Blue-Plate Special

The phone rang in the oval study. It was Mary Jane Truman in Grandview, Mo. with distressing news. Old Mrs. Truman, the President's mother, had fallen from her bed the night before and broken her right hip.

It was a serious accident for a woman of 94--though Mrs. Truman has survived two fractures of the left hip and one of the shoulder in the last six years. At 7:45 the next morning Harry Truman took off from Washington in the Sacred Cow.* Five hours later he was in his mother's bedroom, a box full of flowers in his arms.

He stayed about 25 minutes. Then, because Sister Mary Jane had "too many things to do," he went down the street to the Grandview Cafe for lunch.

There he ran across a couple of old friends. He told them his mother was "resting easy," and ordered the roast beef blue-plate special (70-c-). The other customers--a couple of farmers, some railroad men in blue jeans--paid little attention. Two people went on playing the juke box.

Six Weeks' Wait. After lunch the President went back to his mother's one-and-a-half story frame house to find out what the doctors had to say. The diagnosis: "Complete fracture at the neck of the right femur." Traction should pull the bone into good position, they told him, and she might be out of bed in six weeks.

Reassured, the President drove into Kansas City and spent the night at the Hotel Muehlebach. Next morning he was up at 5:45 for a stroll through the city's dark streets. After breakfast he drove out to Grandview again. At 2 p.m. he took off for Washington. He had another family duty ahead--a party for Daughter Margaret, who will be 23 this week.

Last week the President also:

P:Celebrated Lincoln's Birthday by standing at rigid attention under a wan February sun while Major General Harry Vaughan laid the presidential wreath at the foot of Daniel Chester French's brooding statue of Lincoln.

P:Pledged to shivering England (see FOREIGN NEWS) all possible U.S. help (which was politely refused by Prime Minister Attlee); improved the occasion by pointing out that all coal shipments to Europe would be disrupted if Congress didn't hurry up and extend the Maritime Commission's authority to operate ships.

P:Was seized and bussed on the forehead by tall, bearded Archbishop Athenagoras, Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in North and South America. The occasion: presentation of the Great Holy Cross of the Knights of the All-Holy Sepulchre and a piece of the Cross of Christ, as the "highest blessing of the Greek Orthodox Church."

*Soon to be replaced with a faster, more luxurious DC-6.

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