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I climbed up into Carey’s massive pickup for the short drive across the property to the barn where the Chrysler was stored. Gladys followed in the golf cart she uses to get around the farm. Bringing up the rear was Tanner, loping slowly. Ostensibly the Creasons raise vegetables, hay, and horses on their seventy-five acres, but from what I could see their most visible crop was metallic. Dotting the landscape were dozens of vintage automobiles in every conceivable state of repair.

As we bounced along the dirt road to the barn, Carey explained how her family’s farm had come to be the final resting place for so many automobiles. “My dad liked to collect cars,” she said, “and he was a bit eccentric.” By Carey’s estimation, her father, Bob Creason, acquired at least seventy-five cars over the years. Some, like a 1935 Auburn 851, were immaculately restored. But many more were simply left to rust or were cannibalized for spare parts. “Dad would sometimes take two or three trucks and make one new one out of them,” Carey explained. “He’d take a fender from one, a hood from another, and put them together.”

Bob’s eccentricity was not limited to automobiles. When natural gas was discovered on a piece of land he owned, he had it piped straight into a house on the property to heat it. When a county government invoked eminent domain to seize some of his property to build a racetrack, Bob fought the case all the way to the Kansas Supreme Court before finally reaching a settlement.

On August 11, 2002, Bob Creason was hauling yet another old vehicle to the farm on a trailer when the brakes on his pickup failed. The truck and the trailer left the road and flipped over. Bob was killed instantly. He had celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday just four days earlier. His casket was taken to the cemetery in a 1925 Diamond T delivery truck that he had painstakingly restored. Carey Creason still lives on the farm, and she looks after the cars her father left behind. She and her siblings just don’t seem to have the heart to get rid of them.

Carey pulled her pickup to a stop in front of the barn. We got out. Carey pulled the sliding door open and we walked inside, followed by her mother in her golf cart. Tanner stayed outside to lie in the sun.

And there it was: a battered car parked headfirst against a wall at the back of the barn. It clearly was not in driving condition. The headlights were broken, the body was badly rusted, the tires were flat, and the trunk was caved in. Still, there was no doubt that this was a 1953 Chrysler New Yorker.

But was it Harry’s?

Carey opened a manila file folder she’d brought with her and spread the contents on the back of Gladys’s golf cart. The paperwork was convincing. She had the original title to the vehicle, dated February 16, 1953—the day Harry picked up his Chrysler at the Haines Motor Company in Independence. The owner was listed as Harry S. Truman. The document was signed “Harry S. Truman by C. L. Haines.” Apparently Harry had neglected to sign the title when he took possession of the car, so the dealer signed it for him.

Of course, the title also noted the vehicle’s serial number: 7232332.

I walked over to the car and, with some difficulty, pulled open the driver’s door. Attached to the doorframe was a small rectangular metal plate. My heart began to beat a bit faster than usual as I bent down to read it: VEHICLE NO. 7232332.

Bingo! It was Harry’s car.

Carey had other papers detailing much of the car’s provenance. Harry assigned the title back to the Haines dealership in 1955 when he traded in the New Yorker for a newer version of the same model. This time, Harry signed the document himself, with his inimitable slashing signature. Later that year, Haines sold the car to a Kansas City lawyer named Sam Silverman. (According to a report in a 1955 issue of Billboard magazine, Silverman represented a Kansas City company that claimed to have invented “a new chicken stick for the drive-in trade … on the order of the