Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [29]
It would have been nice to rest my head where the Trumans rested theirs in Decatur, but, absent the commission of a felony, that wasn’t feasible, so I found the next closest motel. It was less than a mile up 22nd Street. It was called the Tri-Manor.
Opened in the early 1950s, the Tri-Manor is a vestige of the golden days of motels. On its roof is a giant red neon sign that reads, simply, MOTEL. But the sign doesn’t work. At night not a single letter is lighted. The Tri-Manor has seen better days, much like Decatur itself, a city named after a War of 1812 hero who was mortally wounded in a duel. As he lay dying, Stephen Decatur is said to have cried out, “I did not know that any man could suffer such pain!” His namesake city could say much the same thing about itself.
When the Trumans came here in 1953, Decatur was a thriving agricultural center, the self-proclaimed “Soybean Capital of the World,” home of the food-processing giants Archer Daniels Midland and A. E. Staley. The city also had a broad manufacturing base. General Electric made television sets here, and a host of smaller companies produced everything from pumps and valves to potato chips. In 1954 Caterpillar opened a heavy-equipment factory on the edge of town, and, nine years later, Firestone began making tires here.
But time was not kind to Decatur. The global economy changed. Free-trade agreements were signed. Companies began to cut jobs, close, or move. Labor strife ensued. At one point in 1994, more than 6 percent of the city’s workforce was either on strike or locked out as the result of separate disputes at Bridgestone/Firestone, Caterpillar, and Staley. Later that year, ADM was implicated in a global price-fixing scandal. In 1996 two tornadoes hit the city within twenty-four hours. In 2001 Bridgestone/Firestone announced it was closing its Decatur plant.
“People who live in small towns, or even medium-sized ones, tend to be pleasantly surprised when they venture out of state and encounter big-city dwellers who can summon salient facts about the travelers’ home towns,” Mark Singer wrote in a New Yorker profile of the city in 2000. “Residents of Decatur, Illinois, though, have learned not to get all that thrilled.”
When the Trumans were here, Decatur was a Norman Rockwell town. Now it feels more like Norman Bates. Which brings me back to my motel.
When I checked into the Tri-Manor, the manager, a short, plump woman with a large scab on her face, told me it was a good thing I hadn’t come two years earlier. “Back then it was all druggies and hos,” she said. Camps of crime, indeed. “But,” she hastened to reassure me, “we’ve cleaned up since then.”
My room at the Tri-Manor was anything but manorial. It reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The door had no deadbolt or chain, just a simple lock in the knob. It didn’t shut tightly either. This I discovered in the middle of the night, when the wind blew it open, scaring me senseless. The bathroom door had a large hole at the bottom, apparently from a kick. The furnishings were worn, and the walls were bare and thin. I wouldn’t have wanted to shine a black light on the bedspread for all the money in the world. And the color on my TV was off: all the people were purple. At $37.85 a night, the room seemed radically overpriced.
But there was also something appealing about it, in that it was refreshingly un-corporate. This was how motel rooms might have looked before Kemmons Wilson took the element of surprise out of the roadside lodging business. This was how Harry and Bess’s room might have looked.
But something tells me the Tri-Manor won’t be welcoming any ex-presidents any time soon.
While the Trumans napped at the Parkview Motel in the early evening hours of June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing. Julius went first. He was strapped into the electric chair at 7:04 Eastern time. The current was applied, and, for fifteen seconds, 2,450 volts of electricity passed through his body.