Bess Truman Read Free

girlhood were a good time to be a woman in America.
    The movement toward a more independent woman began in 1848, and by 1890, there was a distinct whiff of liberation in the air. The bustle finally had been banished, and women were asking and getting the right to play sports and join clubs and launch careers and speak their minds on an astonishing number of topics from temperance to the vote. In 1901, the year sixteen-year-old Bess Wallace graduated from high school, a woman lawyer, Carey May Carroll, was named attorney to the Jackson County collector.
    For Bess, participation in sports was her first stride toward self-confidence. By the time she was in high school, she was the best tennis player in Independence. She was also an accomplished ice skater and rider. In her younger days, she played third base on her brothers’ sandlot baseball team and was their champion slugger. There is a story in the family of Bess happening by when the boys were losing to a team from a nearby neighborhood by three runs in the last of the ninth. Bess was on her way home from a tennis match. Her brother Frank begged her to get into the game as a pinch hitter. She agreed, and they promptly put three men on base. Frank sent Bess up to bat, and she belted a home run over the center fielder’s head, winning the game.
    Next door to Bess Wallace at 614 North Delaware Street lived her closest friend, Mary Paxton. She was the daughter of a successful attorney, and like Bess Wallace, had a number of obstreperous brothers, who frequently got into fights with the Wallace boys. Both older sisters never hesitated to wade into these brawls, grabbing male arms and legs, swatting ears and backsides. Bess, taller and a year older than Mary, was the acknowledged peacemaker. The rascals were told to behave or else. “They were all afraid of her,” recalled Henry Chiles, a high-school classmate who was probably one of the miscreants.
    Bess also kept the peace and issued commands with her whistle. It was a piercing sound that carried for blocks. Moreover, she did it without putting her fingers near her mouth. “She was the only girl in Independence who could whistle through her teeth,” Henry Chiles recalled. The whistle summoned wandering brothers and struck terror into their male hearts when they were about to do something they shouldn’t. For her girlfriends, Bess had a more pleasing, melodious whistle. On summer evenings, they waited eagerly for it to sound from the Wallace back porch. It was a signal to come over for ice cream.
    The Paxtons and the Wallaces had a good time together. On summer nights, it was so good that some of the neighbors - in particular Colonel William Southern, editor of the local paper - complained of not being able to get any sleep. In retaliation, they called Southern “Sneaky Bill.” A lot of the noise was probably generated by Frank Wallace and his big black dog. Visitors to Delaware Street would ask him what he called the mongrel, and Frank would say, deadpan “U-Know.”
    The disconcerted visitor would say: “I don’t know. I just asked you.”
    “U-Know,” Frank would say.
    And so on, while the visitor got madder and madder and everyone else collapsed with laughter.
    U-Know became such an object of affection he thought he could get away with anything. Matthew Paxton, one of Mary’s brothers, had stolen a handful of sugar lumps from his mother’s kitchen and was enjoying them one day. U-Know watched, licking his chops. George Wallace jarred Matthew’s elbow, and the sugar flew up in the air and down U-Know’s gullet. Matthew was so furious he bit U-Know. “Matthew spit black hair for a week,” Mary Paxton recalled. No one seems to remember whether he inflicted any serious damage on the dog.
    While she hung around with these rowdy males, Bess was not allowed to forget that she was Madge Gates Wallace’s daughter. She was expected to be a lady, most of the time. This idea of the lady who concerned herself only