THE JOURNAL
I Called Him Uncle Harry: Growing Up In The Truman-Wallace Household (Donella Press) by Mr David Wallace. Photograph courtesy of Donella Press, Missouri
Back in the early 1950s, when my great-uncle, Mr Harry S Truman was the US president, the Secret Service could not yet legally protect the head of state. On his ferry rides up the Potomac River – on what was familiarly referred to as the “floating White House” – the president’s safety was sensibly entrusted to Marines. So, when my father would accompany his uncle on these excursions, he did as most six-year-olds would do and crept down to the kitchen after lights out to raid the fridge with the leathernecks on duty. One summer, he was regularly accompanied on these sorties by a USMC private he only knew as “Stevie”. My dad has told me this story a dozen times, never failing to finish the tale by announcing that Private Stevie later went into movies and grew up to be called Mr Steve McQueen.
The Wallace Children. From left:: Frank, Bess, Fred, George, with dog Gyp and family friend Ms Bessie Madge Andrews, 1902. Photograph Harry S Truman Library and Museum, courtesy of Donella Press, Missouri
It never occurred to me to believe my dad, about this or about the several thousand fabulous-seeming big-fish stories he has told me my whole life – didn’t occur to me until I recently read a biography of Mr Steve McQueen that describes all of these events to a tee – probably because he is such a good storyteller. It never really mattered to me whether it was true. And besides, I knew the President Truman story to be gospel, knew it the way family history is far more real to you than anything you see on the History channel. But the family stories didn’t flow as freely from my dad as that time he helped invent People magazine’s World’s Sexiest Man franchise, hung out with Divine, or gave Mr Don Johnson a shoulder to cry on before Miami Vice became a hit. The family stories felt like they were somehow forbidden – so I craved them the way my dad craves candy – and sealed in some sort of Midwestern omertà, never to be talked about. For years, I interrogated him, smuggled out snippets of his life, repackaging them into my own self-mythology, assembling a kind of book of secrets of my own.
The shared family home at 219 North Delaware Street in Independence. Photograph Library of Congress, Prints and Photograph, courtesy of Donella Press, Missouri
So what am I supposed to do now, now that my dad has hung out all the family laundry in his memoir I Called Him Uncle Harry: Growing Up In The Truman-Wallace Household? Seriously, how is that supposed to make me feel? This was my schtick, the thing I’d been reporting on for 40 years and he just… scribbled it all out. No, obviously I’m incredibly grateful. But, enough about me, my dad’s intimate reflection on his childhood in the same Independence, Missouri, home (“the summer White House”) that he and his mother, father and sisters shared with Uncle Harry and Aunt Bess, their daughter Margaret, and my dad’s grandmother, feels like an important historical document, as well as the premise for a sitcom. But for me (yes, we’re back to that), it is also something else; it is like a long-hidden treasure map to what I have always wanted most in the world, the true story of how my dad feels.
My father, who was born during the Depression and raised in the Midwest, talks a lot but rarely ever gets to the part about how the events he describes affected him emotionally. Not just what happened, but how it made him feel. For example, my dad opens the book with a story about the time he met Pope Pius XII, in Rome in 1953. With the full dolce vita raging in the city around them, my dad asked the Pope just one question. “‘Your Holiness,’ I asked, ‘the Church teaches me that homosexuality is a sin. So please tell me, how do you think Jesus would feel if I were gay, uh, homosexual?’”
The Wallace family on board the USS Williamsburg, 1947. From left: Grandmother Wallace, Mr David Wallace’s father, Aunt May. Mr David Wallace is leaning against the pole, Uncle Harry, and Margaret. Aunt Bess, Marian, Aunt Nat. At the back: Uncle Frank, Ms Mary Jane Truman and Mr David Wallace’s mother. Photograph Harry S Truman Library and Museum, courtesy of Donella Press, Missouri
“Davide,” the Pope responded, “you are, and always will be, exactly the person God the Father intended you to be. Never forget that.”
My dad doesn’t then say that he felt finally absolved of sin, or eternally at rest in his soul or anything like that. He just reports on the events as they took place. Which made me wonder, how is one meant to read the memoirs of their father? How are we to take any and all stories from our loved ones, for that matter? Seriously, but not literally, as they say? Where is the bloody part about how it made him feel?
I have always taken them seriously, but recently I’ve begun to interpret my dad’s stories a lot more literally. Maybe they are just family gossip, maybe it is a little of my own self-mythology in the making, maybe it is the kind of lore, handed down generation to generation that are the basis of storytelling itself. I just know now that they are, and always will be, exactly as they are intended to be. Gospel.
