I'm Just Wild About Harry

(Judy Garland, 1939)

Tonight I finished ready David McCullough's mammoth book "Truman." It was 900+ pages with an additional 100 pages of footnotes, bibliography and index (I did NOT read that). It was completely fascinating and I found myself wishing I'd been born 40 years earlier so I could have had dinner at the White House with him and Bess. (Aside: When I was a wee young lassie, my dad used to reprimand me for cutting my dinner rolls. Apparently it's bad etiquette. He always used to ask me if I'd commit this flagrant act of impropriety if I were dining at the White House. I'd be like, like that's ever going to happen.)

So here are some interesting facts about HST:
* He didn't go to college.
* He enlisted in the army when he was in his early 30's during WWI.
* He didn't get married until he was 35, although he'd had his eye on Bess since childhood.
* He owned a haberdashery at 104 Main in KCMO (a haberdashery is not a place to smoke hash, which is what Tyler thought it was. A haberdashery sells men's dress accessories - ties, belts, shirts, hats, etc. The business failed after a couple of years.
* Except for the time he spent in Washington as Senator and President, he lived his entire married life in his mother-in-law's house at 219 Delaware in Independence. It was also the house he and Bess returned to after being President.
* He was vice president less than four months when he was sworn in as President after FDR's death.
* Within three months of becoming President he made the difficult decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki (millions of flyers were dropped weeks in advance, warning civilians to clear out.). Prior to his swearing in he had no knowledge the bomb existed (FDR kept him in the dark on many important issues.)
* During his second term, the country had a balanced budget and actually reduced the national debt for a couple of years.
* He was largely responsible for curtailing the escalation of the Korean War (and the spread of communism)with his refusal to drop another bomb, this time the H-bomb.
* He was instrumental in the founding of the United Nations and enacted several important civil rights laws.
* When he left the White House he had no pension and no job. The only thing that saved him from bankruptcy was selling the family farm in Grandview.
* He raised the $1.8 million needed for his presidential library himself (it was the first library of its kind).
* When his memoirs came out he signed 4,000 autographs in five hours.

So there you have it. I could have written that book in one page. But it probably wouldn't get a Pulitzer Prize, like McCullough's book did.

I'm adding him to my list of people on my "People I'd Like to Have at a Dinner Party."