Word: truman
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...funeral itself, held at the library, was basically an Episcopal service, although a Baptist minister and a Masonic leader also participated (Truman, past Masonic Grand Master, was baptized in the Baptist church at age 18; Bess is an Episcopalian). At Truman's request, no hymns were sung and there was no eulogy. Bess and her daughter Margaret watched the ceremony from behind a green curtain that screened them from the 242 invited mourners, all relatives or close friends of the family. At the burial site in the library courtyard-a spot Truman had selected 15 years ago-a frail...
Lightfoot. Harry Truman was the country boy of legend who comes to the big city and outwits all the slickers. His parents and grandparents were people of the Middle Border, the odd blend of Midwesterner and Southerner that enriches Missouri with all the paradoxes of that mid-continental mixture. He was innately religious and believed in daily prayer, but like his mother, he was a lightfoot Baptist; he looked on dancing, cardplaying and bourbon drinking with a tolerant eye. He wore his provincialism as proudly as he did his loud sports shirts, which, to much of the world, represent...
...what, Harry Truman would have asked, is wrong with the American tourist? He never pretended; better than most men, Truman knew himself. He possessed some hard inner kernel of conviction-partly moral, partly intellectual, partly folk wisdom -that was neither proud nor ashamed. It made him secure...
...thick lenses and excluded him from the wide fraternity of athleticism. Reserved, almost withdrawn as a boy, he read every book in the local library. Later, because he was essentially lonely, he became a joiner. In 1918, his field-artillery regiment was sent to France, where Captain Truman for the first time on record displayed the cockerel courage that was to characterize his career. Later he recalled his greeting to the battery: "I told them I knew they had been making trouble for the previous commanders. I said, 'I didn't come over here to get along with...
Back in civilian life, Truman married his childhood sweetheart, Bess Wallace, and invested his life savings of $15,000 in a haberdashery shop in Kansas City, Mo. He prospered briefly, then went broke during the depression of 1922, but proudly paid back all his creditors, although it took years to do so. His political career began when the brother of Kansas City's Boss Thomas Pendergast walked into the failing store, leaned an elbow on the counter, and asked whether Truman would be interested in running for county judge in Jackson County-which includes Kansas City. The offer...