Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [49]
Some thirty years later, on a vacation with her own family in the early 1980s, Randall visited the Truman Library. The former president’s desk was on display. On it she saw an old photograph of a smiling buck-toothed little girl in a Brownie uniform.
It was the photograph she’d sent the president.
Clark and Marny Clifford died in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and the family sold the house on Rockville Pike to a young couple named Tim and Kristen. I mailed them a copy of an old newspaper clipping about the Truman cookout and asked if I—a perfect stranger—could visit their home. I was happily surprised when they said yes.
Like Harry and Bess, I visited the home on a steamy early summer evening. Unlike Harry and Bess, I took the subway. The home is a short walk from the Medical Center stop on the Washington Metro’s Red Line. What was once a rural farmhouse has been completely engulfed by suburbia. To reach it, I had to negotiate a bewildering maze of intentionally winding (and sidewalk-free) streets in postwar subdivisions. Many were the driveways with portable basketball hoops.
When I arrived, Kristen gave me a tour of the house while Tim finished cleaning up after dinner and while their three young children, accompanied by a friend, wreaked playful havoc. Joining us on the tour was Kristen’s father, Doug, a gregarious George Kennedy look-alike who has researched the history of the house. He’d come over specially to see me.
As Doug explained, the old wooden house is an excellent example of the Georgian revival style, a classic “two over two,” with two rooms on the first floor divided by a center hallway and staircase, and two rooms on the second. Later additions were built on either side of the house, doubling its size.
After the tour, Kristen went off to help Tim while Doug and I took seats at the dining room table. Doug showed me a sixteen-page history of the house he’d written. He also produced a thick three-ring binder filled with photographs and photocopied tax and census records, each carefully inserted inside a protective plastic sleeve. It was heartening to see him taking the history of his daughter and son-in-law’s home so seriously. It was also nice of him to have done so much research for me, bless his heart.
Doug’s sleuthing revealed that the house was built in 1854 by a farmer named Samuel Perry. At the time, Perry owned 444 acres along Rockville Pike, already a well-trod route connecting the capital and Rockville, Maryland. Perry and his son-in-law also owned a dozen slaves, who lived in a small stone cottage on the property.
Doug also discovered that Harry Truman was not the first president to visit the home—nor the last. In 1910, when the house was owned by an adventurer named Leigh Hunt, his friend Teddy Roosevelt stopped by. Like Harry, TR embarked on a long trip shortly after leaving the White House, though Teddy’s was slightly more adventurous: he went on an African safari. Upon his return he delivered to Hunt two souvenirs he’d picked up on his travels, stuffed and mounted lion and hippopotamus heads, which Hunt hung over the mantle in the living room. Clark and Marny Clifford bought the house in 1950, and over the next half-century they would entertain a parade of future, current, or former presidents: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and the elder Bush. On the day he left office, Johnson came over for lunch. So, in all, at least five presidents have visited the house, which must be some kind of record for a private home in Bethesda, anyway.
Tim and Kristen have done a lot of remodeling since they bought the house (including the removal of Clark Clifford’s thirty-two-line switchboard in the basement). They said they haven