Please note that the following is a digitized version of a selected article from White House History Quarterly, Issue 50, originally released in print form in 2018. Single print copies of the full issue can be purchased online at Shop.WhiteHouseHistory.org No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All photographs contained in this journal unless otherwise noted are copyrighted by the White House Historical Association and may not be reproduced without permission. Requests for reprint permissions should be directed to rights@whha.org. Contact books@whha.org for more information. Š 2018 White House Historical Association. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions.
Harry Truman ATE HERE A Presidential Site in Frostburg, Maryland MATTHEW ALGEO
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you might call “well fixed.” Harry’s only income was an army pension of $112.561 a month, and he refused to “commercialize” the presidency by accepting lucrative business offers or extravagant speaking fees.2 Around 12:30 p.m. on that unusually warm Sunday afternoon in 1953, the Trumans pulled into Frostburg, a small coal-mining town on the eastern slope of Big Savage Mountain in far western Maryland. They parked just off Main Street. Harry walked around to open the door for Bess, as he always did. Together they walked into the Princess and took a seat in one of the booths against the wall. The ex-president’s fondness for the Princess was not strictly culinary. The diner was owned by George Pappas,
whom he described as “an old Greek who is a damn good Democrat.”3 Truman was only too happy to support a loyal Democrat’s small business. Pappas had come to the United States from Greece in 1907 with $14 in his pocket. He opened the Princess in 1939. Originally it was a confectionery, but over the years he began serving soup and sandwiches, and by 1950 he had turned it into a full-service restaurant. The Trumans ordered the Sunday supper special: roast chicken with stuffing, lima beans, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, rice pudding, and coffee—for 70¢. At first they went unrecognized. But their waitress, Grace Felker, thought there was something familiar about the bespectacled gentleman and his
P R E V IO US S P R E A D A N D A B O VE : B RU C E W H IT E F O R T H E WH I TE H OUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
it was sunday, June 21, 1953—Father’s Day. Harry and Bess Truman were driving from Independence to Washington in their brand new Chrysler New Yorker. It was their first trip back to the capital since Truman yielded the White House to Dwight D. Eisenhower five months before, and their first long drive since the trip home from the 1944 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where Truman was nominated for vice president. As always, Harry was behind the wheel and Bess rode shotgun. They traveled alone. Former presidents would not receive Secret Service protection for another twelve years. The Trumans traveled cheaply, too. Former presidents did not receive pensions at the time, and the Trumans were not wealthy, nor what
matronly wife. When she took their order back to the kitchen, she told the cook, George Pappas Jr., the owner’s son, “That looks like Harry Truman out there.” “I looked out,” Pappas recalled years later, “and I said, ‘It sure does.’ And it was. It was old Harry.” George Jr. had served eighteen months as a mess sergeant in the South Pacific during World War II. He said it was an honor for him to make lunch for his former commander in chief. “He was a good old fellow,” he said of Truman. “Good president too.” Like many of his generation, George Jr. gave Truman credit for ending the war. “That was really a tough decision, for that man to drop that bomb on all them people.”4 While George Jr. prepared the Trumans’ meals, telephones all over Frostburg began ringing. At the time, the town had no direct-dial service, so all calls had to be routed through an operator. It did not take long for the word to get out. Howard Ward, the Frostburg correspondent for the Cumberland (Maryland) Evening Times, was at home changing out of his Sunday best when he got a call from a friend telling him that the former president and first lady were in town. Ward thought it was a prank.
But after he hung up, his curiosity got the best of him. He put his suit back on and headed for the Princess. “Townspeople started to drop in for a Coke,” Ward reported in the next day’s paper, “and one bystander estimated the restaurant did a bigger soft drink business in the time the Trumans were there than in any other similar period.”5 The Trumans did not have a quiet repast. Children badgered Harry for his autograph. The adults weren’t much better, constantly interrupting the
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TOP: A P PHOTO/ ROBERT E. STRONGMAN • BOT TOM: ASSOCIATE D PRESS
The distance from the Princess Restaurant on Main Street in Frostburg, Maryland (opposite), to the United States Capitol is precisely 150 miles. Harry Truman could have told you that. Truman, seen at right moves luggage after checking in to a motel in Decatur, Illinois, in June 1953, and at the wheel of his car with his wife Bess beside him, planned his road trips meticulously, carefully calculating the mileage between stops. When he was a senator, he stopped and ate at the Princess on the drive between his home in Independence, Missouri, and Washington, D.C. But it was the visit he made to the Princess after he left the White House that transformed the diner into a grassroots memorial to the thirty-third president.
