Now Harry, you be good.
—MARTHA ELLEN TRUMAN
I
Harry Truman liked to say in later years that he had the happiest childhood imaginable. Grandpa Young took him riding over the countryside in a high-wheeled cart behind a strawberry roan trotting horse. Grandpa adored him, the boy knew. One summer, every day for a week, they drove six miles to the Belton Fair and sat together in the judges’ stand watching the races and eating striped candy. It was “the best time a kid ever had.” Grandpa was “quite a man, a great big man” with a flowing white beard and strong hands.
Until Mamma gave birth to a third child, the boy’s only competition for attention was little Vivian, who still wore his hair in curls. On a day nearly as memorable as those at the Belton Fair, Grandpa and he conspired to give Vivian a haircut, sitting him up in a highchair on the south porch. Mamma was furious when she discovered what they had done, but amazingly she said nothing, so unassailable was Grandpa’s authority.
The porch where the haircut took place overlooked a broad bluegrass pasture with a creek where the boys were allowed to explore on their own, accompanied by a black-and-tan dog of uncertain ancestry called Tandy and a cat named Bob. Harry would also remember a swing under an old elm close to the house and another swing indoors in the front hall for rainy days. The long porch on the north side of the house made a perfect race track for their red express wagon.
They went hunting for bird nests and gathered wild strawberries in prairie grass as tall as they. The farm was “a wonderful place.” These were “wonderful days and great adventures.” The Young land seemed to go on and on. A few miles beyond the immediate farm with its 600 acres was a second farm owned by Grandpa, this with nearly a 1,000 acres. There were herds of cattle, saddle horses, draft horses, mules, sheep, hogs, chickens, ducks, and geese. Harry’s father presented him with a black Shetland pony and a new saddle. With the pony on a lead, he let the boy ride beside him as he made his rounds. “I became familiar with every sort of animal on the farm,” Harry wrote long afterward, “and watched the wheat harvest, the threshing and the corn shucking, mowing and stacking hay, and every evening at suppertime heard my father tell a dozen farmhands what to do….”
It was a time of self-contained security and plenty, such as the Trumans were not to know again.
Most marvelous in memory for Harry was the abundance of food—dried apples, peaches, candy and nuts of all kinds, “wonderful cookies,” pies, corn pudding, roasting ears in summer. “There were peach butter, apple butter, grape butter, jellies and preserves,” he would write, all produced in a big crowded kitchen by Grandma Young and a German hired girl. Following the late autumn freeze and hog-killing time came homemade sausages, souse, pickled pigs’ feet, and lard rendered in a tremendous iron kettle said to have been too heavy for Old Jim Lane to carry away.
From his Aunt Ada, the boy learned to play euchre. Uncle Harry told amusing stories and taught him a card game called cooncan, a form of gin rummy then more popular than poker. Though Uncle Harry, the bachelor uncle, had forsaken farming for the “bedazzlements” of Kansas City, he returned often, bringing candy and toys. Like Grandpa Young, he was a big man, over six feet tall, “strong as a wrestler,” good-humored, handsome, and like Grandpa Young, he made Harry feel he was somebody particular, because he was named for him. “When he came it was just like Christmas.”
The child liked everybody, to judge by his later recollections. Cousin Sol Chiles, then in his teens and often surly and difficult, would be remembered as somebody who “really made life pleasant.” Sol’s mother, Aunt Sallie, was a “lovely person.” Aunt Laura, another frequent visitor from Kansas City, was “somebody we always enjoyed.”
Yet life had its troubles and woes. On the summer day when his Grandfather Truman died, three-year-old Harry had rushed to the bed to pull at the old man’s beard, trying desperately to wake him. Climbing on a chair sometime afterward, in an attempt to comb his hair in front of a mirror, he toppled over backward and broke his collarbone. Another time he would have choked to death on a peach stone had his mother not responded in a flash and decisively, pushing the stone down his throat with her finger, instead of trying to pull it out. Later, when Grandpa Young lay sick in bed and the little boy approached cautiously to inquire how he was feeling, the old pioneer, fixing him with a wintry stare, said, “How are you feeling? You’re the one I’m worried about.”
