Truman Read online

  “Yes, it is true that Mrs. Wallace did not think Harry was good enough for Bess,” a member of the Wallace circle would comment with a smile sixty years afterward, her memory of it all quite clear. “But then, don’t you see, Mrs. Wallace didn’t think any man was good enough for Bess.”

  In March 1914 his own mother suddenly took ill. The local doctor called in a specialist who decided that an operation for hernia must be performed and at once, there in the house. Harry had to stand beside her bed and hold a kerosene lamp while the doctor worked and “parts” were removed from his mother. It was, Harry said afterward, an experience he hoped he would never have to repeat.

  Apologetically he told Bess he would be unable to leave home for several days. Mamma, as he had once written, was a person for whom there was no substitute. “I hope she lives to be a hundred and one.”

  How direct a connection there was between his steadfast performance during the operation and afterward and the event that followed is not certain. But it was only a few weeks later when Mamma gave him the money to buy an automobile. And it was to be no farmer’s Model T Ford. If anyone had ever rewarded a son with one grand generous gesture, she had. Nothing could have pleased him more or made such an immediate difference in his life. He had never had anything of his own of such value or that drew such attention. He was to love automobiles all his life, but this was the automobile of his life.

  It was a big, black, five-passenger 1911-model Stafford, hand-built in Kansas City by a man named Terry Stafford. Only three hundred of the cars were ever made. It had a four-cylinder engine, right-hand drive, a high brass-framed windshield, and Presto-Lite lamps nearly the size of the lamps on locomotives. On a good road, Harry soon demonstrated, it could do 60 miles an hour. It was a rich man’s car. New, it sold for $2,350. Harry paid $650. The house needed paint; payments on loans and the cost of the lawsuit over his grandmother’s will had stretched the family’s finances to the limit. From all practical viewpoints such an automobile was a huge extravagance—$650 would have been more than enough to pay for two hired men for a year—but to Harry $650 for such an automobile was a “bargain.” While not the first in Grandview, it was certainly the fanciest. In Independence, not even George Porterfield Gates had anything like it. With a little work on the engine, Harry found, he could go up Dodson Hill—considered the great test locally—so fast he had to shut off the power before reaching the crest.

  He could come and go as he pleased now, and mostly it was go, on Blue Ridge Boulevard to Independence. Rolling through the shaded streets of Independence on a spring Sunday, wearing a sporty new cap, a fresh white shirt and proper Sunday necktie, the top down on the car, its brass all polished, he would never be taken for a hayseed. Bess and three or four others would pile into the “machine,” off with him for an afternoon of fishing on Blue River or a picnic at the waterworks beside the Missouri at Sugar Creek. Or Harry would treat them to “a spin” in the country.

  He had a gang again, as he had not since boyhood. Besides Bess and the Noland sisters, there were Bess’s two brothers Frank and George and their best girls, Natalie Ott and May Southern. Harry and his car were the center of attention. They would all pose for pictures with the car, Harry at the wheel. Harry was always good company, said May Southern, who would soon marry Bess’s brother George. Harry, she said a lifetime later, never complained about anything unless there were onions in the potato salad. “Harry didn’t like onions.”

  Uncle Harrison also enjoyed “a spin” with the top down, in any weather. One expedition for his benefit was to Monegaw Springs, an old Missouri spa about eighty miles from Grandview. Mamma, too, had insisted on going along for the ride in Lizzie, as Harry was calling the car by this time.

  I started for Monegaw Springs on Sunday [he began a memorable account for Bess]. Mamma went along and we almost reached the springs without an accident. We got within a half mile of them and ran over a stump. I spilled Uncle Harry over the front seat and threw Mamma over my own head. Neither of them were hurt, except Uncle Harry renewed his profane vocabulary. I backed Lizzie off the stump and ran her into town with a badly bent axle. Mamma and I started for home at 6:00 A.M. on Monday. Got within seventy-five miles of it and it began to rain. Had the nicest slipping time you ever saw. What with a crooked axle and a bent steering wheel I could hardly stay in the road. Five miles south of Harrisonville Lizzie took a header for the ditch and got there, smashing a left front wheel into kindling. I phoned to Ferson and he sent me his front wheel. The accident happened within a half mile of a R.R. station, Lone Tree by name. Mamma and I sat there from 1:30 till 8:00 P.M. waiting for the wheel. It arrived all right and I couldn’t get it on. Then it began to rain in real earnest. I got soaked. A good farmer came and took us up to his house and we stayed all night. Next morning he hitched his team to Lizzie and pulled her out of the ditch. (I had tried to put the wheel on wrong end to, the night before.) He would not have a cent for keeping me nor pulling the car out. We started for Harrisonville and got about five miles north of there when we ran through a puddle and got the mag wet. Had to phone back to Harrisonville and get a man to come and tear it up—cost a five-dollar bill. Another good farmer took us to dinner free. Finally got to Grandview at 3:00 P.M.…

  Mary Jane had spoken up, saying she wanted driving lessons—“I guess I’ll have to do it, though,” said Harry reluctantly, “since Mamma paid for the thing.” When Mary Jane crashed into the front gate, Harry was thankful it was only the gate she hit and not the stone post.

