Sue Ogden Bailey and Dudley Bailey Oral History Interview

Sue Ogden Bailey

NPS

SUE OGDEN BAILEY & DUDLEY BAILEY

AUGUST 26, 1989
INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI

INTERVIEWED BY ANDREW DUNAR
ORAL HISTORY #1989-8
This transcript corresponds to audiotapes DAV-AR #3605-3610

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

Sue Ogden Bailey
HSTR photograph

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.
Sue Ogden Bailey, Andrew Dunar, and Jim Williams reviewed the draft of this transcript. Their corrections were incorporated into this final transcript by Perky Beisel in summer 2000. A grant from Eastern National Park and Monument Association funded the transcription and final editing 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.

ABSTRACT

Sue Ogden Bailey discusses growing up in Jackson County and spending summers in Independence. Just months older than Margaret Truman Daniel, Bailey describes the Henhouse Hicks, games played by the neighborhood girls, the Wallace/Truman adults’ attitude towards the children, and surrounding neighbors. Combined, Sue Bailey and her husband Dudley, describe the political interaction of Independence and Jackson County. The Baileys also explain the relationships between the different religious, educational, and racial groups in Independence and the broader countywide area. Mrs. Bailey ends with a discussion of her subsequent contact with Margaret Truman Daniel and the other girls who lived in the Truman neighborhood during the 1930s and 1940s.

Persons mentioned: Margaret Truman Daniel, Dorsey Lou Warr, Harry S Truman, Charles Allen, Bess W. Truman, Betty Ogden Flora, Madge Gates Wallace, Polly Compton, Vietta Garr, Harriet Allen Kellogg, D. Frederick Wallace, David Frederick Wallace, Jr., Margo Wallace Brasher, Jane Barringer, Jane Barridge, Jane Beveridge, Maude Louise Hartman, Marie Allen Blank, Mona Allen, Dorothy Dean, Betty Dean, Charles Kellogg, Virginia Woods, Elizabeth Woods, Iris Palmer, Norine Allen, Jimmy Carter, May Wallace, Barbara Allen Gard, Betty Lou Wills, Bill McKim, Roger T. Sermon, Jr., Petey Childers, Thomas J. Pendergast, Roy Roberts, Mabel Sermon, Jim Pendergast, Jeff Bailey, David McCullough, Blevins Davis, A. D. Carlson, Robert Knoll, Ron Hull, Frank Gates Wallace, George Porterfield Gates, Powell Cook, Paul Kelsey, Edson Houser, Marilyn McKim, Dick Herman, John Feldon, Mike Westwood, Mary Kay Westwood, and Sue Gentry.

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH SUE OGDEN AND DUDLEY BAILEY

HSTR INTERVIEW #1989-8
ANDREW DUNAR: We’re discussing something about Mrs. Bailey’s contact with the Trumans. If we could start, maybe if you could just tell us a little bit about what you recall about the neighborhood in Independence as you were growing up.
SUE BAILEY: Okay, I should perhaps begin by qualifying the limits of my knowledge because my feeling about Independence is that it was my home and I viewed always as home base, but during the years I was growing up we were often out of Independence living elsewhere temporarily. My father was a salesman or whatever he needed to be during the Depression years, and so we moved a lot while he was changing employment, looking for something better or whatever. But my grandmother stayed at 614 West Maple, which no longer exists, and she provided a home, if we needed it—and we did sometimes—and so we were in and out, sometimes living with her.
And in the summers she encouraged Mother and Dad to let my sister and me come there, so we spent summers there frequently. And I think my memory of the summers is more vivid than almost anything else. I have very few memories of winter, but a lot of summer, and I think that must be because playtime in the summer was very rich and we had lots of experiences.
If I was there year round, I would have been going to Bryant School, which is different looking now but still there, I gather. And I think I was in Bryant School when I was in the second grade and again
2
in the fifth grade. Then we moved back to Independence when I was . . . let’s see, in 1940, I guess, and I went to William Chrisman High School. And, by that time, my sister was off at college and Mother and Dad had an apartment in the Maples Apartment House. Are you familiar with the apartment house which is on Maple where Delaware comes in, in a “T” intersection?
DUNAR: Yes.
S. BAILEY: One is the Maplewood and the other is the Maples, and we lived in the Maples at least two times, I think. So we did kind of hang around that neighborhood off and on as long as I can remember. My grandmother probably didn’t move there herself until probably the early thirties. We’re trying to pin that down ourselves, but my mother is long dead and my aunt, who is the only one who would really remember that, is ninety-four and having trouble. Since I’m sixty-five and having trouble, I do understand that she’s having some trouble making things fit.
But they were kind of an institution in Independence, I think, because Independence was a small town and the neighborhood was compact and everyone did know everyone else. So it seemed to me that it was a friendly, open neighborhood, and yet it had sort of a cloistered feeling about it, too, because people didn’t circulate, it seemed to me, out of that neighborhood. That was it. We did have one relative that lived down on Proctor Place and it seemed like we were going way off someplace if we went down on Proctor Place, that was kind of foreign territory to us.
Downtown was so close by that we related to the Square. It was a source of entertainment and excitement and also a privilege because none of us got to go to the Square unescorted until we were probably in
3
junior high school. We weren’t given that kind of freedom to be out from under adult supervision.
DUNAR: Even in the day time, you couldn’t?
S. BAILEY: Even in the day time. I think we did get to go to the Granada Theater, which was short of the Square, about what, three blocks?
DUNAR: Yes.
S. BAILEY: Earlier, and that we did a lot in the summertime. Particularly that was one of Marg’s favorite things, was a movie, and we were allowed to go unescorted, and I think that was probably her first experience to be without an adult. Probably a little before that, we might have been twelve and my sister is almost four years older and maybe it was assumed that she was some supervision, I don’t know. But Margaret and I are the same age, except she’s in February and I’m in December, so we’re about two months apart. I’m two months older than she is, so she can’t fudge on her age or I’ll remember. [laughter]
The neighborhood to me was the Allen family, my grandmother’s house and the Wallace house. Later, I remember thinking of it as a little broader than that. Dorsey Lou Compton lived in the big stone house on Delaware. It’s in the 300 block, I believe, isn’t it?
DUNAR: The next block down and across the street.
S. BAILEY: Can I take this off a moment and I’ll get some pictures.
DUNAR: Sure, okay. [tape is turned off]
S. BAILEY: . . . and he had suddenly gotten interested, so he took a snapshot of the Maples and the Maplewood and poor old William Chrisman High School with its handsome . . . oh, what do you call that? . . . tile work coming off. Then he got one of the courthouse and Harry in front of the courthouse. He was down in Lexington. Dudley used to teach at
4
Wentworth Military Academy. That being Dr. Allen’s house.
DUNAR: Okay.
S. BAILEY: This is where my grandmother was, my grandmother and grandfather’s house was right there on that lot.
DUNAR: Which is now a vacant lot, yes.
S. BAILEY: Right.
DUNAR: There was a fire there, right? In the late thirties, is that right?
S. BAILEY: Right.
DUNAR: Do you remember anything about that?
S. BAILEY: No, unfortunately that was one of the times when we were not in Independence. I think we were living in Joplin, Missouri, I believe—it doesn’t matter greatly—but we were not able to be there. And we were devastated because the house meant so much to us. It was Victorian and we’d been hiding secrets in the newel posts for years, and nooks and crannies, you know, had meant a lot to us and the fantasies. And we never got to see it again. We didn’t travel about a lot. We were poor enough that taking trips was just unheard of, unless you had a real excuse, like you were going to stay for a while.
DUNAR: And this was the house you really considered your childhood home then?
S. BAILEY: Yes, I really did.
DUNAR: Do you remember anything else about the house, anything in particular?
S. BAILEY: About my grandmother’s house?
DUNAR: Yes.
S. BAILEY: Well, yes, and expect this is kind of important to note. I was in Independence a couple of years ago and my friend Dorsey Lou Warr showed me, I think, one of your earliest mimeographed sheets in attempting to get the neighborhood analyzed, and it referred to that house
5
as the Ogden House. Well, it certainly wasn’t the Ogden house, nor was it really the Graves House, it was really the Jackson House.
DUNAR: Oh, okay.
S. BAILEY: And the Jackson family, I think, may have been either the family or related to the family that the county was named after.
DUNAR: Oh, really?
S. BAILEY: And my grandmother and grandfather didn’t own the house, they only rented it, probably from an estate, because there was never a person. The rent was apparently paid by mail, or at least there was no family still lingering about to look into. So, from our point of view, I thought it was our house.
DUNAR: Right, exactly.
S. BAILEY: I grew up not knowing, really, that it was somebody else’s house. But I thought history cares about the Jackson so somebody ought to take note of who they were. And I’m curious myself, I may look that up myself, because they had some of the same elegant characteristics that are in the Wallace House, you know, lovely old woodwork, stained glass windows. Let’s see, the stairwell particularly had a beautiful stained glass window and we used to like seeing the sun come in that window. We played on those stairs as though they were a theater. And, like spotlights, the sun would hit a red. [telephone rings] Oh, should I take this off for a moment? [tape is turned off] The sunlight coming through the window on the stairway was good for the fantasy that we often played on the staircase, which was that it was a stage. Marg was very romantic, loved fantasizing, either after the fashion of movies or stage plays or some of the mystery stories that we read, so that we always had something going on either in the house on that staircase, which was our favorite place, or
6
on somebody’s back porch, it could have been out in the yard. But there was always something kind of creative going on.
DUNAR: Did you ever perform these plays that you were devising for the adults?
S. BAILEY: Yes we did. I remember that we charged admission, too. [chuckling] That was our way of getting spending money for the movies. None of us were given much money to spend, so money was very exciting stuff and we liked that. We were more noble at other times and we collected money for charitable purposes. The Penny Ice Fund was something that was established in the summertime for people who were poor to be able to have ice. One performance which I missed out on, my sister Betty wrote the play, as I recall, and Marg got to play the lead—I think it was the villain as I recall—and it did get into the Independence Examiner. And someplace there are some clippings about that particular play, that was the one that got publicity enough.
The backyard of that house, when I look at that lot I think, “My goodness, how did all of that get on that lot?” It was not that wide, was it? What would you guess, is it sixty foot or . . . ?
DUNAR: I think would maybe about that. That’s probably about right.
S. BAILEY: But in the back yard, which would be . . . I think that must be the back of the Wallace barn, isn’t it?
DUNAR: Yes, that’s the . . .
S. BAILEY: . . . with the alley running that way?
DUNAR: Yes, this is the alley that runs through.
S. BAILEY: Well, there was what we called a “slave house.” That was probably because we were romantic, I don’t know, but it could have been. But it was a one-room house with a little front stoop, a small porch on it.
DUNAR: And this was on the Jackson property then?
7
S. BAILEY: Yes, and there was still room then for a big old barn. I don’t remember when the barn got torn down; it seemed to me it wasn’t as large as that barn and we didn’t care for the barn at all. It was kind of scary and dirty and we didn’t play in that one, nor did we play in that one, I suppose because we had so many other options. But the “slave house” was kind of a focal point for the neighborhood kids, because nobody cared what we did there. We were allowed to clean it up at one point and scrub it down, because they told us they thought someone had kept chickens in it once and it probably was very dirty, I don’t recall, and we turned it into an office. I was digging around for about a half hour before you came to see what in the world might be still around and I found a copy of a newspaper called the Henhouse Cluck, which I think Marg wrote about in one of her books, I think she referred to it.
DUNAR: Oh, wow, this is great.
S. BAILEY: We had an old typewriter that belonged to my aunt, and we didn’t know how to do anything but one-fingered typing, so it took us probably two days to do one sheet, you know, because we were using carbons and it was a tedious production. And again, we were selling those.
DUNAR: Can we maybe get this Xeroxed and get it back to you?
S. BAILEY: Sure, you surely can, yes. I haven’t got much . . .
DUNAR: We have a picture, in fact, it may be even this picture . . . Is that the same picture, I wonder?
S. BAILEY: Yes, where did you get that?
DUNAR: It’s from the Truman Library. We have a few others, too.
S. BAILEY: Oh, really? Yours is a better copy than I’ve seen. Somebody in my family, I don’t know who, had . . .
DUNAR: We have the same pictures, yes.
8
S. BAILEY: This is August 8, 1940 and it was the old journal. Well, isn’t that interesting. Then they had kept the original themselves, is that it?
DUNAR: Yes.
MICHAEL SHAVER: I think what it was in Margaret’s papers, and she presented several box loads of papers to the library.
DUNAR: How interesting.
SHAVER: And they pulled out a lot of pictures relating to her early life.
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes. Well, what do you know?
DUNAR: Yes, Margaret had the date on that, so that’s good we have the date.
S. BAILEY: Yes, I didn’t remember the date myself.
SHAVER: [unintelligible] for the pictures on the back of it, and we can [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Yes, well, you certainly can have that, which gives you the date.
DUNAR: Okay, great. If we could get copies made and get this back to you [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: It seems to me there was another one that identified that it was the Kansas City Journal, did you have that? The Kansas City Journal has been long defunct. I don’t know when it went out of business, but maybe in the thirties.
DUNAR: Yes, I’m not sure. Did that combine with the Times then?
S. BAILEY: Well, right after the forties, I guess, I don’t remember. But the Kansas City Star swallowed it up probably.
DUNAR: Yes, it was the Star. Yes, that’s right.
S. BAILEY: I was looking for old pictures, too, and my aunt is the source of old pictures. And if I had known about this, I was just down in Texas visiting her last month, and I would have tried to dig around in her belongings.This would have been for pictures of the back yards or the . .
9
.
DUNAR: We have a few.
S. BAILEY: Do you?
DUNAR: Let’s see, here’s one with the slide there.
S. BAILEY: Oh. Oh, my gosh, I had forgotten about the slide. Isn’t that strange, I remembered a swing set but I don’t remember a slide. That’s very interesting. Maybe it’s because it was later.
DUNAR: Maybe so, I’m not sure what the date . . . I don’t know that we have the date on this one either. And Margaret makes reference to, I think, a swing set and a slide. I’m sure you’ve read this at some point.
S. BAILEY: Yes, a long time ago.
DUNAR: There are a few pages here, this is in Margaret Truman’s Souvenir, that talks about . . . Well, in fact, here, you can maybe look at this. It talks about swings and a sliding board, yes.
S. BAILEY: Okay, so that must have been there. I remember we hung by our knees on the thing, which we viewed as very daring, and Marg didn’t care for that kind of daring stuff. We were more tomboyish than she was. And I think that’s perhaps one reason that her mother encouraged us to play, because we kind of did things that Marg didn’t have an inclination to do, kind of physical activity.
DUNAR: Oh, right, right.
S. BAILEY: And that may have been something that she wanted Marg to do, because she herself was pretty athletic.
DUNAR: Right, yes, so she was trying to get . . .
S. BAILEY: None of that sunk in when we were children. I didn’t think of Mrs. Truman as athletic, because she seemed to me always dressed for an afternoon party or something. I always thought of her as being well-
10
dressed and ready to go someplace. I don’t think of her ever as being in sports clothes. She may have been but I don’t have any . . . I remember her teaching us to play mumblety-peg.
DUNAR: Really?
S. BAILEY: Yes, Do you know what mumblety-peg is?
DUNAR: Yes, yes. [laughter]
S. BAILEY: And we’d get the end of our noses worn raw trying to flip the knife while doing that gesture, I remember. We thought that was great but I don’t believe Marg liked it as much as we did, as some of the rest of us did.
DUNAR: Was Mrs. Truman good at it yet?
S. BAILEY: Yes, because she didn’t look like she would do that.
DUNAR: It seems out of character doesn’t it?
S. BAILEY: I was just astonished at what she knew how to do. I hadn’t realized until many years later when I read about her that that was her nature.
DUNAR: [unintelligible] more, yes.
S. BAILEY: Yes, I just didn’t think of it. Because grown-ups didn’t do those things and I did not have an athletic family. My mother was not athletic, my aunt and my grandmother were not athletic, so I didn’t expect it. She seemed to always kind of let us sort of “stretch out.” You know, we did things that I’m not sure as a homeowner I would allow. [chuckling] I think they were so indulgent and so nice about it.
DUNAR: What sorts of things?
S. BAILEY: Well, let’s see if I can get my directions straight. That would be the north side of the house . . . was shady and cool, and it was really hot in the summertime. We sometimes would gravitate to the north side of the house. And one of the things we did over there was to develop a garden or, let’s see, what would you call it? It would be almost like a water
11
course. We captured moss and little tiny microscopic plants that grew near by and we landscaped this water course, which started with the hose bib, the water hydrant, which we then turned on and then let run in a trickle down the water course, all the way down to the driveway.
Now, you know what that was doing to the foundation, I suppose. And I remember Grandmother Wallace getting kind of up-tight about that. And she would sort of challenge, but then if Marg protested then she’d back away and say nothing more. So I don’t think it was approved of but we were allowed to do it anyhow. I suppose somebody later had to go back and fill in the damage and the erosion that we created. [laughter]
Then the same was true of the driveway. The driveway was kept freshly graveled. I suppose it was necessary. Is it paved now?
DUNAR: Well, yes.
S. BAILEY: In the old days it must have been a mud driveway, unless it was graveled, and I can remember that certain times in the summer it would look freshly graveled. There would be some limestone pebbles of . . . I suppose they must have been half-inch to three-quarters of an inch size, and we created a . . . What would we call that? A world of fun, I guess, for want of a better thing. [laughter] We made paths and obstacle courses and drop-off stations and used all of the neighborhood tricycles and wagons we could get together and pull rides to each other. And they accommodated that by not using the driveway for I don’t know how long. They let us keep it there.
DUNAR: They gave you the run of the whole driveway, yes.
S. BAILEY: And, of course, we made it as complicated as we could, given the amount of space. But since the driveway served both aunts’ and uncles’
12
houses as well as the main house, that meant nobody was using the driveway, I guess.
DUNAR: Right, right.
S. BAILEY: I didn’t really think about it until later and I thought, “Oh, my goodness, we really imposed on folks in those days.” [laughter] But they were very nice to Margaret and, therefore, to us, indulgent, because I think they really wanted her to be satisfied and happy. And I guess we were useful in that way.
