Quick Trip

The President whirled through his two-day visit to Missouri at a collar-wilting pace. His first morning in St. Louis he was awake at 5:15, shaved and dressed at 5:30, and out striding along downtown sidewalks at 5:45. At one point during his jaunt he spotted a naval enlisted man named William Hall, standing on the sidewalk in a heated post-dawn argument with a taxi driver. The President tapped the bluejacket on the shoulder and asked: "Where did you get all those battle stars, sailor?" Hall whirled, goggled, hauled himself to attention and stammered an answer: the Pacific. The taxi driver drove off as though he had just seen the biggest traffic cop in the world.

Dash for Shelter. At 7, Harry Truman was aboard a five-car special train, heading for Columbia and the University of Missouri's commencement exercises. By 9:30, in cap & gown, he was marching in the faculty parade around the University stadium. By 10 he was beginning his 18 minute speech, in which he warned against cutting European aid. He raced through the speech; it began to rain just as he started it, and a cloudburst sent his audience of 17,000 stampeding for shelter just as he finished.

Drenched but beaming, the President took refuge in a campus building to receive a Phi Beta Kappa key and an honorary doctorate of laws. He took lunch at the home of the university's tall, grey-haired President Frederick Middlebush. Afterward in the living room he got a new round of laughter and applause by playing the Jenny Lind Polka as a piano duet with his sister, birdlike, 60-year-old Mary Jane Truman, and by giving her a brotherly poke with his elbow for making a mistake in her chording.

By 2:30 he was back on the train 36 miles up the track and making an off-the-cuff speech to a crowd of 5,000 at Mexico, Mo. He left his special car for an automobile at Robertson, Mo. and arrived at Beer Baron August Anheuser Busch Jr.'s manicured, 550-acre estate, Grant's Farm, at 6:05. To the horror of his Secret Service guard, he immediately climbed aboard a horse-drawn coach to inspect a herd of buffalo, elk and deer which roam the Busches' acres. Then he joined the granddaddy of garden parties (200 servants had been assembled for the occasion), drank a slug of bourbon, nibbled some hors d'oeuvres, shook hands with his host, and was on his way again.

Battery D. He got to downtown St. Louis just in time to eat, dress, and appear at a ball which opened the 24th reunion of his old World War I outfit, the 35th Division.

The next morning at 7 he was breakfasting in the Jefferson's mirror-hung Crystal Room with the particular segment of the 35th closest to his heart: the aging warriors of Battery D, 129th Field Artillery, whom he had commanded in France. That afternoon, while 250,000 people cheered along St. Louis' sun-baked downtown streets, he led them--and the rest of the 35th -- in a 16-block parade.

The President beamed and waved his gold-headed cane at the applause and finished his hike without drawing a deep breath; he topped the day off with a speech (see above) to 30,000 people who had gathered along the Mississippi riverfront to dedicate St. Louis' new park, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

It was an amazing physical performance for a man of 66, and he seemed to enjoy every minute of it as heartily as a youngster at his first picnic.

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