Not making much progress, eh? Well, the way the baseball schedules worked out, we had to stay in one place over the holiday weekend, and we had piles of laundry to do, too. All of which made a perfect excuse to take an extra day in Missouri and drag the family up to Independence to visit the home of one of my favorite Presidents, Harry S Truman.
As I think I mentioned earlier, I've been reading a book called Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure, by Martin Algeo, which chronicles a cross-country car trip Harry and Bess made in 1953 from Independence back east to Washington, D.C., and then back home again. It's a very entertaining account of early auto tourism, and as it happens, Harry and Bess stopped in many of the towns we've visited on this trip -- Hannibal, Indianapolis, Columbus, Wheeling. It just seemed too perfect a coincidence.
The more I read about Harry Truman, the more I like him. This high-gabled white Victorian house was where he and Bess lived from the day they got married (when they lived with her mother and brothers) to the day he died, with a few stints in Washington thrown in here and there. While he was President, it was referred to as the "summer White House," but there's hardly anything Presidential about it. Inside, it's furnished in a random mix of antique love seats and needlepointed slipper chairs along with mid-century chintz-covered armchairs and end tables. The kitchen is circa 1950, with a red-Formica-topped kitchen table where Harry and Bess ate breakfast and lunch. Harry's book-lined study is more of a Father Knows Best-ish den than a baronial reading room. Those books weren't just for display, though -- Truman, who had no more than a high-school degree, was a largely self-educated man and voracious reader. The house is a great testament to Truman's desire not to get swell-headed just because he'd accidentally landed in the job of President. 
Though it's only a few minutes from Kansas City, Independence still feels like a sleepy small town where everybody knows everybody else. Except for a series of brass plaques identifying certain landmarks -- the church where Harry and Bess got married, the barber shop where he had his hair cut, the store above which his regular poker club met, the courthouse (right) where he served as judge for a dozen years or so -- the town isn't cashing in on the Truman association, certainly not the way that Hannibal cashes in on Mark Twain.
I guess that's because Truman himself refused to cash in. Though his finances were often tight (no presidential pension back then), he turned down lots of lucrative offers because he felt they would demean the presidency. Instead he spent his post-White House years writing his memoirs and raising funds to build archives for all his papers: the first presidential library, and some say still the best. I haven't been to the others so I can't compare, but the Truman Library was fascinating. The exhibits on Truman's presidency walk you through a complicated era -- rebuilding Europe, the development of the H-bomb, the dawn of the Cold War, the Korean War, McCarthyism, the birth of the civil rights movement -- concisely and yet intelligently, so that even the kids could make sense of it. Poor Truman -- what a world he inherited. And yet he managed to wade through it, making tough decisions and steering a clear course.
Besides the exhibits on the Truman presidency, the Library has preserved Truman's own on-site office, where he met with high-profile visitors from Richard Nixon to Pat Boone, as well as a detailed reproduction of the Oval Office in the White House at the time Truman occupied it. Naturally they have the original desk plaque for which Truman was most famous:
Harry and Bess are buried side by side in the courtyard of the Library, under modest white marble gravestones. (She outlived him by ten years, continuing to live in the family house in Independence.) There are several of his letters to her on display, and it's absorbing to read them -- you sense how much he adored her, and how she kept him grounded.At one time, Independence was apparently a big deal -- the launching point for wagon trains setting out on the Santa Fe Trail and the homesteading wagons of pioneers hitting
Grace went to her first drive-in movie last night, and so today she went to her first drive-in restaurant -- not a drive-through but a drive-in, with carhops and everything. It was just an ordinary Sonic, but a new experience for the kids. Apparently it turned them temporarily goofy.Back to the hotel, time for a dip in the pool and then a visit to the coin-op laundry in the basement. (Man, how fast the dirty clothes pile up.) Then we went back to the Plaza for dinner, taking a roundabout route that crossed over the state line into Kansas, just so we could say we'd done another state. We drove through Mission Hills -- plenty of choice real estate there, I must say.
I wanted to eat at P.F. Chang's, but Grace held out for the Cheesecake Factory across the street. In my opinion the Cheesecake Factory is the lowest-common-denominator kind of chain restaurant, but there is no arguing with Grace. Happy now, Grace?
