Free Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip by Matthew Algeo Page A

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,