DUNAR: You mentioned a little bit about Grandmother Wallace. Could you say more about her, about what your impressions were of her?
S. BAILEY: Well, she was a romantic figure to me because she was so elegant looking. She wore her long gray hair kind of coiled up in a topknot on the top which was carefully coiffed always. I never saw her looking as though she was flustered and she always had a ribbon around her neck with a cameo broach on it, I believe. I think that’s what it was, something. Her dresses, too, always seemed dressed up to me. You would just wouldn’t mistake her as a housewife. Come to think of it, they must have had times where they were wearing so-called “house dresses,” but my memory is not seeing that kind of informality.
DUNAR: Well, other people, too, have observed that Mrs. Truman was always pretty well dressed. So that is consistent with what others have said, too.
S. BAILEY: I see, right. Now, in my own grandmother’s household, I remember they had what they called “house dresses.” My grandmother did not have a maid, did not have a yard man, and so she worked hard and so she wore “house dresses.” As soon as lunch was over, then it was time to be a lady; everybody was supposed to then assume the role of being a lady.
DUNAR: Oh, I see, in the afternoon?
13
S. BAILEY: I was just thinking this morning, it was a very feminine atmosphere, and I hadn’t really thought about it before. There were no male children in that area, not a one. I can’t remember a single boy. Until Marg had a cousin born into the household, I don’t remember any other little boy being around. The men folks were always gone when we were there and so it was very female oriented, you know, everything was controlled by the females. Later in the day, the men would come home and that would seem very different. And we sort of withdrew then, my sister and I, and I don’t know, I’m sure the Allen girls would have felt that way, too. That time, when the men returned, was different and we sort of respected that and didn’t expect playtime in the evening.
DUNAR: That was more family time for each individual family then.
S. BAILEY: Yes.
DUNAR: At the Truman’s, was Mrs. Truman or Mrs. Wallace more of a disciplinarian, do you think, in terms of . . . You mentioned once that Mrs. Wallace came out.
S. BAILEY: Yes, I think Mrs. Wallace guarded the house, the property.
DUNAR: Oh, so she was interested in protecting the Trumans, yes.
S. BAILEY: Right, and she would be the one, I think, that would probably have looked after someone looking after the yard or someone who looked after graveling the driveway. But she would not ever discipline Marg or any of the rest of us if Mrs. Truman was there. I think she sort of deferred, saw her role as grandmother and not disciplinarian. But there really wasn’t any discipline there in anyplace there.
DUNAR: I see, there was a [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: No. Well, for one thing, aside from being rather destructive to property, as we may have been, we were pretty docile children. I was rather in
14
awe of almost all adults, and certainly of Mrs. Wallace and Mrs. Truman and President Truman. That was the way it was and I felt the same way about Dr. Allen. Children deferred to adults.
DUNAR: Right, right.
S. BAILEY: So they really didn’t have to work very hard at discipline. And I can’t remember being disciplined in anything that related to the Wallace house. I remember my mother taking a switch off of the spirea bush that grew by the front steps of 614 West Maple after me once, but that’s about the . . . [laughter] I think I was late for dinner, I think I didn’t come when called, and meal times were very precise and important and kind of formal occasions. The times that they weren’t formal . . . We regularly, at least one summer—maybe this went on more than one summer I don’t remember—we ate lunch together, and I remember my sister and I most frequently eating with Marg, but the Allen girls may have been there occasionally. Because there were more of them, they sort of had their own unit of entertainment in their house.
DUNAR: Right.
S. BAILEY: So they might not have been out looking for companionship as much as Marg was or my sister and I were. But the adults would accommodate us and it varied. I believe they set up a card table out in the . . . kind of about where the swing set is, so this must have been before the swing set, or maybe it was near it—it was in the shade.
DUNAR: But it was outside, not on the porch?
S. BAILEY: Right, right in the yard. And Marg would bring her lunch out, which had been prepared in her kitchen, and we would bring our lunch, which had been prepared in our kitchen. And I’m not sure why it worked out that way because either household would have been very pleased to have
15
fixed lunch for the other, but maybe it was because we were fussy and wanted certain things, I don’t remember. But that was always very pleasant. A real treat was that we got to drink a bottle of Polly Compton’s soda pop, which both households bought that by the case, and there was always great debate over what flavor. [laughter] If you’d had grape the day before, should you have orange? Or, if you wanted something really sweet, should you have his cream soda which was super-sweet. [chuckling]
DUNAR: Do you remember eating at all in the Truman house?
S. BAILEY: Yes. That wouldn’t have been a casual thing though.
DUNAR: That would have been for dinner or for lunch?
S. BAILEY: It was lunch, I don’t ever remember ever being there for dinner, but quite a lot there for lunch. But those were invitational luncheons and there would be others present probably, and we were all dressed up, it was being fancy.
DUNAR: Would adults have been there or just the children?
S. BAILEY: No, as we got older, we would put on hose and our best dresses. You know, from junior high on, it was appropriate to act like you were older than you were, and so it would be like a ladies luncheon only we were younger.
DUNAR: Did the Truman’s have a cook at that point?
S. BAILEY: Yes, Pete, as Marg always called her. We didn’t call her Pete. If I ever used her name at all, I think I said Vietta.
DUNAR: [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Yes, but Pete must have been Marg’s own personal nickname for her.
[End #3605; Begin #3606]
S. BAILEY: That will give you the best identification of that, I’m sure, because these
16
two had remained friends over the years and kept in constant contact. I’m embarrassed I can’t remember her name but I haven’t seen her for about twenty years. But I do recognize his sister.
DUNAR: For the tape’s purposes, we’re looking at picture number 8782-2 and trying to identify who the people are. And, let’s see, maybe if you could go from the left.
S. BAILEY: Yes, left to right. Harriet Allen, who may have been married at that time so her name would have been Kellogg; and I’m uncertain about the next person slightly in back of her; the front center is Betty Ogden Flora; it’s possible that that’s me in back of her but I’m really unclear. The person in the right rear is Dorsey Lou Compton Warr and the person to the far right is Jean . . . blank. [chuckling]
DUNAR: Yes, okay. Okay, great. And then, let’s see, we have this picture.
S. BAILEY: I do not recognize anybody there.
DUNAR: Okay, all right. Is there another picture? I thought we had another.
SHAVER: I think you had them all.
DUNAR: Okay.
SHAVER: A group picture of some folks on the boat. She may not recognize anybody there either.
DUNAR: Right, okay.
S. BAILEY: This one little tiny picture I just found, Marg had gotten a new camera and there might be more of these but I don’t know where they are. That is in the back yard of the White House, and there’s their car back there, and there used to be a big old tree.
DUNAR: Oh, yes.
S. BAILEY: And this is her Uncle Freddy’s two children, David and . . . Goodness,
17
do you know what the little girl’s name was? [see appendix, item 1]
SHAVER: Margo is the name that pops to mind.
S. BAILEY: It could be Margo. Yes, that could be. Yes, I think you’re right. Marg had just gotten a new camera and so she was having me pose. You know, pretend you’ve crashed the bicycle. [see appendix, item 2]
DUNAR: This is a posed picture, yes.
S. BAILEY: She was playing producer.
DUNAR: So Margaret took this picture? [see appendix, item 3]
S. BAILEY: Yes, those three.
DUNAR: All three of them then?
S. BAILEY: Yes. A little blemish there someplace. I don’t know what was wrong with the camera.
SHAVER: Well, a funny thing, this is characteristic of all these pictures that she took with this particular camera.
S. BAILEY: Oh really? [laughter]
DUNAR: Some others that they have, they have the same . . .
S. BAILEY: The same problem, huh?
SHAVER: Yes, a problem with the shutter. We have that chair and the birdbath still.
S. BAILEY: Oh, do you? And do you have her bicycle?
SHAVER: We don’t have the bicycle, we have a tricycle.
S. BAILEY: Do you? Oh, that bicycle was wonderful to me. It was her Christmas present, whatever year would have been appropriate, and I remember after Christmas morning we were called to come see what she’d gotten and whatever else it was that she got was very important and the bicycle was a total zero, you know. [laughter] Whoever decided that she really needed that bicycle had made a big mistake because she certainly
18
thought . . . Well, I had never had a bicycle of my own and just drooled over that—it was wonderful—and Marg didn’t want to learn to ride it. She was intimidated by it and really did not relish it. I don’t know how long it was before she conceded that maybe it would be all right. But what happened was that my sister and I and probably Jane Barringer would go out to the Van Horn roadside, and starting at the corner of Delaware and Van Horn, we would go zooming down the hill, clear up to the junior high, and when we were finally given the go ahead, clear around the block, and time ourselves to see who could make the fastest trip, you know. And we took turns then. The others would stay behind and do something else, watching the clock or whatever, while the other guy was making the trip. And, finally, I guess Marg thought that might be fun, and I don’t recall the exact process of her learning to ride but pretty soon she did do some of that. But the bicycle got a lot of use by the rest of us. [laughter]
DUNAR: Before she ever learned how to use it.
S. BAILEY: Right. I think that must be the same bike. It may have been getting pretty old by that time because it seems to me I look like I might have been in junior high by that time. But that bicycle was, I think, the second adventuresome thing using that same path clear around the block. Earlier we had roller skates and that was, we thought, terribly daring because there’s quite a little hill, up by the junior high particularly, and we didn’t go clear around the block. At first, we’d go up to the junior high and then turn around and swoop back down the hill and then go back up to Delaware. Oh, we got a lot of use out of that sidewalk.
DUNAR: Would you have races or would these be timed also?
S. BAILEY: They were never races. We did it by timing. I guess we must have
19
thought it was hazardous or something. The sidewalk was narrow and imperfect, we had to watch the cracks.
DUNAR: Yes. Would Margaret participate in that?
S. BAILEY: I don’t remember ever seeing her on skates, come to think of it. She may have but I sure don’t remember it. But she’d be engaged somehow, even if she didn’t do those particular things. I don’t remember seeing her on skates, but maybe she did. You’ll have to ask her if she roller skated or not.
DUNAR: Do you remember any other toys in particular?
S. BAILEY: Well, one we created for ourselves. I don’t remember whether Marg mentions that or not. You’d have a better sense than I do of what the distance would be between that upstairs sleeping porch, which opened off of Marg’s room as I recall. Well, clear across the alley, across their back lot, across the alley to a similar sleeping porch on the back of my grandmother’s house, which would have meant it was on the northeast corner of the Jackson House, we stole all of the string that we could find in all the households and knotted it together very carefully and strung it from that sleeping porch to that sleeping porch and tied a basket on it. And we had then other strings which enabled us to wind it in and then to return it. We’d seen this done in department stores.
DUNAR: Yes.
S. BAILEY: You aren’t old enough to know.
DUNAR: I’ve seen those.
S. BAILEY: The little carriers that rode on wires and they would . . . I guess it was a spring that catapulted them. They were open, you could see them going, and the sales slips were put into it, conveyed up to the office, and then change was returned in these little capsules. And we thought we ought
20
to have one of those ourselves.
SHAVER: I’m sure we had something like that. We had a contraption that would do stuff like that at the department store.
DUNAR: In the store, yes.
S. BAILEY: I’ll bet.
DUNAR: So that’s where you got the idea.
S. BAILEY: Yes, I think maybe baskets there. A fairly large thing that would carry . . .
SHAVER: [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Yes, but I remember in Emery Bird Thayer downtown you’d see that sort of thing. We thought that was wonderful. Well, we sent notes or candy or a ring, you know, things that were small enough that they wouldn’t break our rather fragile line. I don’t know how long that lasted but our supervisors must have thought that was not really great because what we were supposed to be doing was to take a nap in the afternoon. That was customary. The females just sort of settled down, took a quiet time. Usually you had a bath and then you were supposed to be napping. And my sister never wanted to nap so I’m sure she must have been the one that cooked up this idea because it was so dull to be taking a nap, you know. [chuckling] But the string would break sometimes, the whole thing would go down, and we’d have to sneak out of the house, hoping not to get caught to go out and repair it, you know. So that kind of toy was the kind of toy that brought us the most pleasure; it was the things we kind of created for ourselves. I’m sure there were other toys like chemistry sets; we liked things like that that we could stir up.
In our chemistry set period, I remember once when Marg decided to do some chemistry using all the ingredients in the pantry. I don’t
21
think her mother was home that day and it really upset Pete because we were in there robbing her spices and mixing things and making terrible messes, you know. I think the ultimate goal, after we saw what this concoction looked like, [was] that we were going to palm it off on the others who weren’t present as “cookies.” [laughter] I can’t remember the rest of it but I remember Pete was just distressed that we were doing this. So toys weren’t as prominent, it seems to me, as the things that were available.
And then the piano came and the piano became the toy. It was a grand focal point. Marg would call us to come over and sing. There wasn’t a good voice in the bunch. [laughter] My sister and I could barely carry a tune, I think, and I don’t remember that the Allen girls were much better, but we sang a lot. Marg could sing in a way that we couldn’t and she read music. And she’d have some new sheet music and she would play, accompany, and everybody would try to sit on the bench at the same time, or stand behind or whatever, and she tried to teach us to sing. It was futile, I think, but it was wonderful entertainment. That was during the Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald era and Marg had, I think, all the sheet music that went with their movies.
DUNAR: Was she serious about her music fairly early or was she [unintelligible]?
S. BAILEY: I didn’t know that she was, but looking back on it she clearly was. I really hadn’t . . . that didn’t sink in until I knew she was taking voice lessons. But it meant a lot to her.
DUNAR: Did she practice the piano pretty diligently or was she forced to practice?
S. BAILEY: No, she was not interested, I think, in being a musician as much as she was interested in creating the romance of the singing and the stage-like atmosphere that went with it. I don’t think anybody really expected her
22
to practice to play. She wanted to play enough to be able to read the sheet music so that everybody could sing; and, particularly, if it was a movie that we’d all been to see, that was part of the fun. But it was not singing old-time things or singing hymns, it was always movie-focused. We spent a lot of time there. Yes, I think that one must have been a daily activity almost; it fitted in somehow, particularly when it was hot outside and people would encourage you to come in, that it was too hot.
DUNAR: Do you remember playing other games at all in the Wallace house? I think Margaret had talked, at one point, I think, that her grandmother tolerated her with a tricycle even inside. Do you remember anything like that at all?
S. BAILEY: I bet she did. I don’t remember the tricycle inside but I would have expected it. Yes, she would have allowed that. Well, we played “sardines.” Do you know “sardines?”
DUNAR: No. No.
S. BAILEY: Let’s see, how did it go? One person was it, had to hide her eyes and count so far, and during that time the others were to disperse and find a hiding place. And unlike “hide and go seek,” my impression is that the optimum was that everybody hid in the same place.
DUNAR: Oh, okay, so you were packed in like sardines.
S. BAILEY: Yes, you were packed in like sardines. And that was amazing. Again, I can remember doing that in the Allen house, and Mrs. Allen had a storage closet—I think it might even have been a cedar-lined storage closet where she kept a lot of bedding and things—and that was one of the favorite places. Everybody could get in there and be relatively comfortable. But I can remember being in back of the bathtub in the upstairs bathroom. It was out from the wall and I was kind of skinny and
23
can remember hiding there. And I think we did sometimes . . . There was, let’s see, a storage room which would be on the Van Horn side, and there was no use that seemed to be made of that room except to store things, and we did sometimes in the “sardines” game, I think, sneak in there. But I don’t think it was approved of. Somehow it seemed to me that wasn’t quite what we were supposed to do.
DUNAR: Were there other areas that were off-limits for games like that? Or did you pretty much have the . . .
S. BAILEY: We never went in Mrs. Wallace’s bedroom, never. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that. Generally speaking, bedrooms were viewed as not probably where we should be.
SHAVER: Was the attic off-limits?
S. BAILEY: Probably it was discouraged, though we were there. I remember there were a lot of old clothes in trunks and we loved looking at those things; mostly I remember women’s clothing up there. And Marg liked to be there and wanted very much, I think, to explore and get into things, but I don’t think we were supposed to be doing that. If she suggested doing that, why, we’d go along with it, but we backed away faster than she did. We could sense that this is probably not good. [laughter] Whereas she would challenge and insist on . . . this was okay.
Oh, and the basement. We were in the basement at times. We liked reading mystery stories and mystery stories that centered on female heroines, like the Nancy Drew series. And so I think we were probably playing Nancy Drew sometimes when we were doing things like scaring ourselves half to death in the basement. The basement was dirt-floored in part, I think, and there was one room way back—we must have been going West—and the furnace was big and formidable looking. We had
24
some phosphorous paint that somebody got for us, I don’t know who, and we made a skull and crossbones and made it into sort of a “fun house” atmosphere. I have a feeling that maybe Marg’s Aunt Boofie might have been the one who helped us with that, for kind of a Halloween-like atmosphere, and the idea would always be to invite some of the other girls who hadn’t helped build this to come in and get scared to death, you see.
DUNAR: Right, right.
S. BAILEY: And I don’t think they much wanted us in the basement. That was true over in my grandmother’s house, too, because my grandmother’s house was formidable and dirt-floored, this great big coal monster furnace, you know, and very dirty. Nobody went in basements if they could help it, but we did if we could. [laughter]
DUNAR: If you could get away with it.
S. BAILEY: Right, if we could. So, again, that was making something instead of having something to play with. We made these scary posters.
DUNAR: How formal was this organization of the “Henhouse Hicks?” Can you describe a little bit about that?
S. BAILEY: I guess, obviously, it got it’s name from the fact that we were told that it had been a chicken house at one time. And I guess there were six of us at that time, and so it sounds like a natural name to me. [chuckling] It must have hung together, at least that summer, and I don’t remember that we ever tried to do anything but laugh about it later.
DUNAR: So it was just the one summer [unintelligible]?
S. BAILEY: I think so. I think around that need to use that house after we had gotten it all cleaned up. I think we had it as a bank once. We probably changed it from time to time. You know, after we’d exhausted ourselves typing
25
those newspapers, we probably then went on to something else that wouldn’t be quite so taxing. Oh yes, we did, we had a miniature golf course and we had that in my grandmother’s back yard, I think. Now, we could have also had one in Marg’s, but we might have gotten chased out of there, I’m not sure. But I remember that we did what you have to do, we dug the holes, you know, and probably made some real trap for the guy who was mowing the lawn.
