Read Online Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip by Matthew Algeo - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Matthew Algeo
Tags: United States, General, History, Biography & Autobiography, Travel, 20th Century, Essays & Travelogues, Presidents & Heads of State, Presidents, Automobile Travel
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with Harry claiming, “I’ve seen it hotter.” Truman was a master of small talk. He could chat with anyone about anything. It was a gift, and, according to journalist Charles Robbins, it was part of his “humanness.” “[H]e went out of his way to treat others not as ‘bodies’ or digits but as fellow human beings,” Robbins wrote.
Mary arrived with her little Kodak Brownie camera. She asked Harry if she could take a picture of him. Truman struck a deal with her: he told her she could take a picture after he and Bess finished lunch—but only if she promised not to tell anybody else they were in town. Mary agreed, and the Trumans went into Osborne’s.
Bud Toben didn’t make them move their car.
Inside the diner, Harry and Bess seated themselves. Amid the din of the lunchtime rush, with waitresses harried and dishes clanging, nobody gave them a second glance. They were, by all appearances, a perfectly ordinary, middle-aged couple. They ordered fruit plates and iced tea and enjoyed their lunch in complete anonymity. “We thought we were getting by big as an unknown traveling couple,” Harry wrote. But, just as they got up to pay their bill, a voice shouted from across the room: “Why, there’s Judge Truman!” An old Marion County judge had recognized Harry Truman—not as a former president, but from his days on the Jackson County bench thirty years earlier. “The incog[nito] was off,” Truman wrote, “and then every waitress and all the customers had to shake hands and have autographs.”
Harry standing next to his New Yorker in the parking lot of Bud’s Golden Cream in Hannibal, Missouri, June 19, 1953.
“They seemed to be having a good time,” John Osborne, the owner of the diner, told a local newspaper. “They were taking their time.” Eventually the couple escaped to the parking lot in front of Bud’s Golden Cream, where Mary Toben waited with her camera. She snapped a picture of the ex-president and her father engaged in more small talk, Truman in his white suit, Bud Toben in a white T-shirt and dungarees.
After he finished chatting with Toben, Truman slid behind the wheel of the Chrysler and, with a wave, he and Bess pulled away from Bud’s Golden Cream. They continued east on Highway 36, which ran right through the middle of Hannibal.
If the Trumans visited Hannibal today, they’d get lost. Highway 36 has been rerouted north around the town. A Dairy Queen opened just up the street from Bud’s in the early 1970s, and Toben finally closed his stand in 1974. He took out an ad in the local paper to mark the occasion. “We will discontinue operations … after 25 short, successful seasons,” it read. “These have been, indeed, most enjoyable years for us…. Our Christmas Tree Services will be taken over by the Optimist Club.”
A KFC now stands where Bud’s once stood.
Osborne’s Café went out of business around the same time as Bud’s. It’s been replaced by an Italian restaurant called Cassano’s.
Passing through Hannibal in 1953, at the corner of Third and Hill, Harry and Bess would have seen on their right a simple, white, two-story house—a house that still stands there today. It was the boyhood home of perhaps the only Missourian more famous than Harry Truman himself: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
He never went to college, but Harry Truman was as well read as any president. “From the time I was ten years old,” he wrote, “I had spent all my idle hours reading.” His reading list is impressive, to say the least: Plutarch, Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, every Shakespeare play and sonnet, the Koran. But his favorite author, his “patron saint” of literature, was Mark Twain. One of Truman’s prized possessions was a twenty-five-volume set of Twain’s works, which he bought for twenty-five dollars in 1910—the year Truman turned twenty-six and the year Twain died at seventy-four. As president, Truman kept a
Mary arrived with her little Kodak Brownie camera. She asked Harry if she could take a picture of him. Truman struck a deal with her: he told her she could take a picture after he and Bess finished lunch—but only if she promised not to tell anybody else they were in town. Mary agreed, and the Trumans went into Osborne’s.
Bud Toben didn’t make them move their car.
Inside the diner, Harry and Bess seated themselves. Amid the din of the lunchtime rush, with waitresses harried and dishes clanging, nobody gave them a second glance. They were, by all appearances, a perfectly ordinary, middle-aged couple. They ordered fruit plates and iced tea and enjoyed their lunch in complete anonymity. “We thought we were getting by big as an unknown traveling couple,” Harry wrote. But, just as they got up to pay their bill, a voice shouted from across the room: “Why, there’s Judge Truman!” An old Marion County judge had recognized Harry Truman—not as a former president, but from his days on the Jackson County bench thirty years earlier. “The incog[nito] was off,” Truman wrote, “and then every waitress and all the customers had to shake hands and have autographs.”
Harry standing next to his New Yorker in the parking lot of Bud’s Golden Cream in Hannibal, Missouri, June 19, 1953.
“They seemed to be having a good time,” John Osborne, the owner of the diner, told a local newspaper. “They were taking their time.” Eventually the couple escaped to the parking lot in front of Bud’s Golden Cream, where Mary Toben waited with her camera. She snapped a picture of the ex-president and her father engaged in more small talk, Truman in his white suit, Bud Toben in a white T-shirt and dungarees.
After he finished chatting with Toben, Truman slid behind the wheel of the Chrysler and, with a wave, he and Bess pulled away from Bud’s Golden Cream. They continued east on Highway 36, which ran right through the middle of Hannibal.
If the Trumans visited Hannibal today, they’d get lost. Highway 36 has been rerouted north around the town. A Dairy Queen opened just up the street from Bud’s in the early 1970s, and Toben finally closed his stand in 1974. He took out an ad in the local paper to mark the occasion. “We will discontinue operations … after 25 short, successful seasons,” it read. “These have been, indeed, most enjoyable years for us…. Our Christmas Tree Services will be taken over by the Optimist Club.”
A KFC now stands where Bud’s once stood.
Osborne’s Café went out of business around the same time as Bud’s. It’s been replaced by an Italian restaurant called Cassano’s.
Passing through Hannibal in 1953, at the corner of Third and Hill, Harry and Bess would have seen on their right a simple, white, two-story house—a house that still stands there today. It was the boyhood home of perhaps the only Missourian more famous than Harry Truman himself: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
He never went to college, but Harry Truman was as well read as any president. “From the time I was ten years old,” he wrote, “I had spent all my idle hours reading.” His reading list is impressive, to say the least: Plutarch, Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, every Shakespeare play and sonnet, the Koran. But his favorite author, his “patron saint” of literature, was Mark Twain. One of Truman’s prized possessions was a twenty-five-volume set of Twain’s works, which he bought for twenty-five dollars in 1910—the year Truman turned twenty-six and the year Twain died at seventy-four. As president, Truman kept a
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