Bess Truman Read Free Page A

with the genteel aspects of life, with art and culture and spiritual values, was still alive in the 1880s and 1890s. Madge Gates Wallace was a lady from the top of her well-coifed head to the tips of her elegant fingers. Although she tolerated her daughter’s athletic prowess, Madge insisted that Bess acquire the social graces.
    In high school, Bess went to Miss Dunlap’s dancing class on Jackson Square in the center of Independence. Scarcely a Saturday night went by without a hop at that particular ballroom. There were other dances and receptions at the Swope mansion, where Bess was welcomed by Margaret Swope, the daughter closest to her in age. Margaret often asked Bess to join her in the receiving line, a sign of their close friendship as well as Bess’ social status.
    “We all learned the polka and the schottische and the Virginia reel,” her friend Mary Paxton recalled. “But we mostly danced the waltz and two-step. We had much the same kind of party dresses, mull with silk sashes, colored or striped. But Bess always looked more stylish than anyone else in the crowd.” In the summer, they sometimes strung Japanese lanterns on the lawn and had outdoor parties. For refreshments in summer, there was ice cream and cake and mints; in the winter, chicken salad with beaten biscuits and charlotte russe.
    On summer nights after a dance, the party often piled into one or two old surreys for a ride through the moonlit town and countryside. They would sing songs and no doubt do a little surreptitious “spooning,” although this adolescent sport was frowned upon if the girl seemed too willing or too careless. One girl who spooned on a back porch with a comparative stranger from Kansas City was never invited to another party.
    By now, you may be wondering about my omission of a name that eventually became important in Bess Wallace’s life - Harry S. Truman. He was not a native of Independence. He was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, a tiny farm town some 120 miles to the south, where his father, John Anderson Truman, was in business as a horse and cattle trader. About nine months later, the Trumans moved to a farm near Harrisonville, in Cass County, some thirty miles from Independence, but part of Jackson County. There, John Truman helped his wife’s family, the Youngs, run their 600-acre farm. In 1890, when Harry was six years old, his mother, Martha Ellen Young Truman, persuaded her husband to move to Independence, because she wanted her children (a second son, Vivian, and a daughter, Mary, had followed Harry) to get a better education than the rural schools could give them.
    Not long after they came to town, Martha Ellen Truman met the local Presbyterian minister on the street. He invited her to send her children to his Sunday school. Although she was a Baptist by birth, she accepted the invitation. Thus, six-year-old Harry Truman walked into the classroom of the First Presbyterian Church and saw “a little blue-eyed, golden-haired girl" named Bess Wallace. To the end of his life, he insisted that he fell in love with five-year-old Bess on the spot and never stopped loving her throughout his boyhood years. “She sat behind me in the sixth, seventh, and high-school grades,” Harry Truman later recalled, “and I thought she was the most beautiful and the sweetest person on earth.”
    Occasionally, Bess would allow Harry Truman to carry her books home from school. He would be dazed with happiness for the rest of the day. More moments of near ecstasy occurred when Bess joined Harry and several other classmates at the home of his first cousin, Ethel Noland, to be tutored in the intricacies of Latin verbs by her older sister, Nellie. Both Nolands soon noted Harry’s adoration of Bess, and he did not try to conceal it from them.
    One day, he appeared at their house with a broad smile on his face and announced that he wanted to play his first musical composition for them. The Nolands seated themselves in their parlor,