Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [87]
Lunch was served at eleven-thirty in the morning. (It seems the elderly, in Richmond, Indiana, at least, like to take their meals early. At the Leland, dinner is served at four-thirty.) I sat at a small table with Judy and one of the home’s residents, a woman recovering from a recent fall and having difficulty mastering the walker she was now forced to use.
“I’m not used to needing help!” she said.
“It’s just part of the process of getting old,” said Judy reassuringly. She spoke in a soothing tone perfectly suited to her position.
“Well, I don’t like it,” the woman said.
Then, out of the blue, the woman insisted Judy guess her age. Judy was hesitant, but the woman prodded her. “Seventy-seven,” Judy proffered.
“No,” said the woman, now suddenly quite pleased. “Eighty-seven!”
Over grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and chicken soup, Judy told me about the Leland. Built on the site of an old casket factory in 1928, it was widely regarded as the finest hotel in all of Indiana when it opened. But it couldn’t compete with the motels that sprouted on the outskirts of town in the 1960s and ‘70s. It closed in 1984, reopened in 1986, closed again in 1990, reopened again in 1993, and finally closed for good in 2000. It was reborn as a retirement home in 2001, which is when Judy was hired. I asked her what she’d done before that. She smiled. “I ran a nursery school for twenty-eight years,” she said. “The jobs really aren’t that different. You just need to meet their needs and try to make them happy.”
After lunch I gave my presentation in the Leland’s “living room,” which used to be the hotel’s lobby. It was attended by seven women—all quite elderly, naturally. They were scattered about on sofas and easy chairs. Two of them dozed intermittently throughout the talk. But I thought I did a pretty good job, and when I concluded, I was rewarded with a round of applause, which, besides making me feel good, had the added benefit of awakening the two drowsy attendees.
Around two o’clock the Trumans left Richmond. That night, they would do what countless other road trippers have done: they would crash with friends.
* * *
14
Indianapolis, Indiana,
July 7–8, 1953
Around four o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday, July 7, Harry and Bess pulled into the driveway behind the McKinney home on North Meridian Street in Indianapolis. At six—after Harry’s nap, of course—the McKinneys hosted a reception for the former president and first lady in their backyard. The weather was lovely. The heat that had seemed to follow the Trumans ever since they left Independence had finally abated. The temperature was in the seventies.
About a hundred people attended the party, which the Indianapolis Times called “one of the season’s most exclusive and loveliest.” It was a swanky affair. Harry wore a white Palm Beach suit, a gray and white silk tie, and spotless white shoes. Bess wore a pale gray dress. “Everybody at the party looks so good,” cracked one attendee, “we look like a bunch of Republicans.” But it wasn’t strictly a political event. Several prominent Indianapolis Republicans were on hand, including the city’s thirty-seven-year-old mayor, Alex Clark.
Nineteen-year-old Claire McKinney, the McKinneys’ eldest daughter, was at the party that evening, dressed in a “gay summer frock,” according to the next day’s Indianapolis Times. She remembered one of the guests turning to Mayor Clark in the receiving line and asking, a bit accusatorily, “What are you doing here?” Truman overheard the remark and grabbed the mayor’s hand, saying, “It’d be a hell of a country, wouldn’t it, Mayor, if there wasn’t a two-party system?” “Then he talked to him for a long time,” Claire said. “Harry Truman didn’t choose his friends by their party affiliation.”
Harry ordered a Wild Turkey (allegedly watered down) from the makeshift bar that was set up in the driveway. Bess had a ginger ale. The guests broke