prison. He was paroled again in 1956. In 1961 he was charged with attempting to molest a sixteen-year-old girl—in Independence, Missouri, of all places. He was fined three hundred dollars and ordered to leave the state. He died five years later in Jonesboro, Tennessee.

  The Ku Klux Klan has never come close to approaching the heights of its popularity in the 1920s. In 2007, however, the Anti-Defamation League reported that the Klan “has experienced a surprising and troubling resurgence due to the successful exploitation of hot-button issues, including immigration, gay marriage, and urban crime.” Indiana, the report notes, was one of the states “notable for active or growing Klan chapters.”

  The remnants of the Starr Piano Factory in Richmond, Indiana. The Gennett Records logo is still visible on the building.

  After it was abandoned in 1952, the sprawling Starr Piano Factory along the Whitewater River quickly fell into disrepair. Most of the structures were torn down in the 1960s and ‘70s. All that remains is the factory’s sixty-foot-tall smokestack and the shell of a building once used for making player pianos. The Gennett Records parrot logo is still clearly visible on the building.

  The Leland Hotel, where the Trumans stopped for lunch, still stands, though it has been converted into a retirement home. The seven-story brick building on the corner of Ninth and South A is now known as the Leland Residence—“The Elegant Retirement Community.” Its residents belong to that rapidly vanishing segment of the American population with firsthand memories of the Truman presidency.