It was Mamma, Harry decided, who understood him best. She was brighter than anyone, he thought, and cared most about his well-being. Holding him in her lap while explaining the large print in the family Bible, she taught him to read before he was five. Then the summer of 1889, following his fifth birthday, Mamma surprised him with a baby sister, of whom nothing had been said in advance. From the sound of crying upstairs he and Vivian thought a new pet had arrived. The baby was named Mary Jane, after John Truman’s mother, the grandmother they had never known, and to Harry she was a miracle. He adored her.
It was Mamma also, a year later, who hustled him off to Kansas City for expensive eyeglasses. Though he had been badly handicapped by poor eyesight all along—“blind as a mole,” in his words—no one seems to have noticed until the night of a July Fourth fireworks when Matt saw him responding more to the sound of the skyrockets than to the spectacle overhead. The Kansas City optometrist diagnosed a rare malformation called “flat eyeballs” (hypermetropia, which means the boy was farsighted) and Matt agreed to a pair of double-strength, wire-rimmed spectacles at a cost of $10.
All at once the world was transformed for him, as if by magic. And as quickly he became a curiosity, small boys with eyeglasses being almost unknown in rural Missouri.
Her heart went out to him, Matt later said, but she was determined not to pamper. While Grandma Young gave every youngster free rein, Mamma taught that punishment followed transgression. She had a switch and she would use it. When Harry led Vivian and another child on an expedition to a water hole in the south pasture, to spend a glorious afternoon plastering each other with mud, she punished Harry severely, and Harry alone, for being the ringleader.
But more painful by far were Papa’s occasional outbursts, for though John Truman never spanked, never laid a hand in anger on any of his children, which seems remarkable for a man of such known temper, his scoldings were enough to “burn the hide off.” One incident was never forgotten. His father had been leading him on the pony when Harry fell off, only to be told that any boy who could not stay on a pony at a walk must walk himself. Harry cried all the way back to the house, where Mamma let it be known she thought he had been unjustly treated.
Still more change followed in the summer of 1890, the summer of the eyeglasses, when Mamma announced they were leaving the farm, moving to Independence, so that Harry could receive proper schooling. With money inherited from his father, John Truman acquired a house and several lots on South Crysler Avenue, close to the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks. At age forty, having attained nothing like the success forecast in the Jackson County History, John had decided to try again as a stock trader. He paid $1,000 down for house and land, and took out a mortgage for $3,000, certain he had driven a good bargain with the owner, Samuel Blitz, one of the few Jews in town.
For Harry, whose world, through the new eyeglasses, had only just come into focus, the next few years were to be a time of great adjustment.
In 1892, Solomon Young died at age seventy-seven. Less than a year later, a black servant girl trying to light a coal-oil lamp accidentally ignited a fire that burned the Young house to the ground. Practically nothing was saved, and though a small house, intended as a temporary replacement, was put up on the same spot for Grandma Young, and Uncle Harrison returned to help manage things, the old way of life at the homeplace was over. The one personal possession of Grandpa Young’s to survive the disaster was the brass telescope from his days on the plains, which he had given to Matt sometime before.
Nine-year-old Harry’s feelings at the time of his Grandfather Young’s death went unrecorded. But in later years he would talk often of the “big man” in his background who had made his own way in the world, on nerve and will, who had seen the Great West when it was still wild, who played a part in history, and who—of course—came home always to Missouri. With such a grandfather a boy could hardly imagine himself a nobody.
He appears to have liked school from the start. He liked his first-grade teacher, Miss Mira Ewin. He liked his second-grade teacher, Miss Minnie Ward. He liked all his teachers, by his later account—“I do not remember a bad teacher in all my experience,” he would reflect—and learned quickly how to make them like him. In this he felt he had quite a knack. He made a study of people, he remembered. “When I was growing up it occurred to me to watch the people around me to find out what they thought and what pleased them most…. I used to watch my father and mother closely to learn what I could do to please them, just as I did with my schoolteachers and playmates.” It was thus, by getting along with people, he discovered, that he could nearly always get what he wanted.
