Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [77]
Of course, this theory did not explain how the lights had outraced an F-94, but the press, at least, bought it. Perhaps the explanation that the UFOs were the result of all the hot air in the nation’s capital was too good to resist. In any event, the papers stopped reporting UFO sightings and the matter was soon forgotten—though, to this day, the sightings have not been fully explained.
So Harry Truman was well acquainted with UFOs. Which is why his seeming disappearance on the very anniversary of the discovery of the Roswell crash is, to put it mildly, a rather interesting coincidence—or is it a coincidence?
Alas, it is. Harry and Bess weren’t abducted by aliens—at least not on the night of July 5, 1953. Though it went unreported at the time, the Trumans spent that night in Washington.
But not that Washington.
Residents of Washington, Pennsylvania, often distinguish their town from the nation’s capital by calling it “Little Washington” (or, in the local accent, “Little Worshington”). Wedged in the southwest corner of the state, the town is the eponymous seat of Washington County. Chartered by the Pennsylvania legislature in 1781, it was the first county in the nation to be named for the Father of Our Country, who was still in his forties at the time and eight years away from becoming president.
Ironically, Washington (the place) ended up giving Washington (the man) nothing but headaches. George Washington owned land in the county, but even as president he was unable to pry the rent from his tenants, so he ended up selling the nettlesome property. Then, in 1794, farmers in Washington County revolted against a new federal tax on whiskey. (Whiskey was a serious cash crop at the time. It’s been estimated that one in six farmers in the county operated a still.) The Whiskey Rebellion was the first serious test of the powers of the federal government, and Washington was forced to send more than twelve thousand troops to the area to crush it.
The National Road was routed through the town of Washington, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was a center of agriculture, with crops and livestock being shipped east and west. But it was the discovery of coal and, later, oil, that turned Washington into a bona fide boomtown.
Yet, as the twentieth century began, the town had no proper hotel. “Every night,” a local historian lamented, “the tourists were taken into private houses in all sections of the town.” In November 1920, frustrated community leaders organized an effort to build a hotel, which would be named after the town’s namesake. They formed the George Washington Hotel Company and sold stock at fifty dollars a share. They raised more than six hundred thousand dollars in a month. Local banks loaned the company another six hundred thousand, and construction began at the corner of Main and Cherry the following August.
The ten-story George Washington Hotel opened on Washington’s Birthday in 1923 with a special reception for its eight hundred or so stockholders. It was said to be the finest hotel on all the National Road. Each of its 210 guest rooms had a private bath and a telephone, and its ballrooms were as fine as those in any hotel in the country.
It was the George Washington Hotel that Harry and Bess Truman checked into on the night of July 5. It had been a long day. They had driven nearly four hundred miles. As usual, word of the famous couple’s arrival quickly spread through town, and soon the lobby was filled. A reporter from the local paper, the Observer, called the Trumans’ room. Harry answered the phone, but he wasn’t in a talkative mood.