One of the difficulties I encountered in connection with being President was the intrusion of journalistic curiosity about my personal affairs and my family. Stories were being written about my early life, associations, and education, intended, perhaps, to shed some light on the reasons for my actions and what course I would be likely to take. Would I continue the New Deal or would I modify it? Would I retain or dismiss the liberals in the government? Would I be more partisan politically than my predecessor? These speculations about what I would do led to many baseless conclusions. Far too often they grew out of inaccuracies or even untruths about my life.

Ultimately, when books came to be written about me, many questionable or untrue statements began to appear as if they were actual parts of “the record.” One such book - it was a book for children - contained, it seemed to me, more inaccuracies than facts and more false quotations than true ones from individuals who purportedly had been interviewed about me.

I believe it fair to say that a great deal of misinformation about me has gained a foothold in this way, and I suppose that some of these “facts” will not be dislodged easily. Still, I hope to prevent the spread of further misinformation, and for that reason I digress at this point to write about myself. I do so without any introspective trimmings.

My parents were married on December 28, 1881. I was born in Lamar, Missouri, at four o’clock in the afternoon on May 8, 1884. When I was about a year old, the family moved to Cass County, Missouri, south of Harrisonville, where my father ran a farm and where my brother Vivian was born on April 25, 1886. In 1887, we moved to the Sol Young farm in Jackson County, two miles south of Hickman’s Mill and six miles north of Belton in Cass County. Later on, a railroad promoter by the name of Blair built a rail line from Kansas City to Springfield, Missouri, and established a station a mile south of the Young farm. It was named Grandview because it was on a high point of land, the highest point in the vicinity, in fact. Lawrence, Kansas, is visible forty miles west, Kansas City eighteen miles north, Lee’s Summit eight miles east, and Belton six miles south. The site would have made a wonderful observatory from which to study the heavens.

My sister Mary Jane was born there on August 12, 1889.

My grandfather Truman lived with my father wherever he went, and I remember him very well. He was a dignified, pleasant man, particularly with Vivian and me. I fear he spoiled us. My grandfather Young and our lovely grandmother, who had beautiful red hair and who made wonderful cookies, also gave us free rein. My grandmother Truman had died before my parents were married.

We had the whole 440 acres to play over and 160 acres west across the road for the same purpose. Some of my happiest and most pleasant recollections are of the years we spent on the Young farm when I was between the ages of three and six.

I had a bobtailed Maltese gray cat and a little black-and-tan dog not much bigger than the cat. The old cat was named Bob, because one day when he was asleep in front of the big fireplace in the dining room a coal of fire popped out, lit on the end of his tail, and burned off about an inch of it. I can well remember his yowls, and I can see him yet as he ran up the corner of the room all the way to the ceiling. The little dog was called Tandy because of his black-and-tan color.

These two animals followed Vivian and me everywhere we went, and me alone when Vivian was asleep or too tired to wander over the farm. I was missed on one occasion and was discovered in a cornfield a half mile from the house, enjoying the antics of the cat and dog catching field mice.

On another occasion, we were playing south of the house in a beautiful pasture with a lovely maple grove in front of it. We had a new little wagon all painted red. I would pull Vivian, and a neighbor boy our age named Chandler, and then the Chandler boy, with Vivian’s help, would pull me. We discovered a mud hole at the end of the grove, and I pulled the wagon with the two boys in it into the hole and upset it. It seemed a good thing to do, and it was repeated several times, taking turn about. When my mother found us, we were plastered with mud and dirty water from head to foot. What a grand spanking I got as the ringleader!

Then there was a long porch on the north side of the house which made a great race track, a swing in the front hallway for rainy days, and a big one in the yard for sunny ones.

My grandfather Young would take me to the Belton Fair, when it was running, in a big two-wheeled cart with high wheels like the one that used to be shown hitched to Nancy Hanks, the great trotter. I would sit in the judges’ stand with Grandpa and watch the races, eat striped candy and peanuts, and have the best time a kid ever had.

We had an old bachelor uncle named Harrison Young, who visited us once in a while. He lived in Kansas City, which seemed a long way off, and he would bring Vivian and me the most wonderful things to play with and all kinds of candy, nuts, and fruit. When he came, it was just like Christmas.

My grandfather Young had a half sister in St. Louis who would visit us about once a year. When she came she would take us over to the back pasture, which seemed miles away but wasn’t more than a half mile. We would hunt birds’ nests in the tall prairie grass and gather daisies, prairie wild flowers, and wild strawberries. When we returned to the house, we’d require a good scrubbing and a long nap.

In the fall, when the apples and peaches were ripe, they were picked, the peaches dried and the apples buried in the ground with straw and boards above them. In midwinter, the apples would be dug up, and were they good! My mother and grandmother dried a lot of peaches and apples, and what fine pies they would make in the winter. There were peach butter, apple butter, grape butter, jellies and preserves, all made in the kitchen by Mama, Grandma, and the German hired girl. All were good cooks.

Later, after the fall freeze, came hog-killing time, with sausages, souse, pickled pigs’ feet, and the rendering of lard in a big iron kettle in the smokehouse. Vivian still has that kettle. Mama used to tell me that the only reason it was there was because it had been too heavy for the Kansas Red Legs to carry when they robbed the house during the Civil War, burned it, and killed all the 400 fat hogs, taking only the hams.

