Margaret Truman Daniel Oral History Interview

• Margaret Truman Daniel, Oral History Interview, Harry S Truman NHS, Part One

  
  

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• Margaret Truman Daniel, Oral History Interview, Harry S Truman NHS, Part Two

  
  

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• Margaret Truman Daniel, Oral History Interview, Harry S Truman NHS, Part Three

  
  

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• Margaret Truman Daniel, Oral History Interview, Harry S Truman NHS, Part Four

  
  

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• Margaret Truman Daniel, Oral History Interview, Harry S Truman NHS, Part Five

  
  

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Margaret Truman Daniel

Truman Library

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW
WITH
MARGARET TRUMAN DANIEL

NOVEMBER 17, 1983
INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI

INTERVIEWED RON COCKRELL
ORAL HISTORY #1983-5
This transcript corresponds to audiotapes DAV-AR #4067-4071

REVISED EDITION
HARRY S TRUMAN NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

EDITORIAL NOTICE

This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for Harry S Truman National Historic Site. After a draft of this transcript was made, the park provided a copy to the interviewee and requested that he or she return the transcript with any corrections or modifications that he or she wished to be included in the final transcript. The interviewer, or in some cases another qualified staff member, also reviewed the draft and compared it to the tape recordings. The corrections and other changes suggested by the interviewee and interviewer have been incorporated into this final transcript. The transcript follows as closely as possible the recorded interview, including the usual starts, stops, and other rough spots in typical conversation. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written, word. Stylistic matters, such as punctuation and capitalization, follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition. The transcript includes bracketed notices at the end of one tape and the beginning of the next so that, if desired, the reader can find a section of tape more easily by using this transcript.
Jim Williams reviewed the original 1984 transcipt. His corrections were incorporated into this revised transcript by Perky Beisel in summer 2001. A grant from Eastern National Park and Monument Association funded the revised edition of this interview.

RESTRICTION

Researchers may read, quote from, cite, and photocopy this transcript without permission for purposes of research only. Publication is prohibited, however, without permission from the Superintendent, Harry S Truman National Historic Site.
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ABSTRACT

Margaret Truman Daniel (1924-2008) was the only child of Harry S and Bess Truman and grew up in the large Victorian era home at 219 N Delaware. Most of the interview focuses on the history of her family home and the architectural and decorative changes to the home and surrounding grounds through the years. She proceeds to talk about the people and relationships of those closest to her that lived in and near the home, including her great-grand parents George P. and Elizabeth Gates and many other members of her extended family as well as her two uncles and their wives, George and Mae Wallace and Frank and Natalie Wallace, both brothers of Bess Truman, who lived in homes on adjoining property. She briefly mentions what it was like as a child growing up in the neighborhood around 219 N Delaware and several of her childhood friends. Her memories of the family’s relationship with Vietta Garr, the family cook for 40 years gives a glimpse of how close and important the employer/domestic relationship was. Her interview concludes with a brief discussion of what life was like for her mother with secret service protection in the years after her father’s death.

Persons mentioned: Dean Acheson, Allen girls, Charles Anderson, Jane Berridge, Shawsie Branton, Paul Burns, Francis Marion Cockrell, Cousin Carrie, E. Clifton Daniel, Clifton Truman Daniel, Thomas Washington Daniel, William Wallace Daniel, Philip F and Erma Faye Dodson, Dr. R. Ferrell, Vietta Garr, Bessie Gates, Elizabeth Gates, George Porterfield Gates, Tom Hannegan, Ardis Haukenberry, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Valeria LaMere, Robert Lockwood, Robert Nickell, Ella Noland, Ethel Noland, Nellie Noland, Reathel Odum, Ogden girls, Robert Sanders, Roger T. Sermon, Jr., Harry S Truman, Bess Truman, Christine Wallace, David Wallace, David Willock Wallace, Frank Wallace, Fred Wallace, George Wallace, Madge Gates Wallace, May Wallace, Natalie Wallace, George Washington, Mike Westwood, Benedict Zobrist
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PREFACE

The following interview with Mrs. Margaret Truman Daniel, the only child of Harry S and Bess Wallace Truman, was conducted by the researcher in the living room of the Truman family home, at 219 North Delaware Street, in Independence, Missouri. Mrs. Daniel graciously made time during her schedule in Independence to discuss the history of her family home with this Historian as well as with other National Park Service personnel. Park Superintendent Norman J. Reigle was also present during the interview which took three hours.
The primary goal of this interview was to assist in finalizing the History and Significance section of the Harry S Truman National Historic Site Historic Structures Report, the draft of which was on National Park Service review during September and October 1983. While the principal emphasis was on answering concerns pertaining to the structural or architectural history of the home, other areas of historical significance were also addressed.
Ron Cockrell
Research Historian
Midwest Region
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ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH
MARGARET TRUMAN DANIEL

