• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Harry Truman’s 1953 Chrysler New Yorker is still out there somewhere, in a dusty garage or weathered barn. According to Mark Beveridge, the Truman Library’s registrar and unofficial “car guy,” the Chrysler is owned by a collector who “wishes to remain anonymous.” I was eager to see the car, of course, so I asked Beveridge if he would be willing to forward a letter from me to the anonymous collector. “No,” he said apologetically. Beveridge hopes the collector will eventually donate the Chrysler to the museum, and he didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize that acquisition.

I wasn’t about to give up that easily, so I placed ads in classic car newsletters—nothing. I posted pleas on Internet bulletin boards—still nothing. I even enlisted the help of a private investigator, again to no avail. My quest, however, did turn up another 1953 Chrysler New Yorker, much like Harry Truman’s.

Back in 1971, Alan Hais was twenty-five years old and just starting his first job as an environmental engineer for the District of Columbia. He was looking for a cheap car to get him around town when he spotted an ad in the paper for a 1953 New Yorker. The asking price was three hundred dollars. Hais and a friend drove out to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to check out the then eighteen-year-old car, but when he learned it had ninety-seven thousand miles on it, Hais got cold feet. When he and his friend stopped for burgers on the way home, though, Hais reconsidered. “It was a good solid car,” he remembered. “So I said, well, we might as well go back.” Hais drove the car home, with his friend following just in case.

Since then, Hais has gone on to a long and successful career, mainly working for the Environmental Protection Agency. And the New Yorker has gone from his beater car to his pride and joy. Over the years he has lovingly restored it “piece by piece,” rebuilding the carburetor, replating the chrome, replacing the brakes and exhaust system. He had it repainted its original color: “Hollywood maroon.”

I went to visit Alan on a warm, humid spring day. The skies were cloudy, and when I pulled into the driveway of his home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he was already outside waiting for me. He was eager to take the Chrysler out before it rained. He carefully backed the car out of his garage, the door of which was barely wide enough to accommodate it. I hopped in and we went for a drive.

Harry’s New Yorker was a four-door sedan. Alan’s is a two-door convertible, but in most other respects the cars are identical. It is a massive machine, measuring nearly eighteen feet in length and weighing around forty-three hundred pounds. The interior is gorgeous, especially the instrument panel, a half-circle with a speedometer surrounded by four simple gauges for gas, oil pressure, engine temperature, and amplitude. Directly above the ignition is a cigarette lighter.

As we cruised along country roads at forty to fifty miles per hour, Alan explained that 1953 was a transitional year for the automobile industry. Immediately after the war, most cars were just warmed-over versions of prewar models. But by 1953, automakers were beginning to innovate. “They were experimenting with a lot of things,” Alan said. “But they didn’t get them all quite right.” I asked for an example. “Well,” he said, “the power brakes are pretty unreliable.” The laws of physics being immutable, this was not a comforting thought. “By 1955,” Alan continued, “the horsepower race started, and you started to see the first traces of fins, which really went over the top in ‘57 and ‘58.”

After a few minutes Alan turned to me. “Do you wanna drive it?” he asked. I hesitated. Of course I wanted to drive it. But I also didn’t want to wrap his pride and joy with the unreliable brakes around a telephone pole. “Maybe up the driveway,” I said. But Alan, to his credit, was insistent. “Drive it,” he said, bringing the car to a stop in the middle of the road. “There’s very little traffic.”

I climbed behind the giant three-spoke steering wheel and