  In three months he drove 5,000 miles. Not since his first pair of eyeglasses had anything so changed his life, and again it was Mamma who made it happen. Her decision was also, of course, a way of telling him she approved of his reason for wishing to be on the road. If Bess Wallace was what he wanted, she would do what she could to see nothing stood in the way.

  In time, Papa, too, declared himself “well pleased” with the purchase and by midsummer would “raise a rumpus” for Harry to drive him out to survey the roads. “Imagine working the roads in a machine,” Harry wrote.

  But by midsummer 1914, the summer the Great War began in Europe, it had become apparent that something was seriously the matter with John Truman. He had strained himself sometime earlier, exactly as he had so often warned Harry not to. Trying to move a boulder from one of the roads, the hard, stubborn little man had refused to give up and so had been done in by a stone in the path, like some figure in a parable.

  Though the pain persisted, he refused to see the specialists, as Matt had, fearing an operation. By Labor Day an X-ray revealed that a severe hernia was causing an intestinal block. John was told he had to decide between surgery or the grave. He had already lost a great deal of weight and looked dreadful.

  “If anyone asks him how he’s feeling,” wrote Harry, “he always says fine, even if he can’t raise up his head.” Fearing the worst, Harry urged the operation as the only choice left.

  The automobile now became the means for getting his father to and from the doctor in Kansas City, who was a Chinese, the supposed family hatred of Orientals notwithstanding. Harry worried continually. He didn’t see how he could ever get by without his father, he confessed to Bess. “You know he is sixty-three and an operation at that age is nearly always fatal.”

  Harry ran the farm, took over the road work, and drove John to the doctor as often as four times a week. He wondered if the fates were conspiring against him, he told Bess, but her “good letters” helped “put that backbone into me to accomplish what I’ve set out to do in spite of the devil and all his angels.” Some evenings his father could hardly talk and Mamma, as she had never done before, asked Harry to forgo the trips to Independence. Meantime, it was essential that Harry “make things hum” and get in 200 acres of wheat.

  The operation on John Truman was performed at the Swedish Hospital in Kansas City in October. Bess sent flowers, which greatly pleased Harry and his father, who refused to let the nurse throw them away until they were entirel
y gone. John returned home, but Harry knew he could not last long. Word of his condition spread and neighbors began to call.

  “I remember the Sunday afternoon Father and Mother drove over to the Truman home to visit him,” wrote Stephen Slaughter. “It was known at the time that Mr. Truman had only a short time to live. And I remember the sadness Father and Mother felt after the visit.” Full of despair, John had said he was a failure in life. “Father had given him what comfort he could,” Stephen remembered. John was told what a good neighbor he had been. He was reminded of the friends he had made, the useful work he had done, the fine family he had raised. Undoubtedly Harry was present as his father talked of his failure, for by this time Harry was rarely away from his father’s side.

  John Truman died the morning of Monday, November 2, 1914.

  “I was with him,” Harry said years later. “I had been sitting with him and watching a long time. I nodded off. When I woke up he was dead.”

  Brownie Huber, the hired man, who was also at the house, recalled: “Harry and I often got up real early and very quietly so as not to awaken his mother and sister. He would make biscuits, cook oatmeal and fry eggs. That is the way it was the morning his father died. I was eating breakfast while Harry went in to stay with the old gentleman, when he appeared at the door and said, ‘Dad just passed away.’ ”

  The day of the funeral, schools were closed in Grandview. Friends came to the service at the house from everywhere in the county. Their buggies and horses and Model T’s were drawn up all along the drive beneath the bare trees. A headline in the Independence Examiner reported the loss of “An Upright Citizen Whose Death Will Be a Blow to His Community.” Burial was at the old Forest Hill Cemetery in Kansas City, at the brow of a slope beside the graves of Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young.

  To Bess, Harry wrote: “I have quite a job on my hands now…. You know, I’ve been in the habit of running the farm for some time, but Papa always made it go.”

  V

  If it was sure-enough war, wheat would go higher still, farmers had been saying all summer. And then it had come, in the first week of August, when sixty thousand German troops crossed into Belgium at Liège. The papers were filled with war news and as Willa Gather would write, even to “quiet wheat-growing people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way of thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of unforeseeable natural disaster….” By September the German armies had swept through Belgium and into France as far as the Marne River, where the French were making a heroic stand.

  To Harry, with his sense of history, his fascination with military heroes, his previous part in the National Guard, all this, presumably, should have been of greatest interest. But the letters he wrote said nothing of the war. Even after his worries and grief over his father had passed, the subject of the world at large received no mention. To judge by what he was writing to Bess Wallace, little beyond his own immediate life ever drew his attention or thoughts from the time he first began corresponding with her in 1910. The only exception was the presidential contest of 1912 that elected Woodrow Wilson, the first Democrat to win the presidency since Grover Cleveland, and to Harry, a great man. If he was at all concerned about what was happening in France, or perceived any connection between the war headlines in the papers and his own fate, he gave no sign of it except once, two years later, when he told Bess he had had a dream. He had fallen from a plane over France and wound up in a hospital crying because he couldn’t see her.