DUNAR: What did you use for golf clubs and golf balls?
S. BAILEY: Somebody had a miniature golf set. I think there might have been three clubs to a set, but I can remember a little plaid, toy golf bag somebody had and so we’d lure then . . . whoever didn’t build the golf course was going to be the customer. There was always this arrangement: We’ll build this thing and we’ll have somebody then who has to come in and do it. But we didn’t branch out very far away, we just had the Allen girls or Jane Beveridge when she lived in the apartment across the street. Again that was summertime.
DUNAR: Where did she live? In one of the Maples?
S. BAILEY: Let’s see, that’s north, and there was a house on the corner. It could have been the second house from the corner of Delaware and Van Horn facing west, so it would have been the northeast sector of that intersection. There was a Mrs. Hartman, Maude Hartman, who lived [in] maybe either the first house or the second house, and so it would have been the other one that Jane Beveridge had, I think. I was never in her apartment. I think she and her mother lived there alone.
DUNAR: Do you remember other neighbors in the vicinity that you interacted with as children? Adults?
S. BAILEY: Later, I remember Dorothy Dean and a sister—I think her sister was
26
Betty—who lived in the little white house with sort of a Dutch colonial door over it, which is directly across the street from 219. Let’s see, it used to have green shutters; I don’t know what it looks like now.
DUNAR: It would have been the second house from the corner?
S. BAILEY: It probably would be, yes. I don’t think it was the corner house. Dorothy Dean Donaldson? I don’t know. They didn’t live there always, so they were there at one time one summer when I was there, and I think I remember being in Bryant School with those two girls. Now, let me see, who else? Dorsey Lou came into the picture later, I don’t remember, she’ll tell you when she first entered. I knew Dorsey Lou best when I was in high school.
DUNAR: Oh, yes.
S. BAILEY: At William Chrisman.
DUNAR: She wouldn’t have been in your group then as younger children?
S. BAILEY: I don’t remember her earlier, no. And I’m not quite sure why that is, maybe it was too far away, you know. [chuckling] It was half a block further. Marg must have been watched all the time and we weren’t aware of that. I didn’t know until much later about the Truman’s apprehensions about her being kidnapped. And they must have not talked about that in front of us because I didn’t have any sense of fear or apprehension at all, and I didn’t realize that anybody else did. But my guess is that we were always being observed by some adult wherever we were, but nobody made a point of it.
DUNAR: There was a still of woods further down to the north, wasn’t there? Did you ever go to the woods at all? That would have been a ways away. It would have been a fairly distance, I think, down near Waldo Street?
S. BAILEY: Virginia and Elizabeth, is that who you’re thinking of? When you’re
27
saying woods, you mean the last name was Woods?
DUNAR: No, I was thinking about . . .
S. BAILEY: Oh, an actual woods. No, we didn’t go to the woods. I can’t think what it would be. You’re thinking of an empty lot?
DUNAR: Maybe it wasn’t there any longer.
S. BAILEY: It might not be.
DUNAR: Perhaps, yes. I’m not sure how big it would be.
SHAVER: It would have been somewhere around Bryant School, maybe south of it.
S. BAILEY: No, that would have been off-limits for us.
DUNAR: A little too far away, yes.
S. BAILEY: Yes, we would not have been allowed to do that. If we had made a point of wanting to be there, somebody might have taken us. Because later when we played tennis, I can remember Boofie taking us to play tennis at the courts next to where the Truman Library is now. What was that park called?
DUNAR: Slover Park?
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes. There used to be a couple of hard surface tennis courts there, I think.
DUNAR: Clay courts?
S. BAILEY: Maybe so, yes. They weren’t particularly fancy, I remember, but then neither were we. [laughter]
SHAVER: That’s interesting. She was she still playing tennis at that age? That was one thing Mrs. Wallace said she liked to do when she was a little girl and when she grew up and after she got married all she wanted to do is play tennis all the time.
S. BAILEY: Is that right? She wanted to keep at it?
SHAVER: Yes.
28
S. BAILEY: Yes, let’s see, she probably was. Hi, Dudley. Come meet these gentlemen, unless you need to pick up the mail. This is my husband Dudley Bailey. This is Mr. Dunar and this is Mike Shaver. Andy is your first name?
DUNAR: Yes.
S. BAILEY: Dudley might be able to say things about the house that I don’t remember. Why don’t you sit down?
DUDLEY BAILEY: I only saw the house recently when we went through it.
S. BAILEY: Well, Dudley knows it from a slightly different angle. He worked down the street and lived down on Van Horn. Your address was what?
D. BAILEY: 1034.
S. BAILEY: And you work place, the filling station . . . ?
D. BAILEY: I worked at the filling station at Cushler Street and Van Horn. Mr. Truman used to walk down that way.
DUNAR: Oh, on his morning walks?
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] when he walks, right. But besides saying “good morning,” I didn’t know him until I met Sue. I met him, really, after we were married.
S. BAILEY: The house was not anything that particularly intrigued you when you were a teenager then?
D. BAILEY: No. We lived in the apartment, you know, down the street [unintelligible] there.
S. BAILEY: You were older then and interested in girls by that time.
D. BAILEY: That’s true.
S. BAILEY: That’s where we met. [laughter] My mother, at the time we met, was managing the Maples Apartments, and Dudley’s mother and father lived upstairs on the second floor. Let’s see, is that right? Were we on the
29
first floor?
D. BAILEY: You were on the first floor and we lived on the second.
S. BAILEY: Okay right. I was showing him that Paul had captured that beautiful building. You remember, Paul took that picture last summer?
D. BAILEY: Oh, yes.
S. BAILEY: Yes, it’s amazing. I think Dr. Allen owned that.
D. BAILEY: You think so?
S. BAILEY: I think so. I think he bought some real estate later and I think he bought that at one time.
DUNAR: Would Mr. Truman ever stop in on his walks and talk to you down there?
D. BAILEY: No, no, he went by at a great clip. He walked very fast, as you know, and he just went whistling by. But he was always very kind. And, you see, I was a boy then [unintelligible] young man. But he always said, “good morning.” He used to walk out to the sanitarium and then I think he must have gone around the block and come back to Maple Street. He walked down Van Horn.
SHAVER: Did he ever bring his car to your station to have it serviced?
D. BAILEY: Oh, no. No, I think he did all his . . .
S. BAILEY: He went to Will’s, was that it?
D. BAILEY: Yes. The Wills’ station across from the high school, because that fellow was . . .
S. BAILEY: Wills.
D. BAILEY: Wills.
S. BAILEY: Yes, Betty Lou Wills’ dad.
D. BAILEY: They were old war buddies or something.
S. BAILEY: I think so, there was some friendship there, as I recall.
30
D. BAILEY: So he stopped there and talked, or so I’ve read.
DUNAR: Yes.
S. BAILEY: Do you remember a woodsy section near Bryant School? I’m a total blank about a woods.
D. BAILEY: Near Bryant?
S. BAILEY: Yes. They were asking if we went to the woods, and I don’t remember a woods. Any vacant area there?
D. BAILEY: Oh, no, I don’t. I’m trying to think of any from any direction.
S. BAILEY: That was in your paper route, wasn’t it?
D. BAILEY: Well, yes, yes. I carried papers up there at one time.
S. BAILEY: But they were still small residences in there, wasn’t it?
SHAVER: Another Delaware Street paper boy. They’re almost legendary on our street.
S. BAILEY: Is that right? [laughter]
SHAVER: Get one a month, it seems like.
S. BAILEY: Is that right?
D. BAILEY: Where were the woods supposed to be? Between the Truman home . . .
DUNAR: Well, it may have been down already by that time; it may have been developed by that time. I know President Truman remembered playing in woods near there when he was young, and it may have been developed by that time.
S. BAILEY: Oh, maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s it, they had cut it down and built houses then.
D. BAILEY: Well, there were woods, of course, north of the school, if that’s what it was.
DUNAR: Perhaps so, that may have been.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible].
31
S. BAILEY: Were there?
DUNAR: Well, in fact I think that’s where it was.
D. BAILEY: Yes, off of 24 Highway, just south of the President Truman Library, yes, that was wooded. And nobody lived there.
DUNAR: Okay, I think that’s what it was.
S. BAILEY: Oh, I see, yes.
D. BAILEY: And the woods west of the President Truman Library. Later, that was a park, you know.
S. BAILEY: Yes, Slover Park, we just talked about.
D. BAILEY: But there were woods there when I was a boy.
S. BAILEY: Yes, it got thinned out a lot over the years, didn’t it? It doesn’t look very woodsy now.
D. BAILEY: Well, it’s built in there.
S. BAILEY: Yes, it was a very unused park. I don’t remember ever seeing people in Slover Park. There must have been but certainly not much.
D. BAILEY: Bill McKim would know about the woods.
S. BAILEY: I bet he would, wouldn’t he?
D. BAILEY: That was his hunting grounds.
S. BAILEY: Oh, was it? Bill McKim was an artist that taught for years at the Kansas City Art Institute.
D. BAILEY: He lives in Kansas City on 32nd Street. He’d have a very vivid memory, because he has a [ of that part of town. He lived on Waldo Street.
S. BAILEY: He was recently acknowledged when he retired, wasn’t he, in that article in the Star?
D. BAILEY: Oh, I think there was an article in the Star, yes.
S. BAILEY: He’d been a Benton student and taught for years after that. Because he was sort of a naturalist, he would certainly know if there was much of a
32
woods left.
D. BAILEY: He’d know every inch of that north to the river, to the bluffs.
S. BAILEY: Well, I didn’t mean to distract you from the mail.
D. BAILEY: I wish I could be helpful, but I don’t know much about the Truman’s, except through my wife.
S. BAILEY: The time periods, as I have explained, are for me a chunk here and a chunk there, and, you know, the rest of the time I have no knowledge whatsoever. I was just recalling for them that I have no winter memories of the Wallace house.
DUNAR: You were there during the summer time.
S. BAILEY: Because . . . except Christmas time. I remember Christmases, but I don’t remember the rest.
DUNAR: Oh, yes. Right.
SHAVER: Time to take another break.
[End #3606; Begin #3607]
SHAVER: There’s another thing, which is not real common knowledge, and we’ve really never been terribly sure of it. Did Mrs. Wallace ever spend time in those apartments that you can recall?
S. BAILEY: In the apartments?
SHAVER: Um-hum. There was one year, a year or two that, that they didn’t take her to Washington with them. He was in the Senate. They rented . . .
S. BAILEY: Hum, I am wondering if she would have moved out of her own house?
SHAVER: Well, they closed down the big house, I got the impression they closed down the house for the winter.
S. BAILEY: I didn’t know that.
SHAVER: And uh, one year, this would probably have been after Fred, Fred Wallace had moved out of the house and moved to Denver. And there
33
was nobody there to watch her. And they said one summer, or at least one winter when they were in Washington they left Independence. I got the impression she was in the apartments.
S. BAILEY: I wonder if it was. I haven’t heard anyone mention that. So that’s not something . . .
SHAVER: Margaret made one mention of it in her book.
S. BAILEY: I was trying to think if there were other apartments that might, that are, were . . . some other apartments down there.
SHAVER: See, see your family was involved in energy here for a while, that’s . . .
S. BAILEY: We lived here until, let’s see, we moved to Florida when I graduated from high school in 1941. So we had no contact with . . .
SHAVER: So, it would have been around that time, it would have been maybe ’40. Somewhere between ’39 or ’42.
S. BAILEY: Uh-hum, we would have been far gone by that time.
SHAVER: Yeah, that’s when the Fred Wallaces lived in Denver.
S. BAILEY: Is your interest is whether or not there is something additional.
DUNAR: Oh, just [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Did you have something there?
DUNAR: Just some thing with this tricycle [showing pictures].
S. BAILEY: Yes, I remember that tricycle. I hadn’t thought of it, but I sure do. That fence, that’s, that isn’t there anymore is it. What do you call it? That lath fence. I am trying to remember [unintelligible]. Oh, that’s a nice picture. I haven’t looked at this book in years. I remember that dress. [laughter] [unintelligible] I never saw, I never saw [unintelligible] that I can remember. I had a picture, that Marg gave me at graduation time when she graduated from high school, I imagine you have that one probably someplace.
34
DUNAR: I haven’t seen that.
S. BAILEY: The woman who took that had her shop, I think, in Bundschu’s and she was known as a nice person who did good photography and made you look beautiful. [chuckling]
SHAVER: Do you remember what her name is?
S. BAILEY: Iris Palmer, I think, was that it?
DUNAR: Right, Iris Palmer.
S. BAILEY: I thought that was an excellent photograph.
DUNAR: Yes, it is. I wonder if we have that in the Truman Library.
S. BAILEY: They surely must. Probably she gave out some to friends at graduation time. Let me see, I didn’t have anything else that you . . . Oh, this you wouldn’t have but then that doesn’t have meaning to the house. I wish I had valued that more earlier, it seems to have lost a corner of it.
SHAVER: We’re not even just only interested in the house but the neighborhood, too, because we talked about the neighborhood. Just a year or two ago we started doing walking tours of the neighborhood and we found out we really don’t know all that much about it.
S. BAILEY: And it’s vanishing, isn’t it? The last time I saw how many houses have been torn down, I just couldn’t believe it.
DUNAR: Well, there was a controversial period in there about the Truman Historic District, as they were calling it, about whether it would be maintained exactly as it was, and there was some question with the Baptist church about building some parking lots and expanding the parking space.
S. BAILEY: Oh, really? Has the city council done a zoning thing to protect the district?
DUNAR: Well, Mike probably can explain more, he knows more about it. [tape is turned off]
35
S. BAILEY: A lovely tunnel and cool and pleasant.
SHAVER: There’s only one maple tree left on Maple Street, and that’s right in front of your old house.
S. BAILEY: Is that right?
SHAVER: And it was so sad to see it. I mean, the last really big street tree left on the street fell about a month ago. Some lady took it down, it wasn’t in bad shape, but that what we would love to see is to see Maple Street . . .
S. BAILEY: Well, are you allowed to restore by planting?
SHAVER: In Independence, yes, there is. In fact, they’ve just hired a city forester to advise the city on their tree program. I’m glad to see they put that back in.
S. BAILEY: They probably won’t plant the . . .
SHAVER: As far as the park service is concerned, we’re the smallest national park area this side of the Appalachian Mountains.
S. BAILEY: Really?
SHAVER: All we’ve got is just right inside the fence, three-quarters of an acre.
S. BAILEY: Isn’t that odd. Are you also in charge of Tower Rock? [tape is turned off] When you think of how old Independence was and how much history went through there, it should be possible to recapture it. Independence was unique, wasn’t it?
DUNAR: Oh, yes.
S. BAILEY: And even if it hadn’t had the good fortune to have Harry Truman living in Independence, it should have recognized what it had that should be preserved.
DUNAR: Do you have any memories of Senator Truman, then Senator Truman, at all?
S. BAILEY: Well, yes, a lot less memories of personal contact because he was rarely
36
there. He was so often away that I think we thought it was a grand celebration for Marg when he was coming home. See, that was my impression. He was always quick to make it seem like we were the most important thing in the world. Whatever it was that we were there doing, he came right to it and immediately took note of it and engaged us in conversation, as though we were really important to him. Maybe he liked seeing Marg happy.
DUNAR: Right, right, yes.
S. BAILEY: I think that was pleasant for him probably. If she was enjoying doing something, then it was very important to him.
SHAVER: As you told me on the phone in our conversation and as I’ve noticed in the pictures, apparently you traveled with them, too, on occasions?
S. BAILEY: Yes, I wish I had a better memory. I remember that one and I think there was at least one other one that . . . I think he was in Noel, Missouri. I remember the restaurant there almost as much as I remember him, because it was so unique. That part of Missouri has wonderful springs bubbling around. I don’t know whether it still does or not, but there was this wonderful spring that fed this stream, and they had built the restaurant over the stream and they specialized in trout. I remember he was going to a political meeting there and I was asked to go along on that occasion.
SHAVER: When they had come down and they picked you up in Joplin and took you to the [unintelligible]?
S. BAILEY: Yes, that’s right. We had moved. This was one of the times when we’d moved away and were living in Joplin, and that was kind of a spur of the moment thing. I don’t think we knew they were coming, they just stopped by. They must have gotten our address from my grandmother.
37
We have never corresponded much. I have a few letters around but Marg sure wouldn’t have very many from me; I’m not that much of a letter writer.
SHAVER: I’m surprised you have any from her the way her dad carried on about that.
S. BAILEY: Yes. Well, she didn’t like to write letters and so we kind of had this understanding, we don’t care to write letters, and so I have very few. I really should make a point of looking them up.
DUNAR: On that trip, did you go to the political gatherings at all, or did you go directly to [unintelligible]?
S. BAILEY: Yes, I just remember a group of . . . there may have been twenty-five people meeting in the dining room having lunch.
DUNAR: It wasn’t a big rally.
S. BAILEY: No, it wasn’t large-scale. It must have been somebody planning strategy or a local group or something.
DUNAR: Did he speak?
S. BAILEY: No, I don’t think so. I think it was an informal thing. A lot of genial exchange of people who already knew each other and then I remember a sort of . . . the awkwardness that was there because Marg, I don’t think, knew any of them. And I certainly didn’t, and so I remember the we felt kind of like drawing back while all of this took place.
When he was available he seemed to be fully available, you know, dropped everything else. I can remember being taken to a ball game once. He and Mrs. Truman took Marg and me. I don’t think my sister was there that time, I don’t know why. It could have been that one of her aunts and uncles was along, too, and he seemed fully invested in the ball game. If he was at home it seemed like the rest of his interests
38
just were wiped away while he centered on what Marg was doing and what Mrs. Truman was doing.
DUNAR: Did you ever see him politicking, in the sense that maybe at the ball game there were people that came up where he was sitting in the stands?