We had a cousin, Sol Chiles, who lived with us at the time. He was about eighteen years old, and he really made life pleasant for us. About the time we moved to Independence, he went to live with his mother, my mother’s older sister, Aunt Sally. She was a lovely person, as were all my many aunts.

There was Aunt Sue, who lived in Arizona. She was my mother’s oldest sister and the best talker of them all. Later on she taught me how to play cribbage.

Aunt Ada, Mama’s youngest sister, lived in Illinois. She taught me how to play euchre. Aunt Laura, Mama’s other sister, lived in Kansas City, and we always enjoyed visiting her.

My father had three sisters and a brother. The youngest was Aunt Matt, who was a schoolteacher. She’d come to see us, and it was an event, sure enough. She taught us all sorts of outdoor games. Aunt Ella lived in Independence. She was my father’s oldest sister, and we saw a lot of her and her three daughters after we moved to Independence. We grew up and went to school with cousins Nellie and Ethel Noland, Aunt Ella’s daughters. Nellie would translate my Latin lesson for me when I was in high school, and I would escort Ethel to parties and learn how to be polite from her. I was always afraid of the girls my age and older.

Aunt Emma, Papa’s other sister, lived on a farm about four miles northeast of the Young farm. There were four children in her family, and we really had a grand time when we spent the day with them.

Those were wonderful days and great adventures. My father bought me a beautiful black Shetland pony and the grandest saddle to ride him with I ever saw. Vivian has just had that lovely saddle rehabilitated for his three-year-old granddaughter, sixty-five years later.

My father would let me ride over the farm with him beside his big horse. He and Grandpa Young were partners in the operation of the farm and the handling of herds of cattle and mules as well as hogs and sheep. I became familiar with every sort of animal on the farm and watched the wheat harvest, the threshing and the corn shucking, mowing and stacking hay, and every evening at suppertime heard my father tell a dozen farm hands what to do and how to do it. In addition to the 600 acres where we lived, there was another farm of 900 or 1,000 acres four miles away, which had to be operated, too.

When we moved to Independence in December 1890, my father bought a big house on South Chrisler Street with several acres of land, a wonderful strawberry bed, and a fine garden. At the same time, he was operating a farm southeast of town and went into buying and selling cattle, hogs, and sheep.

We began making acquaintances with neighbor boys as soon as we were settled. We had an old Negro woman who washed for us every week and sometimes cooked for us. She had three boys and two girls, and what a grand time we had. There was also another family of Negroes who were friends of our cook. There were a boy and a girl in that family.

With our barns, chicken house, and a grand yard in which to play, all the boys and girls in the neighborhood for blocks around congregated at our house. We always had ponies and horses to ride, goats to hitch to our little wagon, which was made like a big one. An old harness maker in Independence made Vivian a set of double harness just like the big set. We would harness two red goats to the little wagon and drive it everywhere around the place. Years later this good old harness man defeated me for eastern judge of the Jackson County Court.

About this time, my parents decided that we should start attending Sunday school. My mother took us to the nearest Protestant church, which happened to be the First Presbyterian at Lexington and Pleasant streets, and we attended regularly every Sunday for as long as we lived in Independence.

We made a number of new acquaintances, and I became interested in one in particular. She had golden curls and has, to this day, the most beautiful blue eyes. We went to Sunday school, public school from the fifth grade through high school, graduated in the same class, and marched down life’s road together. For me she still has the blue eyes and golden hair of yesteryear.

My mother had taught me my letters and how to read before I was five years old, and because I had a hard time reading newspaper print I was taken to an oculist for an eye examination. I was fitted with glasses and started to school in the fall of 1892, when I was eight years old. The glasses were a great help in seeing but a great handicap in playing. I was so carefully cautioned by the eye doctor about breaking my glasses and injuring my eyes that I was afraid to join in the rough-and-tumble games in the schoolyard and the back lot. My time was spent in reading, and by the time I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I had read all the books in the Independence Public Library and our big old Bible three times through.

In 1896, my father sold the house on Chrisler Street and bought one at 909 West Waldo Avenue at North River Boulevard. North River was the road to Wayne City Landing, which was the river port for Independence before the railroad came.

I have one or two vivid recollections of the Chrisler Street place that deserve mention. In the fall of 1892, Grover Cleveland was re-elected over Benjamin Harrison, who had defeated him in 1888. My father was very much elated by Cleveland’s victory. He rode a beautiful gray horse in the torchlight parade and decorated the weather vane on the tower at the northwest corner of the house with a flag and bunting. The weather vane was a beautifully gilded rooster.

My first year in school was a happy one. My teacher was Miss Myra Ewing, with whom I became a favorite, as I eventually did with all my teachers. When I started the second grade, my teacher was Miss Minnie Ward.

In January of 1894, my second year at Noland School, Vivian and I had severe cases of diphtheria from which I had difficulty recovering. My legs, arms, and throat were paralyzed for some months after the diphtheria left me, but Vivian made a rapid and complete recovery. My father and mother had sent Mary Jane back to the farm, and she did not have the disease. She also missed the measles and the mumps when we had them later.

The school board had decided to build a new school on South River, just back of the present auditorium of the Latter-Day Saints, and I never returned to the Noland School. The new school was the Columbian, and I went to summer school to Miss Jennie Clements the summer after my sickness to catch up. I skipped the third grade and went directly into the fourth, where Miss Mamie Dunn was my teacher.