HSTR INTERVIEW #1983-5
RON COCKRELL: Has anybody told you that we have something in common?
MARGARET DANIEL: No.
COCKRELL: We were both born and raised in Independence.
DANIEL: Really!? Some years separately, thought
COCKRELL: Yes, but not all that many! I was born here in Independence in 1958 at Independence Hospital and I graduated from Raytown High School, then moved away. Independence has always been my home.
DANIEL: I was born upstairs in a room in this house.
COCKRELL: Well, yes, I heard about that.
NORMAN REIGLE: I guess I never realized you were born in the house.
DANIEL: Yes, and my mother was superstitious because she had lost two children before I was born and she wouldn’t have any furniture. So they put two pillows in a lower drawer of a bureau and I slept on them for several days until they got a bed.
COCKRELL: I see. Is that the same bureau that is up there now or is that a different one?
DANIEL: No, that’s long gone. It’s been thrown out long ago. Nobody knew it was going to be historical!
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COCKRELL: I guess that’s true!
DANIEL: Actually, there’s not much left in the house—there are antiques, and I pointed out the other things that are antiques to you today. The mirrors are very valuable. This furniture, most of it came from Washington.
COCKRELL: My main purpose today, and we might talk about some of the furnishings, but it is mostly on the history of the house and the architectural or structural changes along with the people who’ve lived inside the house. So, it is kind of an architectural history, and yet it is a history about the people themselves who have lived here. Did you have an opportunity to glance through my Historic Structures Report?
DANIEL: I looked through the downstairs rooms, if you must know, and that’s all.
COCKRELL: Okay.
DANIEL: I put it away very carefully, and labeled it, and saved it because I want to keep it for my children.
COCKRELL: You did glance through to see the format of it and the photographs in it?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Good. I’ve put together a list of questions as soon as I finished the first draft on certain areas which I felt that you could possibly expound upon, or give me some clarifications or your own point of 2
view. The way I would like to start is to go back to the earliest period of the house. In reading some of your own books and other sources, it seems to me that the family here in the house didn’t recall the early years—that this house actually was built in two major stages. One in 1867 and . . .
DANIEL: No. 1862.
COCKRELL: 1862?
DANIEL: My grandmother was . . . The year Grandmother was—it was 1863, but it was finished. You see, she was born in Port Byron, Illinois, then they came here and the house was finished in 1866.
COCKRELL: Sixty-six. All right, but they came to Independence right after she was born?
DANIEL: I’m not sure. They should have, yes. I’m not sure of the exact date.
COCKRELL: We have, through my research and through other historians and architects, uncovered evidence in 1886 of a newspaper published here in Independence that announced the construction of the George Porterfield Gates mansion, a fourteen-room addition. There’s a photograph or an engraving of the house when it was built and it is described as a fourteen-room mansion with water and gas systems installed. [See article and engraving Appendix 1].
DANIEL: That was 1866; it had nothing to do with 1886. My grandmother was already married and living in her own home down on Delaware Street in 1886. My mother would’ve been born by then.
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Article in The Independence Sentinel, January 2, 1886; Harry S. Truman Library and the Jackson County Historical Society
COCKRELL: So you are saying that the house as we see it now was all built...
DANIEL: In 1866. It was added on to, but it was completed by 1866.
COCKRELL: Are you aware of what the additions were?
DANIEL: I think it was this room [living room] and that
COCKRELL: Along with the bathroom?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Do you have any idea what time period that would have been?
DANIEL: It was finished in 1866. This was here then.
COCKRELL: Do you recall any family stories or tales about fires in the house?
DANIEL: Robberies, but not fires.
COCKRELL: Robberies!? This is interesting! Can you tell me something about it?
DANIEL: Well, we had a robber when I was a child, and he came in and he took my grandmother’s—my grandmother was sleeping in that room, that was her room during all my childhood—and he took the family, or her gold jewelry which of course was irreplaceable. The police came and he was hiding at the corner of this porch out here [south side]. The police were such cowards, they wouldn’t get him out. My uncle, Uncle George [Wallace], had a gun. He had a revolver. He was a duck hunter. He may have had a shotgun; I don’t know what kind of a gun it was. He pointed it at the bush and
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said, “If you don’t come out, I’m shooting.” And he came out!
COCKRELL: Was the jewelry recovered?
DANIEL: It was the second time. He came back. I forgot to say that. He had come back for more, to steal more things. He had broken into my uncles’ houses. I’ll never forget one of the things that he did. I had given my uncles ties for Christmas and he stole their Christmas ties. I was shattered. I didn’t care about the jewelry, but the ties—I thought that was disgraceful. But my uncle caught him and then the police did put him in jail. So this house was robbed once and the others were robbed twice, the other two houses.
COCKRELL: I had no idea about any of that. You have no knowledge of any fire at one time in the house?
DANIEL: No.
REIGLE: There’s some charring . . .
COCKRELL: . . . up in the attic.
DANIEL: Well, it must have been recent.
REIGLE: No, it’s very old.
COCKRELL: Apparently it is old. In fact I interviewed some workmen that did some work on the roof. This was during the presidential period. They were in the attic and they saw it at that time and said some of it had fallen from the rafters onto the floor. It appeared to him that it must’ve dated back to the 30’s or 20’s, or even further back. You don’t know anything about that?
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DANIEL: No.
COCKRELL: Okay. Also, out in the barn, there’s some charred areas, isn’t there, Norm, on the west side?
REIGLE: I haven’t noticed that. There is another char in the basement. We think now that that was installed—charred. There’s two theories on that.
DANIEL: I don’t remember anything about any fires. I remember when the police came, the night of the robbery, ray mother saying to me, “Now, you go back to sleep. Everything’s all right. You go back to sleep.” Everybody, the lights were all up all over the house, everybody was up and running around the place, and I’m supposed to go back to sleep! I came down here the next morning and I found a policeman sitting in the music room, and I looked at him, and he looked at me and smiled. I went on and asked Mother, “Who’s that?” And she said, “That’s a policeman because we were robbed last night.
COCKRELL: So the policeman stayed to make sure that nobody else came?
DANIEL: Yes. I guess the man had broken a lock on that door [pointing to the door nearest the bedroom in the living room] , and I think they had the policeman in the house until they got the door fixed.
COCKRELL: This would have been when? During the late 20s or early 30s?
DANIEL: It must’ve been the late 20s, because the early 30s, you see, we were gone.
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COCKRELL: That’s right, you moved away from here . . .
DANIEL: Well, we didn’t move away. Congress only met from January until early June. That was in ’34.
COCKRELL: You yourself were here from ’24 until ’34.
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Your grandmother always occupied that first floor bedroom. Did she at anytime ever live upstairs in the master bedroom?
DANIEL: Well, that’s my room up there. This was a guest room for a long time [pointing to the downstairs bedroom], and she had a room up there, and my youngest uncle was still at home across the way. My mother and father had the room that was over that room, and I had my room that is over the dining room. This was used as a guest room, but then when my grandmother got older arid it was hard for her to climb the stairs, well then my mother and my uncle insisted that she move downstairs. They moved all of her furniture down here, and it in effect became her room and was for many years.
COCKRELL: The room that she had had before became what?
DANIEL: Became my room. I latched on to the biggest room I could find! No, actually, I didn’t. I stayed in my own little room, but when I got older there wasn’t anybody in it so they put me in there.
COCKRELL: Do you have any idea on the time frame? You see, historians are always asking, “When?!”
DANIEL: No.
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COCKRELL: I have some photographs here, not too many, but it’s kind of a mystery about them. Here’s one of a little child that I got from the library [identification number 82-59-101]. It was among those that were taken from this house.
DANIEL: It couldn’t have been taken in this house. There were never shutters like that in this house. I have no idea who that could be unless it was my Uncle Fred when he was a child.
COCKRELL: You think it could be?
DANIEL: I don’t know. Have you showed this to my Aunt May?
COCKRELL: No, I didn’t. I think I’m going to have to.
DANIEL: I think you’d better, but you’ll want to ask her about the shutters, but I don’t remember any shutters like that. Of course when he was young like that, that was forty years before I was born. You’d better ask her about that.
COCKRELL: This one is a slide. You should know about this because you’re in it [identification number 82-56-3].
DANIEL: [Laughter] That was in my book. That was the car we went to Washington in every year. That was our old Chrysler. It was taken right out in the backyard.
COCKRELL: Is that the barn in the background?
DANIEL: The house. That’s the back of the porch and the big top part of the house. I think it’s the big top part of the house.
COCKRELL: Well, good. That one’s solved. I have another matter here about an
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automobile. This wasn’t really a part of my report, but our Regional Curator, John Hunter, has been in contact with a man who lives in Arlington, Virginia. He evidently possesses a car that your parents had in Washington and they sold in April of 1945. Here’s what the car looked like. He’s got the title. It’s a ’41 Chrysler.
DANIEL: It must be the same one that’s in that picture. It must be. He said t hey sold it when? ’45?
COCKRELL: They sold it in 1945; it’s a 1941 Chrysler sedan.
DANIEL: In 1945, we had no car that looked like this. We had two cars. You know the car that’s at the library? Dad’s car? All right, mother had the large version of that car. She had the big Chrysler, or maybe that’s a Dodge, I don’t remember. But she had a big, she had a car double that size with four doors. Her license number, people used to take the pledge when they would come into the parking lot in the back of our apartment building because they would be parked together. Dad’s would say 369, and Mother’s said, 369369.
We couldn’t have sold this car in 1945 because we didn’t possess it any longer.
COCKRELL: This man is claiming that it was sold to a couple in the District by the name of Philip F. and Erma Faye Dodson. This man purchased it in 1975. Evidently it was titled and licensed in Missouri under the name of Bess Truman.
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DANIEL: Was it black?
COCKRELL: No. It was gray with maroon interior.
DANIEL: Well, now, that could have been the one with 369369 on it because you see we got rid of that car and the only reason the library has this car today is because Dad gave it to my Aunt Mary [Truman]. In ’45 we went into the White House and we had no use for cars. If this is a white car, beigey white. The same color of the one in the Library.
COCKRELL: Maybe a light gray?
DANIEL: Beige. Not gray. We never had any gray cars because both of my parents hated gray.
COCKRELL: Oh, really? Well that settles it!
DANIEL: Yes. If it was beige it could be that car. Dodson sounds familiar. They were some friends of ours. We knew some Dodsons a long time ago.
COCKRELL: Yes, he said they were acquaintances because he purchased it from them in ’75. Evidently they had had it since 1945.
DANIEL: It’s a good car. They made cars better in those days than they do now.
COCKRELL: Another question, in my research, I noticed that Elizabeth Gates, your great-grandmother, had a small daughter named Bessie who was only a year old when she died. I was wondering, was there any relationship between the naming of your mother to this Bessie?
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DANIEL: I don’t know anything about it, but she must’ve been called Bess for some reason and so it’s possible.
REIGLE: In the cabinet there’s a cup with the name and date on it that would have been before your mother was born.
COCKRELL: Yes, she’s buried in the Gates family plot.
DANIEL: Is she? Well, you see, my great-grandmother was still alive when I was born, but she only lived six months, so I never knew her.
COCKRELL: Do you know why she died?
DANIEL: She was just an old lady who was eighty-three years old. That was old in those days! She and my great-grandfather lived in that room.
COCKRELL: He died in 1918 before your parents were married?
DANIEL: I don’t know.
COCKRELL: Okay. They were!
DANIEL: I’ll take your word for it!
COCKRELL: I read his obituary and it said that he died after a prolonged illness.
DANIEL: In 1918 he had the flu. He probably died from that flu epidemic. That’s what deafened my mother. She was deaf in one ear because of that flu epidemic. She was a Gray Lady. She was a nurse and she caught the flu. She got over it. She was lucky she got through it. But I’m sure that was what killed Nana.
COCKRELL: Main? [Both syllables pronounced with long As]
DANIEL: Nana. That was what he was called. My mother gave him that name because she couldn’t say “Grandpa.” She could not! My 11
great-grandmother was called “Mama Gates.”
COCKRELL: So the Nana and Mama Gates were the common names that were used?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: During my research, in talking to your aunt and Mrs. Haukenberry, there’s a discrepancy over when your mother, and grandmother and uncles moved into this house. Was it right after your grandfather died down the street?
DANIEL: He died in 1903, because I remember they told me that my Uncle Fred [Wallace]—Uncle Fred was the one I can keep track of because he was born in 1900—I was told when I was young that he was three years old when my grandfather died. Now, when they moved up here, I don’t know. What does Beufie say? My Aunt May [Wallace]? Sorry! That’s my nickname for her.
COCKRELL: Right. I read that. She says it would have been in 1903 right after he died, but Mrs. Haukenberry remembers that she moved in in 1904 across the street there and shortly after . . .
DANIEL: Mrs. Haukenberry didn’t live there in 1904.
COCKRELL: Her relatives?
DANIEL: No. Our cousins, my Cousin Nellie and my Cousin Ethel, and my Aunt Ella [Noland]. They were on my father’s side of the family, but I don’t know how she would remember because she wasn’t around.
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COCKRELL: According to her, her own father died shortly around the time that David Wallace [Bess Truman’s father] died and, I don’t know the transition, but she and her mother moved in with their relatives for a short time across the street and then moved somewhere else.
DANIEL: Yes, because I hardly ever knew her mother.
COCKRELL: Oh, really? Well maybe it was just for a short time, but what she had told me was that she recalls Mrs. Wallace and Bess and your uncles moving in here.
DANIEL: I’d go with my Aunt May. I wouldn’t go with Ardis. I really wouldn’t. I didn’t realize that Ardis was that old. She couldn’t have been more than two or three years old. I don’t think.
REIGLE: I’ve heard eighty-six.
DANIEL: My aunt’s eighty-nine. I don’t think that Ardis is that close to my aunt’s age. Maybe she is, but you see I hardly knew Ardis until I was grown. They lived quite a ways away. honestly don’t remember. I know I’ve seen her mother, the only married sister of the three of them. Then there was a nephew, no a brother, the youngest brother. His wife died of a burst appendix. She was a very young woman and he was left with two small boys to raise. They used to baby-sit and take care of them while he was working and I always called him “Rob” because they always called him “Rob.” I was of course grown by this time—not grown but I was much older than these kids. One of them said, “Yes, you knew him 13
then, because we’re the only ones who called him ‘Rob.’” He’s called “Bobby” by all of his friends. That’s like my son, Will, that I call “Will.” His friends call him “Willy.”
COCKRELL: Does he like that, or does his mother just not like that?
DANIEL: His mother doesn’t like that! I don’t think he cares.
COCKRELL: Okay. Another thing that your Aunt May told me was that when your grandmother moved in here, she transformed the room above the kitchen into a sewing and sitting room. I was wondering, was it used that way during the 20s and 30s?
DANIEL: No. It was the back room. Everything was just shoved in there that we didn’t want to use.
COCKRELL: A storage area, then?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: So the sitting room didn’t last very long then?
DANIEL: No, I don’t think so. Well, it was quite a few years of course because my mother was older. Let’s see, she was [born] in 1885 and when her father died she was what, seventeen, eighteen? My uncles weren’t quite grown up. Then, when my—well, I was going to say that there wouldn’t have been any use for it because they would’ve been dead and they would’ve had that room. But that room was never used for anything when I was a child.
COCKRELL: It was just a storage area.
DANIEL: Yes.
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COCKRELL: How about the basement? Were there a lot of things stored there?
DANIEL: Oh, that was for me to play in! That was my place, oh boy! I’d get my friends in there and we’d play Murder. Do you know what Murder is?
COCKRELL: No! How do you do that? Legally!