S. BAILEY: No, and I don’t remember thinking anybody recognized him. And, you know, it wasn’t apparently a particularly busy night at the ball game. I can remember in the stadium that not many seats were occupied. I remember, I may have told you about his taking us to lunch at the Muehlebach Hotel once. That was really good stuff, you know, to get to go to the Muehlebach Hotel. Well, for one thing, they often had name bands performing. Even at lunchtime you would sometimes be entertained by a name dance band and that was great. I remember being passed a shallow tray with hard French rolls on it. And when the tray came to me, one of the rolls rolled off. [chuckling] And quick as a wink, he said something about, “We don’t know how many times that rolled off that tray before,” you know, don’t worry about it. [laughter] He made a joke, and so immediately you felt at ease, like it wasn’t a major problem.
I did not have a lot of social occasions when he was present. It was feminine, as I had mentioned earlier. But if he was there, he was always warm and no bad language, ever. I can’t picture it, it just doesn’t fit. I’m sure it must have been there but, certainly, he would not have used it around the home place.
DUNAR: Was there interaction between the adults, your grandparents and the Trumans, for example, or the Allens, Dr. Allen, maybe, and the Trumans? Did you observe that at all?
S. BAILEY: No, come to think of it, they must have had very different interests and
39
different sets of friends because they talked over the back fence. That was the social exchange they had, no social exchange other than that. My aunt played cards in a different bridge club than Mrs. Truman’s bridge club, and Mrs. Allen didn’t play bridge much at all, as I recall. She was very home-centered and looked after the household and seemed to be . . .
DUNAR: Mrs. Allen was?
S. BAILEY: Yes, and she always spoke of . . . she called Dr. Allen “Doctor”, she didn’t call him Charles, but “Doctor.” I always thought that was so strange. She was a wonderful woman, and sweet and kind to the children. I don’t know whether you’ve interviewed Marg about her or not, but she was a wonderful woman to have around when you were playing. She was very indulgent and read stories occasionally. But I don’t think there was any social exchange there at all. In looking back on it, in those days my parents didn’t do social things at all. They didn’t know about baby-sitters, they didn’t go out. If they went someplace, we were with them, and though my grandparents entertained, it would more likely be Sunday dinner. And I don’t think they went out socially much. It seemed to me the household, the family, was the focal point for most of those people. I don’t think any of them were drawn out from the household.
DUNAR: So it would just be casual chats over the back fence?
S. BAILEY: Yes.
DUNAR: It seems that certainly in the later years that Mrs. Truman was pretty much, I guess, forced to stay in the house because of tourists and so forth. Was that at all the case earlier? Did she spend time out in the yard or did she mostly stay in the house even earlier?
40
S. BAILEY: It seemed to me that all of the women, adult women, spent time in the house and not out.
DUNAR: Not out in the yard?
S. BAILEY: No. My grandmother had a little flower garden out in her back yard, but she probably threw the seeds in one day in the spring and we watered them because that was fun to play with the hose, but she wasn’t out there much. And Mrs. Allen had a rose garden out in the side yard on the Delaware side that a man put in for her once, but I don’t recall her spending time there. Women seemed to stay in the house. Maybe it was because they didn’t have air conditioning and it was the only place where you were really comfortable in the summertime was in the house.
DUNAR: Well, that’s interesting. So it wasn’t just a matter of the tourists then that drove her inside. That was really sort of the way she had lived before.
S. BAILEY: I doubt it. Yes, because now the back porch would have been another matter; I hope the tourists didn’t intrude there very much because they did spend a lot of time on the back porch.
DUNAR: So they did back then, too?
S. BAILEY: Yes.
DUNAR: Would they stay on the back porch and watch you all playing in the driveway and so forth?
S. BAILEY: Yes, very often. It wasn’t screened in then.
DUNAR: [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Yes. So they would have just been sitting out there. I think I remember rocking chairs on the back porch. But it did get a lot of use even before it was screened in. I wasn’t there after it was screened in, to play. It was still open at the time that we were there.
DUNAR: Did the Trumans have other employees other than Vietta Garr, people
41
that worked on the yard, for example, or anything of that sort?
S. BAILEY: I remember seeing a man doing lawn work but I don’t think of him as the same kind of person that Vietta was and he wasn’t there regularly. He must have come in once a week or something, but he didn’t figure in our lives.
DUNAR: The Senator didn’t do any work in the yard at all, did he? It was just that [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: No. Come to think of it none of the men did either. [chuckling] My grandfather mowed the lawn, that was it.
DUNAR: So the pattern was then that all the families had hired somebody to do the yard work.
S. BAILEY: They must have, yes. Mrs. Allen had somebody come in and spread manure so we couldn’t play in the lawn for quite a while, I remember. [chuckling]
SHAVER: She still takes care of her yard in a very meticulous manner, or sees that it’s done.
S. BAILEY: Does she really? Well, I just saw a letter she wrote to my aunt who lives down in a retirement home in Midland, Texas, recently, and her handwriting was still good enough that I could read it easily and her mind was clearly functioning very well. But I haven’t personally seen her now for a long time. Have you interviewed her recently?
SHAVER: No, I’ve just seen her on her porch on occasion.
S. BAILEY: Well, I judge by that letter her wits are still about her. She sounded very sharp.
DUNAR: We haven’t talked too much specifically about the Allen girls. Could you tell us a little bit about them and maybe about how your group interacted with each other. I know you mentioned to Mike earlier that
42
your sister kind of was the leader of the group. And could you comment on those sorts of relationships?
S. BAILEY: Yes. I don’t know whether that would cause a resentment among the Allen girls or not. [chuckling] I haven’t been with them for so many years, I’m not sure that I even know them now. You know, I knew them well then. We were extremely close. We took our baths together, you know. Now that’s pretty close, splashing all over. [laughter] If we weren’t taking our baths together, we would have had a little play pool out in the side yard—the Allen’s had that—and we played in that; but I think maybe even that was too hot sometimes, you know, so that they let us play in the bathtub. We spent a lot of time in the Allen house because it was so close. And I’m sure we must have been ringing their doorbell at least once a day to see if they could come play or do something and we did use the telephone a lot. The telephone was a toy and we were allowed to call each other on the phone. And I still remember where the telephone was in Marg’s house; under the stairs there was a little table of some sort.
DUNAR: This is in the front hall in the foyer?
S. BAILEY: Yes. And that was where the telephone was, you know, the black kind with the receiver you hang on the hook, and the upright type.
DUNAR: And you went through an operator? Or did you [unintelligible]?
S. BAILEY: Yes, that was when you still had . . . What did they say when they answered the phone in those days? “Number, please?” I guess.
DUNAR: Oh, yes.
S. BAILEY: But we were allowed to use the telephone rather freely. I guess it wasn’t imposing on anybody, nobody else wanted to use it, and so if we weren’t together we were often calling each other on the phone. And so we even
43
called next door because it was fun, so we talked to the Allen girls. Marie and my sister Betty, I think, are approximately the same age, and Harriet then must be a couple of years younger than Marie and a little older than I am, and then Mona was a little younger than I and then Barbie was the baby. And Barbie was enough younger that my sister remembers loving to take care of her; kind of like playing with dolls, Barbie provided a new toy. I’m about to sneeze, you want to turn off your machine. [chuckling] [tape is turned off] Because they had those attics and then the second floor and then you stayed on the first floor on a hot summer day. It was almost like air conditioning. My son brought back a postcard of the den. Oh, that’s the Compton House.
DUNAR: Oh, yes. Yes, it looks very much like that, yes.
S. BAILEY: And that’s another shot. Let’s see, the den didn’t look quite like that when we were there. I think it’s because they’ve added a lot of bookshelves. There probably were . . . My guess is that maybe there were an initial set, either here or there, I can’t recall.
DUNAR: These were all built, I think, in the fifties, with the remodeling that they did in the 1950s.
S. BAILEY: Oh, okay.
DUNAR: So can you maybe describe what you remember of how this was then before that?
S. BAILEY: Well, the rooms seemed much more bare and had very little furniture. It had one large comfortable chair, which I got the impression was Harry’s chair.
DUNAR: Was this considered to be the study then?
S. BAILEY: Yes, it was. Yes, it had that character about it.
DUNAR: Even before they put the book shelves in, it was?
44
S. BAILEY: This comfortable reading chair, for sure, and some bookshelves there.
DUNAR: Was there a desk in it then, at that point?
S. BAILEY: I don’t remember the desk. The reason I’m a little bit puzzled about this is on a hot summer afternoon, when we were supposed to be taking a nap, as we got a little older they would allow us a little more leeway about that and we would lay down a pallet, as it was called. Do you know what a pallet was, to people of that day?
DUNAR: Probably not in that context.
S. BAILEY: Well, it was quilts or blankets layered on the floor.
DUNAR: I see, yes.
S. BAILEY: And we would then stretch out on the pallet and usually strip down to undergarments and then read the mystery books that we had just gotten at the library that morning. And sometimes my sister and I would read the same book. I don’t know why we did that, now that I think about it. And so you’d stretch out on your tummy on the floor with the book open in front of you, and Marg would be reading her book and Betty and I would be reading sometimes the same book, and so we were relatively quiet during that time. Sometimes we read aloud, but I think we preferred reading to ourselves. And there was a big old Emerson fan, you know, the kind that weighs about fifty pounds, black with gold stenciling on it, whirling back and forth, and it was very pleasant. And so I thought of it as a reading room but it didn’t look quite like that. When I saw it, I thought, gee, that just isn’t quite the way I had remembered it. And since we had the pallet on the floor, there had to be quite a bit of floor space.
DUNAR: Yes, so there may not have been at that . . .
S. BAILEY: So I don’t think there was much furniture there. I just remember
45
particularly that one comfortable looking chair.
DUNAR: Were there other chairs? Do you remember other chairs being in there or just the one comfortable one?
S. BAILEY: No, I don’t recall that. No, just that one big one. I have a dim memory of there being plaid in the room, whether it was on the chair, with a gray background and red stripes. Could that have been wallpaper, do you suppose?
DUNAR: Maybe so. We don’t know that.
S. BAILEY: I’ll have to think about that.
SHAVER: Maybe it got burned.
DUNAR: Yes, that’s right. [chuckling] There was a story about the wallpaper being burned. When the people that did the remodeling in the fifties came in, they . . . apparently, Mr. Truman told them there was a pile of wallpaper that Mrs. Truman had kept all the samples, and Mr. Truman told them to go ahead and burn all this stuff. So they took it out and burned it, and that afternoon Mrs. Truman came and she was looking for a piece to repair something in one of the rooms . . . [laughter]
S. BAILEY: And her stash was gone. Oh, that’s terrible.
DUNAR: And they were saying, the people that worked on it, said they thought their job wouldn’t last two hours, period. [laughter]
S. BAILEY: Well, he didn’t know. Well, I’m sorry I digressed, because I was trying to recapture the Allen girls. They were unique, each of them different than the other. Marie seemed sedate and rather like her mother, sweet natured, and mature acting, I think. Harriet was flamboyant and arty, and liked things that had a flair about them. I think she liked being different and seemed rather creative. Mona was a bit of a tragedy but you wouldn’t have known it from her. Mona had been desperately sick
46
from spinal meningitis, which I gather Dr. Allen thought had brought home to her because he was treating a patient. I suppose she nearly died, but she did lose the sight of one eye as a result of that, though she recovered. And since she died rather young, I wondered if she hadn’t been somewhat impaired by that illness, which was often fatal in those days, maybe still is I don’t know. But she was very gentle and I remember she overlooked her own impaired eye and had gotten quite used to it. I was trying to show her how to make a bow and arrow work and told her to close one eye and you could see better where you were pointing. [laughter] She thought that was funny. She was very sweet about that disability and it didn’t seem really to bother her in any way. And then Barbie, because she was so much younger than the rest of us, didn’t actually get involved, except as kind of a prop, you know. [laughter] You know, if we were having a play, right. But I hear interesting things about Barbie. Didn’t she become a politician, too?
DUNAR: We were talking about that just before. It seems that . . . I guess she was a politician, [unintelligible] politician.
S. BAILEY: I think I heard she was a mayor of Redding or . . .
DUNAR: And wasn’t there another one, too, in the group? I think there was another one who was politically active.
SHAVER: It escapes my memory right now.
DUNAR: I’m just wondering if you have any theory on maybe why several of you seemed to have become involved in politics?
S. BAILEY: It is odd. When I think about it, it’s odd because it certainly wasn’t our interest. We totally ignored the fact that there was something political about the Wallace household. It was not something that we focused on and it surprises me that that occurred.
47
DUNAR: Yes, yes, that’s interesting.
S. BAILEY: Yes. The only thing I can think about, I don’t know how Barbie would have felt about it, but I was sort of frustrated by a reference made by my family about . . . “Well, I suppose they decided that.” And I’d say, “Well, who are ‘they’?” “Oh, you know, ‘they.’“ And I grew up wanting to know who are “they,” you know. Because it was clear that our lives were being dictated by whoever “they” were. But my family was much embroiled in politics. I guess it would be hard to live in Jackson County without having a sense of politics being a very vital force. But they were not people who challenged, they accepted the establishment, whatever it was, and they profited from that, I suppose. Roger Sermon who was mayor of Independence for years . . . I thought was our cousin until I got interested in family history and he was not. But his wife, Cousin Mabel, was married to my grandfather’s nephew.
DUNAR: Oh, okay.
S. BAILEY: And so I thought that Roger Sermon, like his sister, was somehow linked by marriage, but he wasn’t at all. But I grew up with that sense that Roger would take care of all this and nobody else had to think about it because everything was under control. But I never made any link in my mind about my getting involved in politics because of that, but it’s possible that we saw it, you know, as what people do. You know, there are people that do.
DUNAR: Yes, they’re just part of the environment and things.
S. BAILEY: Yes, some people farm and some people run for office.
SHAVER: There weren’t any boys in the neighborhood to tell you otherwise either.
S. BAILEY: That’s true. If they had been there, we would have known. But we were kind of contrary, we might have thought that was a challenge, I think.
48
DUNAR: Well, that might have been a part of it, too, do you think?
S. BAILEY: It could have been. Yes, it could have been, because we probably had deprived all of our fathers of something they’d wanted, namely a son. [laughter] And we all may have been challenged to make up for that deficiency. That may very well have been true. My father treated me exactly like I was a son, though he would have never have thought of my being involved in anything out there in the world that men do. I don’t think that would have crossed his mind as a possibility. I guess each of those fathers on the “Henhouse Hicks” group probably saw their daughters as capable, but I don’t think any of them would have envisioned something like that. That doesn’t seem to fit, really.
DUNAR: Were you in classes at school with Margaret?
S. BAILEY: No, she was a year behind me in school, so we would only occasionally see each other, going back and forth to school or in the hall in William Chrisman. I think she was only in William Chrisman one year, as I recall. She was going to school back at Gunston, so I don’t think she was there very much. I can remember occasionally the school dances. We’d see each other at the dances, but since we were never in classes I don’t have very much association with her in school.
DUNAR: How about when you were younger in grade school?
S. BAILEY: Well, I think . . . I was trying to remember. We always walked a certain way to Bryant School and sort of picked up people as we went and we went home for lunch regularly. And for the life of me, I can’t remember whether Marg did that, too, but we walked right by her house. I don’t know whether they’re still there or not, but there were hexagonal . . . octagonal?
DUNAR: Octagonal, I think, yes.
49
S. BAILEY: Paving blocks, gray and white, and we walked certain ways, always aware of those blocks. Some days you’d stay on the gray ones and some days you stayed on the white ones, you know, you didn’t just walk right. But I can’t recall whether she was with us or not—that’s an oddity in my mind. But I can remember by the time we got to Bryant School there might be six or eight girls, come to think of it.
DUNAR: Do you remember, a Mrs. Palmer was still teaching then wasn’t she? Do you remember her?
S. BAILEY: I don’t remember her, Palmer. I remember a Mrs. Burrus. It seemed to me Mrs. . . .
DUNAR: So was that Rufus Burrus’s wife?
S. BAILEY: I think, let me see.
SHAVER: It might have been his mother.
S. BAILEY: His mother?
SHAVER: She lived in that . . . and also an aunt, too. There’s a Miss Burrus -[unintelligible] Edson Berger was another.
S. BAILEY: That doesn’t sound quite right, Edson Houser.
SHAVER: Edson Houser, yes.
S. BAILEY: Yes, I think she was kind of a personal friend of the Truman’s, Mrs. Edson Houser was. [asking her husband] Do you remember her? Do you remember any of the teachers?
[End #3607; Begin #3608]
S. BAILEY: . . . a lot of controversy about the new courthouse that was viewed as inappropriate and too big for the space.
D. BAILEY: Especially money and hard times through it.
DUNAR: Oh, yes, of the Truman Courthouse?
S. BAILEY: Yes, right. So maybe that was the first decline of the Square, or maybe it
50
was the tenth, I don’t know what went on before that. [laughter] But it was a lively time on Saturday night. By the time you were growing up, was it still?
D. BAILEY: Oh yes. I worked at the Missions, you know, and everybody in town came to the Missions for supper.
S. BAILEY: Oh, at nighttime particularly. Since we didn’t go there often at night, ours was afternoon visits. Missions was a drugstore, what soda fountain?
D. BAILEY: Sort of soda fountain and sandwich shop.
S. BAILEY: Right.
DUNAR: Where was that?
D. BAILEY: Just south of the old Bank of Independence at Liberty and Maple.
DUNAR: Okay, okay.
D. BAILEY: On the southeast corner there.
S. BAILEY: On the south . . . West, southwest.
D. BAILEY: No. Southwest, yes, southwest.
S. BAILEY: Yes, southwest corner.
D. BAILEY: Across from the courthouse. It was a soda fountain and sandwich shop.
S. BAILEY: And we went there for ice cream sodas, I remember. I have always wondered whether or not you made me one.
D. BAILEY: I’m pretty sure it’s on Maple Street.
S. BAILEY: Oh, I didn’t know that.
D. BAILEY: And they had parking right there on Maple Street.
S. BAILEY: I don’t remember that.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Our paths crossed and I didn’t . . .
D. BAILEY: People pulled up in their cars and ordered a sandwich.
51
S. BAILEY: But Marg was much addicted to hot fudge sundaes and so we knew all the hot fudge sundae places around town.
SHAVER: Well, was the Granada Sweet Shop a place when you were around, or not?
