Free Harry Truman by Margaret Truman Page A

such as baseball or football, or participate in any kind of roughhousing whatsoever, lest he break the glasses.
    This cut my father off from boys his own age. I have never heard Dad complain about this deprivation. As a lover of books, he emphasizes the new world that the glasses opened for him. “I saw things and saw print I’d never seen before,” he says. But his glasses made Mamma Truman feel a little sorry for him. I know the feeling, now that I have four boys of my own. It is not easy to control the impulse to protect and even overprotect the one who needs the most help.
    Dad spent a lot of time helping his mother in the kitchen, caring for his baby sister Mary Jane, even braiding her hair and singing her to sleep at night. Meanwhile, his younger brother Vivian was rapidly becoming his father’s favorite.
    Not that John Anderson Truman ignored his older son. A story Dad likes to tell demonstrates this, as well as an undercurrent of mild disagreement about how to raise young Harry. “I’d ride with my father on my little Shetland and he on his big horse,” Dad says. “He’d lead my pony and I felt perfectly safe, but one day coming down the north road toward the house I fell off the pony and had to walk about a half mile to the house. My father said that a boy who was not able to stay on a pony at a walk ought to walk himself. Mamma thought I was badly mistreated, but I wasn’t. In spite of my crying all the way to the house, I learned a lesson.”
    There was an enormously strong intellectual-emotional bond between Dad and his mother - the sort of bond which, I have discovered from my delvings into presidential lore, has existed between an astonishing number of presidents and their mothers. No less than twenty-one of the thirty-six American presidents to date have been their mothers’ first boy and almost every one of them were the favorite sons of strong-minded women.
    That brings us to the other side of Dad’s relationship with his mother. Even in her seventies and eighties, when I knew her best, Mamma Truman was a woman with a glint in her eye. She had a mind of her own on almost every subject from politics to plowing. Although she spent most of her long life on a farm, she never milked a cow. “Papa told me that if I never learned, I’d never have to do it,” she explained once to her daughter Mary Jane. Something else I learned from my mother only a year or two ago. Mamma Truman hated to cook, and only made one dish that was praiseworthy - fried chicken. In her early years, she supervised a kitchen that fed as many as twenty field hands, but servants did the real cooking. In her later years, Aunt Mary handled the stove work. Neither she nor anyone else in the family let me in on this secret all during my girlhood years, when we spent almost every Sunday visiting Mamma Truman and dined on her delicious fried chicken. For a while, I was convinced that I was a female dropout because I loathed the idea of cooking from a very early age, and still do it under protest.
    Any boy who spent a lot of time with a mother like Martha Ellen Truman could only emerge from the experience the very opposite of a conventional mamma’s boy. This is one among many reasons why my father always bridled when a writer or reporter tried to pin this image on him. The rest of the family, knowing Mamma Truman, simply guffawed at the notion.
    But Martha Ellen Truman gave her son much else, besides moral fiber. She passed on to him her strong interest in books, music, and art. This may startle some readers. For too many people, particularly in the East, the word “farm” is synonymous with ignorance and poverty. It conjures up images from Tobacco Road or The Grapes of Wrath. Missourians are constantly astonished by this cultural parochialism. Martha Ellen Young Truman came from a family that was, if not aristocratic, certainly upper-middle class. Even in the early 1900s, when her father’s farm was reduced from 2,000 to 600 acres,