An archetypical American diner, The Princess Restaurant serves a full menu in a casual atmosphere furnished with a combination of booths and a long sit-down counter. opposite
couple’s lunch to shake hands. “Through it all,” Ward reported, “they remained gracious and were not annoyed.”6 “We lunched at Frostburg, at the Princess Restaurant,” Truman later recounted. “I had been there before, but in those days they didn’t make such a fuss over me. I was just a senator then.”7 George Pappas died in 1963. George Pappas Jr. took over the restaurant and ran it until 1981, when his own son, George W. Pappas, took over. In 2016, George W. turned the business over to his daughter, Lauren Pappas, who had recently graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in advertising. Of all the small mom-and-pop businesses that the Trumans are known to have patronized on their road trip, the Princess Restaurant on Main Street in Frostburg is the only one that has survived, more or less intact, in the same family. “Granddad was a hard worker and a thinker,” George W. explained. “In 1949, to attract the ‘church crowd,’ he decided to stop selling beer. Beer was a nuisance anyway. Business went up immediately.” George says his father, George Jr., was no less diligent. “They
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were both hard workers and they’d give you a good meal for a good price.”8 When the Trumans came to Frostburg in 1953, Main Street positively bustled with businesses, including Durst Furniture, Prichard’s Hardware, Maurice’s Department Store, Hohing’s Men’s and Boys’ Store, a G. C. Murphy’s five-and-dime, a Rexall, an Acme, and an A&P. Besides the Princess there were a dozen other places to get a meal, ranging from drugstore soda fountains to white tablecloth restaurants: Al’s, Bob’s, Boney’s, the Duchess, Finzel’s, Peck’s. On Friday nights, coal miners from all over Allegany County would bring their families to Main Street for dinner and a movie, to do a little shopping, or just to hang out. It could get a little raucous sometimes. It was what they did for entertainment. Today, all those businesses are gone, except for the Princess. What happened? Lots of things. Highway 40 was rerouted around the town, siphoning traffic from Main Street. Then Interstate 68 was built, siphoning even more. A mall opened down the road in LaVale, followed by a Walmart and other big-box stores. white house history quarterly
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This framed photo of President and Mrs. Truman with Princess owner George Pappas was taken during their 1953 visit and hangs above the location of the booth where they ate lunch.
There were less obvious factors, too. Technological advances made it easier to mine coal from the surface, a process that is cheaper than underground mining and requires fewer workers. Before Frostburg knew it, Friday nights on Main Street were a lot less boisterous. But Frostburg is bouncing back. Since 2015, twenty new businesses have opened in the town.9 Today, the Princess Restaurant still looks much as it did when Harry and Bess ate there in 1953. Along one wall is a soda fountain, with a long counter and fixed, round stools. On the opposite wall are a dozen booths, each with a small, coin-operated jukebox, one song for ten cents, three for a quarter (though Lauren Pappas confided to me that most
of the jukeboxes do not work anymore; apparently a good jukebox repairman is hard to find). A plaque above the booth in which the Trumans sat commemorates their visit: MR. AND MRS. HARRY S. TRUMAN ATE DINNER IN THIS BOOTH FATHER’S DAY SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 1953
The booth is not original. It was replaced during a remodeling in the early 1990s. George W. Pappas kept the old one in his garage for several years, until his wife suggested that the space might be better utilized by a motor vehicle. George called the local historical society to see if it was interested in this unique
piece of local history, but, alas, it did not have any room for the booth either. So, reluctantly, George put it out with the trash one day. 10 Lauren Pappas says Truman fans from far and wide have made the
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The Apple Pie Sunday is one of the popular staples on the Princess Restaurant’s menu. opposite
The Trumans at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., with their daughter Margaret during their 1953 road trip.
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summer of 1953 attests, Harry Truman was a man of the people, perhaps the last citizen-president, a failed haberdasher who became the leader of the free world. In a way, it is fitting that his memorial is a booth in a diner in a small town on Main Street. NOTES 1.
David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 928.
2.
Harry S. Truman, Mr. Citizen (New York: Geis Associates, 1960), 58.
3.
Quoted George Kennedy, in George“Citizen Kennedy, Truman “Citizen Sleeps Truman Late, Omits Sleeps Stroll,” Late, Omits Washington Stroll,” Washington Evening Star,Evening June 22, Star,1953, June7.22, 1953, 7.
4.
George Pappas Jr., interview by author, October 4, 2007.
5.
“Truman Pays County Visit; Creates Stir,” Cumberland Cumberland (Maryland) (Maryland) Evening Evening Times, Times, June 22, 1953, 7.
6.
Ibid.
7.
Quoted in Kennedy, “Citizen Truman Sleeps Late,” 7.
8.
George W. Pappas, interview by author, October 4, 2007.
9.
Jessica Palumbo, “Checking in with Frostburg,” posted June 1, 2017, Small Small Business Business Revolution Revolution (blog), online at www.deluxe.com/ small-business-revolution/blog.
10.
George W. Pappas, interview.
11.
Lauren Pappas, telephone interview by author, November 30, 2017.
12.
“Truman Takes Walk, Talks of Library,” Baltimore Sun, June 30, 1953, 2.
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pilgrimage to the Princess. “It’s funny that they still come in and want to see where the Truman booth is,” she says. “You wouldn’t think this many years later there would still be such interest.”11 Politicians in search of a good photo op have been known to stop by, too. In December 2015, Maryland governor Larry Hogan made it a point to eat lunch in the Truman Booth when he visited Frostburg to serve as grand marshal for the town’s holiday parade. While he was back in Washington that summer, Harry Truman took one of his famous morning “constitutionals,” a brisk walk around the city. He zipped past the great memorials to his predecessors: the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial. There are no grand memorials to Harry S. Truman in Washington (though there is a movement to add a statue of him to the Capitol’s famous Statuary Hall). And Harry would be okay with that. He always insisted he was not interested in a memorial to himself. “I’ll be cussed and discussed for the next generation anyway,” he liked to say.12 Besides, as the road trip he and Bess took in the