Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [86]
After lunch, the hotel provided the Trumans a room so they could rest a bit before resuming their journey.
On the whole, Richmond treated Harry much better than it treated another former president who came to town. In June 1842, a little more than a year after leaving the White House, Martin Van Buren passed through Richmond on his way to Indianapolis. He was on a tour to gauge support for another presidential bid. He didn’t find much in Richmond, mainly because he had vetoed several bills to fund improvements to the National Road, which had been extended through Indiana in 1834. By the time Van Buren became president, the road had deteriorated so badly that Hoosiers called it a “buttermilk lane.” But Van Buren, like Monroe before him, did not believe it was the federal government’s responsibility to repair the road. David P. Holloway, the editor of the Richmond Palladium, did not encourage the town to roll out the red carpet for Van Buren. In an editorial ahead of the former president’s visit, Holloway wrote, “To welcome such a man whose official conduct has spread misery and desolation throughout the land and is seeking power again to enthrall the people is repugnant.” On June 9, Van Buren gave a speech in Richmond that Holloway dismissed as “cold and indifferent.” That night, a “mysterious chap” partially sawed through one of the crossbars underneath the former president’s carriage. The next morning, Van Buren was about two miles west of town when the crossbar snapped. The former president was forced to walk through deep mud for help. “Perhaps it might cure him of his oppositions for the old National Road’s completion,” sniffed Holloway. (Something similar is said to have happened to Old Kinderhook a little farther west in Plainfield, Indiana, as well.)
David C. Stephenson, who was so instrumental in the rise (and fall) of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920s, was released from prison in 1950, after serving twenty-five years for the murder of Madge Oberholtzer. He was arrested on a parole violation shortly thereafter and returned to prison. He was paroled again in 1956. In 1961 he was charged with attempting to molest a sixteen-year-old girl—in Independence, Missouri, of all places. He was fined three hundred dollars and ordered to leave the state. He died five years later in Jonesboro, Tennessee.
The Ku Klux Klan has never come close to approaching the heights of its popularity in the 1920s. In 2007, however, the Anti-Defamation League reported that the Klan “has experienced a surprising and troubling resurgence due to the successful exploitation of hot-button issues, including immigration, gay marriage, and urban crime.” Indiana, the report notes, was one of the states “notable for active or growing Klan chapters.”
The remnants of the Starr Piano Factory in Richmond, Indiana. The Gennett Records logo is still visible on the building.
After it was abandoned in 1952, the sprawling Starr Piano Factory along the Whitewater River quickly fell into disrepair. Most of the structures were torn down in the 1960s and ‘70s. All that remains is the factory’s sixty-foot-tall smokestack and the shell of a building once used for making player pianos. The Gennett Records parrot logo is still clearly visible on the building.
The Leland Hotel, where the Trumans stopped for lunch, still stands, though it has been converted into a retirement home. The seven-story brick building on the corner of Ninth and South A is now known as the Leland Residence—“The Elegant Retirement Community.” Its residents belong to that rapidly vanishing segment of the American population with firsthand memories of the Truman presidency.
Residents of the Leland are served meals in what used to be the hotel’s restaurant. I called the home to see if it would be possible for me to have lunch there, as Harry and Bess had. “Of course you can,” said the cheerful manager, Judy Sherrow. All she asked in return was that I give a brief presentation on