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Instead of ordering room service for dinner, the Trumans went down to the hotel’s Pioneer Grill, but only after the manager promised they “would not be molested while eating.” Still, their meal was interrupted several times by the usual assortment of well-wishers and autograph seekers. After dinner, a photographer for the Observer asked them to pose for a picture. Harry pleaded that they were too tired, but the photographer snapped one anyway. In it Harry and Bess, looking uncharacteristically haggard, are standing in the hotel elevator, impatient for the door to close. The photograph, accompanied by a brief story, appeared in the paper the next day. But somehow—perhaps because it was a holiday weekend—the wire services missed it, which is why, outside Washington, Pennsylvania, nobody knew where Harry and Bess were that night.

To get from the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Washington, Harry and Bess took Route 31. Today you take Interstate 70, but you still pass through many of the same towns, including some with the best names in all of the Keystone State: Hunker, Lover, Glyde, and Eighty Four (the last supposedly named to commemorate Grover Cleveland’s election in 1884).

The George Washington Hotel is now an apartment building. Remarkably, however, the lobby is still largely intact, complete with a lovely, massive, spindly chandelier. The ballrooms are also intact and can still be rented for wedding receptions and other functions.

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12

Columbus, Ohio,

July 6–7, 1953

After their long drive the day before, Harry and Bess took it easy on Monday, July 6, driving only a little over 150 miles along Highway 40 from Little Washington to Columbus, Ohio. Around noon they checked into the Deshler, a thousand-room hotel on the northwest corner of Broad and High streets in downtown Columbus, catty-corner from the Ohio statehouse. When it opened on August 23, 1916, the Deshler was hailed as “the most beautifully furnished hotel” in the country. The table service was gold. The massive Oriental rug in the lobby cost fifteen thousand dollars. (To spare it the ravages of rowdy football fans, the rug was rolled up on Friday nights before Ohio State home games.)

By 1953, however, the Deshler had grown a bit threadbare, and, just a week before Harry and Bess checked in, Conrad Hilton bought the hotel, promising to return it to its rightful place as “one of the finest hotels in the United States.” Nobody doubted Hilton would do it. He’d been in the hotel business since he was a boy, helping his father run a boardinghouse in San Antonio, a tiny mining town in the New Mexico Territory. Returning from service in World War I, Hilton bought his first hotel in Cisco, Texas. His sixteenth was the Deshler.

Hilton seemed to have the Midas touch, turning every property he owned into a moneymaker. His secret was simple. He called it “digging for gold.” He would squeeze revenue out of every square foot of his hotels. At the Palmer House in Chicago, he converted a newsstand (monthly rent $250) into a bar (yearly revenue $490,000). At the Plaza in New York, he rented out a small showcase in the lobby for eighteen thousand dollars.

He would sink more than two million dollars into it, but, alas, even Conrad Hilton couldn’t save the Deshler. It was too late. In 1948, something called a “shopping center” had opened in the Columbus suburb of Whitehall. Another one was on the drawing board for Berwick, with enough parking for two hundred cars. Why bother driving downtown, where parking was a hassle anyway? Businesses began to flee for the suburbs. Suddenly, a thousand-room hotel in downtown Columbus was anachronistic, obsolete.

In 1964 Hilton sold the hotel to Charles “Curly” Cole, a flamboyant businessman who sank his own millions into the Deshler, turning it into a 275-room luxury hotel, where scantily clad women swung from a trapeze in the lobby. Cole’s room, 1212, was decorated in a rain forest theme, complete with