Restored Bounce

While Congress bickered, Harry Truman had slipped away to Key West for a holiday. This week, as the House prepared to vote on interim aid, the President was back. With the bounce restored to his step, he buckled down to prepare his message to Congress on the long-range European Recovery Program.

The President had been tired. At the Commandant's jalousied house on Key West's submarine base--which Harry Truman now calls the "Winter White House"--the President had found privacy and relaxation. He slept late (for him), until after seven, napped in the afternoons, sunbathed on the beach. With a movie camera recently given him by White House photographers, he took pictures of the donors and members of his staff, enjoyed the shooting.

He flew over to the Florida mainland for the dedication of the Everglades as the U.S.'s 28th (and eleventh largest) national park. At the tiny (pop. 600) fishing town of Everglades City, he was welcomed by an enthusiastic, pushing crowd of 4,500. A group of Seminole Indians presented him with a rainbow-colored shirt, and a buckskin bag to take to Bess. He stopped to chat with some sponge fishermen, got two sponges as souvenirs.

At the ceremony, Florida's Governor Millard F. Caldwell formally turned over to the U.S. Government 270,720 acres of the Everglades' sawgrass flats, jungly hummocks, winding waterways and mangrove swamps. Harry Truman beamed, spoke pleasantly about "the wise use of our natural resources."

At Sunday services at the nondenominational Chapel on the base, just before his holiday ended, he found a poem on the program: "Be strong: We are not here to play, to dream, to drift; we have hard work to do, and loads to lift." Next day he returned to a rainy Washington.

Before going to Key West, Harry Truman had taken time off to dedicate a new children's wing of the Georgetown University Hospital. There he dropped in on three-year-old Sharon Meenehan, the victim of an automobile accident. Sharon, who had both legs in casts held straight up by overhead pulleys, was disappointed. She thought her mother had told her that "a present" was coming, not a "President." Next day, Harry Truman sent her a Mother Goose book. He wrote on the flyleaf: "Here's the present you thought you were getting. Get well in a hurry."

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