Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [44]
George has four children. He would like to see one of them take over the Princess someday, but he’s not holding his breath. His son graduated with a degree in culinary arts from Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. “But,” said George, “he’s talking about moving to South Carolina with his girlfriend.”
Nonetheless, George has faith in the future of the Princess. In fact, he’s planning on enlarging it. When I visited, he’d just received the permits he needed to nearly double the size of the restaurant’s kitchen.
“I’m loyal to Main Street,” he said. “You have to be passionate about it.”
While in Frostburg, I had dinner at the Princess—in the Truman booth, of course. I ordered the same meal Harry and Bess had. It was delicious, although the roast chicken dinner that Harry and Bess enjoyed for seventy cents now costs $9.50—still, not a bad deal.
While they were trying to enjoy their lunch at the Princess, a local Democratic Party activist named Bill Byrnes approached the Trumans and introduced himself. (Byrnes would later win election to the Maryland House of Delegates.) He asked the ex-president if he would be willing to visit his elderly mother, Elizabeth Byrnes, who had recently broken her hip in a fall and was bedridden.
“My mother has been a Democrat for ninety-two years and she’s pretty sick,” Byrnes told Truman. “Will you please come over to the house and cheer her up?”
“Who could say no to that kind of an invitation?” Truman recalled.
So, after lunch—George Pappas “refused to take our money for the meal,” Truman remembered—the Trumans followed Byrnes out to his mother’s house in Eckhart Mines, about two miles from Frostburg.
“She was bedfast and quite feeble,” Truman said. “My arrival was a surprise to her. She looked me over and then said, ‘Mr. Truman, you’re better looking than I thought you were.'”
“We had a nice chat,” Truman continued. “That little detour to Eckhart, Maryland, may not sound like much, but it was the high point of our whole motor trip.”
As Truman left, Mrs. Byrnes whispered to him, “May God bless you, Mr. President.”
Harry and Bess had planned on spending just a few minutes at Mrs. Byrnes’s house, but they ended up staying half an hour, chatting with neighbors on the porch. It was two o’clock before they finally got back on the road.
A few miles east of Frostburg, the Trumans passed through the Cumberland Narrows, a thousand-foot-deep gorge carved into the Allegheny Mountains by Wills Creek. It was through this narrow gap that the National Road was threaded, linking the East and the Midwest. This irregular bit of topography was God’s gift to Manifest Destiny.
The Gulf station at the corner of West Patrick and North Jefferson in Frederick, Maryland, looked more like a rocket ship than a filling station. Behind the two pumps was a tall, slim deco building with soaring arched windows and a steeple on top. Behind that was a garage with two bays. Opened around 1940, it was said to be the most modern and innovative service station in Frederick County. The restrooms were sparkling. It even had an electric water cooler, the first in town.
The Gulf station was also the neighborhood candy store, where children bought gumballs, popsicles, jawbreakers, and Hershey bars after school. And it was a political clubhouse of sorts.
The station manager, Carroll Kehne, was a devout Democrat. His grease monkey, Albert Kefauver, was a rabid Republican. The two men discussed politics constantly, always amicably, often with customers and local raconteurs. “People who know me politically call me Mr. Democrat,” Kehne recalled in his later years. He started a Democratic Club in Frederick because he “saw men running for office bumming money from businessmen so they could run.” The club helped raise