Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [32]
Harry and Bess returned to the Parkview to pack their car. Around eight o’clock, they checked out. Floyd Zerfowski and Ray Rex escorted the couple to the Decatur city limits, at which point Chief Kerwin must have breathed a huge sigh of relief. Harry and Bess got back on Highway 36, which they would take to Indianapolis.
That day, a wire-service photograph of Harry unpacking the trunk of his car at the Parkview appeared in hundreds of newspapers nationwide. The caption explained that the Trumans were “motoring leisurely eastward.” For the first time, Americans learned just what their former president was up to. He was doing exactly what many of them did every summer. He was taking a road trip.
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5
Indianapolis, Indiana,
June 20, 1953
East of Decatur, Highway 36 passes through some serious farmland, land that is far too valuable to be covered with structures. It is striking just how few houses there are. The soil is dark, almost black, too fertile to waste on livestock, so there are no animals here, either. Driving across east-central Illinois in late June is like sailing across an ocean of soybeans and corn. The landscape is flat and utterly treeless. The road is impossibly straight. If my car (well, my dad’s car, actually) had been properly aligned, I could have put it on cruise control and taken a nap.
If anything, this place looks even more rural than it did when Harry and Bess passed through in 1953. Back then there were more than 164,000 farms in Illinois. Today there are half that number, though the amount of land being farmed is nearly the same. Chalk it up to technology. Modern machinery has made farming unthinkably productive. GPS guidance systems on tractors prevent overlap when plowing, planting, and harvesting, dramatically increasing efficiency. In 1990 one farm could feed 129 people. Today, one farm can feed 144. When farmers retire, their operations can easily be taken over by their neighbors. And, since they are retiring in droves—the average age of a farmer in Illinois is fifty-five—farms are consolidating rapidly.
With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman was the last real farmer in the White House. In 1906, when he was twenty-two, Harry quit his job as a bank clerk in Kansas City and moved back to his family’s farm in Grandview because his father needed the help. Rising at five o’clock every morning, he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day. It was backbreaking labor. On six hundred acres, the Trumans grew wheat, corn, and potatoes and raised cattle, sheep, and hogs. Harry later said he “did everything there was to do” on the farm: “Plowed, sowed, reaped, milked cows, fed hogs, doctored horses, bailed [sic] hay.” With two plows attached to a team of four horses, he’d work maybe five acres in ten hours. “Riding one of these plows all day, day after day” he later wrote, “gives one time to think. I’ve settled all the ills of mankind in one way or another while riding along seeing that each animal pulled his part of the load.”
Harry didn’t leave the farm until he went off to war in 1917 at the age of thirty-three.
About thirty-five miles east of Decatur, Highway 36 passes the town of Bourbon. Now that must have brought a smile to Harry’s face. And a knowing look and maybe a sideways glance from Bess.
Around noon on Saturday, June 20, Harry guided the New Yorker into the driveway behind a grand Tudor home on Meridian Street in a fashionable neighborhood on the north side of Indianapolis. The Trumans were stopping for lunch at the home of Frank McKinney, Harry’s good friend and the former Democratic National Committee chairman.
Claire McKinney (now Claire McKinney Clark), the McKinneys’ daughter, said