DANIEL: I looked through the downstairs rooms, if you hide and then when you’re found, you climb in with them until there’s one left and then that one person is “It.” Whoever’s left. That’s Murder. I’ll never forget one day in the bathroom upstairs there used to be an old fashioned tub that sat on feet. I don’t know how we did it, but we got behind the tub, between the tub and the wall, and nobody could find us! This one friend of mine was wandering around and she called my mother and she said—there were only three or four of us playing that day, and there were nine of us together in this group. We were all girls. But, she said, “Mrs. Truman, I can’t find them anywhere, and you made us promise that we wouldn’t go up in the attic.” And she said, “I don’t know where they can be.”
Well, Mother had heard us giggling. She knew where we were. She said, “Why don’t you go upstairs and look in the bathroom.” So she went upstairs and found us, and you know, we had the most awful time getting out!
COCKRELL: I’ll bet!
DANIEL: We were stuck in there between the tub and the wall! That’s the 15
last time we did that. But the basement was a great place. We used to do things at Halloween time. We’d get my slide and we’d put it up at the door to the basement. That was the entrance. You had to pay to get in and we’d give it to charity. We raised money for charity. And you’d slide down the slide and nine times out of ten, you’d slide into a tub of water, which was nice! Then you’d bob for apples; then you’d go back into the back to the basement where we had candles. Of course it was damned dangerous! I wouldn’t turn the lights on. I had candles around back in through there and people would jump out and scare you and say, “Boo!” It was a great place.
COCKRELL: So you made it into kind of a haunted house for Halloween?
DANIEL: Yes, that’s what it was, yes. And then we used to put on plays back there in the backyard, and we gave that money—there used to be a charity called “The Penny Ice Fund” in Kansas City. In those days, people didn’t have refrigerators and they didn’t have any way to keep their food so we used to raise money by sending in all our pennies from all of our allowances so that they could have refrigerators—some place where they could keep their milk and things like that.
COCKRELL: Were you the coordinator of most of this?
DANIEL: Yes. Mostly. My mother was very smart. I was just telling you [Mr. Reigle] I had everything in my backyard that anyone would 16
want to play with. I had a swing. I had a trapeze. I had a teeter-totter. I had a slide, and plenty of trees to climb. We had lots more trees out there than we do now. And we used to climb trees. All nine girls used to come over and play in my yard, and that way my mother never had to worry where I was! Also, I had nearly every kind of locomotion that there was. I had a fire engine. I had a three-wheeled bike; two three-wheeled bikes. I had a big two-wheeled bike. I had a small two-wheeled bike. You name it, I had it. The Library found a lot of them left over in the basement, but they also found my baby carriage down there which was wild.
REIGLE: They also have a tricycle of yours.
DANIEL: Yes, they have my tricycle, my favorite tricycle. 1 don’t know how my Grandmother stood it, but on bad days, I was allowed to ride my tricycle in the house. My mother said she always gave her mother credit for that, that she never complained about that, because she was a very strict woman.
COCKRELL: Really?
DANIEL: Oh, yes.
COCKRELL: You could ride your tricycle in any room then?
DANIEL: Yes, all around here.
COCKRELL: These rooms weren’t carpeted then?
DANIEL: No, no. No! I wouldn’t have been allowed to ride on the carpets. Wooden floors.
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COCKRELL: When did this carpeting come in?
DANIEL: Mother put this in when they moved back from the White House.
COCKRELL: I see, so that would have been back in the fifties; sometime after ’53.
DANIEL: The carpeting? Yes. I thought you meant when I used to ride in here, but that would have been much earlier than that!
COCKRELL: [Laughter]. I would hope so!
DANIEL: Yes! I can time frame that in the 20s, early 30s.
COCKRELL: Another question. Some of the historic photographs that we’ve gotten from the Truman Library show that the house here around the turn of the century, the trim was black and the house was either a light gray or a medium gray.
DANIEL: No. It must be bad photography.
COCKRELL: It was never that way? There were a couple of photographs that way.
DANIEL: The trim was never black.
COCKRELL: As long as you remember it, it’s always been white?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: How about the green trim. Was that always used?
DANIEL: What green trim?
COCKRELL: Around the windows. It’s called Kentucky green. I talked to the painter who has painted the house since ’53 and he said he uses Kentucky green.
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DANIEL: That always been the same as long as I can remember.
COCKRELL: It’s always been the same. Okay. Another thing, I came across a Kansas City Star photograph of the house and it showed the renovation, well, not renovation, but the sprucing—up to the house before you and your mother, and then your father came home later, in the summer of ’45—the first official visit home. It showed the painters up painting the guttering and the sides to the house. It would appear that the color of the paint was a real bright white. Either that or the house had not been painted for a while. Do you remember?
DANIEL: Well, the house was painted about every four years.
COCKRELL: Was it? On a regular basis?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Just another sidelight, the same photograph showed the bushes were kind of overgrown. Was that because the house stood empty six or four months out of the year?
DANIEL: Well, at that time, you see, until we came back here, my grandmother was living with us in Washington. When we got back here, if it was taken before we came back for the summer, then the bushes might have been overgrown, but then they would be trimmed back every summer.
COCKRELL: In time for your arrival, or afterwards?
DANIEL: No, no, we would take care of them. My mother had a yardman.
19
We had the same yardman for years.
COCKRELL: I know that you painted the kitchen once.
DANIEL: Oh, yes, I sure did! And that’s the same color of green. My mother liked it so much, the next time she painted it, she painted it the same color.
COCKRELL: One of her favorite colors was green, or did she just like it?
DANIEL: No, she liked it out in the kitchen.
COCKRELL: Was there any particular reason why you decided to paint the kitchen?
DANIEL: Well, it needed to be painted and this was the year after I graduated from college. I was here all summer with my grandmother. Mother and Dad weren’t here. That was the summer I read Shakespeare straight through. I took his historical plays in order of history, not in the order in which the plays were written, but in the order of history, English history. I read all of his plays that summer.
COCKRELL: You must have had a lot of time!
DANIEL: Well, I did I did you know. Well, I had beaus around, but I had a lot of time. I love to read. I just decided to paint the kitchen. I just couldn’t stand the way it looked. That wood has always been a kind of a brown color so I got the green and I started painting before anybody could say anything. My grandmother would never say no. She looked at it and she said, “Oh, that does look much better. Yes, I like that.” When Mother got home, it was done.
20
COCKRELL: What did she say?
DANIEL: Well, there was nothing she could say.
COCKRELL: Did she like it, though?
DANIEL: Well, she said that she thought it was a very nice job. I didn’t care f she liked it or not, I thought it looked much better than it had before. Dad liked it, so that was all that I minded.
COCKRELL: Okay.
REIGLE: He did pick out the wallpaper in the kitchen, didn’t he?
DANIEL: Dad? I don’t know. You see, I had left home. didn’t come back here every summer. Well, I came for a while every summer when they moved back here. When Mother started doing over the house, I wasn’t here a lot of the time so he could have picked out the wallpaper, yes. It’s a good story.
REIGLE: Well, that’s another one we’ve heard.
DANIEL: Well, let’s leave it! That’s good enough, why not? He had very good taste because I remember there were two or three Christmases when, during the Truman investigating committee, and he did his Christmas shopping somewhere else, and brought home beautiful clothes for Mother and me. Suits. And they fitted.
COCKRELL: Oh, really? He didn’t know the exact measurements beforehand?
DANIEL: No, but he had somebody, a salesgirl or somebody, try them on and he’d look at them and say, “Yes, you re about the same size, the same height. That will do.” I may have had to turn up a hem here 21
and there, but they fitted perfectly.
COCKRELL: Another real pressing issue here, the use of the period in his middle name.
DANIEL: No, he never used it.
COCKRELL: Did he care one way or the other if other people used it?
DANIEL: No, he didn’t really care. No, but when he signed his own name, he never put the period in. Well, I don’t put the period in when I write Margaret T Daniel. I don’t put the period in. Do you have a middle initial?
COCKRELL: Yes, “D”.
REIGLE: I usually do. The problem is the enabling legislation for the site does not use the period so the official name of the Park Service presence is the Harry S, no period, National Historic Site. The Library uses the period.
DANIEL: I told the Library they were crazy!
REIGLE: That’s interesting to know. We’re right and they’re wrong!
DANIEL: I know you’re right!
REIGLE: How about that!
COCKRELL: It’s nice to be right.
DANIEL: Well, yes. I’ve told Ben. I said, “Why do you do this? Dad never put the period after his S.” Well, I can’t be bothered to put a period after my name.
REIGLE: That’s what I’d always heard and I didn’t realize there was any 22
question until . . .
DANIEL: I mean, look at it, did you know that when he was President, and they don’t do it any more, he signed personally—now they stamp them—he signed all of the Annapolis sheepskins, the West Point, and the Merchant Marines, Kings Point. He signed all of those. Now Annapolis, to start off with, is six hundred. Well, you’re not going to put a period after you sign your name six hundred times.
COCKRELL: Even when he was a judge here, I think he had to sign all the paychecks and bills and things.
DANIEL: Yes. Yes he did.
COCKRELL: So that’s probably why. Well, the Park Service is in the right!
DANIEL: They are and the Library is wrong.
REIGLE: That’s surprising.
DANIEL: I’m going to tell Ben, “I think you’d really ought to quit this because I think it’s ridiculous.
REIGLE: I had always assumed there was no period since it really doesn’t stand for anything.
DANIEL: No, the S doesn’t stand for a thing.
COCKRELL: Don’t some people say it was kind of a toss up between his two grandfathers, Shipp and Solomon?
DANIEL: No, they weren’t grandfathers. No, no. That was Great Uncle Solomon. He wasn’t a grandfather. There are two family names, Solomon and Shipp, and they had an argument over Dad’s name. 23
So, as my husband, who is a Baptist, I’m an Episcopalian—all my mother’s side of the family are all Episcopalians except for a few Catholics mixed in there, too—I keep saying that my father was christened. He said, “We don’t christen people. He was baptized.” And I said, “Oh, pardon me.” He was baptized. In order to get around this, they called him Harry S, so he never had a middle name.
COCKRELL: So this story about the two family names . . .
DANIEL: Solomon and Shipp.
COCKRELL: . . . that’s where they did get the S?
DANIEL: Yes. That’s true.
COCKRELL: Okay. Back to the house. When you were given your own bedroom in back of your parent’s, was that passageway built at the same time?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: And they took part of the sleeping porch?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: That would have been when you were two years old?
DANIEL: I don’t know what I was.
COCKRELL: Okay. I think your Aunt [May Wallace] said that you were two.
DANIEL: Well, she would know.
COCKRELL: That would have made it in ’26. There’s a door there. Was that always kept open in the passageway?
24
DANIEL: Oh, yes. Yes. Until I got older and then I was allowed to close it if I wanted to. You notice there’s a bolt on the inside of my door into the hall because when I was little—now, this was one of the family jokes. At night when the old furnace, the old wood furnace, coal furnace, it was before they put in the oil to gas. It was coal when I was very small. It never was oil. Then it was gas. But before the gas furnace was put in, we had no blower. I had no heat in my room. I’m tough. I’m a survivor. I had no heat. The only register is that register that is in the dining room which of course did not bring much heat into the room. It was very cold.
Anyway, I thought there was a little man dressed in black who lived in the attic. I mean by that that he was dressed all in black. When the house would cool off at night, the steps would one by one creak coming down and stop right in front of my door. And I said to my mother, I want a lock on my door.” I said, “There’s a little man up there and he comes down every night and he stops in front of my door.” And she said, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” I remember my father saying, “It doesn’t cost anything. Put a bolt on the door.” So they put a bolt on the door.
Do you know where I found that man, that little man dressed in black? Do you know Sandeman Sherry, sherry bottles? The first time I saw that, I said, “There’s the man in the attic!” My husband thought I was crazy, and I said, “No, that’s exactly what 25
the man looked like who came down the steps every night with a cape and a hat. I’d read this in a story somewhere, you know, and it just stuck in my childish imagination.
I was always reading books, incidentally. Our cousin, she was on my father’s side. Yes, that’s right. Cousin Carrie, the librarian. She would let me go into any stack and read any book I wanted to read so I read books that were way ahead of what I should have been reading at my age. I had a vivid imagination anyway, so my mother blamed Cousin Carrie for all the difficulties she had when I came up with these ideas.
COCKRELL: Well, all that reading has helped you since you re an authoress. It came in handy then.
DANIEL: Yes. I don’t understand any of my sons. I don’t have a single reader. Not a single reader.
COCKRELL: That is strange. Your husband was a newspaperman . . .
DANIEL: Oh, he reads. I have a son who is a newspaperman.
COCKRELL: He is? Does he work for the [New York] Times?
DANIEL: No, he works for a paper in North Carolina.
COCKRELL: So that tradition is carrying on.
DANIEL: Well, let’s see. Let’s touch wood and see if he makes it!
COCKRELL: So far no president, or senator, or . . .
DANIEL: Never, I trust! That is one thing that I have discouraged. I even discourage them getting interested in politics. They don’t take any 26
interest in it. I have done this and maybe it’s too bad, but if you ask one of my sons, well maybe my second son would because he reads the papers everyday, but mainly it’s the sports section. But he’s the Yaley; he graduated from Yale and made mostly straight A’s and B’s through most of his schooling. As my oldest son would say, “He’s the bookworm.” He might be able to tell you who’s running on the Democratic side. Maybe my newspaperman—son would have to be able to tell you, but my other sons would say, “Democrats? Democrats? Don’t know.”
COCKRELL: What do you think your father would have said if he knew they weren’t registered Democrats?
DANIEL: Well, they’re not old enough, I mean the younger ones aren’t old enough to be registered. The other two are registered. The oldest one is registered in New York where of course he can’t vote now. But they’re not interested in politics which suits me just fine.
COCKRELL: [Laughter] Okay! Well, back to your room, your childhood room. The lighting in there, what is it now, by lamps on the tables? Was there an overhead light there before?
DANIEL: Yes, there’s one now. It had a child’s design on it up on the ceiling and it had a long thing, it had a bird on the end of it that I used to pull.
REIGLE: That’s in your father’s dressing room.
DANIEL: No, no. The one across. There’s one in Dad’s room that had a little 27
ring with a bird sitting on it like a birdcage. That may be gone by now.
REIGLE: I don’t recall seeing that.
DANIEL: But there is a ceiling light, there was, in my room, but I had a lot of lights around. That chest, right there for example inside that door, was a chest in my room. And the beds that are upstairs in my mother’s and father’s room, that was my furniture.
COCKRELL: Oh, it was? From your bedroom?
DANIEL: My little bedroom, yes. The furniture up here [pointing to the first floor bedroom] we bought in Washington. You see, we lived in furnished apartments until 1940, and finally then, Dad said all along, long before that, Dad said we were going to be in a war. But Congress didn’t start meeting year around until 1940, and so then we rented an apartment and furnished it, and a lot of the furniture in the house—those two chairs for example—came from the Washington apartment. Mother had them sent out here when we moved into Blair House.
COCKRELL: How about the cabinets and the closets in that room? Were they always there?
DANIEL: Cabinets? What cabinets?
COCKRELL: Isn’t there some cabinets above the closet space?
DANIEL: Oh, no, Mother had that, that was all built in when they moved back for Mother’s clothes. That was turned into her dressing room 28
and the room across the hall was turned into Dad’s dressing room.
COCKRELL: I see; those were constructed after they came back.
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: But was there a closet there for you?
DANIEL: That little closet. That was there.
COCKRELL: In your parents’ room, there’s a washbasin there. I think it was your Aunt May who said that the original one was white marble. Was that always there as long as you can remember?
DANIEL: Yes, but Mother got rid of the old one a long time ago.
COCKRELL: Was it after they came back?
DANIEL: Oh, long before that. You know, incidentally, there’s a leg missing from the one in there [pointing to the first floor bathroom], in that bathroom. It’s on the washstand. I looked in the closet, but it wasn’t there.
REIGLE: We’ll have to look for it. There’s a lot of little chips around that we noticed when we were dusting. We’ll replace it. There’s quite a bit of peeling in that bathroom, too, I don’t know if you noticed that.