D. BAILEY: Yes, yes.
S. BAILEY: It was right on the corner, wasn’t it?
D. BAILEY: It was right at the Granada Theater.
S. BAILEY: Yes, the very corner. There wasn’t anyplace to sit down in there though, was there?
D. BAILEY: Well, there was a fountain in it.
S. BAILEY: Yes, I remember the fountain but it was a very small space.
D. BAILEY: There may have been some little booths there, I don’t recall.
S. BAILEY: I remember buying things there but I don’t remember sitting there. Do you know when it came into being?
SHAVER: No, I know of it. We were trying to trace things down on Maple Street, in order to develop our walking tour. Maple Street is my favorite part of the whole tour because there’s still a lot of things there. I don’t know a whole lot about it, but there’s a lot of good stories connected with Maple Street and Mr. Truman. And Mr. Sermon’s store was there on Maple Street.
S. BAILEY: It was, right, and for a long time. And even after he died Powell Cook then ran the same store.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] after a while, right.
S. BAILEY: Since it was Cook and Sermon. That was a good place to go.
D. BAILEY: That was on up almost next to the bank [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Yes. When we were kids we would walk up to Cook and Sermon with my grandfather.
52
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] down at the corner the Swan’s print shop was down in the basement at Osage Street.
S. BAILEY: It was? Oh, that’s where that was. I didn’t remember that.
D. BAILEY: I know the Swans lived next door to Mrs. Shroeder on Main Street.
S. BAILEY: Yes, that’s right. We used to be given candy. You ran a charge account at the grocery store, and that was one of the best parts of living in Independence, it seems to me, was that the delivery boy came almost every day, you know. And you had a charge account. I guess everybody in the neighborhood charged groceries at Cook and Sermon, and so the delivery boy knew everything. If you could find the delivery boy, he’d be able to tell you things that the rest of us don’t know because he was in and out of those houses all the time.
DUNAR: You mentioned the Square on Saturday nights. What went on there?
S. BAILEY: Some people appeared to just come to town and park, angle parking, and so there was a lot of parking.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible]. Showed off, honked their horns.
DUNAR: Yes, yes.
S. BAILEY: This is earlier. There weren’t enough kids having cars, you see, when I was a child.
D. BAILEY: Well, I’m talking about the thirties.
S. BAILEY: Yes, then on, I suppose. When I was in high school there was only one female who had a car and that was Marilyn McKim. So teenagers in Independence who were female didn’t have cars, they got to drive the family car.
D. BAILEY: Right, but a lot of boys had cars.
S. BAILEY: I suppose they did.
D. BAILEY: There was big groups of kids had cars.
53
S. BAILEY: Yes. The farmers came to town on Saturday night. They came to do the week’s buying, I guess, and bring in produce maybe, I don’t know.
DUNAR: Were there gathering places for teenagers?
S. BAILEY: In my time, the gathering place was seven miles out of town at the Shamrock.
DUNAR: What was the Shamrock?
S. BAILEY: It was a beer joint, wasn’t it? Is that what you’d call it?
DUNAR: Where was it?
S. BAILEY: You go out east of Independence on 24 Highway.
D. BAILEY: Seven miles east, tri-cities [unintelligible]. What was the name of the little town?
SHAVER: This was a good ways out.
S. BAILEY: It was. So I was in high school . . .
D. BAILEY: Probably about to Buckner? Wouldn’t that be about it?
DUNAR: Yes, yes.
S. BAILEY: Probably about that far.
D. BAILEY: It wasn’t in the town. It was really out in the country.
S. BAILEY: Three sisters ran it and they supervised.
D. BAILEY: Three maiden ladies ran the place, Gertie . . . I haven’t any notion what they were.
S. BAILEY: Gertie is one of them, right. And they supervised. The big boys like Dudley were served beer if they could afford it.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] if you were of age, right.
S. BAILEY: Yes. But those of us who were not able to drink were given soft drinks, and they had hamburgers. Most dates couldn’t afford the hamburgers though. It was only a really wealthy date that would offer you a hamburger. [laughter]
54
D. BAILEY: Coke dates. Most people had Coke dates.
S. BAILEY: Right, yes, they did. But locally, I don’t believe I remember any gathering spots for teenagers, do you? Oh, during high school there was one right down by William Chrisman on Lexington.
D. BAILEY: Yes. In my day there was John Feldon’s Drug Store right across the street.
S. BAILEY: Yes.
D. BAILEY: But then later there was a place on Lexington, on down on the south side of Lexington.
S. BAILEY: What went on at John Feldon’s Drug Store?
D. BAILEY: Well, he sold hot dogs, you know, Coney Islands and things at lunch. Because in my day, the high school didn’t have a . . . you were free in your off hours so you’d come and go in high school.
DUNAR: Oh, so you didn’t have to stay, yes.
D. BAILEY: You didn’t have to go to study hall, you could go anyplace. So you’d go over to John Feldon’s.
S. BAILEY: Yes, his drug store was immediately west of the back yard of the high school.
D. BAILEY: Right, it was at Lexington and Union on the northwest corner.
S. BAILEY: And then Kelsey’s, was that it? What was the name of the joint across the street that was a gathering spot for high school teenagers?
D. BAILEY: It wasn’t Kelsey’s. Kelsey’s was down on Van Horn.
S. BAILEY: Okay.
DUNAR: Wasn’t that a restaurant or a delicatessen or something? Because I know in the later years Mrs. Truman . . .
D. BAILEY: They were out across from . . . I think Kelsey moved down across from the sanitarium. They may still be down there for all I know.
55
DUNAR: Okay, maybe that was it.
D. BAILEY: But they were just west of River.
DUNAR: Oh, they were further down.
D. BAILEY: On the south side, across from the Van Horn. Now, the Van Horn place is a famous institution. It was just west of River Road on the north side, and A. D. Carlson was the owner of the place. Mr. Carlson made the most famous chili in Independence.
S. BAILEY: You started to mention Mrs. Truman, did she go there for chili?
DUNAR: Well, I’m not sure she went for chili but she liked the food, and, I guess, especially the coleslaw at Kelsey’s and would order it in and have it brought into the house.
S. BAILEY: Isn’t that interesting. It’s like their recipe.
D. BAILEY: Yes, I think that’s probably it. Kelsey’s restaurant was a good restaurant.
DUNAR: Yes.
D. BAILEY: Paul Kelsey ran the restaurant.
S. BAILEY: I don’t think there were any . . .
D. BAILEY: They had beer when beer came back then. [unintelligible] beer.
DUNAR: At Kelsey’s?
D. BAILEY: Yes, much to the consternation of many of our Latter Day Saints. [laughter]
S. BAILEY: Yes, that was not good. I don’t know where else the teenagers went in the thirties, do you?
D. BAILEY: No. No, in my day, I don’t know of any meeting place, because this was the early thirties and nobody had any money and no place to go.
S. BAILEY: Right. Going to a movie was probably a think that was done.
D. BAILEY: Now, the Lexington, was that the one up on the Square, the Lexington? What was the name of that theater? The Lexington?
56
S. BAILEY: Was that it’s name? I had forgotten all about it.
D. BAILEY: On the south side of the square.
S. BAILEY: Yes, that was viewed as a second-rate . . .
D. BAILEY: Oh, yes, it was, it was a dime movie.
S. BAILEY: Yes.
DUNAR: The Granada was the . . .
D. BAILEY: Twenty-five cents.
S. BAILEY: It was the fancy one, yes. [chuckling]
D. BAILEY: They had curtains and all that sort of thing.
S. BAILEY: Oh, that’s right they did.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] chandeliers.
S. BAILEY: Yes. I notice on the back of a postcard it mentioned that Marg gave the chandelier to her folks as a present. What was there before? Do you know? I can’t remember.
SHAVER: It was kind of a brass fixture which came down like this and it was kind of reminiscent of a gas fixture. But wasn’t, it had [unintelligible] on it.
S. BAILEY: It was rather simple, wasn’t it? Not much . . .
SHAVER: Just light bulbs, and we found pieces of it left up in the attic of the garage. I just finally figured out what these things went to, because I was looking at a picture of the old dining room, and lo and behold, these were parts of that light.
S. BAILEY: Do you know which of these pieces are original and which came later? I haven’t a very good memory, I think there was always something on that wall. I was talking to my sister about the fact that you were coming, over the phone the other night, and I was asking her what she remembered about the dining room. And she said she remembered when her oldest son Harrison was born, Marg wanted to see him and so Betty
57
was in Independence. She was living in St. Louis, I think, at the time but she was there visiting with Harrison, and he was under two, walking and at an age to get into mischief. And she said she remembered that she and Marg got distracted in the living room and she suddenly missed Harrison and couldn’t find him, and that she entered the dining room and saw Harry standing, guarding the silverware. Harrison was reaching for it and he wasn’t inhibiting his doing it, except by just moving sideways each time he sort of blocked him, you know. He did sort of a dance step, you know, and then over here, without touching him, you know, and no-no. I was trying to remember what that looked like.
SHAVER: A lot of that stuff is original. The old family silver, there’s pictures of them having that on the table for Thanksgiving and Mr. Frank Wallace cutting the turkey or the ham or whatever the case might be.
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes, I’d forgotten that. That was the register where the hot air came out I think, wasn’t it?
SHAVER: Yes, yes.
S. BAILEY: Ornate, right there, isn’t that handsome? Was that common in Victorian houses? I know my grandmother’s house didn’t have that.
SHAVER: That’s the first one I’ve ever seen, and we’ve been chasing down the origins of that, but apparently it was put in the house at the same time that everything else was. And it’s portable. I mean, you can pick it up and move it. It’s just a real heavy [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Oh, really? And the vent is right there, cut through the floor then?
SHAVER: Yes, it’s cut through the floor and it sits right on the floor above the . . .
S. BAILEY: Oh. Well, I remember feeling the heat coming out of that.
DUNAR: I think grillwork like that was relatively common, but I’m not sure about something portable.
58
SHAVER: Well, that’s the thing we think. It came when Mr. Gates built the house. He ordered the grills for the heat and we think that the fellow who provided the grillwork and the furnace and all that also probably carried that in his line of stuff, I’m not sure.
S. BAILEY: That may have made a useful surface. I suppose they sat things on that, probably. And certainly if they wanted things to stay warm, that might be a nice warming thing. Oh, that’s nice.
D. BAILEY: Their sidewalk wasn’t any good in the thirties, early thirties.
S. BAILEY: Which one, the one on . . .
D. BAILEY: The Truman sidewalk and the Wallace’s sidewalk, because kids roller skated always on the north side.
S. BAILEY: Yes. Well, those blocks were not good for skating on.
D. BAILEY: I know everybody went down the north side street.
DUNAR: Oh, really? Because of [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Yes.
DUNAR: That’s where the octagonal blocks were in the front and those would not have been [unintelligible].
D. BAILEY: Yes, they may have been. I didn’t remember that. Yes, I think that is true.
DUNAR: That’s right.
S. BAILEY: Are there any pictures in here of the music room?
SHAVER: Yes. [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: I was just curious. There was something that I was trying to remember that looked so different. When we went through the house that day, it was about three years ago, wasn’t it? It looked different and I was trying to think why. What do you call the mirrors?
SHAVER: You missed the mirrors, too?
59
S. BAILEY: Yes, I missed the mirrors, the big bubble concave, the convex.
SHAVER: Right. They’re convex, they bowed out.
S. BAILEY: Yes. That I remembered, I think, over the mantel in the music room.
DUNAR: Instead of pictures.
S. BAILEY: Yes. There weren’t any portraits in those days. I guess that came after being in office, didn’t they?
DUNAR: Yes, that’s where all the White House years pictures . . .
SHAVER: There were a few boys there were about your age that went to school with Margaret at Palmer, name of Jones, Alex Jones and another Jones boy, and they came through the house together. And that was one of their first comments was, you know, “What happened to the mirrors?.”
S. BAILEY: Yes.
SHAVER: But apparently Fred Wallace took one with him when he moved to Denver and Mrs. May Wallace has one in her house.
S. BAILEY: Oh, I see.
SHAVER: She has the other one in her house.
S. BAILEY: There’s probably one in the front hallway and then the second one was probably in the music room.
SHAVER: Well, they remembered them being side-by-side or on either side of the fireplace mantel.
S. BAILEY: Well, what would have been in the front hallway? Because it didn’t look like it with the portrait that I saw there.
SHAVER: And another thing which may have changed from your memory of it was that the fireplace mantels were much more ornate than they were later on.
S. BAILEY: Oh, think about that.
SHAVER: One thing Mrs. May Wallace told us about when we first opened up the
60
house, she said, “Are you going to fix up those fireplace mantels the way they used to be before Fred took them out?” And there’s a picture of Margaret’s . . . Well, we call it Margaret’s bedroom, but it was Mrs. Wallace’s bedroom, and the fireplace mantels were ornate like those, like that one.
S. BAILEY: Oh, I had forgotten that, yes. They’re pretty awful, aren’t they. [laughter] Particularly with the television set in front.
SHAVER: But there was one that had two square stands that sat on either side of it. And there was another one somewhat similar that had mirrors.
S. BAILEY: Yes, I think that’s true.
SHAVER: So it’s kind of interesting to say that you could remember those, because I think they were fixed after maybe you . . .
S. BAILEY: Yes, it just didn’t seem quite right and I couldn’t think why it wasn’t.
SHAVER: And Mrs. May Wallace asked us, “Are you going to fix those things up that Fred messed up?” [laughter] You know, she still remembers -[unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Isn’t she wonderful!
SHAVER: What do you recall about her? She seemed to be, today, to us, she still seems to be a gas. She’s real sweet, you know, to the extent that she can be. She has declined a little bit. She’s a real active lady and she almost seemed like a kid in a lot of respects.
S. BAILEY: Yes. We thought of her as a tomboy, because we didn’t have any other word for a woman that was strong and sure of herself and physical, athletic. I wish I had known her better, looking back, because she impressed us at the time. We thought she was wonderful, just because she was always prepared with a big joke and never resting on dignity about anything. She was really a . . .
61
DUNAR: Would she come out and play with you at all?
S. BAILEY: She thought we were kind of funny and I think she stood up for us when were doing things that maybe Grandmother Wallace would rather we weren’t doing probably. But they were such different people, the two aunts. Aunt Nat was quiet and unassuming and less vivacious. She was very nice, always pleasant, but she didn’t have that kind of special flair that . . .
DUNAR: Do you know anything more about her? Because we don’t know much at all, really, about her.
S. BAILEY: No, I really don’t. Because they were the most distant, we saw less of her. I hadn’t thought about that, but it was probably just the geography of it.
SHAVER: Do you remember the uncles? Do you have any recollection of them?
S. BAILEY: We didn’t have much social interchange with them, but, yes, each of them was different. George was kind of dashing and a little less austere, whereas Frank seemed kind of like a banker. You know, he was very tall and he didn’t cut loose like George did, and then Freddy was just downright youthful, you know, compared to the other two. I guess he really was younger, wasn’t he? I thought he and his wife were a dashing couple. She was very pretty and he was very handsome. I think they had a white convertible once, it seemed to me, or yellow. They cut quite a figure, in my mind. I suspect Marg thought so, too, because they were kind of showy.
D. BAILEY: They lived east of the Truman’s, right? Was that the couple that -[unintelligible]?
S. BAILEY: No, that was George and then Frank. But Freddy and Christine lived in the house.
62
SHAVER: Do you remember which bedroom was theirs?
S. BAILEY: I thought it was the front north. Let’s see, looking at it from the outside, I think that was it. There was a window seat. Let’s see, do I remember that right? Was there a window seat under the windows in the upstairs right there?
SHAVER: Well, not since we’ve been there. There’s a little alcove.
S. BAILEY: Kind of an alcove, maybe that’s what it was, but we used that occasionally, though we didn’t spend as much time upstairs as we did elsewhere, but that little alcove made a stage.
SHAVER: There’s a modern day view of it now. There’s a cedar chest.
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes, I see. Yes, we were allowed in there and I thought that this door right here led to Freddy’s room. Does that jive with anything that you know?
SHAVER: That jives. That jives to the letter.
S. BAILEY: I see.
SHAVER: At least what little we know. We don’t know much about Mr. Fred Wallace at all, very little.
S. BAILEY: Is he dead? I don’t know anything . . .
SHAVER: Yes, he died in the late fifties. Christine is still alive but we’ve never had the opportunity to talk to her and she’s living with her son.
S. BAILEY: I see. And did David have a career? Was he an architect, too?
SHAVER: No, he was a writer.
S. BAILEY: A writer?
SHAVER: Yes, he was a staff writer for People magazine for a while.
S. BAILEY: Well, how interesting.
SHAVER: Do you have any recollections of him?
S. BAILEY: Just at that age, I think, in that little tiny picture, that’s the last I
63
remember him, and he looks like he’d be five or six, don’t you think?
SHAVER: Yes, not much older than seven.
S. BAILEY: He was a handsome little boy, I remember, but I didn’t see that much of him.
DUNAR: Now, who is this in the picture again? David and who else?
S. BAILEY: His sister, Margo you thought?
SHAVER: That’s the name that I remember her by.
DUNAR: Okay.
S. BAILEY: I suppose they didn’t always live in the house, did they? They must have just been there at certain times. I’m not sure but they didn’t seem to cross our paths much. So either I wasn’t there or they weren’t there, and I’m not sure maybe both.
SHAVER: [unintelligible] a little bit about their situation and your situation. Growing up were altogether different.
S. BAILEY: They had hard times, too, huh? [chuckling]
D. BAILEY: Have you talked to the Allen girls, any of the Allen girls?
DUNAR: No, not yet.
D. BAILEY: Wouldn’t they know about the house? Were the Allen girls involved here? [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Yes, I was thinking, I think Betty and I spent more time in the house than they did, just because they lived there and had each other. They didn’t need companionship and also they had town friends.
D. BAILEY: I see. Yes, of course.
SHAVER: Oh, that phrase. I haven’t heard that in a long time. [laughter]
S. BAILEY: Yes, we were outsiders, really, Betty and I were.
DUNAR: Because you were gone for part of the year?
S. BAILEY: Yes.
64
DUNAR: Have you had contact with Margaret since, and at any regular basis at all?
S. BAILEY: No. Let’s see, how many years ago was it when I saw her on TV and just spontaneously wrote a letter and told her I thought she was holding up pretty good? And she responded with a nice letter.
