Truman (22 page)

With the loving cup and flags, the atmosphere was not unlike that of a college shop, the college in this instance having been the war. For anyone who liked clothes as Harry did, who had liked always to “look nice,” the effect must have been very pleasing.

Yet it is hard to imagine the adjustment from battery commander to storekeeper as anything but difficult, hard to imagine him not finding it a painful comedown from such career aspirations as he had confided to Bess, or from parading with a victorious army up Grand Avenue. Nor does there appear to be an explanation, unless it was that he—and Bess also—wanted money quite as much as in the years before the war and saw the partnership as the opportunity, while at the same time keeping contact with his “boys,” the city, and people of a kind who might do him good should politics ever become his “line.” His only explanation later was, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”

He and Eddie opened their door regularly at eight every morning and remained open until nine at night. Times were prosperous. “Sporty” 12th Street—the 12th Street of
Twelfth Street Rag
—was “jumping.” Conventioneers poured in and out of the Muehlebach. In the Dixon Hotel, across the street, were two gambling houses. Prostitutes worked the neighborhood. Day or night, salesmen, secretaries, shoppers from outlying towns, nearly everybody seemed to have money to spend. “Twelfth Street was in its heyday and our war buddies and the Twelfth Street boys and girls were our customers,” Eddie Jacobson would recall with pleasure. “Silk underwear for men, and silk shirts, were the rage. We sold shirts at sixteen dollars. Our business was all cash. No credit.” Shirts, the main stock in trade, were Eddie’s specialty. Harry, who called it “the shirt store,” would stand poised for business between two of the showcases, an elbow on one countertop, a hand on the other, his shoes shined, tie straight, the overhead lights glinting in his thick glasses. Like the store, he always looked fresh and clean.

As hoped, it became a rendezvous for their Army pals, a number of whom now looked to Harry as financial adviser, legal adviser, “and everything else,” as Eddie said. “We’d all drop in there sometime during the day—it was the hangout,” remembered Eddie McKim. Some evenings there was barely room for the real customers. “But Harry seemed glad to have us,” said former Sergeant Meisburger. Even the policeman on the corner, Walter “Cushionfoot” Teasley, had been a first lieutenant with the battery at Camp Doniphan.

Harry returned the favor of their patronage as best he could. He bought his suits from Ted Marks, had his hair cut at Frank Spina’s barbershop. They were just like his family, he would say. Bess objected to the haircuts. But Frank Spina was one of his boys, Harry would explain. “You can’t quit them.”

Others living elsewhere around the country wrote to wish Harry well. “I see no reason,” said one man, “why you, with your engaging personality and honest morals, should not be very successful in that business.”

“Well, sir, don’t forget me,” wrote another, Eugene Donnelly, in a letter from a remote Texas oil field, “and when you see a keen young lady come out of the Muehlebach, just say to yourself gee I’d hate to be old Donnelly, living seven miles from a railroad, enjoying the company of two hundred men.” Once, in France, after the Armistice, when Donnelly and several others from Battery D were due to go to Paris on furlough but had no money, Harry had found out about it and loaned them what they needed. “We’d have done anything for him then,” Donnelly would say in an interview years afterward, “and nobody that I know has changed his mind.”

Eddie’s wife Bluma said later that her husband never worked as hard as he did that first year in the 12th Street store, nor Harry either, she supposed. There were no signed agreements between them, there was never a need for it. “They just felt that close to one another that they could trust each other, which they did all through their lives.”

By the year’s end they had sold $70,000 worth of goods, which meant a high return on their investment.