COCKRELL: Yes. The sleeping porch upstairs, that’s where you as a little girl took your naps as a little girl.
DANIEL: Only in the summertime.
COCKRELL: Did your parents ever use it?
DANIEL: Well, we slept out there when it was very hot.
COCKRELL: You and your parents?
29
DANIEL: Well, I don’t remember Dad ever sleeping out
COCKRELL: Just you and your mother?
DANIEL: I’m not even sure Mother slept out there. I may only one who slept out there.
COCKRELL: Was access to the sleeping porch always through
DANIEL: Yes, in Mother and Dad’s room.
COCKRELL: Okay. There never was any door there?
DANIEL: No.
COCKRELL: When did your Uncle Fred marry his wife and move in, or at least move her in?
DANIEL: That’s a good question. I was about, well, it was before we went to Washington, so maybe about 1933.
COCKRELL: I think your Cousin David [Wallace] was born about 1934?
DANIEL: That would be about right because he’s ten years younger than I am.
COCKRELL: Fred and his wife, Christine Wallace, had the room across from the master bedroom?
DANIEL: Well, that’s not a master bedroom. They’re all master bedrooms.
COCKRELL: That’s my term because it has the bay window, but that front bedroom.
DANIEL: Yes, they lived across the way because my grandmother was still in this room over here.
COCKRELL: Okay. Now we move to—I’m going chronologically according to
30
my report.
DANIEL: That’s fine.
COCKRELL: We may jump around a little bit. The rose or the grape arbor outside, I believe it was your Aunt May who told me...
DANIEL: Pergola.
COCKRELL: Pergola? Okay.
DANIEL: No, that’s what we called it. Pergola. Yes.
COCKRELL: That was built on the orders of your grandmother, for her roses, but some other sources say that it was a grape arbor. Was it ever that?
DANIEL: No, the grapes grew around the back porch. The back porch was completely covered with grapes, green grapes. remember eating about thirty one day and being very ill. They were green, little green grapes. Seedless grapes. They were good. No, the pergola had some roses on it, but her rose garden was beyond it where the sundial is. That was her rose garden. She had the four beds around the sundial, and then the grass walks in between them.
COCKRELL: Oh, so it was a geometric pattern then?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: The location of the sundial, then, has always been there?
DANIEL: It was right in the middle, yes. Unless it has been moved, it was in the middle of the rose garden. Then, when she let that go, we moved the sundial for a while. It may not be in the exact position it was then, but it is close to it. We set up a badminton course out 31
there. They used to play in the summertime, my aunts, and uncles, and I.
COCKRELL: What would the time period be for that?
DANIEL: Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I was in high school. This must have been mostly before the war, the late 30s.
COCKRELL: I noticed today there’s a birdbath right in the center of the pergola.
DANIEL: That used to be in the center of the pergola, yes.
COCKRELL: I also ran across a newspaper article, or maybe it was one of your books, that said that after your father received the nomination for Vice-President, you drove back to Independence, and the following day there was a reception. Your parents stood in the center of the pergola and then Independence citizens filed through and shook their hands and congratulated them. Do you recall that at all?
DANIEL: Not one bit of it, no!
COCKRELL: Oh, really? Well, I’m pretty sure it came from one of your diary entries.
DANIEL: That could have been. That first book I wrote. Yes. I don’t remember it. We came back from Chicago. That’s where he was nominated as Vice-President.
COCKRELL: Well, my next question was going to be “Where were you?”
DANIEL: I was probably trying to stay out of the line; I wasn’t so dumb. I didn’t know how many lines I was going to have to stand in after that!
32
COCKRELL: Here’s some more historic photographs we have. One shows your mother and father and you in the 1930s in the backyard. It shows a stone bench out there and then there’s a white picket fence that parallels Truman, or Van Horn, Road. Another thing, there’s bricks lining the driveway.
DANIEL: Yes, there were bricks along the driveway.
COCKRELL: When did the bricks disappear?
DANIEL: When we paved it. It used to be gravel. That was another thing we did that my aunts and uncles just loved. We made roads out of the gravel and this was during all of the drought years and so of course all of the dust that we swept up to make roads would hang in the air for hours.
COCKRELL: And drift into the house!?
DANIEL: Oh, yes. Sure. We were very popular. We had great times. Somebody was the policeman and everybody had something to ride. Some of the others had their bikes and they’d bring them over. Not this house, but the house beyond on the corner of Maple [Avenue] , were four of them, the Allen girls. And next to them were the Ogden girls. Another girl lived down here [on Delaware] and her name was Jane Berridge. We had quite a group.
COCKRELL: It sounds like it. This was the playground of the neighborhood?
DANIEL: Yes. We had the best time. One of the best things we did that really drove my poor grandmother up the wall; I don’t know how she 33
stood it, I really don’t. One grandchild she could take, but to have all these kids in the yard all the time! Of course they sat on the porch, and they got all the noise. We would ride a board down the slide which was quite a big, wooden slide, and of course we had a lovely mud puddle at the end because we put the hose at the top, and ran the hose and the wooden board down and go off into the mud. Oh, it was great fun. And you know, I used to get so mad at my children when they would come home covered with mud.
COCKRELL: A double standard!
DANIEL: “What have you been doing?” “Well, you see, there was this place in the park and they made a mud puddle. One of the park men was watering and we got the hose.” And my husband looked at me and said, “What about those stories about you in your backyard?” And I said, “Just be quiet!” It’s easy to forget your own childhood when your own children come home filthy dirty.
COCKRELL: That’s true. Do you remember that white picket fence at all?
DANIEL: There was a fence along behind the bushes that are in the yard that are out there. There were a lot more of them. It was a thick screening of bushes and there was a fence.
COCKRELL: Did it go all the way up?
DANIEL: No, it didn’t. It stopped after those bushes. There never was any fence on this part as I remember. There was always a fence out here, though, by the alley. What we call the alley.
34
COCKRELL: A board fence?
DANIEL: No, it was a wire fence with a board top and a board bottom, but it ran from the, well, just where this fence runs all the way down to the barn.
COCKRELL: Did you use the alley?
DANIEL: We didn’t use it at all. I think it is still partly city property, isn’t it?
REIGEE: It is.
DANIEL: It is city property. It’s not our property.
REIGLE: We’ll have to work with them to get that restored.
DANIEL: Yes, that’s a bad step there. Of course that ground has sunken in. Too bad you can’t get them to build up that ground so it would be even and then put new curbing all along there.
REIGLE: That’s what we’d like to do is have that done.
DANIEL: The Secret Service man, you know those paving blocks? They’re quite unique. I don’t think there’re any of them left unless there’s a few of them further down here on Delaware, but there aren’t any left anywhere as a sidewalk. One night he saw this guy out there, and he was down doing something. So he went out and stood there and looked at him for a few minutes like this you know. The guy said, “What do you think you’re doing?” And he said, ‘Picking up one of these for a souvenir. I’ll pick one up for you, too, if you want me to.” The Secret Service man just pulled his coat back and there was his gun and he said, “You want to put that back, or do 35
you want to get shot?” And the man said, “Jesus!” Got up and ran! [Laughter]. He was digging up the paving stone, but he was going to give the Secret Service man one, too!
COCKRELL: Well, that was kind of him. Some of the other photographs showed the house with awnings across the front.
DANIEL: Well, that might have been when I was very small, but that mostly was before my time.
COCKRELL: Okay. I think the photograph was sometime in the 20s, but they discontinued using those, then?
DANIEL: Yes, they were too much trouble for one thing, and then you see, in later years we didn’t use the front porch at all. We sat on the back porch.
COCKRELL: When you were ill and your mother took you to Mississippi, do you recall that?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: According to Dr. Ferrell’s book, Dear Bess, your father stayed with his relatives in Grandview. [Side one of tape one ends. The interview is interrupted, but Mrs. Daniel disputes the inference that her father lived with his relatives in Grandview during the period she and her mother were in Mississippi. She said that he lived at 219 North Delaware with his mother-in-law, Madge Gates Wallace, during this time, and that he was able to take some time off to go to Biloxi to visit them].
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[End #4067; Begin #4068]
DANIEL: . . . whenever he could get away because you See he was a judge. But we were only down there for part of one year, just for a few months. I wasn’t ill. I had been ill and they took me down there to recover. I spent six months in bed in that bedroom there.
COCKRELL: Oh, really? Downstairs, here?
DANIEL: Yes. Right there.
COCKRELL: You were ill a lot when you were a child, weren’t you?
DANIEL: Yes. As I say, I’m a survivor! You know they say now doctors have discovered that children who were sickly when they were young, when they grow up, they’re much tougher as adults. Why? I don’t know.
COCKRELL: Now, the alcove upstairs, above the vestibule. How was that used?
DANIEL: Never for anything. Just a cedar chest and to store some things.
COCKRELL: I see. So it was a kind of storage area.
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: The cedar chest that is there now?
DANIEL: Yes. That’s the original one.
COCKRELL: I notice that there is a filing cabinet in there now.
DANIEL: Well, that was put in when—well, Dad thought he was going to use that to put some files away, but I don’t know what’s in those files. I think they probably ought to be just pulled out and just thrown away.
37
COCKRELL: In the small dressing room that your father used, can you recall what it was first used for?
DANIEL: It was never used for anything.
COCKRELL: Nothing at all. Was there a bed in there?
DANIEL: Yes, but it was never used. First of all, until we put in the blower in the furnace, there was never any heat in that room either. And, as a matter of fact, the door was kept shut.
COCKRELL: It was?
DANIEL: Yes, because it was too cold.
COCKRELL: So that room and the storage room upstairs really didn’t get that much use at all then?
DANIEL: No, they weren’t used. No. Except we would use the back stairs to come and go.
COCKRELL: To take things out and put them back?
DANIEL: No, we went up and down the back stairs.
COCKRELL: Oh, I see. Just to get down to the kitchen. Okay.
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: The cistern outside, the old water system off the back porch . . .
DANIEL: Yes, there was a cistern on the back porch.
COCKRELL: Right. When was that discontinued?
DANIEL: Never used. Well, I mean never used in my lifetime. The one story that I have about that is that I put my goldfish bowl out there one night for it to get some air, but it was wintertime, and when I went
38
back the next morning, I had a solid goldfish. That was the last goldfish I had.
COCKRELL: By choice, or enforced?
DANIEL: No, no. I just decided that if they were going to freeze to death, I wasn’t interested. [Laughter]. I was not the pet type. I had a little white dog once and I didn’t take care of it, and my mother said that she was going to get rid of it. And I didn’t pay any attention to her, and I still didn’t take care of it, so I came down one morning and my little dog was gone. She took it out to the country and gave it to a farm family that she knew.
COCKRELL: Didn’t you have an Irish Setter?
DANIEL: Oh! Mike! Mike! That monster!
COCKRELL: You didn’t have him for very long.
DANIEL: No. Tom Hannegan gave him to me. Yes. I think Tom wanted some publicity in the White House. But you put a bird or a squirrel in front of Mike and he would go “woof”, and he would sit down and watch it. A great bird dog, just great. The poor thing at the White House, the guards all just loved Mike. They would feed him and they fed him candy and he developed rickets. I didn’t know that dogs could get rickets. But he got rickets and I said, “Enough is enough. I’m living in New York and this dog is down here and I really don’t . . . ” Mike thought he was a lap dog anyway. he was just big, but he was a beautiful setter. So I gave him to a major in 39
Virginia who raises bird dogs.
A few years later, I asked Reathel Odum who had been Mother’s secretary—she’s now with Mr. Snyder—I said, “Reathel, did we ever hear from that man, what happened to Mike?” And she said, “All we ever heard was that he was never able to turn him into a bird dog!” [Laughter]. I said, “Good!” He wouldn’t chase them.
COCKRELL: Wasn’t he here one summer, though?
DANIEL: Oh, yes! lie was lined up out there on a line and of course it would rain and then he would have mud all over him and then he would leap up on you happily, glad to see you. Then you were mud from here down. He didn’t come back out here.
COCKRELL: He didn’t come back?
DANIEL: No. He stayed in the White House. No, I think it was right after that that I got rid of him.
COCKRELL: Okay. Did he have a doghouse back here?
DANIEL: No, I don’t think so. The Secret Service house was out there.
COCKRELL: That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about. What were your parents’ feelings about that being put out there?
DANIEL: Well, they didn’t care for it.
COCKRELL: They didn’t care for it?
DANIEL: No, they didn’t like it at all. You See, they tore it down. It was just a little tiny box of a house that had a bathroom in it and a room 40
where one or two men could sit at night. That was all we had. We didn’t have a big, big detachment like you have today. The others were around town, I mean they were in various places around town. I know that one of my—a friend of ours down here on Delaware Street used to rent rooms to a lot of the Secret Service men, but Dad’s detail was not very big. Not anywhere near what they have today. I suppose he had fifteen men around him.
COCKRELL: Oh, really? That few?
DANIEL: Oh, yes. Fifteen. Twenty. You could ask Bob Lockwood if you want to find out. He would know, although he’s a later breed of Secret Service man, but he could tell you where to find out if you’re interested. And when he went for his walks in Washington—there s a very funny picture of Dad standing. There’s not a car in sight, nothing is in sight except this little black boy, and Dad’s on the corner. Dad’s waiting for the light to change. If he crossed the street, nothing would hit him. You wait for the light. He’s standing there waiting for the light and this kid has just recognized him and he’s [Mrs. Daniel makes a face of wide—eyed astonishment] I’ve saved that picture for years. I thought it was so funny. But there are only two Secret Service men behind Dad and they were way behind him, walking behind him.
COCKRELL: That wouldn’t happen today.
DANIEL: Well, no president since my father has ever gotten out by six 41
o’clock in the morning either.
COCKRELL: That’s true. That’s for sure.
DANIEL: He got up and read all the papers, and took his walk, and came back, and he got up and had his bath and got dressed. Read five newspapers, cover to cover. Took his walk. Came back and had breakfast at eight o’clock.
COCKRELL: That’s remarkable.
DANIEL: The only thing he would do is eat a banana.
COCKRELL: A banana? Would that keep him going until breakfast?
DANIEL: Yes, well, he liked bananas. He used to eat a banana.
COCKRELL: They’re high in potassium.
DANIEL: I guess so. I hate bananas so I don’t have any potassium!
COCKRELL: Then, that booth was out there. Was the garage used by the Secret Service, too?
DANIEL: They put some of their equipment in there, and then of course after Jack [President John F. Kennedy] was killed—we had no Secret Service protection at all until Jack was killed—and then they began to give protection to all of the ex-presidents. Yes, Mr. Hoover was still alive. No. Was he still alive then?
COCKRELL: J. Edgar or Herbert?
DANIEL: Oh, not J. Edgar! We never discuss that. Don’t ever mention that name in this house!
COCKRELL: I’m sorry. [Laughter].
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DANIEL: No, Herbert Hoover. I think he was around. I went to his funeral in New York to represent Dad. Dad used Mr. Hoover while he was president. He brought Mr. Hoover back into the limelight. He gave him several missions to perform.
COCKRELL: Mr. Hoover was here when the Library was dedicated.
DANIEL: Oh, yes. He came the day it was dedicated. Yes. I had just had my first son and I couldn’t come. But Dad and Mr. Hoover, what I’m trying to say was, that they were the only two ex-presidents. Other than that, ex-presidents never had any sort of protection. Except for the Independence police and one night somebody kept ringing the front doorbell. You could ring it at the gate. The Secret Service later disconnected it when they got their set-up over across the street. And I shut it off, and this man, then he would pound on the gate. So I turned the light on on the front porch, walked out the door, and said, “Get away from that gate and don’t come back!” And turned around and went back in. And he went away. The police came along and they picked him up. He had escaped from a mental institution in Pennsylvania and he had a .45. That’s
the last time I went out there! After that I called the police. Oh!
COCKRELL: It takes all kinds!
DANIEL: Yes!
COCKRELL: How about the fence outside?
DANIEL: Mr. Hoover was responsible for that. Herbert!
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COCKRELL: Yes!