By all surviving evidence he was an exceptionally alert, good little boy of sunny disposition who, with the glasses that so greatly magnified his blue eyes, looked as bright and interested as could be. Mira Ewin, the first-grade teacher, remembered never having to reprimand him. “He just smiled his way along,” she said. A report card for second grade shows him consistently in the 90’s in spelling, reading, and deportment. His lowest grade for the first marking period was an 86 in writing—naturally left-handed, he was being taught to use his right hand—but by the third marking period he had brought that up to a 90, while for both language and arithmetic he received a perfect 100 percent.
The fourth marking period is missing because in midwinter, early in 1894, both he and Vivian came down with diphtheria, and though Vivian recovered quickly, Harry took a dramatic turn for the worse. He became paralyzed in his legs and arms and could only lie helplessly. For months Matt wheeled him about in a baby carriage, until abruptly, miraculously he recovered, and from that point on was seldom sick again.
When it was suggested to Vivian years later that his mother had to have been terribly frightened by the crisis, he said she “didn’t scare easy.”
Tutored through the summer, Harry made such progress that he was allowed to skip third grade and go directly into fourth. By now also he was reading “everything I could get my hands on—histories and encyclopedias and everything else.” For his tenth birthday, in the spring of 1894, his mother presented him with a set of large illustrated volumes grandly titled in gold leaf Great Men and Famous Women. He would later count the moment as one of life’s turning points.
There were four volumes: Soldiers and Sailors, Statesmen and Sages, Workmen and Heroes, and Artists and Authors. They were not books for children, but anthologies of essays from Harper’s and other leading American and English magazines. The subjects, numbering in the hundreds, ranged from Moses to Grover Cleveland. The authors included Edward Everett Hale on Goethe, Lord Macaulay on Samuel Johnson, H. Rider Haggard on Cortéz, and young Theodore Roosevelt on Winfield Scott. Harry would eventually plow his way through all of them, Soldiers and Sailorsappealing especially. He dreamed of becoming a great general. He loved best the story of Hannibal, who had only one eye. “There is not in all history [he read] so wonderful an example of what a single man of genius may achieve against tremendous odds….” Of the American heroes, his favorites, not surprisingly, were Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee, who was his mother’s idol. It was to be worthy of her, he would one day confide to a friend, that he studied the careers of “great men.”
Included in the Lee biography was a letter from Lee to his son written in 1860. Though she could never have found the words, it was what Matt herself might have written to the boy as the new century approached:
You must be frank with the world; frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do right…. Never do anything wrong to make a friend or keep one; the man who requires you to do so, is dearly purchased at a sacrifice. Deal kindly, but firmly with all your classmates; you will find it the policy which wears best. Above all do not appear to others what you are not.
Matt and John Truman both wanted books in the house. John kept loose change in a tray from an old steamer trunk, to save for a set of Shakespeare. Harry would never recall being bored, “not once,” he said, because “we had a houseful of books.” He read the Bible (twice through by the time he was twelve, he later claimed), “pored over” Plutarch’s Lives, a gift from his father, and in time to come, read all of the new set of Shakespeare. The reading was not something you talked about outside the house, he explained. “It was just something you did.”
Home now was a white clapboard, carpenter’s-planbook house not unlike a number of others in Independence, except for a cupola with a gilded rooster weathervane. Sloping away at the back was an unusually deep lot of several acres, where John Truman, an avid gardener, grew strawberries and vegetables, and kept cows, horses, and whatever livestock he happened to be trading at the moment, which could be a surprising number. For a time there were no fewer than five hundred goats quartered on the property. Trying to sink a well, he hit natural gas, with which he heated both his house and that of a neighbor. It was a rare piece of good luck for John Truman.