We found West Waldo Street to be a most pleasant neighborhood, and there were boys and girls our age all around us with whom we became acquainted at once.

Next door, to the east, lived the Burrus family. There were three boys and five girls, three of the girls the ages of Vivian, Mary, and me. Next door east of the Burrus family lived the Wrights. Miss Emma and Miss Florence were lovely ladies. Miss Florence was a schoolteacher at the Ott School, and Miss Emma taught music. Arthur Wright was the oldest boy and was a partner with his father in a tailor shop in Kansas City. Lofton Wright was the second boy in the family and died after an operation for appendicitis. The youngest boy was named James, who became a very good friend of mine and who died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-five.

West on Waldo lived the Pittman family. There were Miss Maud, a schoolteacher, and Miss Ethel, then an older boy, and Bernard, who was Vivian’s age and his pal. South and west of us on Blue Avenue lived the Smith boys, and at the other end of the block, just back of us on White Oak Street, lived the Chiles family with two boys, Henry and Morton, just the ages of Vivian and me. At the corner of Delaware and Waldo, east of us, were the Sawyers, the Wallaces, and the Thomases. Lock Sawyer was older than we were, and the Wallaces were a year or two younger. Bess, Frank, and George Wallace all belonged to the Waldo Avenue gang. Across the street at Woodland College were Paul and Helen Bryant. Paul and Vivian were great friends and raised pigeons and game chickens in partnership.

We had wonderful times in that neighborhood from 1896 to 1902. Our house soon became headquarters for all the boys and girls around. We had a large front yard, and our back yard was surrounded by a high board fence to keep the stock safely off the street. Usually there were goats, calves, two or three cows, my pony, and my father’s horses to be taken care of. The cows had to be milked, and the horses curried, watered, and fed every morning and evening. In the summertime, the cows had to be taken to pasture a mile or so away after morning milking and returned the same evening. The goats and calves had to be taken to the big public spring at Blue Avenue and River, two blocks south of our house, for water.

There was a wonderful barn with stalls for horses and cows, a corn-crib and a hayloft in which all the kids met and cooked up plans for all sorts of adventures, such as trips to Idlewild, a sort of wilderness two blocks north, and pigtail baseball games which I umpired because I couldn’t see well enough to bat.

It was a very happy time, not fully appreciated until a long time afterward. There was a woodpile on which my brother and I had to work after old Rube, a good old colored man with a limp, had sawed the cord wood into the proper length for the cooking stove. The wood had to be split and carried to the wood box in the kitchen for “Aunt” Caroline’s use in making cookies, corn bread, and all sorts of good things to eat.

Like us, Jim Wright and the McCarrolls were interested in raising pigeons. We had fantails, pouters, and many kinds of common everyday pigeons. We carried on quite a trading business in pigeons, chickens, cats, and pups. My mother was very patient with us and our pals and always came to our defense when we went a little too far, and the various fathers decided to take a hand.

We also had a garden, which had to be weeded in season and a yard to be mowed and raked, too. Somehow we managed to get most of the chores done which had been laid out by my father and still have time to play and enjoy the company of our pals, too.

After a while we began to grow up. The gang scattered here and there, and shortly the serious business of education, jobs, and girls began to take all our time.

Education progressed, and we learned geometry, music, rhetoric, logic, and a smattering of astronomy. History and biography were my favorites. The lives of great men and famous women intrigued me, and I read all I could find about them.

We had an excellent history teacher, Miss Maggie Phelps, and an English teacher, Miss Tillie Brown, who was a genius at making us appreciate good literature. She also made us want to read it.

Our science teacher was Professor W. L. C. Palmer, who became principal of the high school and afterward superintendent of all the schools. He married our mathematics and Latin teacher, Miss Adelia Hardin.

I do not remember a bad teacher in all my experience. They were all different, of course, but they were the salt of the earth. They gave us our high ideals, and they hardly ever received more than $40 a month for it.

My debt to history is one which cannot be calculated. I know of no other motivation which so accounts for my awakening interest as a young lad in the principles of leadership and government.

Whether that early interest stemmed partly from some hereditary trait in my natural make-up is something for the psychologists to decide. But I know that the one great external influence which, more than anything else, nourished and sustained that interest in government and public service was the endless reading of history which I began as a boy and which I have kept up ever since.

In school, history was taught by paragraphs. Each great event in history was written up in one paragraph. I made it my business to look up the background of these events and to find out who brought them about. In the process I became very interested in the men who made world history. The lives of the great administrators of past ages intrigued me, and I soon learned that the really successful ones were few and far between. I wanted to know what caused the successes or the failures of all the famous leaders of history.

The only way to find the answers was to read. I pored over Plutarch’s Lives time and time again and spent as much time reading Abbott’s biographies of famous men. I read the standard histories of ancient Egypt, the Mesopotamian cultures, Greece and Rome, the exploits of Genghis Khan and the stories of oriental civilizations, the accounts of the development of every modern country, and particularly the history of America.

Reading history, to me, was far more than a romantic adventure. It was solid instruction and wise teaching which I somehow felt that I wanted and needed. Even as a youth I felt that I ought to know the facts about the system of government under which I was living, and how it came to be.

It seemed to me that if I could understand the true facts about the growth and development of the United States Government and could know the details of the lives of its presidents and political leaders I would be getting for myself a valuable part of the total education which I hoped to have someday. I know of no surer way to get a solid foundation in political science and public administration than to study the histories of past administrations of the world’s most successful system of government.