DANIEL: And he told my father when he came to see him, when Dad asked him to come and see him, that please would he help him. He was with the Food Administration and of course he had been the head of that in World War I. He wanted him to help with the rehabilitation in Europe. Re said, “May I give you a word of advice?” Mr. Hoover said that. He said, “Is your house in Independence well protected?” And Dad said, “Well, there are two or three Secret Service men out there.” He said, “No, no.” He said, “How about the yard?” And Dad said, “No.” And he said, “May I insist that you put up a fence before the American public walks off with your house?” He said, “They did with mine in Palo Alto. They walked up to it and cut hunks out of it with a penknife until I put a fence around it.” So, Mr. Hoover was responsible for the fence and the Secret Service was most grateful, then they finally took over.
COCKRELL: Was the rear gate there on Truman Road left open?
DANIEL: We used to use that, yes. We used that for a while. Then it got to be so difficult with traffic and all that we decided we would come in this way, and come in through that back fence.
COCKRELL: Okay. Did you have to unlock the gate to go out?
DANIEL: Had to unlock it or there, in the kitchen, there was a button that you could press to open it, but it had to be opened in some way. 44
And that was another problem. When the Secret Service finally came, they decided that was just too much trouble and that they would then—they put up a monitor up on the church over there and one on the barn. We’ve always called that the barn although there were never ever any horses in there in my lifetime. But of course they did have horses and carriages in the garage.
COCKRELL: They called it the barn because of its construction?
DANIEL: We call it the barn. No, because they used to have horses and carriages, in my great-grandfather’s day.
COCKRELL: So the name has just carried on.
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: The doors on the barn, just from looking at photographs, the old doors before the garage doors were put on were sliding doors.
DANIEL: No, they pulled together. Yes, they opened out on hinges.
COCKRELL: When did that change?
DANIEL: Well, they decided they were showing signs of wear and they redid the floors, both of the floors, Mother and Dad did. They had that done after they came back and they put in the concrete floors. The floors were wood, they were rotting. So they had the floors, poured concrete, and then they put the new doors on.
COCKRELL: Okay. So during the presidential period, the old doors were on?
DANIEL: Well, I don’t know. Maybe they did that. No, maybe they did that before. Maybe they did that before. They did that before they came 45
back. Maybe that was done after ’45.
COCKRELL: Okay. The rear porch extension. There’s a discrepancy as to whether it was done in January of ’49 or April of 1950. I know that’s not a very big span of time.
DANIEL: Well, it wouldn’t have been done in January. They wouldn’t do anything in the wintertime.
COCKRELL: I wouldn’t think so either. I would go more for April of 1950.
DANIEL: Yes, probably.
COCKRELL: You’re saying okay, then?
DANIEL: Yes, I’m saying it.
COCKRELL: All right. I don’t want to be the one who does.
DANIEL: Yes, I’m saying okay. But I know they wouldn’t do any building out there in January.
COCKRELL: What was the reasoning for having that done?
DANIEL: So they would have a bigger place to sit and eat. You know how narrow the porch is when you go out the door. The whole porch is that narrow. All the back porch. There used to be, there was a door on that side over there and stairs that went down into the garden. That was finally closed off and taken away because they rotted and Mother and Dad didn’t use it and they didn’t see any sense in having it there.
COCKRELL: Was that around the same time that the pergola was taken away?
DANIEL: The pergola wasn’t taken away; it blew down in a bad storm.
46
COCKRELL: Oh, did it really?
DANIEL: Oh, yes, when I was quite young. The pergola hasn’t been there for years and years and years. It was rebuilt once. It was blown down in one storm and then when it got blown down in the next one, my mother said, “Forget it. Just take it away.”
COCKRELL: So that would have been, when they took it away? Because it would have had to have been there in ’44 when they had that reception.
DANIEL: Yes, but it wasn’t long after that that it was gone.
COCKRELL: Okay. The reason that the porch was extended was to have an eating area and . . .
DANIEL: . . . a place where Mother and Dad could sit. Because you see, the house is not air-conditioned. Neither one of them would have it. That bedroom was finally air conditioned when Dad moved down there, so he would be more comfortable. But, there’s no air conditioning in the house. You really don’t need it because at night it cools off enough so that that huge attic fan pulled in all the air you needed through the doors and windows.
COCKRELL: When was that attic fan put in? Has that always been there?
DANIEL: No, no. That was added quite some time ago. I think my grandmother, when she was sick one summer, we didn’t have it. Oh, probably in the 40s.
COCKRELL: During the White House years? 47
DANIEL: Probably before that.
COCKRELL: Would that have been the same one that is up there now?
DANIEL: As far as I know.
COCKRELL: In your book, when you talked about painting the kitchen in the summer of ’48, you mentioned an incident when you sent your father a postcard of the house. The inscription on the postcard was something like that the house had been completely remodeled and redecorated to suit the First Family. The way I was reading it was that you were trying to convey that nothing really much had changed except that you had painted the kitchen.
DANIEL: That’s right. It was a ridiculous postcard. Utterly ridiculous. Nothing had been remodeled.
COCKRELL: Okay. So everything has pretty much stayed the same.
DANIEL: Yes. Except for the changes my mother had made when they moved back here to stay. The carpeting and all. Now, of course the hall out there was carpeted, but there were rugs in all the other rooms.
COCKRELL: Rugs like this? Persian or oriental rugs?
DANIEL: I don’t remember. I expect so.
COCKRELL: All right. The flagpole that is out in the yard. Do you know if that’s the same one that the citizens of Independence installed in June of ’45?
DANIEL: That’s the only one that’s ever been out there.
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COCKRELL: That’s the only one?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: The reason I ask is because a couple of yards this way, there is a concrete footing. One of the architects thought that maybe there might have been another flagpole.
DANIEL: Not that I know of. Not unless it was moved, but it’s the same flagpole.
COCKRELL: All right. One of the most historical events which happened here in the house was the call from Dean Acheson about the Korean Crisis. Were you here then?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Can you tell me what went on here? Do you remember much about it?
DANIEL: No, not unless it was in my book. Whatever I remember was in my book. I answered the phone. I spoke to Dean Acheson and he told me something very serious had happened so I put Dad on. I went to the airport with Dad, as a matter of fact, arid he left that day.
COCKRELL: Was he sitting in here? I think your book said he was sitting in here reading.
DANIEL: Well, he wasn’t in here. He was in the library.
COCKRELL: That’s where he did most of his reading?
DANIEL: Well, yes, he and Mother read in there most of the time.
COCKRELL: One question that I really wanted to ask you was that, when I was 49
going through the photo archives at the Library, I noticed that there’s not very many shots of the interior of the house. There’s a lot of the front, and some of the side of the house, not very many of the back. But hardly any of the interior.
DANIEL: No. We wouldn’t allow the interior to be photographed.
COCKRELL: Was that a family decision not to let them in to photograph?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Well, that explains it!
DANIEL: Yes, that’s right!
COCKRELL: There was, in 1955, your ‘Person To Person” television show.
DANIEL: Yes. Ed Murrow. Of course they knew Ed Murrow and they said they would do that. My mother took a dim view of the mess they made of her house, but I told her, I said, “Now listen, that crew is really very neat. They took the cans of film and used them for ashtrays, they didn’t use your ashtrays.” She said, “There were those ashtrays all over the place!” I said, “Well, yes, but they used the ashtrays, didn’t they?”
COCKRELL: [Laughter]. Were very many pieces of furniture moved out of the way for that?
DANIEL: I don’t know! I was in New York! I interviewed them.
COCKRELL: Couldn’t you see them on the monitor as the film crew followed them through the house?
DANIEL: No, I didn’t pay any attention to the monitor. I could see them, yes. 50
They were photographed on the back porch. No, they didn’t move things around.
REIGLE: It looks very similar, I think.
DANIEL: No, they didn’t move things around. They didn’t move things around in anybody’s house.
COCKRELL: Well, the reason why I was asking that is when they finally went into the den [library], you said something about things have been moved around and where was Dad’s table. Evidently all the cameras and their chairs couldn’t fit in there so they moved the table out of the way.
DANIEL: I don’t remember.
COCKRELL: Okay. Another thing your Aunt May told me was that there used to be a chandelier in this room. It was taken away and these crystal lamps were installed by your Uncle Fred. Do you remember when that would have been?
DANIEL: No.
COCKRELL: Do you remember the chandelier having been in here?
DANIEL: I remember when these were put in, but I don’t remember the chandelier.
COCKRELL: Do you have any idea if it would have been during the Presidency?
DANIEL: Oh, well my Uncle Fred wasn’t living here then! My Uncle Fred was long gone!
COCKRELL: Was he?
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DANIEL: They left before 1940.
COCKRELL: Would he have come back to do the work?
DANIEL: No, no. This was when I was a child. I don’t even remember the chandelier.
COCKRELL: Okay. So then these lamps would have been in the 30s then?
DANIEL: The 20s. Yes. You see, he was an architect so he changed a lot of things. I remember one time we redid the den and we were painting and painting and painting and painting things and we had a big old bookcase in there and he painted the whole thing white and painted the trim red. It was a very pretty bright room after that. It had been a very dark room before that.
COCKRELL: That’s always been used as a den, then?
DANIEL: Yes. But those bookcases were built later.
COCKRELL: During the 50s?
DANIEL: I don’t know when they were built.
COCKRELL: I talked to the wallpaperer who has worked here since ’53, and he told me that he’s done every room in the house except for the living room. He seemed to think that maybe this paper had been put on sometime during the presidential period or maybe even shortly before.
DANIEL: Oh, no. It’s much more recent than that.
COCKRELL: Is it recent?
DANIEL: Oh, yes.
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COCKRELL: Maybe he just didn’t put it up, then?
DANIEL: What’s his name?
COCKRELL: Robert Nickell.
DANIEL: I’ve heard about him; I never heard his name before.
COCKRELL: Oh, really?
DANIEL: No.
COCKRELL: Evidently your mother used him over the span of twenty years to do various rooms at different times. He told me, and I looked at his work diaries, and there never was any mention of him having done the living room. But you think this is a more recent pattern?
DANIEL: Oh, yes, it is. You see it’s coming off tip there from the flood, but this wasn’t done in the presidential years. It would have been after they moved back.
COCKRELL: Another bit of information concerned your grandmother, when she died in the White House. She was brought back here and was there a private ceremony here?
DANIEL: In the house, yes.
COCKRELL: Was that a family tradition, to do that?
DANIEL: No, my mother didn’t want any photographers or publicity around. My grandmother was laid out in that room in there.
COCKRELL: That’s where the casket was, in the music room?
DANIEL: Yes, and we had the Episcopal minister who came and we had the service here and then she was taken to the cemetery.
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COCKRELL: I have read also that your great grandparents, the Gates’s, had also had their funerals in here, and some of your great-uncles had services in here, too. So this house has had a tradition of that.
DANIEL: I don’t know. I don’t remember any of that. They were all dead.
COCKRELL: Truman Road was not changed to Truman Road until around ’49 or ’50.
DANIEL: I don’t remember when. I know we didn’t like it.
COCKRELL: Oh, really?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Why?
DANIEL: Well, have you taken a good look at Truman Road as it goes into Kansas City? The ugliest possible place you could possibly name for my father? Why they didn’t name Blue Ridge road out through the county that he helped build, why they didn’t name that Truman Road, I’ve never understood. You see, he saw to the building of all those county roads when he was a judge. He was the only one who accounted for every single cent of the the bond issue for the county roads. They tried everything they knew to make a crook out of him and he told them to go to hell and built the roads with the least amount of money with the best materials he could, instead of the men who wanted the contracts. He would have no part of them. He said, “You’re going to have the best materials. You’re going to have the best roads.” And they’ve hardly had to be fixed at all.
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COCKRELL: But he didn’t like the fact that they were going to rename this road?
DANIEL: Well, the family hated the fact that they named this road, “Truman Road.” We didn’t like that. He didn’t want to name anything after him.
COCKRELL: Do you think it was because the road was a major through Street?
DANIEL: Yes, a through street to Kansas City. I guess they thought they were doing everybody a favor. It’s a dead road, I mean, a dead street through to Kansas City. The filling stations, and car showrooms, and it used to have a lot of bars on it, but they’ve mostly folded up.
COCKRELL: So it wasn’t the most prestigious street to choose?
DANIEL: Well, no. It’s a dreary road. It really is. When you get into Kansas City now, most of the buildings are empty along the road. They’ve folded up; their businesses are gone.
COCKRELL: Was this like this during the 40s and 50s?
DANIEL: No, not so much so then, but it still was a crummy, crummy street.
COCKRELL: One thing when I was tracing the title to the house, I noticed that in July of 1953, the title was transferred to Frank Wallace and then ten days later, Frank and his wife deeded it to your mother and father. Was there any specific reason for this?
DANIEL: Yes, you see, my grandmother died without leaving a will so the whole family had agreed that Mother and Dad should live here.
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This should be their house. But they insisted on buying, assuming that everybody had a quarter share, and paying everybody what a quarter share was worth. That they would own it free and clear.
COCKRELL: So was it because Frank was the oldest son?
DANIEL: He was the banker.
COCKRELL: Wasn’t he the administrator of your grandmother’s estate?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: So that was why they transferred everything to him and then it [the house] was transferred back to your parents.
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Okay. The second floor bathroom. You said before that it had an old fashioned tub up there. When was that changed?
DANIEL: Well, Mother had that done a long time ago. can’t remember just when. That must have been, well, I think she redid that bathroom before 1940.
COCKRELL: That wasn’t the present blue that is up there now, was it?
DANIEL: Yes. Oh, yes. We used to have a red rug in it, and then it began to wear out and I think Dad talked her into putting a blue one in.
DANIEL: She didn’t change the tub or anything. That was already blue.
COCKRELL: Was that somebody’s favorite color?
DANIEL: It was Mother’s. Yes.
COCKRELL: All right. Now, these fireplaces. I think out in the barn they found some of the old shelving and the old mirror cutouts.
56
DANIEL: Yes. They were taken out long ago.
COCKRELL: Were they taken down in order for these portraits to go up.
DANIEL: No, no. It was taken down because it was ugly. It’s ugly upstairs in my room.
COCKRELL: Really now. Okay.
DANIEL: Well I think it’s ugly.
COCKRELL: One of the craftsmen that I talked to remembers the tile around the fireplace used to be of a boy going fishing. Now today it looks like it is North African style.
DANIEL: It was never, never anything but what’s in there now. It’s always been that. I don’t know where his head is, but that’s been that way ever since I was a small child.
COCKRELL: He told me, Charles Anderson, recalled that he was here in the 50s, and one of the tiles was cracked. They called all over Independence and finally found a tile expert who could repair it with a torch, glue it, reglaze it, and put it back into place. He seemed to remember that it was of a boy going fishing.
DANIEL: No, it’s always been the same. My mother had a hard time when she replaced that [pointing to the floor tiling in front of the living room fireplace]. You see those green tiles are the originals, but she couldn’t find enough to replace those, so she put that line of black in there.
COCKRELL: You were talking before about the furnace system. You said before 57
that it was originally coal.
DANIEL: Coal, yes.
COCKRELL: And then the next stage was?
DANIEL: Gas. That’s when they put in the modern gas inside the old furnace. They didn’t put in a gas furnace. They put the gas inside the old furnace.
COCKRELL: Was that after they came back to Independence?
DANIEL: Oh, no, no. Long before that. They put the blower in at the same time so that it would heat up the whole house.
COCKRELL: Did it? Was it an improvement?
DANIEL: Oh my, yes. The upstairs used to be awfully cold.
COCKRELL: So the transition then with the furnace was before the 40s?
DANIEL: Oh, I don’t know if it was before the 40s or not, but it was before Mother and Dad moved back.
COCKRELL: Okay. I know that up here above the doorways you can see the brass rings where the portieres . . .
DANIEL: Yes, there used to be curtains, heavy velvet curtains. I remember those as a child. And of course this door, I was telling them this morning not to try to close the door into the music room for any reason because you’ll never get it opened again. I don’t think you can close it since the carpeting was put in. But when I was a child, one very, very bad winter, we closed off the music room and the den to save heat.