Beyond the back fence, about 150 yards or so distant, was the Missouri Pacific depot, while on the north side of the house the main tracks ran so close the trains would rattle the kitchen dishes. The soot and noise were something for Matt to contend with, not to say the smell of five hundred goats.
Harry was fascinated by trains, and daily a total of twenty-three went by. He would sit alone on the roof of the coal shed behind the house counting freight cars, or, on winter nights, awake in his bed, listen for the eastbound Kansas-Nebraska Limited, which made no stop at Independence and began shrieking its warning whistle miles beyond town.
“Harry, do you remember how much you loved the trains?” his cousin Ethel Noland would ask years afterward.
“I still do,” he said.
First and second grade were at the Noland School on South Liberty Street, which was a long walk, but when the new eight-room Columbian School opened on South River Boulevard, he had only to go three blocks. He kept to himself more than most boys his age and in later years he would speak feelingly of the isolation of childhood. “It’s a very lonely thing being a child.” He seldom played games. He was afraid of the rough-and-tumble of the schoolyard and because of his glasses, felt incapable of any sport that involved a moving ball. He much preferred being at home.
To help with the cooking and washing, the family now employed a woman named Caroline Simpson, who was “black as your hat,” and who, with her husband, “Letch,” and four children, lived with the Trumans. Caroline Simpson taught Harry to cook on the big wood stove and talked to him by the hour. He liked the warmth and chatter of the kitchen, liked to look after his little sister. He would sit with her in a rocking chair for hours at a time, braiding her hair or singing her to sleep. No one was ever so nice to her as her brother Harry, Mary Jane would say in later years. Outside in the yard he never took his eyes off her, afraid she might hurt herself, as he once had. The cellar door had slammed on his foot and cut off the end of his big toe. Mamma had rushed to the rescue, found the severed piece, and held it in place until the doctor arrived to secure it with a coating of crystalline iodoform and a bandage.
For a small boy he was also abnormally neat and clean. John Truman was the kind of father who wanted everything looking just so—grass clipped around fence posts, horses “slicked up,” and his children turned out in like fashion. But in a photograph of Harry made in Kansas City when he was thirteen and about to enter high school, he looks not just spotless, every detail in order, but like a boy who will stay that way.
He was never popular like other boys, never one of the fighters as he called them. Reminiscing long afterward, he spoke of the teasing he endured because of his glasses. “To tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy,” he would say, using the hated word. He ran from fights, he admitted. Yet his brother Vivian had no memory of Harry being teased about his glasses, and to judge by the recollections of several boyhood friends he wasn’t considered a sissy exactly, only different, “serious,” as one recalled:
They wanted to call him a sissy, but they just didn’t do it because they had a lot of respect for him. I remember one time we were playing…Jesse James or robbers and we were the Dalton brothers out in Kansas…and we were arguing about them…we got the history mixed up…but Harry came in and straightened it out, just who were the Dalton brothers and how many got killed. Things like that the boys had a lot of respect for. They didn’t call him sissy.
With girls of his own age he was so shy he could barely speak. His initial brush with other children in Independence was at Sunday School when the family first moved to town. Matt had sent him to the big, new red-brick First Presbyterian Church on Lexington Street, rather than to one of the Baptist churches, because the Presbyterian minister had been especially welcoming to her. At the Presbyterian Sunday School Harry met a blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl named Elizabeth Wallace and decided she was the most entrancing creature he had ever seen. But it was five years before he dared say a word to her. The only girls with whom he felt at ease were his cousins Ethel and Nellie Noland, the daughters of his father’s sister Ella and her husband, Joseph Noland.
His days passed largely in the company of women—Mamma, Caroline Simpson, his teachers, or Grandma Young, who came often to visit. He was surrounded by “women folk” and he got along with them splendidly, kidding and telling stories. His mother liked to say he was “intended for a girl” anyway, an observation he seems to have taken always in good spirit.