D. BAILEY: You were down when she got the . . .
S. BAILEY: Yes, I barely had time . . . You remember, was it about three years ago that they gave the award to Harry Truman? My friend Dorsey Lou thought I should come down for that. And we don’t communicate a whole lot either but she just called and said, “Why don’t you come down?” She said she had been talking to Marg, and if Marg could work it out that we’d have lunch together and have a chat and that she’d try to see what she could do, though Marg was very unclear about exactly what her duties were going to be when she came. As it turned out, a luncheon was being given for her at the time that Dorsey Lou had wanted to arrange our having lunch, so we didn’t have the luncheon. I only saw her at the reception line then, and so we just had a brief chat then. The first time that we had been that close for how many years do you suppose? I think a . . .
D. BAILEY: A long time.
S. BAILEY: I can’t recall the time before that. I remember going to lunch at the house. Marg had an old-timers luncheon, you know, let’s all get together, which must have been . . . That was after we had Jeff, at least.
D. BAILEY: Well, she came to lunch over at our house on Central, remember?
S. BAILEY: Yes, I found that old telegram.
D. BAILEY: And I sat out in the car. The Secret Service man sat in the car. [chuckling]
65
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] for hours.
S. BAILEY: We lived in a little house we rented from some friends of Dudley’s brother when our first son was born that was just south of the Plaza in Kansas City.
D. BAILEY: Up on the hill.
S. BAILEY: A little bitty bungalow up there, and Marg . . . at that time we were seeing each other more frequently and we were having luncheons. Somebody or another would have a luncheon and so I was having a luncheon, I think, with the Allen girls and Marg, and that’s why that telegram she sent . . .
DUNAR: Yes, [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Because she was verifying that she was going to be there at the luncheon.
D. BAILEY: Well, you had the telegram the night of the election.
S. BAILEY: That’s what that one is. Yes, that was the luncheon that . . . she’s just verifying that’s she’s going to get there and “What a night.” I had that around for a long time before I thought about that and decided I better hang onto that.
DUNAR: This is in July of 1948, would this have been?
D. BAILEY: No, no.
S. BAILEY: Yes, that’s the date of the telegram.
D. BAILEY: But you got a telegram in November when Truman defeated Dewey. She sent a telegram: “What a night.”
S. BAILEY: No, that’s this one. There were some other words on the other one.
DUNAR: I wonder if this would have been maybe at the time of the convention?
S. BAILEY: Yes, I think so.
D. BAILEY: Well, it might have been.
66
DUNAR: Maybe that’s it. Maybe there was one at the convention.
S. BAILEY: Yes, but there may have been another one.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible], too.
S. BAILEY: I’ll look for that, I haven’t taken very good care of such things. This is the luncheon occasion and then there may have been another one, which I will look for sometime. Yes, but the Secret Service man who brought her . . .
D. BAILEY: Well, this combination wasn’t all that . . .
DUNAR: Right, exactly.
D. BAILEY: That was before going.
DUNAR: Yes.
S. BAILEY: Yes.
D. BAILEY: I’m sure there is another one.
S. BAILEY: Probably is, I’ll think about where that might be.
D. BAILEY: I remember the note when Jeffrey was born.
S. BAILEY: That’s true, yes. She sent him a little silver hairbrush and comb.
D. BAILEY: Is that what it was?
S. BAILEY: Yes. Yes, we still have some gifts around. Oh, yes, Lorene just asked me about this. My aunt, I think, I told you is ninety-four, and she has a hard time remembering where things have gone. And since she lives in a retirement house, she has no room for things and so gradually she’s been giving things to my sister and me. And she got to worrying about this because the Trumans gave this to her as a wedding present, and she dearly loved it and so she wanted to know where is that. There’s no inscription on it, of course, but she was very fond of it. So I told her, “Rest easy, at least I know where that is.” But they were generous and kind always, and Mrs. Truman wrote regularly to Lorene, you know,
67
after they moved to Texas. She got letters from her until she got unable to correspond. Betty was telling me . . .
D. BAILEY: Did Lorene keep her letters?
S. BAILEY: Betty was just telling me that she hadn’t realized it but she thinks that Lorene has just been giving those letters away. And I was thinking, well, that’s too bad because I’d like to know what they said and know what kind of history . . .
D. BAILEY: They didn’t say much of anything. It was just idle chatter -[unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Well, I don’t know, I never read one of Bess’s letters, I don’t think.
D. BAILEY: Well, I can’t imagine that Bess would say anything substantial to Lorene.
DUNAR: Even Bess’s letters to Harry often were of . . . oh, just like very routine things.
S. BAILEY: Were they really?
DUNAR: Yes, the few that survived.
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes?
DUNAR: Yes, they don’t deal with things of great import, really. They’re all very incidental things, went to lunch here, that sort of thing.
S. BAILEY: Yes, well, that’s the kind of letter my family exchanged. That fits in with the kind of letters that they wrote to each other. It wasn’t until I married Dudley that I knew what a good letter was. [chuckling] You wrote a few yourself, you know.
D. BAILEY: I thought you were talking about yours that you wrote. [laughter]
S. BAILEY: Oh, no.
DUNAR: Mike, did you have any other questions?
SHAVER: Oh, I’ve just been listening. I had a couple. Do you recall, what were your impressions of Dr. Allen, as a little one, you know.
68
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes. Well, you know, it’s curious. Looking back on it, I think Dr. Allen had more status than Harry Truman did, probably in the whole community, I don’t know. [chuckling] Doctors always seem to be on a pedestal, don’t they. I got the impression that he was highly thought of and loved. He was a very nice man. I think he was one of those who didn’t expect to get wealthy at being a doctor. He did an awful lot of charitable work. And the reason I’m pretty sure of that is that he would take some of us—and I think Marg occasionally—with him in his old Buick. It wasn’t old, it was a new Buick, one of those strange looking boxy things, on calls in summer evenings, because he made house calls. And some of the house calls he made were to dilapidated households, and it was quite clear that he was not likely to get rich out of those calls. But he would drive way out in the . . .
[End #3608; Begin #3609]
S. BAILEY: . . . it was foreign territory. And when we moved to Kansas, my grandmother and grandfather were really disapproving. It’s clear they were carrying over some prejudices from Civil War days and Kansas was not a good place to go.
SHAVER: Yes, that’s the same with me. I guess some of that was deeply rooted stuff.
S. BAILEY: Is that right? Your family was involved way back in the Civil War days in the Neosho area?
SHAVER: Well, originally my family comes from Arkansas and they were on the wrong side. [laughter]
S. BAILEY: Well, now, they couldn’t have been on the wrong side if you’re talking Independence.
SHAVER: They were on the losing side.
69
S. BAILEY: Yes, the losing side but not the wrong side. I have been fascinated how deeply that feeling was in Independence. Independence is Southern.
SHAVER: You could still feel it then.
S. BAILEY: Can you?
SHAVER: I mean, at your time. Yes, I can [unintelligible] it because I’m from the South. But you could still remember then, could you?
S. BAILEY: Yes, it was very clear. Independence was Southern in every sense to me and it still is.
D. BAILEY: It was completely segregated. We were just saying last night, talking to Dick Herman, the blacks were all over in the east part of town. I never saw a black kid anywhere, you know.
DUNAR: Really?
D. BAILEY: Of course, not in the school because they weren’t in the school, but anywhere else.
S. BAILEY: No, that’s true, they were maids in somebody’s home.
D. BAILEY: I didn’t know any black children at all, didn’t know they existed.
S. BAILEY: Yes. There were drivers who drove people on Sunday drives that were black men.
D. BAILEY: Black men, yes. There were black men who worked.
S. BAILEY: And they often had a chauffeur cap and they wore a dark suit in order to sort of dress up the occasion.
DUNAR: Was there any sense of status based on having a black servant or cook or maid?
S. BAILEY: Oh, to me there was. Yes, I figured you really were up there in the world if you could afford to have a servant. That really set you apart. Most of Independence people had a servant.
D. BAILEY: Oh, yes. All sorts of people had somebody who worked for them and it
70
was usually blacks, right.
DUNAR: Were the stores and things like that segregated? Blacks didn’t come into the stores in the Square, for example?
S. BAILEY: Right, yes. We were suggesting that the reason we didn’t see many Blacks in Independence is that they were probably descended from slave families and they had a long tradition of keeping their place and they just made themselves pretty invisible.
DUNAR: I know in later years—I don’t know if this was the case then—but the area near Slover Park, part of the area that had to be removed for the Truman Library, was a black neighborhood. Was that the case then, too?
S. BAILEY: Well, I remembered it more directly east of the Square.
D. BAILEY: Yes, that’s right. The black neighborhood was south of the 24 Highway and north of Lexington Street and east of Noland Road.
S. BAILEY: Right, Noland Road was kind of a dividing line.
D. BAILEY: Yes, I think so. That was where the black community was, you see. We didn’t go there, you know.
S. BAILEY: No, I remembered going there. Somebody took us there, I don’t know who it was, somebody with a car. My family never had a car. That is, my grandmother’s family never had a car. My father did. So that when we were visiting my grandmother, if we went someplace in a car, it was because a friend or one of the neighbors invited us. But we did go to the Holy Roller Church once on a summer night, parked outside and listened to the music.
D. BAILEY: Oh, really?
S. BAILEY: Yes. That was down along Noland Road someplace, I think, in the area that you’re describing. I can’t remember who I did that with, but the rest of the time the blacks were mostly invisible and the prejudice was strong,
71
real strong. My grandfather, well, probably within Jeff’s lifetime, because I remember my oldest son was sitting there beside me, we were sitting out on the front porch and a black woman went by that was wearing some vivid clothes. It was quite a spectacular sight, her dark skin and the red and pink that she was wearing, and I said to my grandfather, “Did you see that black lady across the street?” and he, without even looking at her, said, “That’s not a lady,” correcting my language, your language is wrong, that’s not a lady.
SHAVER: As you guys were running around with the gang, what were your attitudes about Vietta? How did she treat you and how did you see her?
S. BAILEY: I think I saw her differently than Marg did or the Allen girls did because we never had a servant, and I was very uncomfortable about servants in general. Though I understood that this is good to have, I did not have any way of relating to them. Because my father had a way of relating to people who could have been a servant as though they were his equals, so I was very confused when I was with servants. If they happened to be black, that was even harder, because my father wouldn’t ever acknowledge that difference that’s supposed to be there. He came from a Northern family, not very far north, it’s true. He grew up in Hamilton, Missouri, in Caldwell County which is not very many miles north.
DUNAR: Was he seen as a Yankee in that sense?
S. BAILEY: Probably there was prejudice against my mother marrying him, and part of it may have been that. Yes, because it sort of startled me. I was well aware that I think they thought my father was not good enough for my mother. There were little things indicated. It wasn’t until I began doing family history that I saw that there was a lot of prestige in his family, totally unrecognized in the Independence people. For example, I found
72
that his mother’s brother had been on the Board of Trustees of the University of Missouri, her youngest brother had graduated from Johns Hopkins and was a surgeon, others had been elected officials in Caldwell County. But they were northern and there was no curiosity about them at all, they were just different, I think, absolutely no interest in my father’s side of the family. I didn’t know that much about them at the time, but I remember thinking when I heard somebody say that my father’s family were Northern, that was the only group that I’d ever known that were Northern, I didn’t know any other Northern. I didn’t know any Republicans. [chuckling] I was in high school before I realized that Marilyn McKim’s family were Republicans.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] What’s his name, that boy that lived out there on Winter Road that I think you dated?
S. BAILEY: Oh, the Roney family. Oh, yes, that was kind of shocking, I think, to my family. [chuckling]
D. BAILEY: And, of course, a lot of the Latter Day Saints were Republicans. Of course, they were all Yankees so they were [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: True, yes. They’d taken the Northern route to get where they were going.
D. BAILEY: But you remember when they had a reception for Vietta and Lorene came back and said, “Here I was, standing in the front room shaking hands with a coon!” she said. That was Lorene’s version of this reception.
S. BAILEY: I don’t think it was in the house. Where was that?
D. BAILEY: She said it was at the Truman House.
S. BAILEY: Well, I’ll ask her.
D. BAILEY: But Vietta was in the wrong room and everything was just shocking.
73
S. BAILEY: Well, that was just shocking, just shocking to her.
D. BAILEY: She could barely accommodate that.
S. BAILEY: Yes, bigotry is pretty strong in my family.
D. BAILEY: Oh, yes, and it still is. Your old aunt of yours is still just as bigoted as they come.
S. BAILEY: Oh, Terribly bigoted, yes, and about people that she doesn’t know anything about. She’s living now among Mexican-Americans and she knows nothing about them, really, but she knows that they are inappropriate people and really low-class.
D. BAILEY: They don’t know how to cook.
S. BAILEY: They don’t know anything about food and she says . . .
D. BAILEY: You see, blacks do because they did it for you.
S. BAILEY: Because they did it for you, yes. [laughter] She spoke of the woman that comes in to clean her room in the retirement home and she was pregnant, clearly, and Lorene said, “They just breed like rabbits,” and I said “Lorene, you know, I’ve just been counting, did you know your grandfather had seventeen children,” and she would not believe me. She still doesn’t. [laughter]
D. BAILEY: She didn’t know.
S. BAILEY: No, just denial. No, it couldn’t be. He had three wives, it’s true, but he had quite a crop.
SHAVER: Did Vietta ever play this kind of co-conspirator role like Mrs. May Wallace did on occasion? Did she kind of help you kids along or keep you out of trouble?
S. BAILEY: No, she was almost like she wanted to fade into the woodwork, a very shy personality. I never saw her even try to be a person. You know, it was as though she saw her role as to just keep out of everything, keep
74
back. She may have been quite different with the family but I always thought, “I wonder what she’s thinking,” because you never knew.
DUNAR: Did you observe any interaction between Vietta and either Mrs. Truman or Mrs. Wallace?
S. BAILEY: No, I didn’t. I saw just what a servant would do when with the mistress, very competent in her behavior but very non-assertive around strangers.
DUNAR: Would she be more assertive with Margaret?
S. BAILEY: Yes.
DUNAR: Did she discipline Margaret at all?
S. BAILEY: No, but I got the impression that they argued, that she would argue with Marg about whether she should or shouldn’t or could or couldn’t do things. They must have had that relationship, but she seemed very shy about her role. It must have been quite amazing to her to have this reception. I had clearly forgotten about that.
D. BAILEY: Well, I remember that.
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes, Lorene would be like that, yes.
D. BAILEY: Well, I’m sure Vietta was impressed to go to the White House and all that, my goodness.
S. BAILEY: But the color of her skin clearly made it a shocking thing to Lorene, that they would be viewed as equals in any setting at all.
D. BAILEY: Well, and wherever they were, a black was not supposed to be there, you know.
S. BAILEY: Well, except Fanny Cave was there, and that was all right.
DUNAR: Who was that?
D. BAILEY: You mean at Granny’s house?
S. BAILEY: Yes.
D. BAILEY: Fanny Cave wasn’t out in the front room.
75
S. BAILEY: Betty thought she had been. We talked about that recently. Fanny Cave was a very elderly black woman. I don’t know her age yet, but I’m going to look her up. I’m trying to learn how to do black research so I can find out about her. She came to see my grandmother, probably until she was incapable of coming to see her, and she would call and initiate the visit and she would tell my grandmother that she wanted to come see her. And my grandmother would say, “Well, sure, and come ahead,” and she would arrive at the back door, sometimes in a taxicab and sometimes her daughter brought her, and she’d spend the day and my grandmother would get busy and cook specially for her. My grandmother was a great cook, the Southern traditions, and she saw Fanny’s visit as something that she would put herself out about. I think that Fanny would not leave the kitchen, that she ate in the kitchen where there was a kitchen table.
D. BAILEY: The one time I saw her she stayed in the kitchen, I think, nearly all day.
S. BAILEY: Yes, Betty thought she had seen her in the dining room once but I don’t think so. But she liked the friendship and the camaraderie and the two of them must have known a lot about each other over the years. I think Fanny’s family were probably slaves in a family that married into my grandfather’s family, as best I can tell. There’s a Henry Cave and a John Cave who seemed to be in Lafayette County. Do you say Lay-fayette County? What do you say Lafayette?
D. BAILEY: No, it’s Lay-fayette.
S. BAILEY: Yes, right. [laughter]
D. BAILEY: If Pappy heard you say Lafayette . . .
S. BAILEY: Yes, the old folks in Independence said Lay-fayette County.
D. BAILEY: I’m sure they said Vi-etta, too. Vietta was all I ever heard that woman called.
76
S. BAILEY: Instead of Vietta [Vee-etta]?
D. BAILEY: Yes.
S. BAILEY: I guess Vi with a long “I”.
D. BAILEY: It’s like Jimmy Carter and his Vi-dalia onions, you know.
S. BAILEY: Yes, you could be right.
DUNAR: What did Margaret call her? Oh, of course she called her Petey, I guess.
S. BAILEY: Yes, just Pete.
DUNAR: Did she call her Vietta or Vee-etta, do you remember?
S. BAILEY: I don’t think I ever heard that from her. I think Pete was what she called her, and once she apparently decided on that name that’s what it was. I never heard it otherwise. But Fanny represented kind of, to me, the way the white families justified owning slaves. She had clearly grown up with expectations of what the white folks owed her, because of what she had owed them, and she kind of had a sense of her position. She acted like an important person.
D. BAILEY: Yes, and she was self-possessed. I can remember that, she was fairly confident.
S. BAILEY: And she expected my grandmother to make hot white rolls for her, I think. It was, you know, “I’m loyal to you and so you are loyal to me.” That was kind of the way they behaved around each other.
D. BAILEY: She lived there in Independence, did she?
S. BAILEY: Yes, her daughter was a schoolteacher and she was very proud of that.
D. BAILEY: Yes, I remember she used to come in a cab.
S. BAILEY: Yes. I suppose there were probably others like her in Independence homes. She just happens to be the only one I know about personally. But she had not been a servant in my lifetime. Her family had been servants, I gather, and she may have worked for Mom at some time.
