Truman (13 page)

John Truman bought more cows, more than doubling their herd, from thirty to eighty-two. “I have been working like Sam Hill this morning sowing wheat,” Harry informed Bess in a letter written in September 1913. “Papa has a fit every time I heave a one-hundred-pound sack of wheat…. Get to lay off the wheat this afternoon and pitch hay while they thresh.” That year they had enough hay for six hundred bales, and his father talked of a wheat crop for the next year of four hundred acres, enough, if all went well, to put them “out of the woods.” At night in the parlor, as Harry sat writing to Bess, his father would fall asleep in his chair.

It was a killing schedule Harry was keeping, with his work, his travels to Independence and Kansas City, his Lodge nights and letter writing. Though few sons were ever so dutiful, John accused him of losing interest in the farm and many mornings had trouble waking him. Once, when Harry missed his train and arrived home extremely late, he found his father still up and in a “terrible stew,” certain that something awful had happened to him. “He was sure I had been knocked on the head or fallen in the creek. When I told him I’d missed the car he had another fit….”

But Harry’s main concern was his father, who, he was sure, was working too hard. When he learned that John, through friends at the Independence Courthouse, was going after the job of road overseer for the southern half of Washington Township, which included Grandview, Harry had immediate misgivings. The upkeep and repair of country roads was a task performed by local men with their own teams of horses, either for hire or as a way to work off a six-dollar school tax. The work was never-ending and the job of overseer, an appointed political post, was one that paid two dollars a day and that almost nobody wanted. It was his father’s incurable love of politics that made him go after the job, Harry told Bess. “Politics is all he ever advises me to neglect the farm for.” If Harry could have his way, his father would have no part of it.

When John Truman got the job of overseer, others in Grandview took it as a sign that the Trumans were “strapped” and needed the money. John was considered a good man and a good neighbor. As Stephen Slaughter would recall, “I don’t think we would have traded him for anybody.” But by contrast to the Slaughters, the Trumans always seemed hardpressed financially. The Slaughter farm was not as large as the Truman farm, their land no better than the Truman land, yet the Slaughters prospered. O. V. Slaughter sent all eight of his children to college. “I never understood,” said Stephen years later. “They raised crops on that farm. We raised crops. They were always broke. We weren’t broke.”

Nonetheless, the improved quality of work on the roads under John Truman’s supervision was soon apparent. And with his father determined to keep the roads, no less than the farm, in prime condition, Harry thought he’d best help with the roads too. But should his father, on the strength of this job, decide to run for any other political office, Harry told Bess, then he, Harry, would go out and make speeches against him.

The truth was, Harry went on, warming to his subject, he was torn by his own yearnings. He wanted money, yet he knew it to be a less than satisfactory measure of success, let alone personal value. He saw the seductions and the pitfalls of politics. He knew it to be a dirty business and he scorned the kind of posturing it produced in some men. Yet the fascination remained. It was a remarkable letter:

When the newspaper in Belton called John Truman one of the “henchmen” of the Jackson County Court, John took off for Belton to “whip” the editor, but failed to find him, which Harry thought much for the best. “I told him that was a very mild remark and should be accepted as a compliment to a man who has a political job.” It was the first sign of John’s old temper in years and privately Harry appears to have been pleased.

He himself was known as the “mild-tempered” Truman. Through the furor over Grandma Young’s will, in the crossfire of charges and countercharges in court and out, Harry alone of the family seemed able to get along with everyone. He was the one person they could all talk to, the family peacemaker.

In September 1913 he made another try in an Indian land lottery, traveling this time farther from home than ever before, nearly to the Canadian border in northeastern Montana, in the company of a half-dozen other Grandview men, including his father. Harry loved these trips, but this one most of all. On a postcard to Ethel Noland mailed from Minneapolis, he said he was “feeling as good as an angel full of pie.”

Then, at long last, on a Sunday in November 1913, as Harry sat speechless, Bess said that if ever she married anyone it would be him. She wrote a letter to confirm the promise. They agreed they were secretly engaged. Harry was beside himself, “all puffed up and hilarious and happy.” She had made a confirmed optimist of him, he said. She called him an enigma. He said that sounded fine to him and especially coming from her, “for I always labored under the impression that it took smart people to be one.”

On a date in Kansas City, he took her to see Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian starring in a new show,
The Girl from Utah,
and held her hand as the handsome dark-haired leading man sang the show’s biggest hit, a song by Jerome Kern, “They’ll Never Believe Me.”

There were no bounds now to his horizons. “How does it feel to be engaged to a clodhopper who has ambitions to be Governor of Montana and Chief Executive of the U.S.?” he inquired, the expansive aspirations intended as humor only. To his surprise, she wrote at once to say how much she cared for him. “I know your last letter word for word and then I read it some forty times a day,” he said. “Oh please send me another like it.” He thought perhaps he should put it in a safe deposit vault to keep from wearing it out.