While still a boy I could see that history had some extremely valuable lessons to teach. I learned from it that a leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do, and like it. It takes a leader to put economic, military, and government forces to work so they will operate. I learned that in those periods of history when there was no leadership, society usually groped through dark ages of one degree, or another. I saw that it takes men to make history, or there would be no history. History does not make the man.

History showed me that Greece, which was not as big as the state of Missouri, left us ideas of government that are imperishable and fundamental to any society of people living together and governing themselves. It revealed to me that what came about in Philadelphia in 1776 really had its beginning in Hebrew times. In other words, I began to see that the history of the world has moved in cycles and that very often we find ourselves in the midst of political circumstances which appear to be new but which might have existed in almost identical form at various times during the past 6,000 years.

Especially in reading the history of American Presidents did I become aware of the value of knowing what has gone before, I learned that the idea of universal military training, which was being hotly debated when I was in my teens, had first been recommended by President Washington in 1790. I learned of General McClellan, who traded his leadership for demagoguery and eventually defied his commander in chief, and was interested to learn how President Lincoln dealt with an insubordinate general.

These lessons were to stand me in good stead years later, when I was to be confronted with similar problems. There were countless other lessons which history taught that would prove valuable to me. There was the miserable performance of the Committee on the Conduct of the War in the 1860s, which did such a poor job for the federal government that Douglas Freeman, talking about his biography of Robert E. Lee, told me the committee was worth several divisions to the Confederacy. I was thoroughly familiar with the antics of that committee, and as chairman of the Senate special committee to investigate the defense effort in the 1940s, I avoided every pitfall into which my predecessors had fallen.

I learned of the unique problems of Andrew Johnson, whose destiny it was to be thrust suddenly into the presidency to fill the shoes of one of history’s great leaders. When the same thing happened to me, I knew just how Johnson had coped with his problems, and I did not make the mistakes he made.

History taught me about the periodic waves of hysteria which started with the witch craze during colonial days, produced the abominable Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s, flourished again in the Know-Nothing movement, the anti-Masonic hysteria, anti-Catholicism, the Ku Klux Klan, the Red scare of 1919. When the cycle repeated itself during my administration in the form of anti-Communist hysteria and indiscriminate branding of innocent persons as subversives, I could deal with the situation calmly because I knew something about its background that students of history would know but perhaps not appreciate. When we are faced with a situation, we must know how to apply the lessons of history in a practical way.

I was beginning to realize - forty years before I had any thought of becoming President of the United States - that almost all current events in the affairs of governments and nations have their parallels and precedents in the past. It was obvious to me even then that a clear understanding of administrative problems presupposes a knowledge of similar ones as recorded in history and of their disposition. Long before I ever considered going into public life, I had arrived at the conclusion that no decisions affecting the people should be made impulsively, but on the basis of historical background and careful consideration of the facts as they exist at the time.

History taught me that the leader of any country, in order to assume his responsibilities as a leader, must know the history of not only his own country but of all the other great countries, and that he must make the effort to apply this knowledge to the decisions that have to be made for the welfare of all the people.

My first paying job was opening up a drugstore in Independence for Mr. Jim Clinton at six-thirty in the morning, mopping the floors, sweeping the sidewalk, and having everything shipshape when Mr. Clinton came in. When everything was in order, there were bottles to wipe off and shelves to dust. There must have been a thousand bottles to dust and yards and yards of patent-medicine cases and shelves to clean. At least it seemed that way, because I never finished the bottles and shelves by schooltime and had to start the next morning where I’d left off the day before. By the time I got around them all, it was time to start over. How I hated Latin-covered prescription bottles and patent-medicine shelves!

The drugstore had plate-glass windows in front with a big glass jar, shaped like an enlarged Greek vase in each window. Each vase was filled with colored water and oil in layers. How they kept those colors from mixing I don’t know. Then the vases were surrounded by displays of patent medicine that had to be cleaned and dusted, and once a week the windows had to be washed and redecorated.

You walked through a front door onto a tile floor with showcases on each side and a soda fountain on one side in front. Behind the cases on one side were interminable rows and rows of bottles with those Latin abbreviations on them. One in particular I remember, because Mr. Clinton told me to be careful not to break it. He said no more Icy Toed Feet were to be obtained. The mark on the bottle was Ici. Toed. Foet. I never found out what it was.

After the bottles and the patent-medicine cases had been cleaned, then the prescription case had to be dusted very, very carefully.

In a little closet under the prescription case, which faced the front and shut off the view of the back end of the store, was an assortment of whiskey bottles. Early in the morning, sometimes before Mr. Clinton arrived, the good church members and Anti-Saloon Leaguers would come in for their early-morning drink behind the prescription case at ten cents an ounce. They would wipe their mouths, peep through the observation hole in the front of the case, and depart. This procedure gave a fourteen- year-old boy quite a viewpoint on the public front of leading citizens and “amen-corner-praying” churchmen.

There were saloons aplenty around the square in Independence, and many leading men in town made no bones about going into them and buying a drink, I learned to think more highly of them than I did of the prescription-counter drinkers.

I’ll never forget my first week’s wages - three big silver dollars. It was the biggest thing that had happened to me, and my father told me to save it for myself when I tried to give it to him on coming home that Saturday night.

After a few months at this morning and night work, my high school studies became rather heavy, and my father suggested that I quit my job and study harder, which I did.