In his campaign for President in 1920, the handsome Republican candidate, Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio—who had been picked in a famous “smoke-filled room” at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, just a year after Mr. and Mrs. Harry Truman stopped there—called for a return to “normalcy.” The American people, Harding said, had had enough of heroism, and he and his running mate, former Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, defeated the Democratic ticket of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt with a bigger majority than in any previous election. Normalcy seemed indeed to be what the country wanted, and in this respect Truman and Jacobson, restocking their shelves in Kansas City, waiting on customers, seemed in perfect step with the times. Harry joined the Kansas City Club, the Triangle Club (a businessmen’s lunch group much like Rotary), and the Kansas City Athletic Club, where, with relentless determination, he taught himself to swim, using a strange, choppy, self-styled sidestroke, his head above water, so he could keep his glasses dry. With Ted Marks or Jim Pendergast, he ate regularly at the Savoy Grill, in the old Savoy Hotel on 9th Street, his favorite place for lunch. He dreamed also of a new car, to replace the second-hand, four-cylinder Dodge roadster he was driving to and from the city.

The one looming worry was that the farmers were hurting and the reasons were plain enough at the same Kansas City grain exchange where John Truman had lost his money twenty years earlier. Prices were tumbling. Wheat that had sold for a record $2.15 a bushel in 1919 had dropped to $1.44 a bushel by the fall of 1920. Farm prices overall fell 40 percent and the farmers’ plight began to spread. The Middle West was especially hard hit. By 1921 the silk shirt that had been such a symbol of the postwar boom became the shirt Truman & Jacobson could no longer sell. By mid-year their “flourishing business” had evaporated. With the country in a full-scale depression, Harry and Eddie Jacobson were in trouble. To keep their stock up to date, they were forced to borrow more money.

The same old friends kept dropping in, but no one was buying as before. Several now found the store a convenient place to borrow an extra five or ten dollars. It became a combination club and unemployment agency, and, because of Harry’s generosity, small loan office. If they came in asking for “Captain Harry,” Eddie Jacobson recalled, he knew it was for a touch. If they asked for “Captain Truman,” he knew he had a sale.

It was Harry also who paid for the damages after a Battery D reunion on St. Patrick’s Day, 1921, a dinner at the Kansas City Elks Club that turned into a brawl, with the “boys” hilariously “airlining” soup and dinner rolls at one another. There had been no shortage of whiskey for the evening, Prohibition notwithstanding, and things were finally so out of hand that the police had to be called. But then one of the police turned out to be a former Battery D sergeant, George Brice, who, to the delight of the other police, was unceremoniously relieved of his revolver and most of his clothes.

As the depression grew worse and the partners had less and less to do, Harry became increasingly restless. “He would get out and go to lunches and mix with people…and Eddie Jacobson would stay around and take care of business,” said Ted Marks, who had not encouraged Harry to go into the retail line. Now they talked about anything and everything but Harry’s troubles. “We all were having a hard time those days…. Rents were high and starting anew—it was pretty rough,” Marks remembered.

Harry and Eddie had an ink blotter printed up as a flyer to hand out at the counter:

Dr. A. Gloom Chaser Says:

“It Takes 65 Muscles of the Face to Make a Frown and 13 to Make a Smile—Why Work Overtime?”

Buy Your Men’s Furnishings from Us at New Prices.
YOU
Will Smile at the Great Reductions.
WE
will Smile at the Increased Business. Then
NONE
of
US
Will be Overworked.

In the fall of 1921, when plans were announced for an American Legion convention in Kansas City, as part of ceremonies to dedicate the site for a colossal new war memorial, Harry at once volunteered his services. As chairman of the decorations committee, he raised money, ordered flags and bunting, and launched a campaign to have every downtown business, trade association, club, every household “show the flag” in what he promised would be the most patriotic gathering ever in the country and one certain to make Kansas City “the most talked about town in the world.” He was brisk, enthusiastic, and effective. The big day was November 1. France sent Marshal Ferdinand Foch; Great Britain sent Admiral Earl David Beatty; Italy, General Armando Diaz; and Belgium, General Baron Jacques, a strapping figure with a pink face and huge cavalryman’s mustache. General Pershing came to town—a thrill for Harry—and Eddie Rickenbacker and Vice President Coolidge, who, reportedly, looked and acted so effacingly vice-presidential that he had trouble gaining admittance to several gatherings. Eighty-five bands marched and sixty thousand men of the American Legion, including former Captain Harry Truman, who was chosen for the honor of presenting flags to the Allied commanders. Foch, whose presence on the reviewing stand electrified the crowds, said he had never seen such a display of feeling, such patient, “almost sacred,” attention from so many people. More than a hundred thousand had turned out.

