Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [83]
There’s another sight at Wright-Patterson that is connected to Truman, though it is very much off-limits to the public. The remains of crashed UFOs and their occupants are stored inside the secret “Blue Room” in Hangar 18. Or so the story goes. It makes sense, in a way, since Wright-Patterson is where Project Blue Book was based. (Though, it must be noted, Blue Book concluded that there was “no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ were extraterrestrial vehicles.”) Supposedly the debris from Roswell was taken to the Blue Room where, according to some of the wilder accounts, it was personally inspected by Truman. That’s highly doubtful. Even the president would have had difficulty gaining entrance to the Blue Room. “I once asked General Curtis LeMay if I could get into that room,” Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater told the New Yorker in 1988, “and he just gave me holy hell. He said, ‘Not only can’t you get into it but don’t you ever mention it to me again.'”
On the shuttle bus to the presidential planes hangar, I asked our chaperone, half-jokingly, if it would be possible to see Hangar 18, too. All he would say is, “They don’t want us to talk about that.”
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13
Richmond, Indiana,
July 7, 1953
On the morning of Tuesday, July 7, Ora Wilson, the sheriff of Wayne County, Indiana, got a call from a friend at the Ohio State Highway Patrol. His friend advised Wilson that Harry and Bess Truman were headed his way, and helpfully supplied a description of their vehicle and an ETA. Like Glenn Kerwin, the police chief in Decatur, Illinois, Ora Wilson was anxious to “look after” the Trumans while they were in his jurisdiction. He also wanted to get his picture in the paper. So he recruited one of his deputies—his son Lowell—to help spring a trap for the Trumans. Father and son sat in a cruiser parked on the east side of Richmond, the county seat, and waited to intercept the couple as soon as they came into town. In the backseat was a photographer for the Richmond Palladium-Item.
Richmond, Indiana, population forty thousand, sits on the banks of the Whitewater River, just across the Ohio border. Founded by Quakers in 1806, it was a center of the abolitionist movement. The Wright Brothers grew up here, and Wilbur attended Richmond High School before the family moved to Dayton. It’s also where the Reverend Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple, went to high school. But Richmond’s two enduring claims to fame are curiously paradoxical: in the 1920s, the city played a key role in the rise of both the Ku Klux Klan and African American music.
During the Roaring Twenties, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence known as the second wave, exploiting white anxiety over the influx of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the mass migration of African Americans from the South to the North. In 1924 there were four million active Klan members, including some five hundred thousand in Indiana—the largest single state contingent. In Richmond roughly half the city’s adult white males belonged to the Klan, including the mayor, the county sheriff, and the county prosecutor. On the evening of Friday, October 5, 1923, the Klan staged a spectacular parade through Richmond. It featured more than six thousand hooded and robed Klansmen, as well as marching bands, floats, and, of course, many “fiery crosses.” In “magnitude and impressiveness,” the Richmond Palladium-Item reported the next day, the parade “has had few equals in this city.”
The Klan’s Svengali in Indiana was David C. Stephenson, a former printer’s apprentice and Socialist Party activist who was said to pocket two dollars of each