Happy Boxing Day.
On this day 39 years ago, the President I was named for died. I acknowledge this anniversary every year. As a child I had hoped to meet him. When he died I was nine and a half years old. I wore a campaign button from the 1948 election for days afterward, watching the coverage on TV.
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF0dJYh3JbM[/youtube]
I suppose if I had to be named for a public figure Harry Truman was as good as any. As a child the name was not a popular one, it forced me to stand out when I didn't want to, it has lead to expectation from people who jump to conclusions. It sometimes forces me away from rabbit holes.
He was a very unlikely President. He had failed at most everything. He got into politics and found favor with a political boss that supported him, to the horror of his poor wife, a woman who lived 90 years in fear that the public would find out her father had committed suicide in the bathtub of the house where they still lived. I cannot help but think when he accepted the nomination in 1944 he knew what would happen. Roosevelt was obviously a very sick man. His family was carried along onto a roller coaster ride that included moving into a White House that was literally falling down around them. Most of the presidency would be spent living at the Blair House nearby while the entire place was rebuilt.
When I visited his grave at his library in 2004, there was a monument erected by a lone veteran thanking him for dropping the Atomic Bombs on Japan. It reflects an almost forgotten ideal held by tens of thousands of servicemen and their families. He had saved their lives probably. No invasion of the island needed. That gratitude now seems almost absurd in the face of the pandora's box every single person that will ever be born with have to deal with.
My namesake Integrated the military. I think that is his greatest achievement. He was called all sorts of things. He was disparaged and everyone expected him to loose the 1948 election. We have all see that picture. "Dewey Defeats Truman". He was not perfect. The "Martinsville Seven" a group of seven African American men from my town were convicted of raping a white woman, and were all executed. He could have come involved but chose not to.
He was full of one liners. He was a true dandy. In 1953 he and his wife packed their 8 year old car and they drove home to Missouri. Took a week. No secret service, no motorcade. Just two old people alone on the road, stopping and eating at diners, staying at roadside motels. Not even a cell phone. Such a thing will never happen again. In retirement the man whose finances had never been his strong point found a life of near destitution until Congress agreed to pay former Presidents a pension. He wrote him memoirs, and walked from his house to his office at his Presidential Library every day until the last month or two of his life.
I have lived to see a time when my name is considered cool. My own nephew and his wife considered naming their son for me but I talked them out of it. He is still better off with them name he has. I kind of like keeping it for meself.