I began going to my aunt Ella Noland’s house to study Latin and algebra with Cousin Nellie and Cousin Ethel and, incidentally, my beautiful young lady with the blue eyes and golden hair. This happened about twice a week, and on two other nights Fielding Houchens and I would go out to Miss Maggie Phelps’s house and take special courses in history and geography. We were hoping to obtain appointments either to West Point or to Annapolis. I was anxious for a higher education, and because my father was having financial troubles about this time, I knew he would not be able to send me to college two years hence when I finished high school. Unfortunately my poor eyesight kept me from getting an appointment.

My high school experience is one that I will never forget. In my last year, we organized a magazine for publication by the senior class and called it the Gleam, after Tennyson’s poem, Merlin and the Gleam. It has been published ever since by each senior class. The editors were Charlie Ross, Tasker Taylor, Howard Morrison, and myself, and I really think we got out a good magazine.

I was graduated in 1901, a short time after my seventeenth birthday. Bess Wallace, who afterward became Mrs. Truman, was graduated in the same class, as was Charlie Ross, who was to be my press secretary in the White House.

I spent part of the summer on the farm, and during that summer I paid a visit to my aunt Ada in Murphysboro, Illinois. She was my mother’s youngest sister and a favorite of all of us. I spent a month there and had a grand time with my cousins, whom I had never seen before. Aunt Ada had no children, but Aunt Sally’s older married daughter lived with Aunt Ada and had four children. Two of them were about my age. Aunt Sally’s daughter, Cousin Sudie Wells, and her two daughters sat on the platform in Murphysboro, in the campaign of 1948.

On the way home I stopped in St. Louis to see my mother’s aunt, Hettie Powell. She used to visit us on the farm when I was very small, and I liked her very much. I saw my first professional horse races in St. Louis at that time. My cousin, Aunt Hettie’s son, took me to the races, and I had a fine time.

In the fall of 1901, I got a job as timekeeper on the Santa Fe Railroad, working for a contractor named L. J. Smith. I kept that job until the contract was finished, living in hobo camps along the Missouri River where the Santa Fe Railroad ran. I became very familiar with hobos and their viewpoints. I learned what it meant to work ten hours a day for $1.50, or fifteen cents an hour. The contractor paid thirty cents an hour for a wagon, team of horses, and a driver.

These old hobos were characters in their own right. It was my duty to pay them off on Saturday nights if they wanted to be paid. The pay-off took place in a saloon either in Sheffield or Independence. The object in paying the men in a saloon was to give them a chance to spend all their money right there and guarantee their being back to work on Monday morning. The checks were time checks and were signed by me as timekeeper. If I made a mistake in favor of the hobos, I lost the money; but if the mistake favored the contractor, he kept it. If a man drew his time under two weeks, he was discounted 10 percent of his pay. The contractor got this 10 percent instead of the saloonkeeper. My salary was $35 a month and board, but I received a very down-to-earth education in the handling of men.

The contract was finished along in May or June of 1902, and my father and I took a trip to southern Missouri. He had forty acres of land in Oregon County, of which Alton is the county seat. We went to Thayer and hired a buggy and a team of horses and drove up the Eleven Point River for quite a distance, to Thomasville. In making this drive we crossed the river thirteen times in eight miles. It was at flood stage, and the water came up to the bed of the buggy each time we crossed it. We visited the forty acres that my father owned and found it more perpendicular than horizontal. It ran straight up the side of a mountain and certainly was not worth much. We had a grand trip, however, and returned home very much more familiar with southern Missouri land than when we left.

When we came back, I took a job in the mailing room of the Kansas City Star at $7 a week.

My father sold the house on Waldo Avenue and bought another at 903 North Liberty Street, where we stayed a few months, and then bought a house in Kansas City at 2108 Park Avenue.

Vivian and I went to work at the National Bank of Commerce at $35 a month. We worked in that part of the bank called the “zoo,” which handled the transit checks that came through the bank as through a clearinghouse. The bank had more than 1,200 correspondents in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, and it was our duty to list these checks, charge them against the account of the bank on which they were drawn, and give credit to the bank from which they came.

A short time after we started, Vivian left to go to work for the First National Bank, and I was promoted to personal filing clerk for the president and cashier of the bank. My salary was increased from $35 to $40 a month.

My father traded the house at 2108 Park Avenue for eighty acres of land in Henry County and moved to Clinton. I changed jobs and went to work at the Union National Bank, where I was paid $60 a month as a bookkeeper. Vivian and I stayed on in Kansas City and boarded with a good old lady at 1314 Troost Avenue, where we paid five dollars a week for room and board, which included breakfast and dinner. We usually bought a ten-cent box lunch and spent the noon hour eating it in a five-cent picture show. We would go home weekends to be with the family in Clinton. I remember that my father had put in a big crop of corn that year, and when the Grand River flooded, it washed the whole crop away.

In 1904, we moved back to the farm at Grandview. My old bachelor uncle, Harrison Young, had been living with my grandmother on the farm, and he decided he wanted to quit. So we moved in with my grandmother and ran the farm for the next ten or twelve years.

When I was growing up, it occurred to me to watch the people around me to find out what they thought and what pleased them most. My father and mother were sentimentalists. My father had been raised by a religious man, Grandfather Truman, who set the women of his family on a pedestal and kept them there. No one could make remarks about my aunts or my mother in my father’s presence without getting into serious trouble.

