Free Harry Truman by Margaret Truman Page B

it regularly earned $15,000 a year - the equivalent of $50,000 to $60,000 today. She had an excellent education, having graduated from the Baptist Female College in Lexington, Missouri, where she majored - if that is not too strong a word - in music and art. I have already noted that she taught my father to read before he was five; she had him playing the piano not much later.
    Mamma Truman was the moving spirit behind the family decision to set up housekeeping in Independence. They had been living on the Young farm for three or four years, but the country schools in nearby Grandview were decidedly inadequate, compared to those in Independence. At this point in time - 1890 - Independence was by no means the quaint little farming community that some of my father’s biographers have imagined. It was a very genteel town, with plenty of what might be called “old money” in it, if we foreshorten the term a little. In its heyday, before the railroad spanned the West, Independence had been the jumping-off point for both the Santa Fe and Oregon trails. There were only about 6,000 people living in the town in 1890, but there was a remarkable number of houses built along spacious Victorian lines.
    The Trumans moved into one of these, on Chrysler Street, formerly owned by a wealthy family named Blitz. Kansas City, only a few miles away at the western end of Jackson County, was a roaring boom town of 55,000. But neither the Trumans nor the Youngs would ever have dreamt of living there. That was the “Yankee town.” Independence was the stronghold of the old original pioneers in Jackson County, most of whom, like the Trumans and the Youngs, came from Kentucky. The atmosphere in Independence was Southern in the best sense of that much-abused word.
    The pace was slow and dignified, the people friendly. The word “family” included numerous cousins, and the bond between “kin” was strong. The past was very important. I am sure my father’s interest in history was born in his numerous discussions of the Civil War with his mother. She always talked as if the Yankee guerrillas from Kansas Territory - “Jayhawkers” as they were called - had appeared at the Young farm only a few weeks ago to slaughter the pigs and cattle, kill the chickens, and steal the family silver and featherbeds. When she recalled these memories for me, she always seemed to reserve a special resentment for the loss of those featherbeds - something that long puzzled me. Only when I was an adult did I realize that it took months of plucking geese to create a featherbed, and they were extremely valuable.
    This absorption in the Southern side of our historic quarrel led my father inevitably to an equally strong interest in politics - on the side of the Democratic Party. Democrats were not made by campaign promises and rational debate in Independence. They were born. As for Republicans, Mamma Truman always talked about them as if, at that very moment, somewhere in Kansas they were all collectively dining off her mother’s silver.
    My impression of John Anderson Truman is not nearly as sharp as my impression of Mamma Truman, because he died in 1914, ten years before I was born. He exists in my mind as a shadowy figure, lovable and charming in many ways, but without the hard delightful impact that flesh and blood leave on the memory. He was a small man - and very sensitive about it. For years, I was puzzled because, in the few pictures of him that were taken with my grandmother, he was always sitting down while she was standing up. He was two inches shorter than she was, which meant that he must have been only about five foot four.
    John Anderson was an energetic, ambitious man, who tried to follow in his father-in-law’s footsteps, and make a career of cattle and livestock trading. The house he purchased on Chrysler Street in Independence had several acres of ground, and there were many cows, goats, and horses in pens in the yard. He was also a born farmer and had