This last point was a large question indeed, for Madge Wallace remained, as would be said, a virtual “prisoner of shame” over her husband’s suicide and clung to Bess as a figure of strength greater than her own. She needed Bess quite as much as John Truman needed Harry. As the only daughter of an important family, Bess would have been a guarded “prize” even under normal circumstances. The prospects for a debt-ridden, farm-boy suitor would have been extremely remote, however persistent or well mannered he might be.

“Mrs. Wallace wasn’t a bit in favor of Harry,” remembered one of the Noland family, all of whom were strongly on Harry’s side. “And she says, ‘You don’t want to marry that farmer boy, he is not going to make it anywhere.’ And so she didn’t push it at all. She kind of tried to prevent it….”

Every call Harry made at 219 North Delaware Street could only have been a reminder of what distances remained between his world and hers. The etched glass in the front door, the plum-colored Brussels carpets, the good china and heavy lace curtains at the long parlor windows, the accepted use of silver dessert forks, the absence of any sign that survival meant hard physical labor day in, day out, the whole air of privacy, of unruffled comfort and stability, reflected a way of life totally apart from anything in his experience. (“We have moved around quite a bit and always the best people are hardest to know,” he once told Bess defensively.) Had he only to overcome the obvious differences in their station, he would have had an uphill haul, as he would have said. But the problem was greatly compounded by how Madge Wallace felt toward anyone or any cause that threatened to take Bess from her.

“Yes, it is true that Mrs. Wallace did not think Harry was good enough for Bess,” a member of the Wallace circle would comment with a smile sixty years afterward, her memory of it all quite clear. “But then, don’t you see, Mrs. Wallace didn’t think
any
man was good enough for Bess.”

In March 1914 his own mother suddenly took ill. The local doctor called in a specialist who decided that an operation for hernia must be performed and at once, there in the house. Harry had to stand beside her bed and hold a kerosene lamp while the doctor worked and “parts” were removed from his mother. It was, Harry said afterward, an experience he hoped he would never have to repeat.

Apologetically he told Bess he would be unable to leave home for several days. Mamma, as he had once written, was a person for whom there was no substitute. “I hope she lives to be a hundred and one.”

How direct a connection there was between his steadfast performance during the operation and afterward and the event that followed is not certain. But it was only a few weeks later when Mamma gave him the money to buy an automobile. And it was to be no farmer’s Model T Ford. If anyone had ever rewarded a son with one grand generous gesture, she had. Nothing could have pleased him more or made such an immediate difference in his life. He had never had anything of his own of such value or that drew such attention. He was to love automobiles all his life, but this was
the
automobile of his life.

It was a big, black, five-passenger 1911-model Stafford, hand-built in Kansas City by a man named Terry Stafford. Only three hundred of the cars were ever made. It had a four-cylinder engine, right-hand drive, a high brass-framed windshield, and Presto-Lite lamps nearly the size of the lamps on locomotives. On a good road, Harry soon demonstrated, it could do 60 miles an hour. It was a rich man’s car. New, it sold for $2,350. Harry paid $650. The house needed paint; payments on loans and the cost of the lawsuit over his grandmother’s will had stretched the family’s finances to the limit. From all practical viewpoints such an automobile was a huge extravagance—$650 would have been more than enough to pay for two hired men for a year—but to Harry $650 for such an automobile was a “bargain.” While not the first in Grandview, it was certainly the fanciest. In Independence, not even George Porterfield Gates had anything like it. With a little work on the engine, Harry found, he could go up Dodson Hill—considered the great test locally—so fast he had to shut off the power before reaching the crest.

He could come and go as he pleased now, and mostly it was go, on Blue Ridge Boulevard to Independence. Rolling through the shaded streets of Independence on a spring Sunday, wearing a sporty new cap, a fresh white shirt and proper Sunday necktie, the top down on the car, its brass all polished, he would never be taken for a hayseed. Bess and three or four others would pile into the “machine,” off with him for an afternoon of fishing on Blue River or a picnic at the waterworks beside the Missouri at Sugar Creek. Or Harry would treat them to “a spin” in the country.

He had a gang again, as he had not since boyhood. Besides Bess and the Noland sisters, there were Bess’s two brothers Frank and George and their best girls, Natalie Ott and May Southern. Harry and his car were the center of attention. They would all pose for pictures with the car, Harry at the wheel. Harry was always good company, said May Southern, who would soon marry Bess’s brother George. Harry, she said a lifetime later, never complained about anything unless there were onions in the potato salad. “Harry didn’t like onions.”

Uncle Harrison also enjoyed “a spin” with the top down, in any weather. One expedition for his benefit was to Monegaw Springs, an old Missouri spa about eighty miles from Grandview. Mamma, too, had insisted on going along for the ride in Lizzie, as Harry was calling the car by this time.