Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [23]
Harry standing next to his New Yorker in the parking lot of Bud’s Golden Cream in Hannibal, Missouri, June 19, 1953.
“They seemed to be having a good time,” John Osborne, the owner of the diner, told a local newspaper. “They were taking their time.” Eventually the couple escaped to the parking lot in front of Bud’s Golden Cream, where Mary Toben waited with her camera. She snapped a picture of the ex-president and her father engaged in more small talk, Truman in his white suit, Bud Toben in a white T-shirt and dungarees.
After he finished chatting with Toben, Truman slid behind the wheel of the Chrysler and, with a wave, he and Bess pulled away from Bud’s Golden Cream. They continued east on Highway 36, which ran right through the middle of Hannibal.
If the Trumans visited Hannibal today, they’d get lost. Highway 36 has been rerouted north around the town. A Dairy Queen opened just up the street from Bud’s in the early 1970s, and Toben finally closed his stand in 1974. He took out an ad in the local paper to mark the occasion. “We will discontinue operations … after 25 short, successful seasons,” it read. “These have been, indeed, most enjoyable years for us…. Our Christmas Tree Services will be taken over by the Optimist Club.”
A KFC now stands where Bud’s once stood.
Osborne’s Café went out of business around the same time as Bud’s. It’s been replaced by an Italian restaurant called Cassano’s.
Passing through Hannibal in 1953, at the corner of Third and Hill, Harry and Bess would have seen on their right a simple, white, two-story house—a house that still stands there today. It was the boyhood home of perhaps the only Missourian more famous than Harry Truman himself: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
He never went to college, but Harry Truman was as well read as any president. “From the time I was ten years old,” he wrote, “I had spent all my idle hours reading.” His reading list is impressive, to say the least: Plutarch, Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, every Shakespeare play and sonnet, the Koran. But his favorite author, his “patron saint” of literature, was Mark Twain. One of Truman’s prized possessions was a twenty-five-volume set of Twain’s works, which he bought for twenty-five dollars in 1910—the year Truman turned twenty-six and the year Twain died at seventy-four. As president, Truman kept a framed copy of his favorite Twain quote on his desk in the Oval Office: “Always do right! This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” In Twain’s books, however, Truman heard no echoes of his own youth in Missouri. Frail and bespectacled as a child, he never identified with Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. “I wasn’t in that class,” he told an interviewer once. “I was kind of a sissy growing up.”
As he drove by Twain’s house that day, Harry probably contemplated the author’s role in another president’s life. It was Twain who helped Ulysses S. Grant, penniless and near death from cancer of the throat, complete his memoirs. It has been suggested that Twain even ghostwrote some of the memoirs, which were a critical and commercial triumph. Truman’s own memoirs—three hundred thousand words—were due to be delivered to Doubleday in two years, on June 30, 1955. Harry planned to start working on them in earnest as soon as he got back home. The task weighed heavy on his mind. By his own admission,