My sister Mary Jane, named for his mother, was my father’s favorite, and he made my brother and me look after her to see that she was properly protected in play and at school. We were a closely knit family and exceedingly fond of each other.

My mother was partial to the boys, both in the family and in the neighborhood. I used to watch my father and mother closely to learn what I could do to please them, just as I did with my schoolteachers and playmates. Because of my efforts to get along with my associates I usually was able to get what I wanted. It was successful on the farm, in school, in the Army, and particularly in the Senate.

Whenever I entered a new schoolroom I would watch the teacher and her attitude toward the pupils, study hard, and try to know my lesson better than anyone else. I followed a similar program in my bank jobs. In this way I gained a reputation in the bank of always finishing the task that was set before me and of helping the others get theirs done, as well. Once in a while I would take the chief clerk of the Union National Bank, the head bookkeeper, and the paying teller to the farm for a chicken dinner. My mother was great on fried chicken, baked ham, hot biscuits, and custard pie. We would have a grand time, walk over the farm, look at the livestock, take horseback rides, and then go back to town for more work at the bank.

In 1905, Battery B of the National Guard of Kansas City was organized by George R. Collins, who became captain of the organization. Fred Boxley, who became first lieutenant, afterward was county counselor of Jackson County when I was presiding judge of the county court. There were about sixty men in the organization, and most of them were very fine fellows who worked in banks and stores around town and who would go out to a rented armory once a week and pay a quarter for the privilege of drilling.

I joined the battery the year it was organized. And when I attended my first National Guard camp at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, I was a private in the rear ranks and acted as the No. 2 man on the old three- inch gun, which was the U. S. Army’s light artillery equipment. I learned many things, including how to handle Army horses.

In 1906, I quit the bank and went back to the farm, where I stayed until the war of 1917 came along.

One day in late 1908, a cousin of my mother came to the farm to look at some stock. I noticed a Masonic pin on his coat and told him I had always wanted to be a member. A few days later he brought me an application for membership in Belton Lodge No. 450 at Belton, Missouri. On February 9, 1909, I received my first degree.

Frank Blair was cashier of the Bank of Belton, where we did our banking, and W. B. Garrison was the assistant cashier. Both were enthusiastic Masons. Frank was deputy grand master and district lecturer for the 34th Masonic District of Missouri, and Billy Garrison was master of Belton Lodge. These two men very patiently taught me the lectures and the ritual for the various degrees. I received my third degree on March 9, 1909. Shortly after that the grand lecturer of Missouri, James R. McLachlan of Kahoka, came to Belton for a three-day stay. I attended every meeting for the three days and then followed the grand lecturer to Holden and to St. Joseph. I became letter-perfect in all three degrees and accompanied Frank Blair on his official visits in the 34th District. There were nine or ten lodges in the district, and during the winter months all of them were visited.

At the next lodge election I was elected junior warden and served during 1910. In 1911, I organized a lodge at Grandview, No. 618, and was made master U.D. along in May or June. I went to the Grand Lodge meeting in St. Louis, obtained a charter for Grandview, and became a regular attendant at the yearly meetings of the Grand Lodge.

Grandma Young, who lived to be ninety-one, died in 1909, leaving the 600-acre Blue Ridge farm to my mother and Uncle Harrison. Other members of the family contested the will, but the matter was settled out of court, and in 1916, when Uncle Harrison died, he left his share of the farm to my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.

The great mid-continental oil fields were being opened at about this time, and test drilling was extensive in Missouri and adjoining states. Interest was very widespread, and I decided to try my fortune in this mushrooming new industry. The resulting experience was one which taught me a good deal about finance and human nature, as well.

It all started when Jerry C, Culbertson, a Kansas City attorney who had known our family for years and who had once handled an investment for us in a zinc mine near Joplin, called me into his office one day. He introduced me to a man named David H. Morgan, who had just moved to town from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Morgan, I soon learned, was a businessman with a degree in law and with extensive experience in the oil industry. He was also a fine gentleman who was to become a lifelong friend of mine.

Culbertson had just completed an agreement with Morgan for the organization and promotion of an oil company, and he invited me to come in as a one-third partner.

I decided to make the suggested investment, and after I had executed $5,000 notes endorsed by my mother, the contract was drawn up on September 25, 1916, making Morgan president of the new firm, Culbertson secretary, and myself treasurer.

The financial structure which Culbertson had worked out was typical of thousands that appeared during the first quarter of the twentieth century. He called the oil concern the Atlas-Okla Oil Lands Syndicate to signify the 1,500 acres of land in eastern Oklahoma which Morgan had turned over to the corporation in exchange for his share of interest. There was also formed a brokerage firm known as the Morgan & Company Oil Investments Corporation to handle sales of shares, purchases and management of oil properties, leases, etc., on a regular commission basis.

I was enthusiastic about the possibilities of Morgan & Company, and it soon became widely known through Culbertson’s promotion techniques.

Culbertson soon decided, however, that the original syndicate formed on the 1,500 acres of land which Morgan had owned was not suited to the type of promotion he planned, and he therefore proceeded to revamp it. In March 1917, the reorganization was completed in the form of a common-law trust with 60,000 shares, and the Atlas-Okla Oil Lands Syndicate became the Morgan Oil & Refining Company. All assets, lands, and other property belonging to the original syndicate were transferred to this new company.

