Truman (31 page)

A summer outing on the Little Blue River with Harry at the oars, Bess with the fishing pole. “Harry was always fun,” remembered Ethel Noland.

The portrait of Bess that Harry carried to war in 1918. “Dear Harry,” she wrote on the back, “May this photograph bring you safely home again from France.”

His AEF identity card shows a newly commissioned Captain Harry S. Truman with no glasses and a regulation haircut.

With Harry “over there,” Mary Jane was left to run the farm. “It was quite a blow to my mother and sister,” he later conceded.

Truman (third from right) poses with some of his fellow artillery officers “somewhere in France.”

Wounded soldiers from the Argonne are tended beneath an undamaged painting of the Ascension in a ruined church in Neuilly, September 1918.

The war over, Captain Truman (on the right) relaxes in the sunshine at Monte Carlo.

Harry and Bess Truman pose for their wedding portrait with bridesmaids Louise Wells (left) and Helen Wallace, Bess’s brother Frank (center rear), who gave her away, and best man Ted Marks, who made the groom’s suit on special order. The day, Saturday, June 28, 1919, was extremely hot and humid—standard for summer in Missouri.

The Gates-Wallace house, 219 North Delaware Street, Independence, as it looked at the time the Trumans moved in “temporarily” with Bess’s mother, following their honeymoon.

Truman & Jacobson, “the shirt store,” as Truman called it, opened for business on 12th Street, Kansas City, in November 1919. Above, on the left, haberdasher Harry S. Truman strikes a characteristic pose at the sales counter.

Thomas J. Pendergast, the “Big Boss” of Kansas City, beams for photographers at his daughter’s wedding.