Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [45]
Around three-thirty on the afternoon of Sunday, June 21, 1953, a newspaper reporter came into the station and asked Albert Kefauver to help him fix a flat. “Then another newsman came in and I thought he was just going to talk to his buddy,” Kefauver remembered. But then another showed up. And another.
One of the reporters asked to use the phone. Carroll Kehne asked him if it was a local call. “No,” the reporter said, “I want to call Margaret Truman to see when her father is supposed to get here.”
“I didn’t believe him at first,” Kehne said. “But the next thing I knew, he”—Truman—“was driving up to the pumps in a beautiful new black Chrysler…. I didn’t know he was coming.”
By now a dozen reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen were crowded around the pumps. Kehne filled Truman’s car with gas and checked the oil while his fifteen-year-old son, Carroll Jr., washed the windows. “When President Truman stepped out of the car,” the younger Kehne remembered, “he offered to shake my hand. I stated it was wet, but that didn’t faze him. He said, ‘That’s no problem!'”
“I made up a ticket for his gasoline and made him sign it,” the elder Kehne recalled. “But I wouldn’t let him pay it. I just wanted to be able to say that I treated President Harry S. Truman to a tank of gasoline.”
Harry went inside the station. “The Boss wants a glass of water,” he announced, “and I’d love a Coke.” Leaning on the counter, he spent about twenty minutes chatting with Kehne and Kefauver while he enjoyed his soft drink. “We was talking about everything in general,” Kehne recalled. “He was the kind of guy who could talk to you about anything, fixing cars or changing oil, or politics.” This event, Kehne’s son told me, was the highlight of his father’s life. “My dad was so very excited, as he truly loved Harry as a president. Being a Democrat made it even more pleasant for him.”
At one point, Kehne asked Truman to give Kefauver a hard time for being a Republican. “Na,” said Truman. “It’s too hot to give anybody hell.”
When Truman finished the Coke, Kehne saved the empty bottle.
Back outside, the newspaper photographers and newsreel camera operators asked Harry and Bess to pose with Kehne reading a map. It was preposterous, of course; Harry knew the way to Washington by heart. But he obliged them, smiling, as he always did.
Harry finishes off his Coke at Carroll Kehne’s service station in Frederick, Maryland, June 21, 1953, while Kehne (left) and his mechanic Albert Kefauver watch. When Kehne asked Truman to give Kefauver a hard time for being a Republican, Harry said it was “too hot to give anybody hell.”
Years later, in his memoir Mr. Citizen, Truman recalled the scene at the Gulf station:
The press caught up with us at the filling station in Frederick where I had always filled up in times past. I was reminded of the time my mother visited us at the White House. I had wanted her to meet some of these same press correspondents, but I was a little uncertain how she would take to the idea, so I put off saying anything about it until I was leading her from the plane into the midst of them. Then I said: “Mama, these are photographers and reporters. They want to take your picture and talk to you.”
“Fiddlesticks,” she said. “They don’t want to see me. If I had known this would happen, I would have stayed home!”
There on the road in Frederick, I felt the same way she did.
Really? According to the New York Times, “Mr. Truman … greeted the photographers and reporters at Frederick like long-lost brothers.” “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said.
The newsreel footage of the former president at Carroll Kehne’s Gulf station would be shown in movie theaters around the world. When it was shown at a theater in Whittier, California—Richard Nixon’s hometown—the applause