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COCKRELL: So then would you use the portieres or the curtains to keep it warm?
DANIEL: No, they were decorations.
COCKRELL: Decoration? I was thinking that maybe you would close off the room and then use the heat from the fireplace.
DANIEL: No, no. They were just decoration. They used to be held back with cords.
COCKRELL: What color were they?
DANIEL: I believe they were dark red. Those rings, that’s another thing when you’re working on the house, you really ought to take those off. Unless they leave a—maybe they weren’t taken off because there’s a hole.
REIGLE: That could be so.
DANIEL: I don’t think anybody would notice it.
REIGLE: I don’t think so.
COCKRELL: All right. How about the television?
DANIEL: I gave that to Mother and Dad.
COCKRELL: The one that’s in there [music room]. How about the one that’s upstairs?
DANIEL: The one upstairs is the old one that they moved up there to get it out of the way.
COCKRELL: I see. Did they watch television very much?
DANIEL: No. Not unless I was on! No, Dad didn’t watch the news on
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television because frankly it hurt his eyes. He watched very little. Sometimes when the president had a press conference he would sit in there and watch it, but he didn’t watch television very much. Mother, in her later years when she was alone, used to like to watch it.
REIGLE: Baseball?
DANIEL: Yes. She used to like to watch the baseball games.
COCKRELL: And the wrestling matches?
DANIEL: No, she thought that was a disgusting thing.
COCKRELL: Oh, well, maybe she was kidding about it, but I read somewhere that she would watch them.
DANIEL: Wrestling and prize fighting, she thought, were the lowest form of entertainment.
COCKRELL: Okay. I know just from looking at the photographs that the television antenna appears somewhere in the middle of the 50s. I think it was your wedding day, they took A picture of the house and the TV antenna was up there. Would that have been the most likely time that it was put up?
DANIEL: Probably so. The first set was black and white, the one upstairs. And then I gave them this color set.
COCKRELL: How about the telephones in the house?
DANIEL: Ha, ha, the telephones! The original telephones, I have no idea where they are, they were the upright kind that you would take 60
your receiver off and talk into it like this, and they sat up like this. That’s what I talked about that day at the courthouse. They found one, an old one, and put it in his office there. Now you can buy them for three hundred dollars. There was one underneath the stairs. I had that phone taken out quite some time ago while Mother was still alive. Nobody ever used it and I couldn’t see any sense in paying for it. So we kept the one in the library and the one out in the kitchen which I don’t know whether it is now or not, but it used to unplug and it could also be used out on the back porch in the summertime. And then I had one in Mother’s room in here with a big, long cord on it that she could have right by her chair there. Also, there was a jack in Mother’s bedroom upstairs, and when I came home, I had to go grab the one phone with the jack on it and put it upstairs, otherwise I had to run downstairs every time anyone called me!
COCKRELL: Was that the only phone that was upstairs?
DANIEL: No, there were only two phones. There was one phone under the stairs, and one phone in Mother and Dad’s room. They were both the upright phones, and one was 1523J and one was 1523W.
COCKRELL: You have a good memory!
DANIEL: Well, my lord, I grew up with those telephones! N was downstairs and J was upstairs, but it didn’t make any difference with the N and the J because if you answered one you could hear everything 61
that was said on the other one. Yes, it wasn’t separate numbers. So, I didn’t see any point, and they both rang; when you called one, they both rang. Of course that was the phone company in those days. That’s all we had.
COCKRELL: Okay. Now, the yard lamp outside, the gas lamp. That was installed in ’64.
DANIEL: Well, that was put in when they were doing it all over town. That was a gimmick. My aunt bought one and, I don’t know, it was that year’s gimmick.
COCKRELL: Did she like it because it lit up the front yard?
DANIEL: It doesn’t throw any light at all, no. It’s of no use. It’s just ornamental.
COCKRELL: But it was her decision to have it installed?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Getting back to the sundial, it’s been here as long as you can remember.
DANIEL: It doesn’t rhyme. It’s this: My Face Marks the Sunny Hours, What Can You Say of Yours? It does not rhyme.
COCKRELL: Was that given as a present or was it always here?
DANIEL: I don’t know. It’s been here all my life.
COCKRELL: Meals here in the house. Where were they eaten, in the dining room or in the kitchen?
DANIEL: Oh, no, in the dining room. Oh, yes, we had a cook all my life. 62
Mother had a cook. When our old cook finally had to quit. She was with us for forty years. She went with us to the White House, as a matter of fact, and took care of my grandmother. Vietta [Garr]. Then she cooked for a while after they came home, and finally Vietta just got tireder and tireder and crankier and crankier, and finally Mother and Father retired her on pay, on a good pension. I went with her one day and helped her buy a house. One of these houses that you buy and put down on a foundation. I went out with her and I said, “Now this is the house you want. There’s your bedroom and there’s an extra room in case your nephew comes to see you. There’s a nice kitchen; you don’t need a dining room, you’ve got a nice, big living room, plenty of closet space. That’s for you.” She was looking at two of them. She said, ‘All right. If you say so.” So she bought the house.
COCKRELL: You must have been pretty good friends, then.
DANIEL: She helped raise me.
May I tell you a story about Vietta? I couldn’t get over it. Vietta really knew me. I couldn’t get away with anything. But she wouldn’t tell on me. She knew exactly if anything had gone wrong where it had come from. When I was a child, there was a card that you put in this window [pointing to the front bay window, a clear pane to the upper left] for the ice wagon. We had an icebox and you had to have a big hunk of ice in the top of it. A big old brown 63
wooden thing. If we still had that, that probably would be worth five hundred dollars—the things we threw away]. And so the card was sitting in the window one day for fifty pounds of ice which is what we usually got. So I thought, I’ll turn it around to one hundred. The number that was on top was the number that we wanted, so I put it up with one hundred on it. A hundred would not fit in the icebox. The ice man was a great big black man. Well, he’d have to be a hefty man to carry it. I remember he had a great, big hunk of leather and big thongs and he’d carry the ice on his shoulder, bring it around the house from the front. He had a horse and wagon and he’d stop at the front and come around to the back. He came in and I was around somewhere. I wanted to see what was going to happen, so I was kind of hanging around the kitchen, which wasn’t unusual because I loved the kitchen. It was always warm, for one thing. I heard him say, “Vi, that card out front reads one hundred pounds. How come?’ She said, “What do you mean, one hundred pounds? You know we can’t get a hundred pounds into the icebox!” And I heard Vietta say, “Well, I know who did that. You just get the fifty and bring it in here!” And he did, and I disappeared as fast as I could and I didn’t get to the window in time to change the card. And my grandmother took the card out, after she saw him leave, she took the card down. She saw it said one hundred and she went out to Vietta, and Vietta said, “Oh, he 64
just brought in fifty.” Then she said to me, “Don’t you do that
again!”
COCKRELL: Where was the icebox kept?
DANIEL: Right where the refrigerator is. One of my jobs, at least they tried
to make it one of my jobs for my allowance—it didn’t work very
well because I kept conveniently forgetting it—but the icebox, you
pulled out the bottom and you had to empty it every night. A great
big pan of water. I mean it was big, and it was heavy. I was
supposed to empty that to save Vietta from having to do it. Well, I
would just forget it and of course it would run over and there was
quite a puddle in the kitchen. So they gave that up. Vietta emptied
it. She said, “I don’t want to clean that puddle up anymore. I’ll
empty it!”
COCKRELL: And you were relieved, right?
DANIEL: Oh, yes. I was very spoiled, by everybody. I was the only child.
COCKRELL: Didn’t that have its disadvantages, though?
DANIEL: There is not one disadvantage to being an only child. You had
everything aunts and uncles—I used to go down to my Aunt
Natalie’s first, and they would eat dinner a half an hour earlier than
we ate dinner up here. Then, if she had some desert, I would eat
part of their desert down there. Then, I’d go next door to my Aunt
May, and she always had ice cream in her refrigerator, and I’d get
some ice cream. At six o’clock, we’d have dinner and I’d come up
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and sit down. And it was a long time—I don’t know, my mother was a very smart woman—but it was the longest time before she figured out why I didn’t eat too much for dinner.
Finally, she asked my aunts. She said, ‘Has Marg been down there?” Beufie [Aunt May Wallace] wasn’t going to say anything, and Aunt Natalie Natalie] said, ‘Well, of course. She always comes down here before she goes up there to have dinner.” But sometimes I didn’t like what they were having for dinner. But I was told that I wasn’t supposed to go down there before dinner. That ruined that.
COCKRELL: Did your aunts and uncles tell on you a lot?
DANIEL: No, well, they were pretty good to me, and I could usually borrow money here and there without getting caught. One thing that I have been brought up with, my mother, well, my father was too—but he was not the disciplinarian, my mother was. He could do more by just giving me a look, like how could you do that, do a thing like that? Boy, I was decimated when he did that. My mother used the hairbrush, and I was brought up to be a very honest child. I had to learn to forget a lot of that when I got into politics. If I saw somebody that I didn’t like, I had to be polite, and not say, ‘I don’t like you; I wish you would go away.” That kind. I don’t mean crooked politics. I just mean being polite to people I couldn’t stand.
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COCKRELL: Diplomatic.
DANIEL: Yes. I do not suffer fools gladly and my husband says that now I’m out of politics I’m rather obvious about it sometimes. In any case, at a dinner party the other night I tried to be polite because he kept saying nice things about my father.
But, yes, I was spoiled rotten by everybody, including my grandmother. She did beautiful needlework and she loved to sew and if anything went wrong with a slip—you know you didn’t throw anything away in those days like slips and underpants and stockings and those things. They were fixed. They were sewn up. I would take it straight to my grandmother. She’d fix it for me so that you would never know that it had ever been torn.
COCKRELL: That’s almost a lost talent these days.
DANIEL: It is a lost talent. And another thing was that she used to fix my dresses so Mother didn’t know I had torn the dress!
COCKRELL: It sounds like you were always getting out of scrapes!
DANIEL: Oh, yes, I was always getting out of scrapes! I was a tomboy in a way. I was quite a tomboy. All the girls were very athletic, and there wasn’t a boy for miles around, but we all played tennis. As soon as we were old enough, all you had to do to get a driver’s license was go uptown and see a certain man who was a friend of my uncle’s and plop down fifty cents and he said, “Margaret,” Jim Noel was his name, he said, “Margaret, do you know how to drive 67
a car?” And I said, “Yes, Uncle Frank taught me.” Which was true. Mother and Dad said they wouldn’t have anything to do with it. My Uncle Frank taught me to drive. And I said, “Yes. Uncle Frank taught me to drive.” And he said, ‘Okay. Here’s your driver’s license.”
And do you know, I never took a driver’s license [test] until I went to get my New York driver’s license in 1949. No, wait a minute. No, I didn’t have to drive a car until 1953! didn’t have a driver anymore. So, I went to get a driver’s license and the man said, “I know you know how to drive, so you don’t have to take the written license [test],” but he said, ‘I would like to have you just drive rue around a little bit.” The motor vehicle department is down near Chinatown with all these one—way streets and all this, that, and the other. He said, “I would like to see if you know how to handle New York traffic.”
All right. New York traffic. Nothing at all. So I took off and drove him around. And he said, “That’s fine. You’ll be perfectly all right. You can drive in New York City. You can handle anything.” We were on a wide street, a two-way street, and he said, “You can make a U—turn and go back.” And I said, ‘No. No way.” And he said, “Why not? My office is right there!” And I said, “You’re going to your office back through all the one-way streets!” He said, “Look, Miss Truman, that’ll take fifteen 68
minutes!” And I said, “How do I know I can make a U-turn? How do I know that you aren’t trying to find out whether I know whether I can make a U-turn or not? I’m making no U-turns!” I took him back and he said, “God, I’ll never ask you to drive me again!”
COCKRELL: Well, good for you!
DANIEL: He wasn’t trying to pull a fast one, but I didn’t trust him!
COCKRELL: Better safe than sorry. Getting back to the Secret Service, when the Secret Service did return, what was the attitude of your mother and father toward that? Were they glad to see them come back?
DANIEL: Well, no, not really. I was glad to have them back. Very glad because there had been other incidents with Dad and, of course in those days, Dad was driving to Kansas City every day to the Federal building where he had his office. There was no Library. After the Library was built, of course, I didn’t worry so much about him. Dad was a perfectly good driver, but Dad would drive along thinking about other things. He was one of those. I didn’t like him to drive any great distance. In fact, I wouldn’t drive with him; I made him let me drive. My mother was a very good driver, up until she was in her eighties. She quit driving voluntarily. So did he. He quit driving voluntarily. He didn’t have to, but she did. After the Secret Service came back, she still drove herself. She wouldn’t have them drive her, and she wouldn’t let them go with
69
her. She went to the city and went shopping or she went out to lunch with somebody, why, goodbye! But Dad has this driver! Dad had Mike . . .
COCKRELL: Westwood.
DANIEL: Westwood. And Mike, oh God, Mike was one of the world’s worst drivers, and the Secret Service nearly went crazy because Dad didn’t want to give up Mike. They were sure he was going to kill both of them and so was I. The day they finally got Mike out of that driver’s seat and got a Secret Service man in there, I breathed a sigh of relief. Mike still hung around. He went walking with Dad every morning. Nobody could take care of Dad as good as he could.
They didn’t mind the Secret Service. They got along with them very well and knew all of them by name and at Christmas they invited them all in for a drink and some cake and coffee or whatever. They were kind of like family.
COCKRELL: A close relationship then?
DANIEL: Oh, yes. A very close relationship.
COCKRELL: I’ve read that inside here in the house there were three different transmitters that whenever the Secret Service was needed, all your mother and father had to do would be to press the button and they would come.
DANIEL: Yes. There were more than that, actually. 70
COCKRELL: There were more?
DANIEL: Yes, and then particularly when Mother got so she was walking with the walker—Mr. Burns had been the head of Dad’s detail, I never did understand this, but it’s not for me to understand the Secret Service. Mr. [Paul] Burns had gone down to take over the Johnson detail and Mr. [Robert] Lockwood had come from the Johnson detail to take over Mother’s. Of course, Mr. Johnson, I keep forgetting, he died a month after Dad did. If you talk to Mr. Lockwood, well, he wouldn’t tell you because he doesn’t know you, but he has told me that Johnson definitely had a death wish. He said, “He had one of those boxes that your mother has right by his table. If he had pushed that, I think we could have saved him.” But he didn’t push it until it was too late.
COCKRELL: That’s sad.
DANIEL: But he said, “I think that man wanted to die.” told Mr. Lockwood, “Now look, Mother is walking around with this walker. If she would fall or if it would tip over in any way, she couldn’t get to a window.” They had them on the windows. Not all the windows, but just certain ones where she was, and also when Dad was around. I said, “If she were to fall, she couldn’t get up and get to the window, but she could reach the basket and get that one and press the button. So, they got one and put it in the basket that she could use. But, of course, I don’t know if they told you about the 71
day that my children were investigating them?
COCKRELL: No.
DANIEL: Oh! Oh, that was quite a day! One, it was William. He always had to know what everything was—still does—how it works, why it’s there. He should have been the newspaperman. So, he found this in the window and he thought that would be interesting to look at, and so he pressed the button. And I couldn’t figure out why five Secret Service men appeared in the yard. One of them came in the front door, and the others were coming around through the back door. And I said, “What’s the matter? Did the smoke alarms go off?” And they said, “No, no. The alarm went off in the window.” And I said, “Oh, it did, did it?” And I said, “Oh, remember the boys are here?” And they said, “Oh, how could we forget that?!” So that was it. I gave them hell. I said, “You leave those things alone!”
COCKRELL: [Laughter]. Well, it was fun while it lasted!
DANIEL: The other thing was that someone had given Dad two, what looked like, real submachine guns. They were the most real looking guns.
REIGLE: Not the ones that are upstairs?
DANIEL: Yes. They would shoot red plastic bullets. They were dangerous, I thought. Dad thought that was a great idea for his grandsons. They later joined the Grays which is a military group in New York, and they learned great respect for guns, and they learned how to take 72
