Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [42]
Harry and Bess sat in a booth near the front and ordered the Sunday supper special: roast chicken with stuffing, lima beans, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, rice pudding, and coffee—for seventy cents.
George Pappas Jr., the owner’s son, was working the grill that day, and when the Trumans’ waitress, Grace Felker, brought their order back to the kitchen, she told Pappas, “That looks like Harry Truman out there.”
“I looked out,” Pappas remembered, “and I said, ‘It sure does.’ And it was. It was old Harry.”
While the younger Pappas prepared the Trumans’ meals, telephones all over Frostburg began ringing. At the time, the town had no direct-dial service, so all calls had to be routed through an operator. It didn’t take long for the word to get out. Howard Ward, the Frostburg correspondent for the Cumberland (Maryland) Evening Times, was at home changing out of his Sunday best when he got a call from a friend telling him that the former president and first lady were in town.
“Yeah, right,” said Ward, thinking it was a prank. But after he hung up, his curiosity got the best of him. He put his suit back on and headed for the Princess.
“Townspeople started to drop in for a Coke,” Ward reported in the next day’s paper, “and one bystander estimated the restaurant did a bigger soft drink business in the time the Trumans were there than in any other similar period.”
The Trumans did not enjoy a quiet repast. Children badgered Harry for his autograph. The adults weren’t much better behaved, constantly interrupting the couple’s lunch to shake hands.
“Through it all,” Ward reported, “they remained gracious and were not annoyed.”
“We lunched at Frostburg,” Truman later recounted, “at the Princess Restaurant, which is run by an old Greek who is a damn good Democrat. I had been there before, but in those days they didn’t make such a fuss over me. I was just a senator then.”
George Pappas died in 1963. George Pappas Jr. took over the restaurant and ran it until 1981, when his own son, George W. Pappas, took over. George Jr., a spry eighty-six, still puts in occasional shifts in the kitchen.
“My boy does a good job” running the restaurant, George Jr. told me when I visited the Princess. “My dad would be proud of him.”
George Jr. served eighteen months as a mess sergeant in the South Pacific during World War II. He said it was an honor for him to have served his former commander in chief lunch.
“He was a good old fellow,” he said of Truman. “Good president too.” Like many of his generation, George Jr. gave Truman credit for ending the war.
“That was really a tough decision, for that man to drop that bomb on all them people.”
The Princess Restaurant still looks much as it did when Harry and Bess ate there in 1953. Along one wall is a soda fountain, with a long counter and fixed, round stools. Along the opposite wall are a dozen booths, each with a small, coin-operated jukebox, one song for ten cents, three for a quarter.
George W. Pappas in the Truman booth at the Princess Diner, Frostburg, Maryland, 2008.
A plaque above the booth in which the Trumans sat commemorates their visit:
MR. & MRS. HARRY S. TRUMAN
ATE DINNER IN THIS BOOTH
FATHER’S DAY
SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 1953
The booth is not original. It was replaced during a remodeling about fifteen years ago. George W. Pappas kept the old one in his garage for several years, until his wife suggested that the space might be better utilized by a motor vehicle. George called the local historical society to see if it was interested in this unique piece of local history, but, alas, it didn’t have any room for the booth either. So, reluctantly, George put it out with