A FLY ON THE WALL

A Fly on the Wall.

   “How I wish I were a fly on the wall.” At some point in time, most of us have muttered those words when we desperately wanted to hear a conversation going on in the next room. Carolyn Freeman is certainly not a fly but as a teenager back in the 1930s she would often find herself in such an advantageous position when Senator Harry Truman visited her Aunt Minnie’s home in Rich Hill, Missouri.

   The 85 year old Independence, Mo woman grew up on an eighty acre farm a few miles from her Aunts place.

  “My sister Virginia and I got up at five o’clock every morning to do chores before we went to Ovid grade school which was two miles away if you took the road.” Carolyn said. “Not particularly wanting to walk that far, we usually cut the distance in half to the one room school house by taking a short cut across the corn field.”

    Those early morning tasks the girls had to do were not easy.

“I had to clean that dad blasted cream separator every single day!” Carolyn said as a slight frown began to wrinkle her forehead. “At the end of each day I scrubbed our clothes on a wash board and rinsed them with water we caught in a rain barrel. I had to press them with a heavy triangular shaped iron we heated up on the stove every morning before we left for school.”    

   No electricity or indoor plumbing made their day to day lives quite challenging but they got by like countless other rural families in that time period.

    “We had kerosene lamps for light and an outhouse for a bathroom.” Carolyn said. “The only running water we had was when my mom gave me a one gallon syrup bucket and told me to run down to the well and get some water. Our entire family worked long, hard hours every day from early spring until late summer to keep the farm going and provide us a living. We didn’t have much but neither did any one else in our farming community. We were happy and when you get right down to it, you can’t miss what you never had.”

    With the fall of the year coming to an end, all the crops harvested and old man winter beginning to make its annual assault on the farm, it was time for Carolyn’s father and their hired hand, Mick to start working in the small coal mine located on the property. A tractor was parked at the mine entrance with one wheel taken off so a belt could be attached to the hub. The belt ran along the tracks that led into the dark interior of the mine where the two men would shovel coal in to a couple of heavy steel cars five feet long and three feet wide. The tractors powerful engine would turn the belt and pull the cars to the surface.

  “Dad sold some of the coal to neighbors but a lot of the time he just gave it away to people that were down on their luck and figured they would pay him some day when they got the money.” Carolyn said. “Of course, most of it was used to warm our own house through out the cold, harsh winters. Our brother Bill, who was killed in World War Two, got to occasionally help in the mine. Virginia and I always took lunch to dad and Mick but were never allowed to go inside. Dad had become very over protective with me and my sister after Virginia got hit in the hip by a baseball at age five. She was able to walk normally immediately afterwards and didn’t seem to be in pain so our parents didn’t take her to the doctor. Just to get an x-ray would have meant driving a hundred miles to Kansas City. By the time Virginia was seven years old she began to have problems walking due to a hair line break in her hip that would require eleven operations over the rest of her life. Dad kept a close eye on us after that and made sure we didn’t get around the cattle or horses or do any thing that might cause us to be injured.”

    Every Sunday you could find the family enjoying a huge dinner at Clark and Minnie Ritchie’s house on the edge of town.

    “The old coal stove in the kitchen must have been very difficult to use but Aunt Minnie could cook virtually anything on it and make it taste great.” Carolyn said. “Her fried chicken was out of this world.”

    The meals were so good that Senator Harry Truman who would later become the 33^rd president of the Untied States ate there on many occasions when he spent the weekend at the Rich Hill Gun Club. Mr. Truman was in the army during World War One with Clark’s son Judd Ritchie so he stopped by with his buddy Jimmy Pendergast and another man to visit and enjoy some fantastic home cooking.

  It was on these visits that Carolyn would get a call from Aunt Minnie to come over and give her a hand.  She still remembers what the old place looked like. “Chickens would scattered out of my way as I ran across the back yard.” She said. “The house was very big. It had five bedrooms and a living room so enormous that two 8 by 10 and two 4 by 6 rugs couldn’t cover the entire floor. A big stone fireplace warmed the room so well that Mr. Truman once fell asleep on one of the two divans after a big lunch and nearly missed an important speech he was giving in town.

    I asked Carolyn if she had any lengthy conversations with Senator Truman. “My goodness no.” She laughed. “I was a young teenager and very shy. I just kept quiet as I took food from the kitchen into the dinning room where Mr. Truman, Jimmy Pendergast, Uncle Judd, Uncle Clark and another man I can’t remember the name of sat at the table.

  Leaning forward in my chair, I said. “I’ll bet you over heard some very interesting political discussions as you served the meals.”

   Carolyn’s answer surprised me. “No, not really.” She said. “Most of the time they just talked about your every day topics that men are interested in like the war, fishing, hunting and women.”

   Carolyn graduated from Rich Hill high school in 1941 and left for Kansas City that same night. She currently lives in Independence which of course is where President Truman lived.

  Her son Bill also had several personal encounters with Mr. Truman.

     “It was back in the early to mid 1960s.” Bill said. “I was about the same age my mom when she used to bring meals to Mr. Truman at Aunt Minnie’s house. I was a student at the old Palmer Junior high school in Independence. Mr. Truman was retired and loved to take early morning walks through the neighborhood with his body guard. Occasionally, their route would bring them by our school just as we were getting off the bus. Mr. Truman always stopped and talked to the kids for a few minutes. Unlike my mom, I did indeed talk to him every chance I got. He was always very polite and answered all my questions before he continued on to the barbershop where he loved to shoot the breeze with any one who might be there.”

   What a classic display of history repeating itself I thought as I left Carolyn’s home. ago.

  How I wish I would have been a fly on the wall of that charming house in Rich Hill seventy one years