Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (9 page)

Springfield held no special place in Harry Truman’s heart.

The Trumans didn’t stop in Springfield, but I did. I wanted to visit the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a ninety-million-dollar complex in downtown Springfield that opened in 2005. Unlike most other presidential libraries, it is not run by the National Archives. Instead, the state of Illinois runs it.

With Harry’s library, the museum component was practically an afterthought. The original design included just two main exhibit rooms. When it was proposed that one of the rooms be dedicated to telling the story of Truman’s life, the former president vetoed the idea. As Wayne Grover, the head of the National Archives, explained at the time, “Mr. Truman … would be offended by anything that looked too much like an advertisement for him.” In fact, the museum would not include a comprehensive exhibit on Truman’s life until the late 1990s.

The Lincoln Library, on the other hand, suffers no shortage of exhibits dedicated to its namesake. The museum, which was designed by HOK, the same architectural firm that designs “retro” ballparks like Baltimore’s Camden Yards, has been described as “cutting edge” and “state of the art.” It features life-size replicas of Lincoln’s boyhood home (a log cabin, of course), his law office in Springfield (which is kind of superfluous, since the real thing is just a few blocks away), his White House cabinet room, his box at Ford’s Theater, even his funeral cortege. Each of these replicas is inhabited by mannequins that are very lifelike (except when deathlike is more appropriate) and a little creepy. Gathered around the table in the cabinet room were Lincoln, seven members of his cabinet—and one real live human being dressed in period costume. He gave me quite a start when he said hello.

The museum unabashedly attempts to be hip. The 1860 election is covered by a videotaped MSNBC news report in a room made to look like a modern TV control room. Of course, it’s all very interactive as well. One wall is completely covered with Civil War–era photographs. The corresponding captions can only be retrieved by touching a computer screen.

The museum does have some cool stuff: a signed copy of the Thirteenth Amendment, a ticket to Lincoln’s second inaugural, a schoolbook containing the earliest known example of his handwriting, a photograph of Fido, the family dog in Springfield. But on the whole it seemed too flashy, designed less to educate or entertain than to simply keep visitors from being bored.

Personally, I like my museums the same way I like my martinis: very dry. Apparently I’m not alone. Historian John Y. Simon has dismissed the Lincoln Museum as “Six Flags over Lincoln” or “Lincolnland.” It’s a far cry from the “research center” that Harry Truman envisioned for his own library. Yet it has proved immensely popular. The museum welcomed its one millionth visitor in 2007, less than two years after it opened, and (it claims) faster than any other presidential museum. Take that, Harry!

Around five o’clock the Trumans pulled into a Shell station on the outskirts of Decatur, Illinois. Harry asked the attendant to fill the tank. Truman had stopped at this particular station many times back when he was in the Senate. “The old man”—the attendant—“kept looking at me as he filled up the gas tank,” Truman recalled. “Finally he asked me if I was Senator Truman. I admitted the charge.”

Harry paid the attendant. Then Bess carefully recorded the purchase on the small card Harry kept in the glove compartment to track the car’s mileage. It would become something of a ritual on the trip, a small ceremony observed at every service station.

Harry’s interest in fuel efficiency was largely financial. Like most Americans, he was concerned about skyrocketing gas prices. Why, just that day, Standard Oil had hiked prices a penny a gallon—to 27.1 cents. The company blamed the increase on rising crude oil prices, which were approaching three dollars a barrel. On Capitol Hill, though, some lawmakers accused the oil companies of collusion and price gouging. The House Commerce Committee had launched an investigation.

Before pulling away from the station, Truman asked the attendant to recommend a good motel in town. “We’d never stayed at one,” Truman later explained, “and we wanted to try it out and see if we liked it.” It would also save them a little money. A night in a motel only cost about five bucks.

The attendant recommended the Parkview Motel and gave Harry directions. Then, as soon as the Trumans were gone, he called the local newspapers.

The Parkview was quiet when Harry and Bess pulled up. The clerk didn’t even recognize them when they checked in. But within minutes the motel’s parking lot swarmed with reporters, photographers, and curious locals. Harry, who had “expected to enjoy the pleasures of traveling incognito,” was dismayed by the carnivalesque atmosphere. It was just what his friends had warned him would happen.

When Decatur Police Chief Glenn Kerwin learned the former president and first lady were traveling by themselves—without even a single bodyguard—he was aghast. What if something happened to them while they were in his jurisdiction? Kerwin immediately dispatched two officers, Francis Hartnett and Horace Hoff, to the Parkview. The Trumans, Kerwin ordered, were to be shadowed around the clock until they left the city. “I don’t need any protection,” Harry pleaded when Hartnett and Hoff showed up at his motel door. But orders were orders. The former commander in chief was outranked by Chief Kerwin. The cops stayed.

Harry unloading luggage from his car outside the Parkview Motel, Decatur, Illinois, June 19, 1953. Harry rejected the suggestion that he be photographed reclined in an easy chair with Bess placing a pillow under his head.

Harry signed a few autographs in the parking lot and sent a note to a child who was ill at the motel. He agreed to be photographed for the papers, as long as the pictures wouldn’t appear until the next day—after he and Bess had left town. One photographer suggested the Trumans pose in their room, with Bess placing a pillow under Harry’s head while he reclined in an easy chair. Harry vetoed that idea, offering to be photographed taking luggage out of the trunk of his Chrysler instead. Then he asked everybody to back off. He and Bess were exhausted from the long drive in the heat, he explained. They had traveled 350 miles in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees. Now they were going to lie down and take a nap.