In the meantime, Morgan, who was the practical oil man of the organization, was in the field, inspecting and leasing thousands of acres of oil properties for the company in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. On some of these properties, test wells were drilled to completion, but these, unfortunately, proved to be dry holes. On others, drilling was in progress when the entry of the United States into World War I suddenly put an end to the company’s activities.

I have always wondered how things would have turned out in my life if the war had not come along just when it did. Morgan & Company had just begun drilling on a huge block of leases we owned in the northwest corner of Greenwood County, Kansas, when the war-created manpower shortage forced us to dispose of all our leases. In fact, I was already in France when drilling stopped at a depth of 1,500 feet in that particular well. Other companies and operators who bought our interests in Greenwood County continued drilling, and later in the year 1917, they struck the Teter Oil Pool, one of the largest ever opened up in the state of Kansas.

When the United States entered World War I in the spring of 1917, the Missouri National Guard decided to expand Battery B in Kansas City and Battery C in Independence into a regiment. I helped in that expansion, and we raised six batteries as well as a supply and headquarters company in Kansas City and Independence, and also a battery for the 1st Missouri Field Artillery in St. Louis.

The regiment was organized, and all the officers were elected by the members of the organization. The batteries elected their officers, and the officers elected the staff. I was elected first lieutenant in Battery F when it was organized on May 22, 1917.

I had hoped that I might be a section sergeant, a post for which I was well qualified. I had not hoped for a commission, and when I found myself a lieutenant, I had a tremendous amount of work to do in order to become familiar with my job. At that time, light artillery batteries had two first lieutenants, a senior and a junior, and I was the junior lieutenant of Battery F in the 2nd Missouri Field Artillery.

We trained and drilled in Kansas City, at Convention Hall and on the streets, and on August 5, 1917, we were sworn in as part of the federal service and became the 129th Field Artillery of the 35th Division. On September 26, 1917, we entrained for Camp Doniphan at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

The colonel appointed me regimental canteen officer, and I asked Eddie Jacobson, a member of Battery F and a man with merchandising experience to help me. We collected $2 per man from each battery and from each headquarters and supply company. This gave us $2,200, whereupon Eddie and I set up a store, a barbershop, and a tailor shop. We went to Oklahoma City and stocked up our store with things that would not ordinarily be issued by the government - cigarettes, paper, pens, ink, and other items the men would want to buy.

Each battery and company was ordered to furnish a clerk for the store. Eddie and I sewed up their pockets, and I deposited our sales intake every day. After operating the canteen for six months, we paid the $2,200 back, plus $15,000 in dividends. Many other canteens of the 35th Division were failures, and some of the men who ran them were sent home, but after our arrival in France I was promoted, largely because of the work Eddie Jacobson and I had done.

In addition to my duties as canteen officer, I performed all the regular duties of a battery officer. I took my turn as officer of the day, equitation officer, and firing-instruction officer for the battery. I attended the Fort Sill School of Fire and did foot drill as well as whatever else needed to be done. When it came time for my captain to make an efficiency report on his lieutenants, he made such a good one on me that the C.O. sent it back with the comment, “No man can be that good.”

I was examined for promotion in February 1918 and was picked for the Overseas School Detail. I left Camp Doniphan by train on March 20, 1918, and arrived about four o’clock the next morning at Rosedale, Kansas (now part of Kansas City, Kansas). I asked a switchman if I could call my fiancée in Independence.

“Call her,” he said, “the phone’s yours, but if she doesn’t break the engagement at four o’clock in the morning, she really loves you.”

I called her at once, and she didn’t scold me, I also called my mother and sister. They all wept a little, but all of them, I think, were glad to know an overseas lieutenant.

I went on to New York and spent a few days at Camp Merritt at Tenafly, New Jersey. It was my first opportunity to see New York City, and my first visit there came when I was given a twenty-four-hour leave, which also gave me a chance to purchase some extra spectacles. I was very nearly blind without glasses and felt that I had better get three extra pairs. The man who gave me the examination and made the glasses for me would not allow me to pay for them. He said I was paying him by going overseas in the service of the country.

On March 30, 1918, we sailed for France on the George Washington, and we arrived at Brest on the morning of April 13. Ashore, we were put up at the Continental Hotel, where we stayed for a week or two before being sent to the 2nd Corps Field Artillery School at Montigny-sur-Aube. The school was in charge of Dick “By God” Burleson, a brother-in-law of Governor Vardaman of Mississippi and a nephew of the Postmaster General. He and Colonel Robert M. Danford (afterward major general, chief of field artillery) taught me how to fire a French 75. I spent five weeks at this school and then rejoined the regiment. I was made battalion adjutant of the 2nd Battalion under Major Melvin Gates, and then we were sent down to Angers for more training at one of Napoleon’s old artillery camps, Coëtquidan. We arrived there on July 4, and on July 11, I was put in command of Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery. Then, after a stay at Angers, we were moved up to the Vosges Mountains, where we went into position.

We fired our first barrage on the night of September 6. We were occupying an old French position which probably was fairly well known to the Germans, and as soon as we had finished the barrage they returned the compliment. My battery became panic-stricken, and all except five or six scattered like partridges. Finally I got them back together without losing any men, although we had six horses killed.

We moved from the Vosges to the St. Mihiel drive, then from September 12 to 16, we occupied positions on the 35th Division’s front for the Meuse-Argonne drive, which started on September 26. My battery fired 3,000 rounds of 75 ammunition from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. on the morning the drive began. I had slept in the edge of a wood to the right of my battery position the night before, and if I had not awakened and got up early that morning, I would not be here, for the Germans fired a barrage right on the spot where I had been sleeping.

