"THE OLD REBEL"

This outline of the facts of his mother's life was penned by President Truman ten weeks ago. Afraid then that she was dying, he was speeding to Grandview on the presidential plane. There was more to remember.

Her father was a Missouri bullwhacker, a driver of the 16-hitch ox teams that pulled Conestoga wagons over the old Santa Fe trail.

Martha Ellen Young had seen the Federal "Redlegs" of the Civil War storm out of Kansas and slaughter her family's hogs. Her girlhood memories were of dances in the front parlor. "I was what you might call a light-foot Baptist."

She raised her three children by the doctrine: "Always aim to do the right thing."

A fiercely partisan Southern Democrat, Martha Truman had a tart opinion on almost everything. Her friends fondly called her "the old rebel," and shamelessly embroidered a tale of how she had said she would sleep on the floor rather than occupy the White House bed that Yankee Abraham Lincoln had slept in.

In her yellow clapboard house in Grandview, "Momma" Truman kept to the small, daily rituals of a lifetime. Whenever Harry could, he stopped by. Always, when she bade him goodbye, she said: "Now, Harry, you behave yourself." He always answered: "You raised me right. You know I'll always behave." He liked to say about her: "They don't make them like her any more."

Now Harry Truman had one sentence to add to the biography.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.