Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [40]
Apart from a large and incongruous group of Russian businessmen in the lobby, I didn’t see any other guests at the McLure the night I stayed there. The place felt a bit sad and ghostly. The water coming out of my bathroom faucet was brown when I first turned it on, a sign that I was the room’s first occupant in a long time.
The next morning I enjoyed a “complimentary continental breakfast” in the Beans 2 Brew Café, the hotel’s coffee shop. This consisted of a prepackaged cinnamon bun and a cup of coffee. Behind the counter was a chatty woman whose every self-amusing sentence ended with a loud, harsh laugh that would mutate into a hacking smoker’s cough. “Would you like me to warm your bun? Ha, ha, ha, hack, hack, cough, cough.” I was afraid she might expel something. I passed on the whole bun-warming thing.
Harry came down to the lobby around eight o’clock the next morning. Dent Williams, a Wheeling Intelligencer reporter, cornered him. As he had in Indianapolis, Truman sidestepped questions about Eisenhower and Korea, “because any comment I would make would be a half-baked comment, and Lord knows, I’ve had too many of those half-baked comments.”
But Truman, who had apparently researched local issues in the communities along the route of his trip before leaving Independence, couldn’t resist taking a jab at the Republican-controlled Congress for cutting funding for a floodwall in Wheeling. “Wheeling needs a floodwall badly,” he said, “and I’m sorry to learn that construction funds were stricken from the federal budget.”
He talked about how well the Chrysler was running, how hot it had been in the Midwest, how happy he and Bess were to be on the road again. His only regret, he said, was that he couldn’t travel incognito. “I’ve found that it’s impossible to travel cross-country unnoticed,” he told Williams. As if on cue, Williams overheard a hotel guest tell his young son, “That’s Mr. Truman over there.”
The interview was interrupted when the desk clerk told Harry he had a phone call. The call was transferred to a lobby telephone. After a few minutes, Harry hung up the receiver and returned, smiling, to Williams. “Another nut caught up with me,” the former president said, laughing.
At eight-thirty Bess came down, and the former first couple had breakfast in the hotel’s coffee shop, probably the precursor to the Beans 2 Brew Café.
After breakfast, the Trumans checked out of the McLure. Before paying, though, Harry checked the bill very carefully. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was being overcharged. In 1941—when he was in his second term as a U.S. senator, mind you—he wrote Bess from a Memphis hotel. “Had breakfast in the coffee shop downstairs and they charged me fifty-five centers for tomato juice, a little dab of oatmeal and milk and toast. I don’t mind losing one hundred dollars on a hoss race or a poker game with friends, but I do hate to pay fifty-five centers for a quarter breakfast.”
From Wheeling, the Trumans continued east on Highway 40, following the path of the old National Road through the rugged Allegheny Mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania and western Maryland. Near Farmington, Pennsylvania, they passed Fort Necessity, where, during the French and Indian War in 1754, George Washington, then a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel in the British army, suffered one of the worst defeats in his military career, surrendering the fort to French forces. (Incidentally, Washington had been sent to the area to build a road.)
Just past the town of Addison, Pennsylvania, they dipped south into Maryland. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 1760s. Until then, both colonies claimed the land between the thirty-ninth and fortieth