National Affairs: By the Tall Pine Tree

Lamar, Mo. (pop. 4,500) is going to do right by its most famous son. Last week Constable Everett Earp, who owns the five-room white frame cottage where Harry Truman was born in 1884, took matters into his own hands.

“They’ve been doing a lot of talking about signs and markers but I got tired of waiting on them and went ahead myself,” Earp explained to reporters. “I’ve got Ernie Shaffer—he’s my carpenter—building the sign right now. He’s had a little trouble getting a piece of plyboard for the middle—that’s hard stuff to find nowadays—but he should be done in a day or so.

“It’s going to be a four-by-six-ft. sign set in a lattice frame and I’m going to put it in the yard in front of the house by that tall pine tree—sixty feet high, it is—that the Trumans planted the day the President was born. Folks will be able to see it from highway 160 and from the Missouri Pacific depot both. The depot’s just a block away.”

Constable Earp, who is a second cousin of Arizona’s famed Wyatt Earp,* is going to fix up the house with paint and a new roof, and put a place in the back of the lot for his real-estate office. “I plan some little things like picture cards and a booklet on Wyatt Earp and the family,” he said, “and if someone buys 50¢ worth I’ll show him the Truman room free.”

While Constable Earp did his bit, the Lamar City Council and Chamber of Commerce continued to search for someone to erect two neon signs at the city limits. Said Businessman Gordon Boyer:

‘I’ve been dickering with a sign outfit in Joplin, but they’re too busy with a bunch of Coca-Cola signs right now. It looks like Truman’s going to be out before we get those signs up.”

*Quick-on-the-draw deputy U.S. marshal at Tombstone, Ariz. in the ’80s.