At eight o’clock, we finished firing and pulled out for the front. As we marched on the road under an embankment, a French 155 battery fired over our heads. As a result of that, I still have trouble hearing what goes on when there is a noise. I went back and told the French captain what I thought of him, but he could not understand me, so it made no difference.

We came to the front line at a little town, or what was left of it, called Bourevilles. I stopped the battery and went forward with my executive officer and the battalion commander, Major Gates. We located a battery of the enemy and sat in a ditch while they fired machine guns over us. We finally went back, and I spent the rest of the night getting my battery across no man’s land.

At 5:00 a.m. on September 27, the operations officer of the regiment, Major Patterson, came to my sleeping place under a bush and told me to fire a barrage in ten minutes. I told him to go to hell, that I could not figure a barrage in ten minutes, but I’d try! We moved on up behind the infantry and went into position on a road between Varennes and Chepy about 10:00 p.m. on September 28. In going into position, I rode my horse under a tree, and a low-hanging branch scraped my glasses off. In desperation I turned around, hoping to see where they could have fallen, and there they were, on the horse’s back, right behind the saddle.

I put the battery in position and the next day we moved into an orchard a half mile ahead. We fired on three German batteries, destroying one and putting the other two out of action. Then the regimental colonel threatened me with court-martial for firing out of the 35th Division sector! But I had saved some men in the 28th Division to our left, and I believe some of them showed their gratitude in 1948.

One of my lieutenants was acting as communications officer that afternoon and was wearing a headphone. He looked up, saw a German plane, and remarked to the battery executive that the “so-and-so” German was dropping something. The bomb exploded, cut the phone from his head but left him unhurt. A little later I was up in front of the infantry without a weapon of any kind, observing the enemy fire from every direction. An infantry sergeant came up and told me that my support had moved back 200 yards and that I’d do well to come back, too. I did.

In October, notice caught up with me that I was a captain. I had been in command of Battery D since July 11, and as far back as May I had seen in the New York Times that I was a captain. During all that time I wore the bars and did a captain’s duty, but I was never paid for it because the official notice did not reach me until October. My claim for back pay was turned down because I had not “accepted” the commission earlier.

We supported the 35th Division and the 1st Division until October 3, when we were moved in front of Verdun in the Sommedieu sector. On October 27, 1918, we were moving along from one front-line zone to another when the French edition of the New York Herald was distributed along the line. Headlines in block letters informed us that an armistice was on. Just then a German 150-mm. shell burst to the right of the road and another to the left.

“Captain,” one of the sergeants remarked, “those blankety-blank Germans haven’t seen this paper.”

Some ten days later, Roy Howard, of the Scripps-McCrae papers, also sent a message to the United States proclaiming an armistice. Such false newspaper reports are terrible things, and the people responsible for them are no better than criminals.

We went into new positions on November 6 and prepared barrages for the next day’s drive on Metz. The 129th Field Artillery was then supporting the 81st (Wild Cat) Division, and five days later, at five o’clock in the morning, Major Patterson, the regimental operations officer, called me and told me that there would be a cease-fire order at eleven o’clock. I fired the battery on orders until 10:45 a.m., when I fired my last shot at a little village northeast of Verdun.

Firing stopped all along the line at eleven o’clock on November 11, 1918, and the silence that followed almost made one’s head ache. We stayed at our positions all day and then crawled into our pup tents to sleep. That night, however, the men of the French battery just behind our position got their hands on a load of wine which had come up on the ammunition narrow gauge, and every single one of them had to march by my bed, saluting and yelling, “Vive President Wilson! Vive le capitaine d’artillerie américaine!” No sleep that night. The infantry sent up all the flares they could lay their hands on, fired pistols and rifles and whatever else would make a noise all night long.

The next day we were ordered to leave our guns in line and fall back to the echelon. After that, we spent our evenings playing poker and wishing we were home.

On December 7, a number of officers were given a leave, and I was one. We went to Paris, where we spent three happy days. I attended a performance of Marion at the Paris Opera, went to the Opéra-Comique to hear Carmen, and then to the Folies-Bergère, which turned out to be a disgusting performance.

We went on to Nice, stayed at the Hotel Méditerranée, and saw the American Bar in the Hotel Negresco. We visited the Casino in Monte Carlo but could not play because we were in uniform. They did give us each a five-franc chip, and that was all we had from the famous gambling hell. We had lunch one day in the Casino de Paris, about seven or eight of us sitting at a big round table in the rear of the place, when all of a sudden every waiter there rushed to the front and began bowing and scraping. We were informed that Madame la Princesse de Monaco had come in. Our lieutenant colonel was facing the front and could see the performance. He watched very closely and pretty soon he reported, “Oh hell, she’s taking beer! Can you imagine a princess drinking beer?” It was quite a disappointment for all us common folk.

We went back to the regiment, which was moved a couple of times and finally sent to Brest. On April 9, 1919, we embarked on the German passenger ship Zeppelin and arrived in New York City on April 20, a beautiful Easter Sunday morning. I had been gone from that city just a year and twenty days.

We were sent to Camp Mills and then ordered to Camp Funston, Kansas, where we were discharged on May 6, 1919. It was from there that I went home to the Blue Ridge farm.