77
D. BAILEY: Well, the Trumans had a black woman in their house.
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes, and cousin Mabel did, too. Yes, and the Allens did. Everybody did except us poor folks. [chuckling]
D. BAILEY: That’s right, and us Latter Day Saints because we didn’t believe in that sort of thing.
S. BAILEY: You didn’t believe in slavery either, did you?
D. BAILEY: No, but I don’t think the Latter Day Saints families had [unintelligible].
SHAVER: It seems like the rest of Independence society put you Latter Day Saints just like one notch above.
S. BAILEY: Yes. [laughter]
D. BAILEY: Well, Latter Day Saints have sort of taken over the town in recent . . .
SHAVER: Yes, they came back.
D. BAILEY: In fact, they owned the whole damned county. They bought Zion, you know. The Utah church and the reorganized church together had bought Zion. [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Well, that’ll teach them, you know, “If you treat us mean and we’ll show you, we’ll buy you.” [laughter]
DUNAR: What was the view of the Truman’s toward both the reorganized church and the . . .
S. BAILEY: Total prejudice, just like the rest of the families, yes. Dudley, I think, sort of broke new ground because I think he broke through the prejudice barrier. My family learned to love this man who had a background of belonging to the Latter Day Saint Church. And they were just amazed at how nice he was, and over the years the prejudices fell away after we were married or were unspoken after that. There was never a word heard after that. I’m sure it’s still there.
D. BAILEY: Well, since I fell away it made it easy for them.
78
S. BAILEY: Yes, right. [laughter]
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible], after all.
S. BAILEY: Yes, the only place where there’s more prejudice against you is the church that you left behind, I guess. Dudley’s uncle married us in the Stone Church. Do you know where the Stone Church is on Lexington? And he was one of the Quorum of Twelve. Is that the phrase?
D. BAILEY: He was in the president’s [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Whatever that group is called.
SHAVER: Apostles.
S. BAILEY: One of the apostles?
D. BAILEY: He was an apostle and then he was elevated to the first presidency, right.
S. BAILEY: Okay. I think that was kind of shocking. Probably my elderly aunt may have reacted almost as strongly to this notion that I was marrying out of the Methodist Church into this other church as she did to going to the reception for Pete, you know, but she didn’t say anything at the time. [laughter] She thinks Dudley is wonderful now, but she wouldn’t think that about the religious group because Methodism was very important in my grandmother’s household at the time I was growing up. My grandmother spent most of her spare time in the kitchen of the Methodist church up there on the corner of Maple and whatever that is.
SHAVER: So you folks went to the First Church you didn’t go to Watson?
S. BAILEY: Right.
D. BAILEY: No, she went to the First Church right on Spring Street.
SHAVER: Spring and Maple.
S. BAILEY: I thought Methodism meant hot light rolls, fruit salad and fried chicken. The view I had of the church was through the kitchen. [laughter]
D. BAILEY: Well, what is it? [laughter] I don’t think the Trumans probably shared
79
this prejudice.
S. BAILEY: Yes, they did.
D. BAILEY: They did?
S. BAILEY: Yes, I heard it.
DUNAR: Can you think of examples of it?
S. BAILEY: I think that there was always an undercurrent of resentment about what was viewed as a takeover of property—that would be the way I would here it—not against individuals. I don’t remember ever hearing an individual singled out, but against the gradual accumulation of land. It might even be directed toward the sanitarium which, heaven knows, if the church hadn’t built the sanitarium there wouldn’t have been a hospital.
D. BAILEY: That’s right.
S. BAILEY: But there was some kind of resentment that they had done that.
DUNAR: Yes, a tendency to that.
S. BAILEY: If the Methodist Church had built the hospital, that would have been okay, or the Baptist Church that would have been fine. Episcopalians don’t build hospitals very often, do they?
D. BAILEY: Not in Independence. [laughter]
S. BAILEY: There weren’t enough Episcopalians, I guess, to raise hackles for any purpose at all, nor enough Catholics.
D. BAILEY: Well, politically, of course, the Latter Day Saints in the main were Republicans, too.
DUNAR: So that was part of it, too, maybe.
D. BAILEY: That was part of it, yes. At least they were viewed as Republican. You know, I think most of them were; my family wasn’t. So I suspect they were on the wrong side politically as far as that goes. The Latter Day
80
Saints supported Sermon pretty strongly.
S. BAILEY: Oh, did they? I didn’t know that.
D. BAILEY: Yes. They didn’t like him, I think, but they allowed that he ran a pretty good city. Independence was a model city.
S. BAILEY: Well, in some ways, yes.
D. BAILEY: There were no city taxes when we moved in, not a penny city tax. And your December electric bill was free.
S. BAILEY: That was a Christmas present.
DUNAR: Oh, really?
D. BAILEY: The electric plant made so much money. Well, Rog Sermon ran the town.
SHAVER: He must have been doing well to be re-elected for thirty years.
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes.
SHAVER: He’s an individual I’m real curious about.
S. BAILEY: I wish I had been more alert then. I remember going down to city hall, that was on South . . . That’s not Main, is it?
SHAVER: Yes, South Main.
S. BAILEY: Is it South Main? And helping lick stamps and stuff envelopes, I guess, for his election. I was thinking about that not long ago. Well, that’s a strange thing to use city hall for a political [unintelligible].
D. BAILEY: He probably ran them through the meter at [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Well, it’s quite possible, yes.
D. BAILEY: Pendergast [unintelligible] after all [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Well, yes, politics were different in those days.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] I knew voted the graveyards. That’s the way they made their college money in Kansas City.
S. BAILEY: Oh, don’t tell me their names. I don’t want to know about these . . .
81
D. BAILEY: Kids I knew at the university made money working for the Pendergast machine and they voted the graveyards. They went in and told them they were somebody who had been dead a hundred years. It was worth a Republican’s life to challenge them, you know.
S. BAILEY: Are you really prepared to testify that this was going on?
D. BAILEY: Well, they told me that that’s what they did. I didn’t go out with them.
S. BAILEY: Well, I think it would have been a darned sight easier than working in the filling station if you needed money.
D. BAILEY: Yes, you made more money that way, I’m sure. [laughter] My brother was a Shannon.
DUNAR: Oh, yes.
D. BAILEY: Joe Shannon, a rabbit. And he was the rabbit precinct [unintelligible] and on election day he would go out with his pockets filled with fifty-cent pieces and he kept buying votes [unintelligible]. But [unintelligible] I think he never bought a vote.
S. BAILEY: I’m glad you said that, since this is going on tape. [laughter]
D. BAILEY: The Republicans, most of them Latter Day Saints, couldn’t be bought, you know. They were terribly honest and the only vote that Bruce, in a sense, bought was Jenny Longnecker’s. She was a widow lady who didn’t have much money and Jenny was going to vote Democrat. Well, Bruce would go out and pick her take her poll and then he’d give her several half dollars.
S. BAILEY: Just because he thought she needed them?
D. BAILEY: Because Jenny needed them. She had kids and she was just desperately poor. So he got rid of some of his half-dollars that way.
SHAVER: Well, that was charity, that wasn’t . . . [laughter] The Democrats would have done it anyway.
82
S. BAILEY: I guess elections weren’t that exciting in Independence, they were such a foregone conclusion then.
D. BAILEY: Roger Sermon called my parents the day after election always and thanked them for their vote.
S. BAILEY: No kidding? Did he really?
D. BAILEY: Always the day after elections, you see, Latter Day Saints who did vote for him. My brother was involved in the Shannon gang and later Dad worked at the courthouse.
S. BAILEY: Yes, he did for the sheriff, didn’t he? We just didn’t have the hang of that. I had the darnedest time remembering rabbits from goats when we were kids. I just thought that was mysterious and hard to understand.
D. BAILEY: Well, goats are the real people [unintelligible]. [laughter]
SHAVER: That’s a new twist.
S. BAILEY: You haven’t heard that before?
SHAVER: No, not in this life.
DUNAR: What was the LDS viewpoint of Truman? What was that, as he was making his political climb?
D. BAILEY: See, I can only go by the people I knew, you see, and most of our friends thought Mr. Truman was all right. They were quite sure he was an honest guy and, of course, they all hated the . . . The Kansas City Star, you see, was terribly against Truman. They ran that story about the loan to his mother’s farm, my God, for years. Finally, they had to retract on the front page, saying this was a very good investment. The best damned investment the county ever made. Roy Roberts would never have done that. He was in his grave, I’m sure, by then. But the Star, you see, was totally Republican, totally against Pendergasts’ machine. They were elated, you know, when Pendergast went off to jail and they had that
83
clean-up government in Kansas City. And everything went smashing, those people don’t know how to run anything, you know, and there were potholes in the street and the people in Kansas City were just livid and so they returned . . . I can’t think of the young man’s name, the young Pendergast. They returned him to power. He paved the streets and got things going again.
DUNAR: Well, I remember Truman lamenting with one of his other political contacts that Jim Pendergast just didn’t know how to run things like the old man did.
S. BAILEY: That was probably true, wasn’t it?
D. BAILEY: Yes, he wasn’t as good.
SHAVER: I think the old man’s cronies essentially ran the thing.
D. BAILEY: Yes, probably. The Pendergast machine was remarkably efficient.
SHAVER: The machine survived the founder.
D. BAILEY: Right, and the city, you know, you run a . . .
S. BAILEY: It’s a way, yes.
D. BAILEY: It’s a way of running the city, right.
S. BAILEY: It may not be a good way but . . .
D. BAILEY: They took care of people.
DUNAR: Yes, right.
D. BAILEY: If you needed coal, you got some coal in your basement.
S. BAILEY: It’s amazing how efficient something can be that’s corrupt. You know, slavery was efficient as all get out when you look back at it.
D. BAILEY: Only in that he sold ready-mix concrete, you know, and paved the whole damned state of Missouri. [laughter] Those highways are still there.
SHAVER: Yes, they’re still there.
S. BAILEY: Yes, it must have been good quality, it didn’t break up like some of ours
84
that do.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] our roads. And, you know, they had paved in Brush Creek [unintelligible].
SHAVER: Some of the best jazz concerts I’ve ever heard have been played in Brush Creek.
S. BAILEY: Is that right? Using it as an amphitheater?
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] concrete down there. And it saved the Plaza when they had the big flood.
S. BAILEY: About two summers ago, wasn’t it?
D. BAILEY: The water went on down, you know, otherwise the Plaza would have been up to the chin in water.
S. BAILEY: It practically was, even so. The mystery of Independence politics, though it’ll just have to remain that from my point of view, because our position was so jaundiced, you know, we were so much on one side and not the least bit interested in the other point of view. I had no idea what was really going on.
D. BAILEY: Well, the people that I grew up with, I’m sure, supported Sermon. They thought the city was well-run and they also, I think, were supportive of Truman. And I never heard any of them suggest that Truman was a . . . I think they pretty well knew that Truman . . . Pendergast hired people and then . . . I’m sure Truman was never asked to do anything crooked. Of course, Truman never did, he was a pretty straight guy. Pendergast didn’t need that.
DUNAR: Yes. It’s mostly the patronage, he gave him patronage.
D. BAILEY: You bet, you get what any congressman does.
SHAVER: Some loyalty to the organization, but not aligned. That’s the impression that all of us have.
85
S. BAILEY: Lorene was telling me when I was down there that she remembers going for rides with Mrs. Truman, driving out to look at some roads that Herrick was supposed to be responsible for back when he was a judge. I was asking her how far back did she remember and that was as early as she could remember.
D. BAILEY: They concreted the county, you know. Every farmer in Jackson County had hard surface to the door—that was in the 1930’s.
SHAVER: That was his promise and that they didn’t have to drive more than a mile to [unintelligible].
D. BAILEY: Oh, in the county there was ready-mix concrete all over the place there.
DUNAR: [unintelligible].
D. BAILEY: You bet.
S. BAILEY: Things are different in Nebraska, almost. [chuckling]
D. BAILEY: Well, there’s altogether too much concrete here, if you ask me. [laughter] I feel that farmers ought to have to go through mud for the first twenty-five miles.
[End #3609; Begin #3610]
S. BAILEY: . . . yes, croquet is really important, huh?
SHAVER: To the Truman story, yes.
S. BAILEY: Well, in the front yard, let’s see, to the south, the south portion of the front yard was where we had the croquet set, at least one summer, and I suppose more than one because we got fairly good at it, as I recall. I think that when we finished playing in the mornings and afternoons that maybe the adults may have taken over. Maybe some of the aunts and uncles were there, I have some vague memories of their being there using that area. It wasn’t a classy court arrangement like you might see where somebody took croquet really seriously, but it was mowed and it
86
was carefully measured out to stake it in exactly according to game rules.
D. BAILEY: Was it big enough for a croquet set?
S. BAILEY: It must have been.
D. BAILEY: Of course, it’s fenced now. The yard didn’t used to be fenced.
S. BAILEY: Yes, it wasn’t fenced then. You know, if we had to adjust the dimensions, we would be pretty precise about that because I’m sure it mattered a great deal to us.
D. BAILEY: Was the little house there between them and the Allens in those days?
S. BAILEY: Yes.
D. BAILEY: It was there?
S. BAILEY: Yes, that stucco house.
D. BAILEY: I thought it was built later.
S. BAILEY: No, it was always there.
SHAVER: Do you have any recollections of who lived in there?
S. BAILEY: It was rental property, so the people came and went.
D. BAILEY: Harriet Allen lived there at one time.
S. BAILEY: After she was married.
D. BAILEY: George Gray.
S. BAILEY: No, that was Marie’s husband.
D. BAILEY: Oh, Harriet. Harriet lived there, not Marie.
S. BAILEY: Right. She was Charles Kellogg’s wife.
D. BAILEY: They had a party there one night, I remember.
S. BAILEY: Oh, that’s right they did, yes. That’s right, I’d forgotten that. The house, I think Dr. Allen bought it early on, probably to defend himself against who might live there because it’s so close, it didn’t have much of a yard and it came right into their yard. And also, I think he wanted to build a driveway clear around his lot, does it still come in the back of the house
87
and come out over on Delaware?
SHAVER: Yes.
S. BAILEY: That was because he didn’t like backing up his car. It had a curbed driveway and if you didn’t go straight, then the tires would bind in the driveway, so I think that may have been part of his motivation so he could drive freely all the way around. Then the house was rented to one family we didn’t get to know very well, but the little girl, who must have been about three or four years old, would get into her mother’s things while her mother was napping and get into all kinds of mischief. I remember one time it was the talk of the neighborhood, she showed up in the alley stark naked, carrying a wad of bills out of her mother’s purse. [laughter] So there was quite a flurry while everybody . . . I think her mother had fallen asleep, so some adult took charge of the little girl and woke up the mother and put things to right. But, see, that set quite a tone there, you were never quite sure what might happen at that house. [chuckling]
DUNAR: Right, yes.
SHAVER: We talked about back yards, did your grandparent’s house have much of a back yard, or not?
S. BAILEY: Yes, enough. Now, given that probably my proportions are going to be different as an adult, it was big enough to have this little one-room house back there, plus this old barn in back of it, and then we still had room to have a little flower garden and a miniature golf course. So we must have used every square inch of it, it wasn’t extravagant. The house was very large.
SHAVER: Well, I can gather from looking at the depression where the basement used to be that it did look like it was a large house.
88
S. BAILEY: Right.
SHAVER: Kind of between where there’s some shrubbery, bushes and things, from the alley to part of that. It doesn’t make the lot look as big as it probably was.
S. BAILEY: The front yard was quite small. Their house sat further toward the street, I think, than the Allen House. My guess is that that Jackson house had owned much of that block at one time because the houses on each side of it were so modern compared to it. The Hardings lived to the east and that was kind of a thirties-style house, I think, or maybe late twenties.
SHAVER: What about the house next door to the Hardings? There used to be a big old house there, you can still see the foundations of it, and there’s this stucco Spanish style there now.
S. BAILEY: I’m a blank about what was between, but the stucco was where Dr. Gard had his office and a dentist. I went to a dentist in that little building at one time.
D. BAILEY: That was built in the thirties.
S. BAILEY: But what was the house like that was between the Harding’s house? See, it goes Allen’s, then the Jackson house, then the Harding house, then this big old house and then the stucco house. I can’t remember who was in that big one.
D. BAILEY: I have no memory of that. There was a sort of a hotel or a rooming house there. [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: That was an old, old building, wasn’t it?
SHAVER: [unintelligible] a few doors down. Well, if you remembered the stucco house, then the house is sitting on where that large house used to be. I think R. D. Meyes may have lived there at one time.
S. BAILEY: It may have been gone by the time we were there then.
89
SHAVER: So it was probably gone by the time you moved there.
S. BAILEY: It may have been, yes.
SHAVER: So it was a doctor’s office then?
S. BAILEY: Yes, as a matter of fact, I had a baby tooth pulled there so the stucco house must have been there pretty early.
SHAVER: Well, it has been a doctor’s house almost until about three or four years ago, so I was surprised about that. I have a question for you, how historians work. David McCullough came to visit you, did he not?
S. BAILEY: Oh, not exactly. He called me on the telephone.
SHAVER: Oh, did he?
S. BAILEY: Yes. Now, do you have contact with him?
SHAVER: He had come to visit us once upon a time and he had talked about his researching the Truman story and he had made mention about you.
S. BAILEY: Oh, he did? Well, it was kind of a curious way in which he found me. Dudley was chairman of the English department here until he retired and one of the men in the English department, Robert Knoll was a friend of a man who went to Washington a few years back on behalf of public television [PBS]. Nebraska is way in the forefront with public television and so he was viewed as quite a plum and he went off to Washington. His wife stayed here because their kids were still in high school and he commuted back and forth. He must have met David McCullough through public television activities. David McCullough must have gotten a professorship or maybe a visiting lecturer or something at William Jewel College and responded to Ron Hull’s invitation to come to Lincoln to visit him. The Knolls that Dudley knows invited them over to dinner—“bring your guests”—and the Knolls must have told him that they knew me and Robert and Virginia had known, I guess, since we’ve
90
known them now for about twenty-five or thirty years that I had come from Independence and had known the Trumans. And so that very night after dinner was over he called and we had a long telephone conversation, but I’ve never met him. But we did talk, and he sent back a letter to try to verify some of the conversation. Is he helpful to you?