By the 1920s it was possible for the first time to drive an automobile long distances over paved roads. But if you did, you had to be prepared to rough it. Hotels were concentrated in city centers, usually around train terminals. Outside urban areas just about the only accommodations available to travelers were squalid campgrounds or flophouses. Then, in 1925, an architect named Arthur Heinman opened what he called a “mo-tel”—a motor hotel—along Highway 101 in San Luis Obispo, California, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Heinman’s motel was the first in the world. It consisted of a series of two-room bungalows with attached garages that rented for $1.25 a night. The concept proved nearly as popular as the automobile itself, and soon motels of all shapes and sizes were springing up along roadsides from coast to coast. Even the Depression couldn’t stem the tide. In 1933, according to
The Architectural Record,
the construction of motels was “the single growing and highly active division of the building industry.” By 1940 there were twenty thousand motels in the United States. Nearly all were family-owned, with spectacular neon signs and quirky names like the Linger Longer, the It’ll Do, the Close-Inn, and the Aut-O-Tel. To attract guests, some incorporated kitschy elements of popular culture into their design, such as giant replicas of teepees or spaceships. No two motels were exactly alike.

It wasn’t just weary travelers who frequented motels. Their remoteness and the relative anonymity they afforded made them perfect for illicit assignations. Bonnie and Clyde hid out in motels. So did John Dillinger. In 1940, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover denounced motels as “camps of crime … a new home of disease, bribery, corruption, crookedness, rape, white slavery, thievery, and murder.” But the negative publicity didn’t hurt business. Motels continued to proliferate after World War II. By 1960 there were sixty thousand. But by then the era of the independent, family-owned motel was already fading.

In the summer of 1951, a Memphis businessman named Kemmons Wilson, his wife, and their five children took a family vacation to Washington. Along the way they stayed in motels, most of which Wilson found grossly inadequate—or just plain gross. Many were dirty. None had air-conditioning. And all imposed a surcharge of two dollars per child, a practice that, for obvious reasons, Wilson resented. “My six-dollar room became a sixteen-dollar room,” he remembered. “I told my wife that wasn’t fair. I didn’t take many vacations, but as I took this one, I realized how many families there were taking vacations and how they needed a nice place they could stay.” The motel business, Wilson determined, was “the greatest untouched industry in America.”

As soon as he got back to Memphis, Wilson hired an architect to design a new kind of motel. Every room would have air-conditioning, a television set, and a telephone. There would be a swimming pool, vending machines, and free ice. And children under twelve could stay in their parents’ room for free.

Wilson didn’t know what to call his new motel, so his architect suggested the name of a popular Bing Crosby movie:
Holiday Inn.
(Wilson would eventually be required to pay royalties to Irving Berlin, the composer of the movie’s title song.)

In 1952, the year after Kemmons Wilson’s disappointing family vacation, the first Holiday Inn opened along a busy stretch of Highway 70 outside Memphis. The gaudy, fifty-three-foot green and yellow sign out front was designed by Wilson himself.

Wilson’s goal was to build four hundred Holiday Inns scattered across the country, all exactly alike, none more than a day’s drive from another. Within twenty years there were more than one thousand. Clustered around them were countless other motel chains, not to mention fast-food restaurants, all piggybacking on Wilson’s phenomenal success.

In 1972 Kemmons Wilson was on the cover of
Time
magazine. “Wilson,” said
Time,
“has transformed the motel from the old wayside fleabag into the most popular home away from home.”

And so it came to pass that idiosyncratic, independently owned motels were replaced by sterile corporate cookie cutters where, in Kemmons Wilson’s opinion, the best surprise is no surprise. In 1962 less than 2 percent of all motels were affiliated with a national chain. Today more than 70 percent are.

The Parkview, the motel where the Trumans stayed in Decatur, is still around. Only now it’s a prison. The Illinois Department of Corrections bought the motel in the late 1970s and converted it into a correctional facility for work-release inmates. Officially known as the Decatur Adult Transition Center, or ATC, it houses more than a hundred convicted felons, all male, completing the last three to twenty-four months of their sentences. Security, compared to, say, a maximum-security prison, is light. The “residents” (as they are known in DOC parlance) are permitted to leave the facility during the day to work or attend adult education classes.

Tucked behind a thick stand of pine trees on the corner of 22nd and Pershing, the Decatur ATC still looks like a motel, a long, straight, singlestory building—the classic “I” shape—with a reception area in the middle. A tired traveler today could be forgiven for mistaking it for a working motel—until reading the sign on the door to the office:

Like a Holiday Inn, the best surprise here is no surprise. And they most definitely will leave the light on for you.

I wanted to take some pictures of the building but thought it wise to get permission first. I went inside and explained to the guard at the front desk that I was writing a book about a road trip that Harry and Bess Truman took in the summer of 1953 and I …

He cut me off with a wave of his hand. “You’ll need to talk to the warden,” he said. He took my driver’s license and had me sign a logbook. I was given a badge (but was spared the search). Then I was escorted to the warden’s office, which was an old motel room, complete with a full bathroom. The burly warden was sitting behind a desk, holding a cell phone to one ear and a landline handset to the other. He looked harried. On his desk was a copy of
Law Enforcement Journal
(“Don’t Be Afraid to Pull the Trigger,” “Tasers Getting a Bad Rap”).

I took a seat and put my homemade business card on the desk in front of him. After he hung up the phones, he asked me what I wanted. No introductions, no pleasantries. He wasn’t exactly gruff, but he was all business. I gave him a very condensed version of my spiel: Trumans took a road trip, stayed here when it used to be a motel, can I take pictures? He evinced no interest in the story whatsoever. He just picked up the phone (landline) and called a DOC flack in Springfield. This led to another phone call, and another, before he finally got an answer: yes, I could take pictures, but only of the outside of the building, and I couldn’t photograph any inmates or staff—no pictures of people. I said that was fine with me, thanked him for his time, and hightailed it out of his office.