them apart and put them together. When they went to camp, they had riflery, but they hadn’t had that then.
They got behind the bushes and they were playing war all
over the yard. [Laughter] And the Secret Service men didn’t see them to start with, they just saw the guns, and they came running! One of the boys pointed the gun and said, “Stop where you are or I’ll shoot!” And the Secret Service man said, ‘That’s all right! I give up!’ Because he knew that those red things were in there and they would hurt. So he said, “I give up! Don’t shoot!” [Laughter]. They had a great time. I finally took the bullets away from them. Finally, they brought the guns in the house and the guns made a terrible rat-tat-tat noise, and Dad took the guns away from thorn so that ruined everything!
They’ve never forgotten that. The Secret Service and the boys, they were very good about them. These are the big boys, my little ones were too small to be much trouble. But my big boys were about twelve or thirteen, thirteen or fourteen. But they were very good. They let them come over to the house [Secret Service Command Post, 224 North Delaware Street] and watch how they did everything.
COCKRELL: Were you aware that when the Secret Service first returned, they asked your parents if they could reconstruct that guardhouse in the backyard?
73
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: You wore?
DANIEL: And they were told, “No!” Not under any circumstances. They were told by my mother that she would not have that in the backyard, and that was it.
COCKRELL: Do you recall when that other one was finally carted off?
DANIEL: ’53.
COCKRELL: ’53? When they first got back?
DANIEL: No, no. Before that. You see, the minute Mr. Eisenhower was sworn in, Dad had no Secret Service. It just so happens that this one man, who had been with him all the way through the whole years, he went to the station as a civilian, not as a Secret Service man. They didn’t even go to the station to see him off. They turned him loose. I got in the car, turned around, and said, “how do you do, Mr. Truman?” He looked at me and then he roared with laughter. And I said, “I’m thirty-one years old and never in my life have you been without a title.” And he hadn’t.
COCKRELL: Did he find it easy to get along without the Secret Service?
DANIEL: It didn’t bother him in the least.
COCKRELL: Was it the same with your mother?
DANIEL: Oh, my mother wouldn’t have them with her. She didn’t like the whole idea. She was very nice to them and she got along well with them, but in Washington, she said, “My driver can take care of 74
me,’ and her driver was about seventy-five years old! But she would go shopping and, while she was in the White House, she wouldn’t have the Secret Service with her.
COCKRELL: Because she preferred not to have them?
DANIEL: Didn’t want a guard; didn’t think she needed it, and in those days, she didn’t.
COCKRELL: Those were simpler times.
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Okay. The replacement of the roof, taking the slate off and putting the asphalt shingle tiles on. Did you have anything to do with that?
DANIEL: No. Mother did that. Mother and Dad.
COCKRELL: In ’69 they did that. Was it because the old root gave out?
DANIEL: Yes, and they were having leaks, quite a few leaks, so they redid the roof.
[End #4068; Begin #4069]
COCKRELL: [At this point, side two of tape one ended. The question involved how the present water damage inside the house was connected to the replacement of the roof].
DANIEL: Yes, that’s happened in fairly recent years.
COCKRELL: After the new roof had been put on?
DANIEL: Oh, yes.
COCKRELL: The declaration of a National Historic Landmark for the house and the immediate neighborhood was in 1971, and your mother and
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father did not want any ceremony to mark it at all. Was there any specific reason for that?
DANIEL: They were probably just tired of ceremonies.
COCKRELL: Well, I can’t say I blame them, really! Later, after the death of your father, the Harry S. Truman Heritage District was created.
DANIEL: I understand that that’s in trouble.
COCKRELL: Yes, it is. Unfortunately.
REIGLE: I don’t think it’s as bad as that, though. There’s so much strong support here that . . .
DANIEL: But the church apparently was able to pull all those houses down.
REIGLE: Well, they haven’t pulled them down yet.
DANIEL: Oh, they haven’t?
REIGLE: No.
DANIEL: Well, after I wrote to Dr. Hunt and told him his church was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen!
COCKRELL: You did?!
DANIEL: I did. I said, “It’s too bad.” I said, “Architects are hard to come by these days, but,” I said, “you certainly got a lemon!”
COCKRELL: Did he respond to that?
DANIEL: No. I wrote and told him that I had nothing more to do with it, that I had talked to the mayor and had expressed my displeasure and I thought it was quite disgraceful to tear down houses for parking lots, that I was not going to do anything more. But I thought it was 76
too bad they weren’t going to build a pretty church. Of course the Baptist Church has never been a thing of beauty.
COCKRELL: It is kind of a plain building.
DANIEL: Yes, it’s ugly. It’s not very pretty inside either. I went in [laughter], once. The Allen girls over here were Baptists, so one Sunday they said, “Come on, go to church with us. We’ve got to go to church.” So I said, “All right.” So I asked Mother, “Can I go with them instead of with you?” And she said, “Well, I guess so.” I went with them. In our church, you just walk in, and Mother usually sat in the same place, nobody was assigned a pew. You just went and sat in the church. I walked in with the Allen girls, and I walked into a pew, and they said, “You can’t sit in there!” And I said, “Why not?” And they said, “That belongs to “Miss Noland.” And I said, “I don’t know who Miss Noland is,” but I got out and we went down to their own pew, and we sat in their pew.
I came home, and I said, “You know the funniest thing about Dad’s church”—it was Dad’s church, you see, not my church—the funniest thing about Dad’s church, I tried to walk into a pew and they said it belonged to Miss Noland!” And my mother and father just roared with laughter, and they said, “Do you realize that that’s your Cousin Nellie and Cousin Ethel?” And I said, “No, I never realized that their last name was Noland!” I didn’t know their last name—just Aunt Ella, and Cousin Ethel, and Cousin 77
Nellie! I didn’t know their last name. I was about eight or nine years old when this happened!
COCKRELL: How did your mother feel about the Truman Heritage District? Did she think it was a good idea?
DANIEL: I think she thought it was a good thing, yes, because I think—just strictly between us—could we shut that off?
COCKRELL: Sure. [At this point, the tape recorder was turned off for a period of five minutes] Just have a couple of more questions here. After the death of your father, what was behind your mother’s feelings about remaining here in the house?
DANIEL: Well, she didn’t mind at all, no.
COCKRELL: This is what she wanted then?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: I think I read in an article that you had offered to let her move to New York and live with you? Or is that a legend?
DANIEL: She could have if she wanted to. If she’d moved to New York, she couldn’t have lived with us because we had our children; they took up all our space we had, but I may have asked her if she wanted to move to New York and live in an apartment there. I don’t remember doing that at all, because it never occurred to me that she would live anywhere else.
COCKRELL: Okay. Was there any conscious decision to leave things the way they are? A lot of people, when they see the interior here, come 78
away with the impression that the Trumans have just left for the moment. Was there any conscious decision to do that?
DANIEL: What do you mean?
COCKRELL: Well, like to leave the coat and the hat on the rack and . . .
DANIEL: I just never moved it. I just didn’t think of it. That never ever occurred—the Library came and picked up nearly all these things before the Park Service decided to take over the house, or were given the money to take it over or whatever. Because the people the bank hired, they found them asleep most of the time, the guards. So, Ben Zobrist [Director, Harry S. Truman Library] and two of his girls came up here and took all the valuables out of the house. So, now they’ve put them back for the Smithsonian [World], and of course I’m going to leave them here because now the security is good. But you see, these horses and things here, I bought them for Mother because she loved horses. She collected them.
COCKRELL: Oh, she was a collector of horses?
DANIEL: Yes.
COCKRELL: Was that from her childhood days, that she liked to go horseback riding?
DANIEL: No, not particularly. She just liked horses. I brought them from all over the world.
COCKRELL: From your different trips that you’ve taken?
DANIEL: Yes.
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COCKRELL: Another thing, repointing the chimney. It happened sometime in late ’82.
DANIEL: Yes, I know. I paid for it.
COCKRELL: Did you? What did the workmen tell you about what needed to be done?
DANIEL: Well, it was sagging down in on one side and it was in imminent danger of falling over. Mr. Sanders cook care of it and did a very good job. He’s done a lot of work around the house. In fact, I think he was the one who painted the use.
COCKRELL: Yes, he was. That’s right, he’s a very nice man; I’ve interviewed him.
DANIEL: Yes, he knows what he’s doing.
COCKRELL: He was really quite helpful. Another thing, when your mother was in the hospital, I think in 1982 sometime, Mr. Roger Sermon, replaced some of the curtains.
DANIEL: Yes, well, you all call him Roger. He’s “T’ Sermon to me. His name is Roger T. Sermon, Jr. And is fattier is Roger Sermon, who was mayor for about thirty years, and we called him T; T and I grew up together, So I know him. Roger, Okay he’s gone back to Roger. That’s fine. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to be called T either! But we did that because of his father.
Yes, we did the curtain upstairs and I was telling Sarah [Olson, Harpers Ferry Center, National Park Service] today that I
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hope she will want to replace these curtains [in the living room] and some ocher curtains in the house. And I asked her if she would please get in touch with Roger T.
COCKRELL: Didn’t he replace some of them that year?
DANIEL: I did it. I mean he did it for me. It was upstairs. I couldn’t stand the way they looked and I knew that Mother would never see them and that nobody would ever see them except perhaps me and my husband. And I said, “I just can’t stand this.” And I had him do them upstairs.
COCKRELL: So it was just the one room upstairs?
DANIEL: No, two rooms, I think. One or two rooms.
COCKRELL: Basically that’s it. We went through my list and it’s a little bit after four, You’re going to get done early today.
DANIEL: Well, all right! I don’t have to be to dinner until 6:30!
COCKRELL: Unless there is something else that maybe I didn’t talk about?
DANIEL: No.
REIGLE: I have a few questions. In your parent’s bedroom, the beds. Which was your father’s and which was your mother’s in relation to the sink?
DANIEL: Which was what?
REIGLE: Your father’s bed and you mother’s bed.
DANIEL: Oh, neither one of those beds. These beds were up there [pointing to the downstairs bedroom].
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REIGLE: Oh, those beds were up there.
DANIEL: Yes. But he slept in the one near the outside wall. Well, they’re both outside walls, he slept in the one where the sink is at the foot, yes.
Now, Mother stayed up there for a long time, and I finally persuaded her. Mr. Lockwood was absolutely frantic because she would go upstairs at night and he could just see her falling all the way down the stairs. She was using a cane and so he and I finally talked her into moving down here, and I told her, I said, “I will be sure of one thing, if Mr. Lockwood will do it. He and the Secret Service men will change the beds for you so you have your own bed.” So, she did and that far bed was her bed.
The beds upstairs belong to my, with my suite of furniture that I had when I was a child.
REIGLE: So, these two beds were . . .
DANIEL: Were upstairs, yes. And then she needed a bureau down here, and the one upstairs that belongs with those beds wasn’t big enough. So I went, Shawsie, you know, Branton, and I went out on Main. What is it? The street that goes from downtown to the Plaza? The main one, Main Street, yes. There’s a big furniture outlet there. Shawsie said she thought that was probably the best place to find it, so I found that for Mother and had that put in. She used every drawer, and finally one day, Valerie [LaMere; Mrs. Truman’s companion] 82
was very nervous about her jewelry because she wouldn’t put any of her jewelry in the bank. And so I put it all in one drawer and pushed it in the back and put it away. I was interested in it as you might imagine because I was going to inherit it. Finally, Mr. Lockwood called me on the phone. I was coming out here in a few days and he said, ‘You’ve got to do something for me.” He said, “There are Ixco many nurses going into that house.” He said, “You’ve got to take it away; I can’t be responsible for your mother’s jewelry. So that’s when I put a great, big envelope of her jewelry out at the Library, which I now have. But I put mine in the bank, hers in the bank. I’ve got a new box to put her jewelry in because insurance is incredible.
COCKRELL: How about some of your mother’s personal possessions, like her clothing and things?
DANIEL: Well, that was all gotten rid of. Well, the Library has some of it. The Library came and took some of the better dresses. I don’t know what they’re going to do with them. I don’t know what they’re going to do with them, but they have them. They have a couple of her—I looked at one and I said, “Oh, that’s one of her inaugural gowns, and they said, ‘Ah! It is? Really? Oh!”
COCKRELL: A treasure!
DANIEL: Yes! [Laughter]. She never threw anything away. Dad was the worst string-saver on earth, though.
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COCKRELL: Oh, really?
DANIEL: Oh, he was terrible. There’s still some of his clothes upstairs. I’ve got to get rid of them one of these days. Is that everything?
COCKRELL: Yes.
REICLE: We sure appreciate it. You’ve been a great help.
DANIEL: Well, I hope it’s been some help.
COCKRELL: Oh, yes! I hope I haven’t worn you out.
DANIEL: It will take a lot more than that to wear me out. This is the way that I write my books, you know.
COCKRELL: Oh, really? Just sitting down and talking?
DANIEL: Yes. I cannot type, and if you give me a pencil or a pen and put some paper in front of me, I will promptly go to sleep! I hate writing. That’s the answer if I’m going to be a writer, I use a tape recorder.
COCKRELL: I’ve read several of your books and I must say I found them very interesting.
DANIEL: Thank you!
COCKRELL: I like murder mysteries.
DANIEL: So do I!
COCKRELL: Yours really maintain interest all the way from start to finish. I don’t have one of your books, but I have this invitation that I’d like for you to autograph for me.
DANIEL: Sure.
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COCKRELL: I didn’t know if you did autographs or not.
DANIEL: Of course. Anybody in public life does autographs and if they don’t, there’s something wrong with them. If they don’t do autographs, then they shouldn’t be in public life. Oh, this is for the stamp! I didn’t get one of these! [unveiling ceremony for the portrait on the Harry S. Truman Centennial Stamp at the Truman Library, November 18, 1983]
REIGLE: You didn’t get invited?
DANIEL: No! [Laughter].
REIGLE: I can cut you a deal for mine! [Laughter] . The important thing is to get the blue ticket. That’s the one for lunch.
DANIEL: Oh, it is? No, I haven’t gotten that one!
COCKRELL: Well, thank you! It’s very nice. Now, I’m going to keep this and give it to my grandchildren.
DANIEL: And they will say, “Who’s that?” Oh, dear. I gave up getting autographs for my children a long time ago because when I bring them home, they say, “Oh, Mom! Don’t!” They were rather spoiled having a grandfather who was president. They didn’t know it when they went to school; they didn’t find out until they’d been in school for several weeks. My oldest son’s middle name is Truman. He doesn’t use it.
COCKRELL: Oh, really?
DANIEL: No.
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COCKRELL: Don’t your other sons have Gates and Wallace family names?
DANIEL: Oh, they’re all family names, yes. My sons are descended from three presidents.
COCKRELL: Three?
DANIEL: On their Grandmother Daniel’s side, they’re collateral descendants of George Washington through a nephew of his who’s buried at Mount Vernon, who’s a Justice of the Supreme Court. And they are descended from John Tyler on my father’s side of the family. If you ever look at the picture of John Tyler in the White House, you will see my father’s nose and my nose beyond the shadow of a doubt! Oh, yes! The profile is the same. Just exactly the same. It came right down. I’ve said, “It’s funny he couldn’t have passed along something better than that.” And then their Grandfather Truman. So Thomas Washington Daniel is named Washington because it’s part of the family.
COCKRELL: Sure. That’s kind of a nice tradition.
DANIEL: Yes, I’m a great believer in family names for children.
COCKRELL: Yes. My great-great-great uncle was Francis Marion Cockrell.
DANIEL: Oh, yes!
COCKRELL: He was U.S. Senator from Missouri for thirty years, so we have something else in common other than being from Independence; someone who served in the Senate.
DANIEL: Well, you remember the Blairs? When we lived in the Blair House. 86
Preston Blair was Senator from Missouri for years and years and years.
COCKRELL: That’s right!
DANIEL: Yes. I remember one night after we first moved into Blair House in 1945, Percy Blair came by. We were the first people to live there after they’d given it to the Government. And he came by and when he left, they said—I didn’t see him that night, he came to see Dad and they had a long conversation—they said he was practically in tears. He was so moved that the first person to be in his family home would be the first president from Missouri. Their whole family was from Missouri.
COCKRELL: These Missouri people get around!
DANIEL: Oh, yes, we get around! Here and there!
COCKRELL: I sure thank you for all your time and trouble.
[End #4069]
[END]

