Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [26]
Harry paid the attendant. Then Bess carefully recorded the purchase on the small card Harry kept in the glove compartment to track the car’s mileage. It would become something of a ritual on the trip, a small ceremony observed at every service station.
Harry’s interest in fuel efficiency was largely financial. Like most Americans, he was concerned about skyrocketing gas prices. Why, just that day, Standard Oil had hiked prices a penny a gallon—to 27.1 cents. The company blamed the increase on rising crude oil prices, which were approaching three dollars a barrel. On Capitol Hill, though, some lawmakers accused the oil companies of collusion and price gouging. The House Commerce Committee had launched an investigation.
Before pulling away from the station, Truman asked the attendant to recommend a good motel in town. “We’d never stayed at one,” Truman later explained, “and we wanted to try it out and see if we liked it.” It would also save them a little money. A night in a motel only cost about five bucks.
The attendant recommended the Parkview Motel and gave Harry directions. Then, as soon as the Trumans were gone, he called the local newspapers.
The Parkview was quiet when Harry and Bess pulled up. The clerk didn’t even recognize them when they checked in. But within minutes the motel’s parking lot swarmed with reporters, photographers, and curious locals. Harry, who had “expected to enjoy the pleasures of traveling incognito,” was dismayed by the carnivalesque atmosphere. It was just what his friends had warned him would happen.
When Decatur Police Chief Glenn Kerwin learned the former president and first lady were traveling by themselves—without even a single bodyguard—he was aghast. What if something happened to them while they were in his jurisdiction? Kerwin immediately dispatched two officers, Francis Hartnett and Horace Hoff, to the Parkview. The Trumans, Kerwin ordered, were to be shadowed around the clock until they left the city. “I don’t need any protection,” Harry pleaded when Hartnett and Hoff showed up at his motel door. But orders were orders. The former commander in chief was outranked by Chief Kerwin. The cops stayed.
Harry unloading luggage from his car outside the Parkview Motel, Decatur, Illinois, June 19, 1953. Harry rejected the suggestion that he be photographed reclined in an easy chair with Bess placing a pillow under his head.
Harry signed a few autographs in the parking lot and sent a note to a child who was ill at the motel. He agreed to be photographed for the papers, as long as the pictures wouldn’t appear until the next day—after he and Bess had left town. One photographer suggested the Trumans pose in their room, with Bess placing a pillow under Harry’s head while he reclined in an easy chair. Harry vetoed that idea, offering to be photographed taking luggage out of the trunk of his Chrysler instead. Then he asked everybody to back off. He and Bess were exhausted from the long drive in the heat, he explained. They had traveled 350 miles in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees. Now they were going to lie down and take a nap.
By the 1920s it was possible for the first time to drive an automobile long distances over paved roads. But if you did, you had to be prepared to rough it. Hotels were concentrated in city centers, usually around train terminals. Outside urban areas just about the only accommodations available to travelers were squalid campgrounds or flophouses. Then, in 1925, an architect named Arthur Heinman opened what he called a “mo-tel”—a motor hotel—along Highway 101 in San Luis Obispo, California, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Heinman’s motel was the first in the world. It consisted of a series of two-room bungalows with attached garages that rented