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In 1975 Carroll Kehne closed his service station. He was sixty-five. It was time to retire. Besides, the business was changing. “This is what you call the old, country-type gas station,” he told the Frederick Post shortly before the closing. “Where people always gather and have good times. But this is one of the last.”

“All the new stations are concerned with,” he complained, “is just how quick you get in and how quick you get out.”

The Coke bottle that Harry Truman drank from at Carroll Kehne’s service station in Frederick, Maryland, on June 21, 1953. After Kehne died, his son donated the bottle to the Historical Society of Frederick County.

The striking deco service station was torn down shortly after it closed. In its place stands a transmission shop’s nondescript, four-bay garage.

Carroll Kehne died in 1994. Among his belongings, his son found the Coke bottle that Harry Truman had drunk from all those years before. Carroll Jr. donated it to the Historical Society of Frederick County, where it currently resides, lovingly swaddled in acid-free archival paper.

In honor of Harry’s pit stop in Frederick, H. I. Phillips composed a poem for his syndicated newspaper column. It was a spoof on “Barbara Frietchie,” a John Greenleaf Whittier poem about a Frederick woman who became a local hero when she allegedly stood up to Confederate troops during the Civil War.

Up from the meadows rich with corn,

Clear in the steaming mid-June morn,

The gasoline stations of Frederick stand

And give to Harry a hearty hand.

Round about them the tourists sweep;

Clicking and clacking the meters creep;

Routine and drab is the station’s way,

Oftentimes dull … but NOT THIS DAY!

* * *

8

Washington, D.C.,

June 21–26, 1953

At 5:40 P.M. on Sunday, June 21, Harry and Bess pulled up in front of the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. A doorman helped Harry on with his double-breasted suit jacket. Harry supervised the unloading of luggage.

Never before had a former president returned to the capital quite like this: driving his own car in his shirtsleeves, as if he were nothing more than a curious tourist—which, Harry insisted with a gleam in his eye, is all he was.

Margaret was waiting for her parents at the hotel. She had come down from New York to stay with them while they were in Washington, acting as a kind of unofficial press secretary, a role she clearly relished.

The Truman family stayed in suite 676, which had been redecorated especially for them. (C. J. “Neal” Mack, the hotel manager, jokingly called it the “ex-presidential suite.”) There was a parlor with green walls and white-shaded lamps, a small dining room, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. For this, Mack had agreed to charge the Trumans a “special daily rate” of just fifteen dollars. That was a significant discount: the usual rate was thirty-six dollars.

A doorman helps Harry on with his jacket upon his arrival at the Mayflower Hotel, June 21, 1953. Harry liked the Mayflower so much he called it “Washington’s second-best address.”

Shortly after checking in, Truman invited the reporters who’d covered his return to the capital up to his suite.

“You’re awfully nice to come up here just to see an old has-been,” he said as they filed in. To all questions about politics, Congress, Ike, or Korea, his answer was the same: “No comment.” Mostly he just wanted to talk about the drive from Missouri. It was exactly 1,055 miles from his home in Independence to the Mayflower, he reported. With a touch of pride, he added that his new Chrysler was getting sixteen to seventeen miles a gallon.

The trip, he said, was “wonderful,” “lovely.”

His smile, one reporter noted, was wider than ever.

He said he had no plans to see President Eisenhower. “He’s too busy to see every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes to town,” he said, putting special emphasis on the last name.

He said he only came back to Washington to see “old friends” and insisted he would be “keeping away from politics.” He