INDEX
A
Acheson, Dean 37.
additions 5.
air conditioning 35-6.
alcove [2nd floor] 28.
Allen girls 26, 56.
alley 27.
Anderson, Charles 43.
antiques 1.
attic 6, 13, 20.
attic fan 36.
authoress 60-1.
awnings 27-8.
B
backyard [playground] 14, 26.
back porch 8, 26, 46. grapevines around 24. extension of 34.
“back room” 12.
badminton 24.
Baptists 19; in Independence 55-6.
barn [garage] 27, 32, 34, 43.
basement 12-3.
bathroom [1st floor] 5, 22-3.
bathroom [2nd floor] 13, 42.
bedroom bureau 1.
bedroom [1st floor] 5, 7, 22, 28, 59; Gates’s room 10; air-conditioned 36.
Berridge, Jane 26.
Biloxi, Mississippi 28.
birdbath 25.
birth 1.
Blair House 22, 62-3.
Blue Ridge 41.
Branton, “Shawsie” 59.
broken lock [living room door] 6-7.
Burns, Paul 51-2.
C
carpeting 14, 36.
cedar chest 29.
ceramic tile 43.
charity [money—raising] 13.
chimney [repointing] 57-8.
Christmas 17.
Chrysler 8. Chrysler [1941; Arlington, Va.] 3-9.
Church [RLDS] 34
Church [Baptist]55-6.
cistern 29-30.
Cockrell, Francis Marion 62.
color of paint [house] 15.
construction [house] 2-5.
Cousin Carrie [librarian] 20.
curtains 53.
D
Daniel, E. Clifton 19-20; 26, 49, 58.
Daniel, Thomas Washington 62.
Daniel, William Wallace 12, 52.
Dear Bess [Dr. Ferrell] 28.
deed to property 42.
dining room 47.
Dodson, Philip F. and Erma Faye 9.
dog 30.
driveway 25.
Episcopalians 19, 56.
F
filing cabinet 29.
fireplaces 43.
fires 5-6.
flagpole 36-7.
front porch 28.
front, west bedroom 7.
furnace 19-20; 29, 43-4.
G
Garr, Vietta 47-8.
Gates, Bessie 9-10.
Gates, Elizabeth [“Mama Gates”] 9-10.
Gates, George Porterfield [“Nana”] 2, 10; death from influenza 10.
goldfish 30.
Grandview, Mo. 28.
88
H
Halloween [haunted house] 13
Hannegan, Tom 30.
Harry S. Truman Heritage District 55-6.
Haukenberry, Mrs. Ardis 11.
Hoover, Herbert C. 32-3.
Hoover, J. Edgar 32.
I
icebox 47-8.
Independence police 5-6; 33.
iron picket fence 33.
J
jewelry 5, 59-60.
Johnson, Lyndon Baines 52.
K
Kansas City 13, 41, 51.
kitchen 16, 29, 34, 36, 478.
Korean Crisis 37.
L
LaMere, Valerie 59.
landscaping 15-6.
library 37-9; 44.
lithograph 4.
“little man dressed in black” 20.
living room chandelier 38.
living room furniture 1.
Lockwood, Robert [Bob] 31, 52, 59-60.
M
Margaret’s childhood room 7, 19, 22; furniture in Truman bedroom 22; bolt on door 19-20; overhead light 21; cabi-nets 22.
“Mike” [Irish setter] 30.
mirrors 1.
Missouri 62-3.
“Murder” 12-3.
music room 44.
N
National Historic Landmark 55.
National Park Service 18, 58.
New York City 50, 57.
Nickell, Robert 40.
Noel, Jim 50.
Noland, Aunt Ella 11.
Noland, Cousins Nellie and Ethel 11, 56.
O
Odum, Reathel 30.
Ogden girls 26.
oriental rugs 36.
P
painting 15, 36, 39, 58.
parents—dislike of gray 9; sleeping porch 23; reading in library 37; deed to property 42; with cook 47; replacing roof 54.
passageway [2nd floor] 19.
“Penny Ice Fund” 13.
pergola 24-5; 35.
“Person to Person” [1955] 38.
photographs of interior 37.
plays 13.
Port Byron, Illinois 2.
portieres 44.
postcard of 219 N. Delaware 36.
public life 61.
R
reception [following V.P. nomination] 23, 35.
robberies 5-7.
roof 6, 54.
rose garden 24.
S
Sandeman Sherry 20.
Sanders, Robert 58.
Secret Service 27, 31, 33, 50, 51, 52-4; transmitters 51-2; command post 53.
Secret Service booth 31, 53.
Sermon, Roger T. 56.
sewing/sitting room 12, 29.
sidewalks 27.
sleeping porch 19, 23.
Smithsonian World 57.
89
Sons 20-1; 26, 32, 52-3; 57, 61.
sundial 24, 47.
T
telephones 45-6.
television 45.
tricycle 14.
Truman bedroom 7, 21, 59; furniture in 1st floor bedroom 21, 59; wash basin 22, 59; access to sleeping porch 23; beds 59.
Truman, Bess Wallace 6, 12, 13; 20, 49; miscarriages 1; car 8-9; name 10; deafness from flu 10; kitchen 16; dressing room 22; pergola 35; “Person to person 38; television 45; sports 45; Secret Service 52-4; disciplinarian 49; driving ??; move to 1st floor 59; remain in house 56-7; collector of horse figurines 57; inaugural gown and clothing 60.
Truman, Harry S 20, 33, 49; car 9; kitchen 17; period in name 17-8; dressing room 21, 22, 29; judge 28, 41; mornings 31-2; Herbert Hoover 32-3; Korean Crisis 37; television 45; driving 51; with grandsons 32-3; Baptist 56; string-saver
Truman Library 18, 32, 37, 51, 57, 60.
Truman Road 41-2.
Tyler, John 62.
W
Wallace, Christine 23.
Wallace, David [cousin] 23.
Wallace, David Willock [grandfather] 11.
Wallace, Frank 42, 50.
Wallace, Fred 7, 8, 11, 23, 38-9.
Wallace, George p. 5.
Wallace, Madge Gates 2, 5, 7, 14, 16, 24, 26, 28, 47; pergola 24; funeral 40; intestate 42; spoiled granddaughter 49.
Wallace, May [“Beufie”] 6, 11, 12, 19, 22, 38, 48-9.
Wallace, Natalie 46-9.
wallpaper 17, 39-40.
Washington, George 62.
Westwood, Mike 51.
White House 30, 31, 40, 47, 54.
Y
yard lamp 46.
Z
Zobrist, Benedict K. 13, 57