Later activities, however, were considerably different in spirit. “That,” remembered Harry’s friend and fellow legionnaire, Harry Vaughan, “was when we took the Hotel Baltimore to pieces.” Somebody drove a Texas steer into the hotel lobby. A crap game in the street outside stopped traffic. Eddie McKim could not recall Harry taking part in any of the “high jinks…except he probably looked out of his haberdashery store door and would see some of the ladies’ negligées floating down from the windows of the Muehlebach Hotel. They used to lodge in the trolley wires….”

The goodwill and mutual respect between Harry and Eddie Jacobson, meantime, seemed not to suffer from the strain they were under, though it remained at heart a business friendship. Eddie’s wife sensed a certain distance between the Trumans and the Jacobsons that she took to be a sign of anti-Semitism among Harry’s in-laws. The Wallaces, she said, were considered aristocracy, and under the circumstances the Trumans could not afford to have Jews in their house. But then Harry seldom if ever brought any of his friends home to North Delaware Street. The privacy of Madge Wallace’s world was one thing, the world without was another, and so it would remain.

Truman & Jacobson failed in 1922. After much discussion, the partners decided not to file for bankruptcy—and thereby wipe out their debts—but to try to pay off their creditors as best they could, little by little as time went on. The business was approximately $35,000 in the red. Eddie, who went on the road as a shirt salesman, did all he could to meet his part of the debt, but in three years, unable to keep up, was forced to declare himself bankrupt. Some time later, when the two friends met for lunch downtown, Harry, seeing Eddie’s frayed suit, gave him some money and told him to buy some new clothes. Fifteen years after the store went under, Harry would still be paying off on the haberdashery, and as a consequence would be strapped for money for twenty years. But like his father, he never ever neglected appearances.

The store had been a dismal failure. Yet few thought it Harry’s fault. He was the victim of circumstances, the times were against him. “It was a nice store, and he was just a victim of circumstances like all the rest of us,” remembered former First Lieutenant Edgar Hinde, who was trying to sell Willys-Overland automobiles in Independence. “It was rough, I’ll tell you, it was rough!” The price of wheat in 1922 was 88 cents a bushel.

An exception to this view was Harry’s former Grandview neighbor and Lodge brother Gaylon Babcock, who remembered Harry’s downfall coming as no surprise. To Babcock, whose father had put money in the store, it was just another case of “There goes Harry again.”

Harry blamed the Republicans in Washington. The fault was neither in himself nor in his stars, but in the tight money policy of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, he insisted. But it could also be said that the trouble began in 1920 when the Wilson administration suddenly cut government spending and raised taxes.

To his wife Bess, who regarded most of his Army friends as roughnecks, Harry once described Jimmy Pendergast as “a nice boy and as smart as the old man he’s named for.”

The old man in question, the original James Pendergast, was the legendary Alderman Jim, the first Pendergast in Kansas City politics and founding father of what became a famous, or infamous, depending on one’s point of view, Kansas City dynasty. His was a familiar American story. The son of Irish Catholic immigrants who had settled and raised a numerous family in St. Joseph, upstream on the Missouri River, Alderman Jim had come to Kansas City in the centennial year of 1876, a young man with neither money nor connections and in desperate need of a job. He found work first in a slaughterhouse, then in an iron foundry, in the West Bottoms, a roaring industrial section that stretched across the muddy lowlands between the river’s great bend and the bluffs of the city. Jim Pendergast was brawny and gregarious and with his sunny disposition made friends rapidly. He also saved his money and in 1881, after betting on a winning horse called Climax, he purchased a combination hotel and saloon which, in tribute to his lucky horse, he called the Climax. Other saloons were acquired as years passed, these, too, proving popular and profitable, especially with the added attraction of back-room gambling. In addition, Jim Pendergast moved into the wholesale liquor business.