  As it was, he had plenty to think about. He felt the responsibility of the farm keenly and “gave it everything he had,” as his sister later said. “I almost got done planting corn this evening…. I was in the field at six o’clock and quit at seven. Nearly a day’s work,” he informed Bess in April 1915. “…I’ve simply got to make things come across this year if I have to work night and day.” He worried about the weather. He worried about his debts. He worried that the men would never work for him as they had for his father.

  He kept on as road overseer for another six months, until a rival faction took over at the Independence Courthouse and he was out. From February to August he also served as postmaster in Grandview, though in name only, since he left the work to an assistant, a widow, who he thought needed the money more than he did.

  He was up with the sun every morning, still, even with Papa gone. Early morning was the best time for “solid thinking,” he liked to say. He was thirty years old. He had been on the farm eight years, or more than a quarter of his life. He had lost none of his devotion to the family, or his determination to win Bess Wallace, or his good humor. (She must send him another picture of herself soon, he said, so he could have one downstairs as well as up. “It’s right unhandy to chase upstairs every day to see how you look.”) Yet his restlessness was greater than ever. He hated his “slow progress” at home, even with the rise in farm prices. He had reached a point, in fact, where he might have gone off in any of several directions with his life, given the opportunity.

  With Uncle Harry in tow, he traveled to Texas hoping to entice him into some land speculation. The trip, like his earlier ones, came to nothing. Involved next in a zinc mine in Oklahoma, he told Bess, “There’s no one wants to win half so badly as I do.” He pictured the two of them in an ideal country house and the thought made the delays nearly unbearable. “Then I wake up and see our old house going to wreck for want of paint and repairs because I must pay interest on a debt I had no hand in making and my dream has to keep waiting.”

  When the suit over his grandmother’s will was settled at last, after six years, his mother wound up no better off than before. She won the case and kept the farm, but what money came of it was consumed in lawyers’ fees. Even before John Truman’s death she had been forced to put another mortgage on the land. To pay off doctors’ bills and funeral expenses, Harry had to sell some Black Angus cattle he had only recently acquired. Now, along with Uncle Harry, his mother was advancing him money for his zinc-mine venture, which infuriated Vivian, who thought Harry had already been given quite enough and would be better off paying attention to the farm.

  Vivian proved correct. The zinc mine was Harry’s first big experience with failure of his own doing.

  The mine was located at a point called Commerce in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, just over the Missouri line, and 192 miles from Grandview. If the weather was right, the roads passable, and provided he had no blowouts and succeeded in fording four river bottoms, he could make it in the Stafford, he claimed, in seven hours. More often he took the train.

  “This place down here is certainly one beyond the limit,” he wrote from Commerce early in 1916. “When it rains there is water six inches deep over everything. When it’s dry the dust is as deep over everything.” He was homesick, lonesome, yet expecting to be “on velvet” before long. Someday, he vowed, he would have a Pierce Arrow.

  “I don’t suppose I’d ever have been real pleased if I hadn’t tried just once to get rich quickly,” he would tell Bess before it was over.

  He had put up several thousand dollars to go into partnership with two brother Masons, Thomas Hughes, a Grandview farmer, and a Kansas City promoter named Jerry Culbertson, neither of whom knew any more about mining than he did. They called themselves the T-H-C Mining Company and bought what was known as the Eureka Mine at Commerce, hoping to cover their start-up expenses with the waste ore that had been left lying about above ground by the previous owner. Their troubles began almost immediately. The superintendent they hired turned out to be a crook. A rival group shut off the water needed for processing the ore. Equipment failed. Meantime, Harry kept shunting back and forth to Grandview, often twice a week, trying to hold things together at both ends.

  Jerry Culbertson had no interest in the day-to-day operations of the mine, and when lightning struck Tom Hughes’s barn at Grandview, burning it to the ground, Hu
ghes refused to give any more of his time, leaving the job to Harry, whose outlook swung from “blue-sky” confidence to abject gloom and back again. It was proving a liberal and expensive education, he observed during one of his high points. Of necessity he became a mechanic, mine superintendent, night watchman, and, above all, “official straightener” of mix-ups. He had never worked so hard or worried so much. And he refused to give up. “I can’t possibly lose forever,” he wrote plaintively to Bess. He had put Mary Jane in charge at home, but the hired men resented taking orders from a woman. When two of them quit, Harry had to catch the next train.

  He saw his money vanishing. On May 19, 1916, feeling unusually sorry for himself after a trying day at Grandview, he wrote Bess a letter of a kind she had not seen before. He had begun to think his knack for failure was hereditary:

  The mine has gone by the board. I have lost out on it entirely. If Uncle Harry had not been sick I should have gone down there Tuesday evening. It is a setback from which I don’t suppose I shall very soon recover. If I don’t lose all the livestock I have, it will only be because I shall turn it over to Mamma. I shall join the class who can’t sign checks of their own I suppose. It is a hard nut to crack but it had to be done. There was never one of our name who had sense enough to make money. I am no exception.