Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [31]
I think it’s safe to assume that Harry Truman would detest cell phones.
(On a subsequent visit to Decatur, I noticed that the McDonald’s had been torn down and was being replaced by another McDonald’s, presumably bigger and better than the old one.)
After dinner, the Trumans returned to the Parkview and went to bed.
Later that night, Floyd Zerfowski, a thirty-three-year-old Decatur police officer, reported for work at eleven o’clock as usual. But when he got to the station, he received an unusual assignment: he was to spend the night protecting Harry and Bess Truman. He and another officer, Ray Rex, were sent to the Parkview to relieve Francis Hartnett and Horace Hoff.
It was a boring assignment.
“We got out there and they were already in bed.” Zerfowski said of the pointless vigil. “We sat out in front of his room all night long. We found some lawn chairs and we sat out there and watched his motel door. It was sort of amusing. That was an easy job!”
Of the four cops assigned to Harry Truman’s unwanted security detail in Decatur, Zerfowski is the last survivor. Now in his late eighties, he lives alone in a tidy ranch house in a forty-year-old subdivision on the edge of town. His only companion is a police scanner, which he listens to all day. Thin and balding, he wears oversized eyeglasses that make him look a little owlish. In preparation for my visit, he had pulled out an old scrapbook filled with yellowed newspaper clippings documenting his law enforcement career.
Zerfowski joined the Decatur Police Department in 1949. Assigned to the graveyard shift, he walked different beats all over the city. “Whenever somebody was off, I usually worked their beat,” he explained. “I got to know Decatur pretty well.” Zerfowski said there wasn’t much crime in Decatur back then, but in his rookie year he was forced to fire his gun for the only time in his career. He interrupted a burglary in progress at a union hall. The burglar attacked him with a pipe. Floyd got off two shots, one of which pierced the burglar’s heart, killing him instantly. An inquest ruled the shooting justified.
Floyd retired from the police force in 1970 and went to work as a maintenance man for the Decatur school district so he could qualify for Social Security. He retired for good in 1986. His wife died suddenly of a brain aneurism just a year later.
After all those years of walking a beat, Floyd found it impossible to stop walking in retirement. Some days he would put in as many as fifteen miles inside the Northgate Mall, becoming a familiar and popular fixture among shoppers and workers there. When I first spoke with him in late 2006, however, he was recovering from a broken hip and feared his mallwalking days were over. “Now I just go there and drink coffee,” he said a little sadly at the time. But when I visited him a year later, he was feeling much better, and was back up to a mile a day at the mall. “I plan on living to be a hundred,” he told me.
The Trumans came out of their room at seven the next morning. Harry presented Floyd and his partner mechanical pencils bearing his name and picture—his usual token of appreciation. “Here’s a little gift to remember me by,” he told them. (Zerfowski saved his pencil and proudly showed it to me when I visited him.)
Then, once again accompanied by their unwanted entourage of cops and reporters, Harry and Bess went back to Grove’s for breakfast. “When he looked up and I saw who it was I almost dropped dead,” said their waitress, Helen Werve. “He was very pleasant and said everybody he had met on the way had