SHAVER: Well, he took time out to come talk to the park staff one time and Dr. Dunar got a chance to listen to the tape. But he talked about a lot of people. He didn’t mention you by name, but he said, “Well, I talked to a lady in Lincoln, Nebraska,” and I said, “Oh, I know who that lady is.” [laughter]
S. BAILEY: Small world isn’t it? [laughter]
SHAVER: In fact, we’re going to talk to that lady.
S. BAILEY: He asked very perceptive questions, things that I hadn’t thought about for years. He seemed particularly interested in the lack of flow between the Truman family, Harry’s family, and the Wallace family. He wanted to know about that and I couldn’t tell him about that except in a negative way. I think that it was much the same in my family. My grandmother’s sisters and brothers lived in rural Lafayette County down around Odessa, and they were country, and country wasn’t as good as city. I didn’t catch on to that until I started doing family history and found on both sides of my family total farmers, and it was never acknowledged. They had somehow grown away from the farm and didn’t even want to acknowledge it as their roots. I think that may have been true with others in Independence and probably . . .
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Yes, and I think it was true for Marg.
D. BAILEY: People come to Lincoln, you know, from a little Nebraska town and
91
Lincoln is the biggest town in the world as far as they know. And they come and get a job here or set up here somewhere and then they go back home, you know, and lord it over all the folks. [laughter]
S. BAILEY: I suppose, yes.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] over in Iowa the Prall fellow who was a dentist in Des Moines. He went to his little hometown and they were there a week and just lording it over everyone.
S. BAILEY: Was he really?
D. BAILEY: Oh, yes, he was dressed much more expensively than all of them. He just spoke knowingly [unintelligible]. That’s a typical Midwestern pattern. It may be Southern, too, but it’s certainly Midwestern. And then you go back home and you’re much more sophisticated than those poor devils out there, those hicks.
S. BAILEY: Well, he seemed very intrigued about this almost denial that he had sensed, and I guess it was there all right.
DUNAR: Did Vivian or Mary Jane or Harry’s mother, for that matter, come to the Wallace house at all?
S. BAILEY: I don’t think I ever saw them but once and that was maybe when they were just leaving, going out the driveway. Though I know there were trips out to the farm, Marg didn’t want to go. It seemed to me that was not one of the things she wanted to do.
DUNAR: Really?
S. BAILEY: And when I think about it, what do you do on farms? Well, you may be outdoors a lot and she wasn’t all that interested in being outdoors and animals were not interesting to her. I remember, I don’t know who got her the puppy, and I think it may have been just a mongrel puppy, I’m not sure, it was kind of German Shepherd-looking and it didn’t last very
92
long. I gather that she made it pretty clear that that was not something she cared about and so the dog didn’t stay there. I don’t know what happened to the dog.
DUNAR: Do you think that she sort of took on maybe some of her grandmother’s prejudice against the country folks?
S. BAILEY: It seems likely, doesn’t it? Yes, it seems likely.
DUNAR: Yes, and that she maybe felt that way even about her grandmother on her father’s side.
S. BAILEY: Yes. My grandmother certainly saw herself as far more sophisticated than her sisters. They came up and brought things from the country.
D. BAILEY: They brought loads of merchandise.
S. BAILEY: Yes, my sister still talks about these terrible looking chunks of meat. They’d come in carrying this ugly looking thing. It was a Missouri ham, you know, and they were ugly. [laughter] Betty couldn’t stand the sight of that thing, you know, but it would get scrubbed with a brush and soaped overnight in the wash barrel and then it would be like a Smithfield ham, only Missouri style, I suppose. But they just didn’t quite pass the muster, just because they were living still on the farm.
D. BAILEY: Aunt Nora was an awfully nice woman.
S. BAILEY: She really was.
DUNAR: Do you remember Margaret making any remarks at all that sort of would give away that sort of feeling?
S. BAILEY: No, I can’t remember her actually saying that but she made it very clear how she felt somehow. I know my sister to this day sort of says things about hicks or hayseeds. There is a feeling that’s very strong.
SHAVER: Do you have any recollection of the Nolands across the way?
S. BAILEY: No, I remember just seeing them come out and I knew that food went
93
back and forth across the street sometimes, but they never came when we were there playing. You know, maybe just walking by to take something to the house, but there was no more than that.
D. BAILEY: How were they related?
S. BAILEY: Cousin, I think.
DUNAR: They were cousins of Harry.
S. BAILEY: That’s where he stayed, I think, when he was courting Bess.
D. BAILEY: Oh, you mean they’re cousins of Harry’s?
S. BAILEY: Yes, yes.
DUNAR: Cousins of Harry’s, right.
D. BAILEY: Well, I know the FBI guy stayed upstairs in the Noland house. That was the first time I ever knew the Nolands lived there.
S. BAILEY: Yes, he did.
D. BAILEY: But the guy sat up there and watched the house across the street.
S. BAILEY: Well, whatever he has to do. Does anybody do that now?
SHAVER: No.
S. BAILEY: The house looks after itself the best it can.
D. BAILEY: They’re not there now. They don’t protect him. [chuckling] He got to be president.
S. BAILEY: Well, the park service has got this investment they’ve got to look after.
SHAVER: We don’t have anybody watching it. We have electronic things.
S. BAILEY: That’s it, you don’t have to have anybody personally watching it.
SHAVER: I’m kind of interested in how historians work and, I guess, Mr. McCullough’s book is going to come out next year, but were there any other particular lines of inquiry that you remember that he was trying to pursue?
S. BAILEY: That seemed to be the one that really engaged him. I didn’t realize that it
94
was that important to him until he reacted to it so strongly. “Aha!” You know, “Aha! Just what I thought,” you know. He was puzzled that Margaret did not call her father a farmer, that he simply was not, had never been. And, yet, here he was very proud of it and liked to show off that he could plow a straight row, and there was this kind of “Well, why is that?” But he was interested in kind of the essence of Independence, the sight, sound, smell.
DUNAR: Right, right.
S. BAILEY: He kind of wanted the flavor of it, I guess. And it’s not often you think about that very much, but that comes back to me in little bits and pieces, like when the cicadas came out this summer, you know? That always brings back . . . people used their front porches a lot in the summertime. On Maple Street you’d see the people across the street and wave after dinner. They’d get they’d dishes done and they’d come out on the front porches at night and everybody sat there until bedtime. And you’d chat and the cicadas would come out, when they did come out, and make so much noise you couldn’t hear. So that sound of cicadas I always think of as part of the summer evenings.
D. BAILEY: And it was hot. Don’t you remember, Dr. Allen put wet sheets on his bed to keep cool. A lot of people slept out. Slover Park was absolutely filled with people in the thirties.
S. BAILEY: Yes, it was. It was really hot. I think it prepared me, though, for almost anything. To this day, I’m really not very fond of air conditioning. I learned to survive without it. It doesn’t really have that much meaning to me anymore.
DUNAR: What were the attitudes toward Kansas City?
D. BAILEY: It was a suburb of Independence.
95
S. BAILEY: Yes.
DUNAR: Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised with that.
S. BAILEY: A lot of that.
DUNAR: Yes, it was an upstart after . . .
S. BAILEY: There was always a need to tell somebody that. If somebody didn’t know that Independence was the county seat and that Independence was older, then they got told. You’d always be sure that they were informed.
D. BAILEY: That’s true, right. And the Kansas City high schools were much inferior to William Chrisman.
S. BAILEY: True. Yes, no one wanted to go to Northeast.
D. BAILEY: We didn’t engage them in athletics, maybe originally, because they weren’t up to our standard, I don’t know.
S. BAILEY: Or they might have beaten us.
D. BAILEY: Yes, or the high school that made mincemeat of us.
S. BAILEY: Yes. Since Mom and Pap, as I call my grandmother and grandfather, had lived in Kansas City before they came to Independence, they had none of that prejudice themselves. They had lived in Kansas City and liked it, I think, very much.
D. BAILEY: Well, your mother and Lorene went to Northeast High?
S. BAILEY: No, Manual Training. So they viewed themselves as city folk.
DUNAR: Were there views, too, against maybe some of the ethnic groups in Kansas City, like the Irish Catholics and so forth? Was that part of the reason, as well, do you think?
S. BAILEY: They were very bigoted, but when they knew somebody, you know, it was like, “Some of my best friends are Irish Catholics,” or “Some of my friends are Jewish,” or something, but they never said, “Some of my best friends are black.” They never said that.
96
D. BAILEY: I doubt they said any of their friends were Dagos, either, did they?
S. BAILEY: No, they didn’t use that word because they just didn’t have any problem, they didn’t know them.
D. BAILEY: They didn’t?
S. BAILEY: No.
D. BAILEY: Well, there was a great deal of prejudice against the Italians that I grew up with in North Kansas City.
SHAVER: Well, they never left North Kansas City either.
S. BAILEY: Is that right, still there?
SHAVER: Yes, they’re still there.
D. BAILEY: Well, they were north of Sixth Street in the old days. I remember Sixth Street was sort of the line between them. The Pendergasts lived between Sixth Street and . . . Where was it?
SHAVER: Almost to the river.
S. BAILEY: Was it?
D. BAILEY: Well, yes, they were north of Sixth Street, in between Sixth Street south to what?
S. BAILEY: Well, let’s see, what was the bus line?
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] maybe almost. It was to Denton maybe almost. It was south [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Oh, not surely that far.
D. BAILEY: That was considered safe territory, nothing happened there. But, of course, nothing happened in Kansas City, you see, in the old days because the Kansas City Star had a policy of not publishing any . . .
DUNAR: Nothing negative.
D. BAILEY: Any . . . you know, murders.
S. BAILEY: They just didn’t write about it, yes.
97
DUNAR: Is that right?
D. BAILEY: I remember speaking to the guy at the Kansas City Union. He said, “You know, this is strange. This is the most wonderful town I ever saw, there aren’t any murders, no robberies, nothing.” [laughter] Boy, people being toppled every other [unintelligible]. But it never hit the Star. The Star had a policy, they didn’t print that sort of thing.
S. BAILEY: It was considered not dignified.
D. BAILEY: That’s right. When Johnny L [unintelligible]? was killed they had to put it in the paper.
DUNAR: That would have been pretty hard to ignore.
D. BAILEY: It just about ruined the poor guys down at the Star.
SHAVER: They emptied several machine guns into [unintelligible].
D. BAILEY: He was killed off-limits, you know. [unintelligible] There was an area there that you could go, but you couldn’t kill them south of it. That was north of Sixth Street. Nobody ever got killed up north of Sixth Street.
S. BAILEY: You be sure the historians get these facts straight. [laughter] Independence folks loved to go to Kansas City.
SHAVER: Oh, I got that impression, loved to go shopping.
S. BAILEY: Yes, that was important to do.
SHAVER: That was almost as big a highlight as the farmers coming into Independence, was going downtown and regroup there.
S. BAILEY: Exactly.
D. BAILEY: Well, because there were stores and you ate. There was no decent place to eat in Independence, Missouri.
S. BAILEY: Well, there used to be a few places. Remember the Brown Teapot? You don’t remember the Brown Teapot?
D. BAILEY: No, I don’t. I don’t think probably it was much of a place. People went
98
to Kansas City to eat because there were good restaurants there.
S. BAILEY: As a matter of fact, that was the thing to do. People in Independence kept track of where every good restaurant was and the whole county and would drive there for meals, or further if they went up to Gallatin to Mrs. McDonald’s Tea Room.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: They would go wherever they needed to go to find this wonderful restaurant. The food was wonderful stuff.
DUNAR: Go to plays and . . . ?
D. BAILEY: And the Victory Cafe in Lexington. The old Victory Cafe was a big place to go.
S. BAILEY: Yes, but I don’t think many Independence people went there, though.
D. BAILEY: No, I don’t think they did.
DUNAR: Was that on Lexington in Kansas City or in Independence?
S. BAILEY: That’s the town, the town of Lexington.
D. BAILEY: Lafayette County. [laughter] Where they had a cannonball in the courthouse.
SHAVER: Well, there’s still that mental barrier, you know. You just don’t really go east of Independence.
S. BAILEY: I see. [chuckling]
D. BAILEY: But, you see, when we grew up now the focus was east, you see, because we played Lexington High School and we played . . . Come one, what are the towns down here?
S. BAILEY: Warrensburg?
D. BAILEY: Odessa, Warrensburg. Those were the schools we played. Nobody went to Kansas City, to play Kansas City. We played northeast, as I remember.
99
S. BAILEY: Yes, that’s true. Do you remember, were there plays in the Memorial Building?
D. BAILEY: Plays? Well, I saw [unintelligible] there. In fact, when he was just a little boy. [unintelligible] still going on.
S. BAILEY: I don’t know, I haven’t thought about that for a long time. When Blevins Davis came back to Independence, were plays put on up there?
D. BAILEY: I don’t know whether he put any of his plays on there or not, but there were plays put on the stage. I think it probably made a lousy place to put a play on. My memory is the stage [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Well, yes, it’s high and no permanent seating. That’s where the Methodist women had their dinners, in Memorial Hall.
D. BAILEY: And they had commencement for the high school there.
S. BAILEY: Yes, true. It was probably good for almost everything but plays. [chuckling]
SHAVER: Did Mr. Davis come back while you were in Independence? Do you recall?
S. BAILEY: Yes, he was back when we were first married, wasn’t he?
D. BAILEY: Yes, I don’t know that he was back . . . The last time I saw him he was still married to that Hill woman. Because he told me, you remember, that . . . He asked me, “guess what we paid for our apartment in the Pierre Hotel?” Of course, I didn’t know, and he said, “Well, we pay more every month than I made a year teaching school here.” [laughter] He was very proud of that.
SHAVER: That’s what you do, you go marry a railroad heiress and you’re in good shape.
S. BAILEY: That was a good move on his part.
D. BAILEY: Well, he came back loaded and went through it, I guess, pretty fast.
100
S. BAILEY: Have you interviewed Roger T. Sermon?
SHAVER: No, he’s one I’d always thought about.
D. BAILEY: He might know some things.
S. BAILEY: Oh, yes, he sure would. He’d know Independence from a totally different way than we would.
D. BAILEY: [unintelligible] the Trumans. Did they know the Trumans?
S. BAILEY: In a way, yes.
D. BAILEY: I’m sure they knew each other.
S. BAILEY: Well, T. is older than I. He’s quite a bit older, so she was just a little girl to him.
D. BAILEY: T is younger than I am.
S. BAILEY: A little maybe, but that’s old, you know. [laughter]
DUNAR: Are there other people that you can think of that we ought to talk to?
S. BAILEY: Let me think a moment. You’re following the book, so you’ll be talking to . . . Is Mary Shaw still living in Kansas City?
DUNAR: That’s one that people have mentioned that we interview.
SHAVER: Was she kind of your contemporary?
S. BAILEY: Yes, but in a different way. She lived in Independence, down on Proctor Place, I believe, didn’t she?
D. BAILEY: Right, right.
S. BAILEY: So she was far enough away that it was like another world. She would have to get in the car and come there, so that made it different.
DUNAR: Yes, she wasn’t there on a daily basis.
S. BAILEY: Yes, she would be there sometimes, but I don’t have a feeling of intimacy about her because I really never got to know her very well, she wasn’t there often enough. Marg probably knew her well because their parents were friends.
101
SHAVER: [unintelligible].
S. BAILEY: Yes. So she knows her well, but I didn’t really. She was just there occasionally.
SHAVER: What about Jane Barridge?
S. BAILEY: Jane must have only lived there a brief time. I don’t know how many years that was, but I don’t remember her being there when we first started this relationship. She must have moved into that apartment. I had the impression that there was a single parent raising her—I don’t think she had a father—and the fact that they lived in a rented apartment meant that they didn’t have any permanency about them, and so they may have floated back out again. She was a nice person but not one I knew well because she was very shy. I have no idea what happened to her ultimately. I don’t think I’ve heard anybody that does know. I don’t think they had lived in Independence long, or if they had, not apparently in that neighborhood, so she was kind of a newcomer.
SHAVER: How long did you guys make an effort to stay together or to keep in touch with each other?
S. BAILEY: Well, for me personally that luncheon I gave when Jeff was a baby—and Jeff is now what, forty-three—was the last time I had made a strong effort myself. And then my memory is that Marg then reciprocated with a later luncheon in which she tried to get everybody, and we were in the house having lunch as we had in the past sometime after that.
D. BAILEY: I think Marg’s marriage pretty much brought an end to it, don’t you think?
S. BAILEY: Except it seemed to me before that that we really had rare chances to see each other. Because we weren’t there very much and neither was she, so it was just a rare happenstance if we both happened to be there at the
102
same time. Dorsey Lou has made an effort in the last twenty years because she is very active in the Girl Scouts at the national level and so she had occasion to go to New York on business for the Girl Scouts rather often, and I think she did develop a pattern of calling Marg and they’d have lunch together. So she knows her in a totally different way and she is in touch. I think up to the time Marg quit coming back to Independence that she had fairly regular contact. She knew when they were there because they’d come borrow her baby bed. Marg’s coming and so then one of the kids needs a baby bed, so then she’d know because of that. And certainly she knows Independence backwards and forwards, so that she’d be someone that you’ll have to talk to.
D. BAILEY: Mike Westwood is dead, no doubt.
DUNAR: Yes, he is. We’re going to talk to his widow, though. On Monday we’re going to talk to her.
S. BAILEY: Is that right? I don’t remember her name.
DUNAR: Mary Kay.
S. BAILEY: Okay, I’ll have to mention her.
D. BAILEY: She drove for the [unintelligible]. And what about the woman at the Examiner, Sue Gentry?
S. BAILEY: Oh, she would know everything.
D. BAILEY: Is she still alive?
SHAVER: Oh, yes.
S. BAILEY: She lives next door to Dorsey Lou, I think.
DUNAR: I think so.
SHAVER: It’s always the occasion on Sunday morning when you’re standing out in front of the house waiting for the next tour, to watch Sue Gentry speed down Delaware [unintelligible].
103
S. BAILEY: Is that right?
SHAVER: She still drives.
S. BAILEY: Oh, how about that?
SHAVER: [unintelligible]. She comes and picks up Mrs. Wallace and takes her to bridge games and things like that.
S. BAILEY: Oh, how about that. I was talking about the Burrus twins a while ago . . .
END OF INTERVIEW